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Opportunity Does Not Ma...

2012-02-29T11:03:14-05:00

This essay seeks to get to grips with what I see to be the barrier to crime reduction knowledge progression that has been thrown up by two criminology theories/approaches: Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) and Routine Activities Theory (RAT). This problem is caused by the policy oriented popularity of SCP and RAT that is likely due in no small part to their simplistic and easily comprehendible, compelling, yet ultimately illogical weird focus upon describing the data of crime in ever more complex ways so that simple truisms about the scenes of crime and potential crime are placed in the spotlight and presented as a root cause of crime. Yet, as this essay reveals, this notion of opportunity is, in fact, the very data that a true testable theory of causation could explain.

My concern with the need to fully understand the criminological notion of opportunity and to examine claims that ‘opportunity is a cause of crime’ stems from the fact that many key academic proponents of the Situational Crime Prevention (SCP) approach, and Routine Activities Theory (RAT) – who have been collectively labelled Administrative Criminologists (Young 1994) – are now claiming to be scientists working in the mould of natural scientists under their own self-styled designation as Crime Scientists (Laycock 2003; Pease 2008) and claiming that their notion of criminological opportunity is the most important cause of crime (Felson and Clarke 1998; Tilley and Laycock 2002; Laycock 2003).

My identification of logical problems with the RAT notion of opportunity caused me to conclude that it is not a scientific explanation for causality, but is instead a mere truism. The essential argument is that the RAT notion of crime opportunity - described as an 'opportunity theory' by its own author, and by the originator of SCP, Ronald Clarke (e.g. Felson and Clarke 1998: p. v), is pseudoscientific (Popper 1976) because it is based on what is an elegant description of the data of a succesful crime in commission (see Fig 1 below). This makes it a truism (as opposed to a tautology - this tautology claim is a long standing criticism of Crime Opportunity Theory. But it is something of a red herring). Being a mere truism, the RAT notion of 'opportunity' is something that is incapable of empirical testing and falsification. These arguments are more fully laid out in two earlier essays that I wrote on the subject, which can be found on the Dysology website.

Note: The basic problem is that the RAT notion of opportunity for crime is based on the Classic RAT Triangle that describes the essential elements of a successfully completed crime only (see Fig 1). But what of all those perceived opportunities that don't work out for the offender? Illogically, the RAT notion of opportunity is based on information that nobody can know until after the crime is successfully completed. Nowhere does Felson ever tell us that his RAT notion of 'opportunity' has anything to do with the offender's perception of guardianship - or the victim's and/or guardian's perception of the offender's relative capability come to that. Neither do Felson and Clarke (1998).

This, my third, essay on crime and opportunity seeks to understand the reasons why the authors and followers of RAT, SCP and Crime Science, and their critics, failed to identify this problem. I conclude in this essay that the reason they all failed to spot it seems to be based on a failure among all crime as opportunity theorists to clearly and consistently define what they mean by opportunity or by guardianship.

Criminology theory clearly has implications for criminal justice and crime reduction policy making. Because irrational or simply wrong theory is likely to, at the very best, lead to some beneficial policy driven practice but perhaps not the most effective and if it is effective then it will be so in ways that are not intended and by ways that are not understood. At worst it can be lethal (for either offenders or their victims) – either directly or else over time by way of focusing our attention away from developing knowledge in terms of crime casualty. As Einstadter and Henry (1995: p.18) explain:

Assumptions made about crime causation have direct implications for criminal justice policy and about how actions towards offenders are justified, which in turn colors the way the institutions and procedures of justice will be used. Whereas a society may punish offenders based on specifications in criminal law, criminological theorists are concerned with overall policy, based on the logic of their theoretical analysis. …For criminological theorists, then, the main constraints on policy and accompanying correctional ideology come not from law, political expediency, or empirical efficiency, but from the logic of their own theoretical analysis.

In this essay I essentially argue that the classic RAT crime triangle misleads us because if we continue to irrationally accept its three components (that in reality describe only a successfully completed crime in commission) as a cause of itself (crime) then we have no reason to consider motivation, perception or contingency - which is why these three crucial elements have been ignored in Crime Opportunity Theory. In another essay (Sutton 2012), I explain how understanding more about motivation, contingency and perceptions might take knowledge forward in the area of crime causation, particularly wth regard to the role of real crime opportunities as a cause of crime and how best to reduce them.

The Fallacy of Equivocation

Equivocation is a logical fallacy that occurs when the same term is used in different senses in order to make an argument. An example is: "The water vole lives in the bank. Banks are found in city centres. Therefore, the water vole lives in the city centre."

Dictionary definitions of opportunity generally describe it along the lines of being a favourable appropriate or advantageous juncture of circumstances. Unless the simple truism nature of the RAT trinity is explained (and it never is) the use of the word opportunity is naturally taken by the reader to mean that it is something that occurs before the crime takes place - and so is a cause of it. But as Essay No 1 on the dysology webste explains, the RAT, SCP and Crime Science notion of opportunity is something that only occurs for sure after the crime has been successfully completed. Therefore, I would argue that the claim that opportunity is a cause of crime is an example of the fallacy of equivocation.

Some who claim that opportunity is a cause of crime have gone further to claim that it is the most important cause of crime (Tilley and Laycock 2002). To repeat the point already made, their notion of opportunity as a cause of crime is not the simple and commonly understood one for opportunity in general, which consists of a favourable, appropriate or advantageous juncture of circumstances existing prior to any action that might capitalise on it; rather it involves three things coming together in time and place after the event: (a) a suitably motivated and capable offender (b) a suitable target for that offender and (c) the absence of capable guardianship to protect the target from the offender (Felson and Boba 2010). We might call these three things the RAT trilogy or ratortunity. Those who argue for the theory of "opportunity as a cause of crime" do not explain that what they mean by opportunity is a description of what they can only know to be these three core components of a successful crime in commission after it has happened (not during, and not before) because that is the only way that they know for sure that the offender was capable of overcoming the guardianship. That alone is enough to prove that crime as opportunity theory is an example of the fallacy of equivocation because those who use the RAT 'after the event' trilogy of 'crime as opportunity' argument fail to make it clear that thier noton of opportunity (ratortunity) does not mean the universally understood and more commonly understood notion of opportunity as something that occurs prior to an act that capitalises on it.

The Fallacy of Ambiguity

The philosopher Gary Curtis (undated) writes: “Because of the ubiquity of ambiguity in natural language, it is important to realize that its presence in an argument is not sufficient to render it fallacious, otherwise, all such arguments would be fallacious. Most ambiguity is logically harmless, a fallacy occurring only when ambiguity causes an argument's form to appear validating when it is not.”

Accepting Curtis’s definition of the informal logical fallacy of ambiguity in arguments, we can apply it to the argument that opportunity is a cause of crime in order to determine (a) whether it is used ambiguously and (b) whether that ambiguous use is sufficient to render the argument fallacious.

To proceed, it seems useful to first seek to establish what is commonly and most widely understood by the word ‘opportunity’ . As Garwood (2011 p.37) points out:

“The Merrian-Webster Online Dictionary defines opportunity as ‘a favourable juncture of circumstances’. In common with many such definitions, this excludes consideration of the mindset of the person faced with such a juncture of circumstances.”

In this essay we will see that the current criminological notion of opportunity as a cause of crime goes way beyond this commonly agreed dictionary definition. The criminolological notion of opportunity as it currently stands includes not only the mind of the potential criminal actor but, amongst a host of other complexities, also the intrinsic incapability or actual failure of others, (a) present or (b) not even present, to prevent the crime. Most importantly, such information can only be known for sure after the crime was successfully accomplished.

Ambiguity about the RAT concept of guardianship causes further ambiguity about whether opportunity is a refutable scientific explanation or merely a description of the data of a successfully completed crime that amounts to a mere truism.

The RAT notion of opportunity incorporates the need to understand what actually happens before, during and after a crime. This goes beyond the common understanding from dictionary definitions of opportunity as being perceived as circumstances favourable to a perceived goal that the perceiver can choose to capitalise upon or pass up. As Felson (1986) explains at length:

To understand criminal opportunity, we need to know not only some of the decisions made by offenders, human targets, guardians, and handlers, but also the situations of their physical convergence as a result of these decisions, regardless of whether the decision makers know what we, as analysts, know. And we have to know the outcome. Was the offender wrong, missing a golden opportunity or committing a silly blunder? Did the getaway car stall or did the selected target trap him? Did the victim succeed by going through the day safe from crime, regardless of whether he or she thought about it? What choices on the part of a citizen produce an unplanned victimization and impair or assist guardianship of targets and handling of offenders? Indeed, a criminal situation is made possible by various decisions by those who set the stage for the convergence of the four minimal elements, however inadvertently. Any set of decisions that assembles a handled offender and a suitable target, in the absence of a capable guardian and intimate handler, will tend to be criminogenic. Conversely, any decision that prevents this convergence will impair criminal acts. Even though an offender may prefer to violate the law, his or her preference can be thwarted by the structure of decisions made by others, regardless of whether they know they are preventing a crime from occurring. In short, we cannot understand the rational structure of criminal behavior by considering the reasoning of only one actor in the system.'

Tilley and Laycock (2002) similarly perceive the criminological notion of ‘opportunity’ as inseparable from the rewards of successful offending:

‘The most significant, and universal cause is, however, opportunity. If there were no opportunities there would be no crimes; the same cannot be said for any of the other contributory causes. In so far as opportunity creates criminality by rewarding those with low motivation with success in easily chosen and completed crime, it thus comprises a root cause - as one recent paper puts it, ‘Opportunity makes the thief‘ (Felson and Clarke, 1998).’

Clarke (1984) and Felson and Clarke (1988) see the RAT explanation for crime as integral to the notion of Crime Opportunity Theory. Despite routine use of the word 'opportunity' in their work these authors fail to make it clear what they mean by it. Instead they are opaque and mysterious about what they really mean, exactly, by 'opportunity'. This might even stem from their personal uncertainty. Consider the following fogginess from Clarke (1984: 80):

'The difficulties of achieving the necessary accuracy in counts of criminal opportunities derive in large part from the conceptual complexities; opportunity is not merely the necessary condition for offending, but it can provoke crime and can also be sought and created by those with necessary motivation.'

Felson and Boba (2010) similarly fail to define with any degree of clarity what they mean by opportunity. Consider the following vagueness (p206) which seems that it might mean to imply that the RAT trilogy notion of the core components of a crime are part of what is integral to the meaning of opportunity. Although it fails to appreciate the reality of much crime where offenders offend on foot and travel to the crime scene on foot and do not rely on transport to sell what they steal:

'Crime is a process, depending on the convergence of offenders and targets in the absence of guardians. The transportation system generates these convergences. Markets for stolen goods are of central importance for generating crime opportunities, and opportunities make the thief.'

The problem is that criminologists who support opportunity theories of crime have not produced a clear or consistent definition of the criminological meaning of opportunity (See e.g. Willison 2000; Garwood 2011). The reasons for this lack of a succinct definition are very clearly stated by Clarke (1984). While never clearly defining opportunity himself, Clarke distinguishes between many types of situations and targets for crime that he loosely describes as criminal opportunities. For example, he writes about subjective assessments made by potential criminals of the ease and attractiveness of opportunities. He then mentions the fact that some offenders go hunting for opportunities, while others manipulate the world so as to create them or plan for them when they occur. He says that some opportunities relate to routine activities or the situations in which crimes take place and to differential vulnerabilities of targets and differential attractiveness between targets . Clarke ultimately concludes that it would be extremely difficult to quantify opportunities in society due to these conceptual difficulties. This presents a problem for crime science if, as Laycock (2003) writes, it is to be founded on the premise that opportunity is a cause of crime. We can see from Felson's (1986) attempt to explain the complexity of his notion of crime opportunity, and from reading Clarke's (1984) paper, that the notion of opportunity as a cause of crime is a complex idea in need of an equation.

Clarke's own failure to get to grips with a clear definition of what he means by opportunity is a good example of the fact that we must always bear in mind, when considering arguments that opportunity is a cause of crime, that those who believe this consider opportunity to be many different things and this makes their notion of it not only very complex but also very ill-defined, which results in its idiosyncratic usage in ambiguous arguments - such as (Felson and Clarke 1998 p. v: '...opportunity is a root cause of crime.' My contention that this argument is ambiguous is something that the remainder of this paper seeks to demonstrate.

To compound this problem, Felson is also ambiguous about the meaning of guardianship. On page 28 of his fourth edition of Crime and Everyday Life (Felson and Boba 2010) the author’s write that the third almost always’ element of a criminal act is: ‘The absence of a capable guardian against the offence.’ Their notion of guardianship is that it must be capable only twice - on pages 28 and 47. Elsewhere in the book (pp. 30, 31, 32, 33 and 180) on five different pages the presence of a person is sufficient to make them a guardian that may deter crime (note Felson and Boba do not say it will in all cases) – there is no mention of them needing to be capable. Criminology geeks might be interested to learn that in the third edition of Crime and Everyday Life (Felson 2002) Felson uses the term ‘capable guardian’ three times (pp. 21, 35, 79) and ‘guardian’ alone three times. Both terms are used by Felson (And Felson and Boba) as though they mean the same thing. But, as this essay will show when explaining Fig 2 (below) there is a world of difference between what these two phrases actually mean.

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Basic RAT Triangle

Fig 1. Felson's basic and classic Routine Activities Triangle, shown above, is used by countless academics, police and government departments to guide their understanding and crime policy making (e.g. Anderson 2010).

Fig 2: Three Triangles Lay Hidden Within the Classic RAT Crime Triangle

The diagram above, (Fig 2) revelas for the first time the logical variations of how Felson's classic RAT crime triangle (Fig. 1) must logically influence RAT's notion of crime opportunity, because Felson does not offer any other theoretical explanation for what makes a crime opportunity. As Fig. 2 reveals, Felson sometimes uses the term ‘absence of guardianship’ to mean (G1) the absence of any person (regardless of their actual intrinsic guardianship capabilities) to serve to create opportunities for crime. By default, the presence of any type of guardian serves to reduce criminal opportunities. And this is a testable hypothesis. For example, to take this hypothesis to the extreme, Crime Scientists might conduct a controlled experiment using life-size cardboard cut outs of people (even mock-police officers) to measure their impact on crime reduction.

On other occasions, as the opposite of Felson's classic G3 explanation for opportunity, RAT's notion of crime 'opportunities' must occur in the presence of incapable guardians (G2). On some occasions, Felson alternately uses guardianship to very specifically mean (G3) ‘capable guardian’, and here he uses its absence to describe the necessary component of a successfully completed crime. By default, therefore, RAT’s G3 ‘capable guardianship’ is either an-as-yet-undiscovered-by-mankind intrinsic and somehow known-in-advance capability that is superior to somehow, as-yet-undiscovered-by-mankind, known-in-advance offender capabilities - or else it must theoretically have been an actually deployed and proven presence that is a necessary component in successfully preventing an attempted crime, not just preventing an otherwise favourable juncture of circumstances for a crime that nobody tried to capitalise upon. Therefore, both G2 and G3 models must underpin the RAT notion of crime opportunity, yet both contain information that cannot be theoretically known until after the theoretical crime has been completed, which makes them both the data of successfully completed crime acts, which makes both G2 and G3 irrefutable truisms, rather than refutable hypothesis that can be empirically tested in the field. This is true, for example, because an offender might attempt to commit a crime in the initial absence of a capable guardian, but then be thwarted when one suddenly turns up. Logically, therefore, only G1 is theoretically capable of existing as an opportunity before the crime is committed.

Attribution

Fig 3 The Latest RAT Crime Triangle

Note: The basic RAT crime triangle (Fig 1) is used in this critique because it is the foundation upon which Felson’s more recent triangle (Fig 3) is built. I contend that the more recent and complex version of the triangle (e.g. see: POP Centre) in Fig 3 is simply an exercise in overlaying more truisms over the original (see Fig 1) , which simply overcomplicates and adds multiple layers of seemingly tautological complexity to the original.

For the purposes of seeking to achieve clarity, it is perhaps worth examining at this point whether or not there are any implications in the seemingly random interchangeable use by crime opportunity theorists of the terms 'motivated offender' (e.g. Felson 1993; Brantingham and Brantingham 1993), 'likely offender' (e.g. Cohen and Felson 1980; Felson and Boba 2010) and 'potential offender' (Farrell et al 2005). Such seemingly random usage may even occur within texts (e.g. see Farrell et al 2005). To add to the slightly baffling confusion that might arise from the way crime opportunity theorists use these terms interchangeably, they are also known to use them in moderately baffling ways. For example, Brantingham and Brantingham (1993: p. 262) write: 'Neither motivated offenders nor opportunities for crime are uniformly distributed in space and time'. It seems that while such mixing of terminology may be confusing, that, ultimately, these three terms must all mean the same thing. Namely, capable offender. Although the term capable offender does not appear to have been used by any of these authors, the use of all or any of these other three terms in the context of the description of crime provided by RAT basic crime act triangle (e.g. Felson and Boba 2010: p.29) must infer that all of these offender descriptions mean capable offenders (as well as motivated offenders) since they are part of the RAT criminal act triangle only because guardianship is necessarily incapable when such a crime act (other than a failed attempt, which is an outcome that is curiously never considered) occurs.

If crime opportunity theorists were to re-think their definitions, accepting that their RAT notion of opportunity is so different from its etymological meaning that it has no predictive ability, they might seek to develop measurable and findable values for vulnerability, for offender capability, and for offender motivation. These could then be tested by way of prediction, regarding liklihood of successful victimisation in a given time period, and attempted empirical falsification and subsequent improvement. Surely this is what we should expect of a real crime science?

To summarise, you cannot know for sure that a guardian is incapable or capable, relative to an offenders ability, until after a crime has been successfully completed, or else an attempt prevented. It is odd that two out of the three RAT models that must underpin RAT's notion of crime opportunity (G2 and G3) can only be known to exist after the crime is successfully committed. We can see, from this logical analysis, the theoretical limitations that arise as a result of RAT not having a clear definition of opportunity and of its reliance upon both stated and unstated truism models of a completed crime act to create a pseudoscientific notion of opportunity as a cause of crime. In short, the current RAT notion of opportunity as a cause of crime is based on the irrational theoretical premise that the crime it seeks to explain caused itself to happen.

Fallacy of the Social Absolute

The problem with G1 (see Fig 2, above) is that even this model may not even represent reality for most cases of feasibly possible potential crime scenes. To begin to examine this problem we need to ask: what does ‘absence’ of any kind of guardianship mean in RAT? We know it is probably not meant as an absence perceived by the offender because that notion is never explored by Felson in any of his writing on RAT, nor by Felson and Clarke (1998). So absence of guardianship in RAT is almost certainly meant to mean (Type A) ‘physically absent’ that there are absolutely no other human beings physically around at the potential crime scene. However G2 and G3 could be re-imagined to mean (Type B) perceived to be ‘conceptually absent’ because the potential guardian is physically present, but with an absence of any possible or potential-offender-perceived guardianship ability of any kind.

In other words we need to ask: does (Type B) mean that that there are other human beings physically around (or perhaps CCTV or even faux human beings that aim to fool potential offenders into thinking they are real – such as life size cardboard cut-out police officers), but they do not in reality have the potential or intrinsic ability, or else cannot even create the perception in the mind of the offender that they could prevent the crime? If G1 means (Type A) then it represents an opportunity of that kind, which can be empirically tested. However, if on another occasion G1 means (B) (G1-Type B’) then how can we possibly know for sure, in advance of the crime being successfully completed, that the physically present person is really conceptually absent as any kind of guardian? The answer is that we cannot. A physically present person of any kind may be perceived to be conceptually absent, to the offender, as any kind of guardian, at the time the offence is being carried out, but that offender may get an unpleasant surprise and find out he/she was wrong.

This means that a ‘G1-Type A’ opportunity is quite easily capable of being known in advance of a successful crime being completed. And that is why this type of RAT opportunity is realistically capable of being empirically tested as a cause of crime (rather than found to be a truism after the event). Fortunately, we probably can test for the impact of a G1-Type B opportunities as a cause of crime as well - so long as we can find ways to know the mind of the offender at the point of the commission of the crime. The use of imaginative mock-crime scenarios may present some potential for future research in this area.

It is by no means a perfect analogy, but one useful example to begin thinking about how G1-Type B opportunities are based on unknowable outcomes are major sporting upsets. Here we must think of the notion of opportunity from the point of view of the contenders. Imagine the title at stake as belonging to the hot favourite and the underdog contender as the ‘thief’ hoping to ‘steal’ the title.

Before the start of a world title boxing match, for example, does the rank-outsider challenger consider the title holder – who’s crown he hopes to ‘steal’ - a capable guardian?

Of the three classic RAT triangles that inform the Opportunity Theory of Crime, only G1 is capable of consideration for this question. And within that model, only G1-Type B can possibly apply.

The excellent boxing website RandyTurpin.Com provides some data on a classic boxing story for us to consider. In the first of two blistering boxing matches the British underdog Turpin caused a major sporting upset by dethroning the American champ Sugar Ray Robinson – a man said by many to be the greatest pound-for-pound boxer who ever lived.

Sugar Ray Robinson v Randolph Turpin I – the data

On July 10th 1951, Robinson was the World Middleweight champion, was 91 fights undefeated, and had lost only once in his 132 fight career.
Turpin was British and European Middleweight champion, and had won 40 of his 43 contests.
Turpin was widely considered to be way "too young and inexperienced" to defeat the World champion Robinson.
Robinson was 4-to-1 favourite to win. Turpin was 20-to-1 to win on points. Result: Turpin clearly won on points and became the new middleweight boxing champion of the world.

Turpin agreed to a rematch to take place only 64 days later, in New York, USA

Sugar Ray Robinson v Randolph Turpin II - the data

On September 12th 1951, Turpin was out to prove that his victory was no fluke, whilst Robinson was determined to avenge the defeat and regain the title.
Robinson was a 2-to-1 favourite to win. Turpin a 6-to-4 underdog.
Turpin lost when the fight was stopped in the 9^th round due to his failure in that round to fight back against Robinson’s intense punching.

(Q) Taking the logic of the Opportunity Theory of Crime, which is based on the classic RAT 'crime act' triangle, how might we consider the ‘opportunity’ for Turpin to ‘steal’ Robinson’s world title in their first encounter?

(A) Firstly, we could not know in advance that Turpin was a relatively more capable competitor (offender) for the title (target) than Robinson was as owner (guardian) of it. Therefore, G2 and G3 are wrong as explanations of ‘opportunity’ for Turpin to win the title or for Robinson's opportunity to successfully defend it – at least not if we consider an opportunity to be something that exists prior to an action to capitalise upon it. Secondly, G1-Type A does not help us here either, since it requires a physical absence of any kind of guardianship and Robinson was not physically absent from the fight (and neither was Turpin come to that). In terms of the opportunity for Robinson to successfully defend his title - or for Turpin to win it - G1-Type B can only help us if we could know the respective states of either Robinson’s or Turpin's minds in the first boxing match. In the case of Robinson for instance, he might have considered this fight with Turpin to be a G1-Type B opportunity to successfully defend his title, because, prior to knowing the outcome of the fight, there is no other RAT opportunity type. But how did Turpin actually view it? The only possible RAT answer is that Turpin must have seen it as a G1-Type B opportunity as well. This is the only RAT notion of opportunity that is left available for us to consider, and it is far from perfect because to accept it as theoretically sufficient we would have to work on the premise that both fighters absolutely considered the other to be incapable (conceptually absent). Having done a little boxing myself, I very much doubt that would have been the case where two rational professional boxers are concerned.

Furthermore, both the Turpin v Robinson fights serve well our understanding of why RAT G2 and G3 ‘opportunity’ models are merely truisms, as opposed to known and testable entities prior to the commission of the act. Because Robinson was only an incapable guardian of his world title after he lost, as was Turpin only known to be incapable after round 9 in the re-match. In both cases their 100 per cent knowable ‘absence’ as guardians never existed before the event was over. What this example shows us is that it is unlikely that offenders and guardians alike will always consider guardianship in binary terms as either conceptually present or absent. The notion of guardianship in terms of opportunity - prior to action made possible by perception of it - is sometimes (depending on the type of guardianship situation) on a spectrum of perceived capability.

Moving back to crime to consider G1-Type B offenders' perceptions of a person’s potential guardianship capability, we can see an obvious potential personal risk for the offender making a wrong assessment. And this is well evidenced by all those heart warming stories of unlikely ‘have-a-go-heroes’ thwarting an offender's immediate criminal ambition and in the routine hoodwinking of offenders by well disguised police officers acting as prostitutes, drug addicts or other official sting operations. In reality then, it is not only potential offenders, but also potential guardians who may choose to capitalise on a conjunction of favourable circumstances to go after their target.

Of course, the usual day-to-day reality of how offenders asses guardianship is likely to be somewhere in the middle between outright perception of 100 per cent capability or else 100 per cent absence of capability. Meanwhile, at the opposite side of the story to how two skilful and powerful professional boxers are likely to rationally assess one another are those involving drunk offenders. Consider all those – the exception proves the rule - type of news stories. For example, there is the memorable one about a pair of British drunks attacking cage fighters dressed-up as drag-queens, and there are much more serous cases involving drunken thieves, being electrocuted stealing live copper cable. That these stories are exceptional proves the point that it’s really not a binary world involving most offenders making RAT-type decisions about human guardians being 100 per cent capable or not. The latter example should also awaken our academic sensibilities to the importance of our theoretical work in terms of how it influences real-world crime reduction policymaking. Despite my jokes, this subject area is deadly serious because people die from poor policymaking in the field of crime.

Currently, the influence of the self-referential RAT notion of opportunity on knowledge progression is that policy makers and practitioners are being seduced by its unapt simplicity to the extent that they are failing to focus adequately upon where progress could be made by way of understanding more about the role of target vulnerability in opportunity structures for crime. For example, as it is currently understood, the RAT notion of opportunity can only consider an open window to be an opportunity for theft or burglary if the crime is successfully completed. And yet we know, from interviewing them, that burglars do flee homes empty handed if they are disturbed - or if they can find nothing inside worth stealing. Understanding more about the interaction between opportunities and failed attempts is as important for recognising what works in crime reduction as understanding the reasons for successful crimes.

A fourth fallacy then, the fallacy of the social absolute, underpins the RAT notion of crime opportunity, based as it is on the RAT crime triangle where all capable guardianship is absolutely absent. The error of all such binary notions in the affairs of mankind is perfectly explained by William James (2008: p.42):

‘As absolute, or sub specie eternitatis, or quatenus infinitus est. As such, the absolute neither acts nor suffers, nor loves nor hates; it has no needs, desires, or aspirations, no failures or successes, friends or enemies, victories or defeats.'

Seeing reality outside of RAT's impossible notion of opportunity allows us to identify a new and important question for crime opportunity theory that it has, to date ignored. Namely, how does the RAT notion of crime opportunities fit with immediate crime prevention opportunities as they are perceived by different types of guardian? To date, RAT has only considered this element from the perspective of the potential offender. Crime opportunity theorists wishing to analyse G1-Type B offenders' perceptions of guardianship would be making a big mistake if they sought only to measure whether all offenders thought capable guardianship was simply present or absent. Reason suggests that they should seek also to understand to what degree offenders perceive certain types of guardianship relatively inferior to their own abilities and why. Research of this kind, conducted in the field, would enable opportunity theorists to tell the difference between more fully rational choices (those who had a really good rational - weighing up of all the pros and cons - think about it), pseudo-rational choice (those who thought about it just for a bit) and irrational choice (those who were intoxicated, deluded or pretty much totally spontaneous).

In terms of whether or not a particular crime has been committed, the law tends to think of the offender’s intentions and his actions as having either happened or not. So, if he perceives an opportunity and chooses not to act upon it then no crime has taken place. Alternatively, if a burglar orchestrates an opportunity to burgle a commercial property by conspiring with others and an informant tips off the police, then he will be thwarted before he attempts to break in, but may be charged with conspiracy. If he attempts to break in, but is thwarted by physical security, canine or human guardianship, then he has committed the offence of attempted burglary. If he breaks in, but is disturbed or thwarted inside by similar guardianship or internal security he may take some items with success, but have to leave others behind. He may complete the burglary, and yet be arrested on leaving the premises. He may leave to premises but be arrested in possession of the stolen goods before he can sell them. Or he may temporarily stash the stolen goods in a nearby garden only to have them found and removed by someone else – perhaps another thief or curious children - before he can sell them. He may find he is unable to sell the stolen goods, or else he may be arrested during the sale, or shortly afterwards, possibly following a tip off from a fence or member of the general public. He may, as often happens, be arrested several days or weeks later on the basis of forensic evidence such as a finger print or DNA left at the crime scene.

For the thief, therefore, both the theft itself and stolen goods trading typically involves several steps, beginning with the theft itself and culminating in an end consumer obtaining the stolen goods. Some of these steps have ideal but not absolutely positive or negative outcomes, such as getting a satisfactory haul from a burglary and getting a satisfactory price, rather than having to leave promptly with less property, or not sell it for a satisfactory price. Even remaining at large for several weeks following a burglary for which he will eventually be convicted is more of a positive outcome than immediate detection and arrest. Other steps, such as overcoming physical security and avoiding immediate detection or apprehension by a guardian, have binary outcomes of absolute success or failure.

Since most thieves steal property in order to sell it for cash (Sutton 1998), the various steps involved for successful completion, following an initially successful crime of theft are depicted in Figure 4 below (from Sutton 2010).

Figure 4 -

For the offender, if not the law and the RAT crime triangle, crime is a process. The way the law sees a crime as having been committed is far simpler than what an offender sees as a crime having been successfully completed. Seeing crime from the point of view of the offender reveals why the appealing simplicity of RAT crime triangle is actually what makes it simply inadequate.

The Fallacy of Precognition

There are three reasons why the overall RAT notion of crime opportunity as it is currently understood cannot include opportunities that offenders are capable of perceiving: first, it is not an opportunity that a potential offender can choose to ignore because he is by now deemed (albeit impossibly) to have successfully committed the crime; second, it follows that it is not based on a notion of opportunity, which if acted upon, could result in a failed attempt; and third, it is based entirely upon the classic RAT crime triangle model (Fig 1) of a successful crime in commission, which means that it relies upon the underlying assumption that any offender who perceives the opportunity knows in advance that their criminal action will be successful (something which is impossible to know with certainty - just ask anyone who has ever attacked a cage fighter going to a fancy dress party in high heels and cocktail dress).

If the RAT crime opportunity is one which the potential offender at a potential crime scene can recognise then in order to do so he would need know things that are impossible to know without access to return-ticket time travel, or else he would need to possess precognition. At the time of writing, human time travel to the future and back has not been accomplished. Moreover, since nobody has yet won the pot of accumulated prizes on offer that amount to over $2m (US) for proof of psychic abilities, RAT crime opportunity theory is wrong whenever it is used to interpret offender decision making. Therefore, at least in this regard, the RAT opportunity theory for crime is based on what we might here name the fallacy of precognition.

The Post Hoc Fallacy: The fallacy of assuming that temporal succession is evidence of causal relation

Because the RAT notion of opportunity is based upon the fallacy of offenders having precognition it follows that it is also built on the following premise: Because absence of capable guardianship is a condition of every successfully completed crime, all offenders rely upon this fact in order to commit the crime, which means that it is therefore a cause of the crime. The term post hoc comes from the logical fallacy: post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore on account of this). The RAT notion of opportunity is clearly a post hoc fallacy.

Some Logical and Veracious Reinterpretations of the Crime Opportunity Myth

Most opportunity theorists, including Clarke and Felson, appear to consider the RAT crime triangle notion of opportunity to exist as a fixed certainty before a crime is even committed. However, some scholars do get much closer to reality.

Weaver and Carroll (1985) discovered that novice shoplifters perceived the likely effectiveness of observed security measures and other guardianship in very different ways to expert shoplifters.

Tilley (1993) theorises about offender perceptions and not certainties where he speculates about about how crime prevention measures to protect previously victimised homes might change repeat-offenders' perceptions:

“… Kirkholt was a high crime area, that it was clearly circumscribed, and that it was culturally homogenous are features of the context in which the project was established. The removal of meters, the establishment of cocoons and the target hardening of already victimised dwellings were measures taken, which in turn triggered mechanisms which might include, respectively, increasing the offenders’ perceived risk of recognition and apprehension, removing incentives to burgle the property, and rendering more difficult and more risky entry to properties hitherto found to be most vulnerable.” (Tilley 1993: 14)

Similarly, Farrell et al (1995) do consider the characteristics of target vulnerability to be something that offenders perceive in advance of committing a crime, rather than something that is so. Incongruously, however, in seeking to make sense of repeat victimisation, they then go on to describe previous criminal success against a target interchangeably as something that makes the target ‘known’ to be suitable (p.391) – which is logically impossible - while elsewhere (p.396) they veraciously describe previously victimised targets as something that repeat offenders can only ‘perceive’ to be suitable:

“A burglar walking down the street where he has never burgled before sees two kinds of house - the presumed suitable and the presumed unsuitable (by dint of occupancy, alarm, barking dog and so on). He burgles one of the houses he presumes to be suitable, and is successful. Next time he walks down the street, he sees three kinds of house – the presumed unsuitable, the presumed suitable and the known to be suitable. It would involve least effort to burgle the house known to be suitable.” (Farrell et al 391)

Contrast that with the more logical acknowledgment that 'opportunity' depends upon perception, not knowledge of certainty or the pre-existence of certain outcomes:

“Offences against the same target by the same offender are based on the experiences of the previous victimization, and perception of known risk and rewards. This rational choice is based upon the motivated offender's greater knowledge of the victim's suitability and the likelihood of the absence of capable guardians.” (Farrell et al 396).

DISCUSSION OF THE MYTH THAT OPPORTUNITY IS A CAUSE OF CRIME

I suspect that the confusion between fixed properties of 'opportunity' and offenders' perceptions of target vulnerability that have led to confusions about causality and truism in the RAT notion of opportunity is in no small part due to the way it has been described by its originator and his various co-authors. For example, Felson and Clarke (1988) could hardly describe more positively the components of the classic RAT Triangle as though they are things that exist as a known and permanent state of affairs before an offender attempts to succeed, rather than what can only be known after an offender has managed to succeed:

‘The routine activity approach started as an explanation of predatory crimes. It assumed that for such crimes to occur there must be a convergence in time and space of three minimal elements: a likely offender, a suitable target, and the absence of a capable guardian against crime.‘ (Felson and Clarke 1988: p. 4)

Furthermore, this notion of the RAT and SCP discovery of some kind of universal law at work is probably reinforced by Felson's repeated reference to his crime triangle as 'the chemistry of crime' (See Box 2, page 4 Felson and Clarke 1988; chapter 2 Felson 2002; and chapter 2 Felson and Boba 2010) and the fact that this is confusingly labelled (Felson and Clarke 1988) as 'The New Opportunity Theory' and then immediately and weirdly followed by the caveat that it’s probably not a theory at all. So why call it one in the first place? Perhaps because what we are witnessing here is evidence of a struggle between knowledge of the need to seek veracity and the desire to create an influential stylistically definable discourse that is expressing the strong components of the semantic system of the natural sciences, which is one reason why all such myths are created. Namely, in order to solve complex social problems as elegantly as pure mathematics (Maranda 1972).

The equivocal use of the meaning of guardianship by Felson in the above (Felson and Clarke 1988 e.g: see elsewhere on page 4), and his varous other works on RAT, by way of vacillating randomly between two distinct, yet unacknowledged, types makes the argument that opportunity is a cause of crime fallacious. Because if the guardianship component of RAT opportunity must be a capable one to prevent crime then it must be incapable guardians that allow a crime ‘opportunity’ to take place, but that can only be known for sure after the crime has been successfully completed, which makes it an irrefutable truism and not an opportunity awaiting an action to capitalise on it. If, however, the guardian needs merely to be anyone - with any degree of incapability – to serve a role in reducing, to some degree of success, crime opportunities from existing, then this weaker (G1) notion of guardianship is not a truism but is instead the sound premise upon which to build a scientific hypothesis for the RAT notion of ‘opportunity’ as a cause of crime because it can be tested to see if it can be refuted by empirical research, which fulfils Popper’s criteria for scientific explanations.

Two pillars (G2 and G3) of the three that support all RAT-reliant opportunity theories of crime are wrong

Those who promote the opportunity theory of crime need to develop scholarly vigilance against what appears to be a tendency towards confirmation bias in their published work in order to allow for greater consideration of disconfirming evidence. The current situation is that RAT and SCP adherents are characterised by their biased systematic collection and parading of many weak and unapt confirmatory examples – such as, for example, suicides from coal gas (Clarke and Mayhew 1989). This classic SCP coal gas / natural gas suicide example is cherished by both SCP and RAT adherents, who use it to promote their belief that opportunity is a cause of crime, but it is unapt as an explanation for crime or deviance because of the fact that suicide by coal gas, via the kitchen oven, was something done by (a) people suffering from depression and (b) it was the only painless and culturally acceptable form of suicide available in the home at the time. So it was not just that one important opportunity had been removed - it was that the only known option of affordable and painless suicide had been removed. This meant there was no acceptably alternative known method to which those with suicidal tendencies could be displaced to. And yet Clarke and Mayhew (1989) claim that the gas suicide story is evidence that specific types of crime opportunity reduction does not simply result in crime displacement to all those other relatively vulnerable targets in society.

Another cherished, but unapt, RAT and SCP example of the importance of opportunity as a cause of crime is the claimed affect of compulsory helmet legislation on the reduction of motorcycle theft (Mayhew, Clarke and Elliot 1989). However, they fail here to consider that – rather than simply reducing so called 'opportunities' for theft – this new law effectively required any would-be motorcycle thief to wander the streets on foot while visibly going equipped for theft with an unconcealable crash helmet in search of a suitable target. This legislation caused, not so much a reduction of opportunity – at least not in dictionary definitions of what opportunity means - as an introduction of the need for thieves to look much more suspicious than previously, which may have played a large part in the decline of this offence. The real problem is that those writing about opportunity and this crime at the time oddly never interviewed the very subjects of their research, namely motorcycle thieves. Had they done so they might have had a chance to better understand how the law impacted on their criminal behaviour, where, when, why and with what effect.

With regard to paying even-handed attention to disconfirming evidence for their claim that opportunities alone are the most important root cause of crime, Opportunity Theorists would do well to consider why it is the case that in so many quaint and affluent English villages those honesty cash boxes for unmanned organic vegetable stalls are not stolen? I suggest they might wish to consider conducting some empirical research to test their assumptions that opportunity alone is the most important root cause with controlled experiments, with such honesty box set-ups, in different rural and urban settings with contrasting levels of affluence.

In the final analysis, the Routine Activities Theory is Brilliantly Wrong

The medical notion of the four humours of the human body that was adopted and systemized by the ancient Greeks at around 400 BC dominated medicine up until the end of the nineteenth century - blood (hot and moist and airlike), phlegm (cold moist and waterlike), yellow bile (hot, dry and firelike) and black bile (cold, dry and earthlike) - and led to the irrational notion of treating people through bloodletting, along with a host of other irrational and harmful treatments, that continue today as bad alternative medicine (Wanjek 2003). The RAT notion of opportunity as a cause of crime is not quite as brilliant in its thoroughness and appeal as the notion of the four humours. But it is equally as irrational and wrong. Hopefully, it will not endure for two millennia.

Understanding the Power of a Criminological Myth

Perhaps the RAT triangle as a cause of crime represents the power of the small and clever myth over those larger and more clumsy rhetorical arguments offered by the wishful thinking of certain sections of the academic left. Maranda (1972, 16) summarises the power of the simple myth: ‘ …a culture’s myths contain its semantic jurisprudence. Whether this can be reduced to an algebra depends on the power of the analyst.’ Thinking about this, it might be that the RAT triangle, being a triangle, signals veracious triangulation, which for time time now has been a respected way of checking results by employing more than one empirical research method.

Barthes ( 1973: 110-111) provides some insight as to how this might be so in terms of analysing myths through the science of semiotics: ‘…pictures, to be sure, are more imperative than writing, they impose meaning at one stroke, without analysing or diluting it.’ And: ‘This does not mean that one must treat mythical speech like language; myth in fact belongs to the province of general science, coextensive with linguistics, which is semiology.’

More research, it seems, is needed if we are to seek to understand the possible significance of the RAT triangle and its three classic components as signifiers of truth by criminologists who have accepted it as evidence that such a precise and elegant description of the data of a successful crime can be an explanation for itself. Why the guardianship component of the RAT triangle has never been described by its originator and the vast majority of Crime Opportunity theorists as something that is determined by the offender's perception is an area in need of further research. Perhaps it is because this would break its mythical power as the closest thing criminology has to a scientific equation for crime causation?

CONCLUSION

To avoid ambiguity we need a Crime Science equation for the old saying: 'opportunity makes the thief' that is based upon a clear definition of the criminological notion of opportunity. Felson and other writers in the RAT field should ensure their work is clear about which of two very different possible types of guardianship is in the RAT notion of crime as opportunity, because the current ambiguous use of the term makes arguments that opportunity is the cause of crime logically fallacious. The ambiguous meaning of ‘guardian’ in RAT taints Crime Science with the mark of pseudoscience (Parke 2000) and undermines RAT. The heart of the problem is in Felson’s seemingly random switching between use of ‘absence of guardianship’ with 'absence of capable guardianship' as one of three essential elements of a crime which is compounded by their secondary use by Felson and others in badly defined notions of opportunity as a cause of crime. Felson, and those who support RAT as an opportunity theory for crime could do worse than sort out this confusingly ambiguous theoretical area.

Breaking the RAT notion of crime as opportunity down into three clearly distinct, yet previously unarticulated subtypes, one of which can be further split into two sub-types allows us to see that only one of the three main sub-types (G1) is logically valid as a possible cause for crime. The remaining two are irrefutable truisms and so cannot, rationally, be the cause of themselves. The sub-type G1, which can be tested by empirical research, should be tested in order to determine the roll of opportunity as a possible cause of crime.

This highly specific critique of RAT is necessary for the development of a real crime science, because composing a logical, theoretically sound and refutable equation for crime opportunity is the sort of thing we would expect a real science of crime to do. Read and Tilley (2000) argue that much crime prevention is not rocket science. That may be so, but launching a scientific opportunity theory for crime might well turn out to be more complex than one for launching a rocket.

If having read this far you think there still might be something rational or useful about the RAT notion of crime opportunity then consider the following scenario.

The vault of the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox holds at least $278 billion dollars’ worth of gold. It is deemed impregnable. Were crime scientists to assign a measurable and discoverable value upon its level of vulnerability to theft (which they have never done because doing that would mean they might be proven wrong in empirical testing in the field) it would probably have to be placed at or around zero. As far as RAT theory is concerned the vault at Fort Knox has never been overcome because guardianship is more capable than any of the motivated offenders out there. In effect, all offenders wanting to steal the gold from Fort Knox are incapable.

But what if I have just invented a teleportation device such as those used on the Stark Trek’s Star Ship Enterprise? Well, before you guffaw at such a childishly naïve idea and click to another more sensible article on the internet you might be wise to read up on what quantum physics is getting up to these days click here.

Ok – so imagine that we are living now some 300-1000 years in the future. And I’m a rogue scientist who has secretly developed a way to teleport living or heavy matter without needing to first destroy it. And, being a rogue, I decide to teleport myself and another teleportation device into the vault of Fort Knox. And then I teleport myself and the entire contents of the vault back to my secret underground bunker somewhere in Britain.

What does this caper mean for crime opportunity theory?

Overnight, all the crime opportunity theorists (perhaps one might even be a member of Felson's future family tree) will have been right all along about the reason Fort Knox was overcome. Great , Great, Great, Great, Grandfather Marcus Felson was never wrong all those years ago either. Some will be on the TV and others writing academic articles to explain that the reason the gold was stolen is because the guardianship was incapable compared to the offender’s capability. Well duh!

Surprisingly, even the law is less of an ass than, so called, Crime Science and Crime as Opportunity Theory in this regard. For example, police capture houses that operate by leaving windows open or doors unlocked, in order to be able to secretly video record active burglars to prove that they are burglars, are not seen by the law as cases of entrapment - because that's what people normally do. Normal people leave their windows open sometimes. Open windows do not cause crime. If they did then lawyers would be able to make the case that the police using open windows on capture houses caused the burglar to burgle the house. Open windows are simply something that puts your home somewhere up the yet to be created measurable, discoverable and refutable scale of vulnerability to theft. You can read an interesting post with a link to an even more interesting video on police capture houses in my own city of Nottingham - here. Information about the video can be found here.

Crime as opportunity theorists and the Crime Scientists who believe that this weird criminological notion of opportunity is a cause of crime are pseudo scholars and pseudo scientists chiefly because, whilst claiming to be either objective criminologists or else 'real' scientists, they blindly believe in their insular world of self-referential confirmation bias, anecdotes and ever more complex truisms dressed up as causal explanations. They have yet to establish a consistent definition of opportunity or guardianship. And they have yet to formulate a measurable and discoverable value for victim or target vulnerability that can be tested by empirical research.

In the absolutely final analysis, the RAT notion of crime opportunity is nothing more than an unhelpful truism. I'm afraid that I have to say that anyone claiming that such a notion of opportunity is a cause of crime is, unfortunately, a pseudoscientist supporter armed with a conveniently infinitely variable, untestable and therefore irrefutable post-hoc explanation for crime that ultimately is based on the illogical premise that all successfully completed crimes cause themselves to happen. Put another way, so called crime as opportunity theory is currently based on the premise that something you have not yet done is the cause of you doing it. If you are happy with this RAT-based crime as opportunity notion for crime causation, then - I don't wish to be rude but - might I suggest you set up your own church for those who believe in criminological miracles. Why not call it the Church of Crime Science? Alternatively you might wish to consider the above logical arguments, which explain why the current notion of crime opportunity is both unrealistically simplistic in part and is, elsewhere in its reasoning, completely impossible as a cause of crime.

OFFENDERS PLAY DICE

Not Quite Quantum Criminology: Proposing an Improved Definition of Criminal Opportunity

Unlike the predictions that can be made for physical laws such as gravity, criminal opportunities are not logically capable of being described as certainties. Rather, in this one respect at least, we should think of them as physicists think of quantum physics, Namely, that they exist as probabilities. With more research, we should be able to predict the probability of a particular property being successfully burgled, perhaps with the same precise accuracy, but not certainty, that a physicist can predict where particles will land (Wootters and Wojciech 1979) and casino bosses can predict that the house, overall, always wins. Here we would not be saying that any given premises will not be burgled, in the same way as a casino’s management cannot know for sure that you, the reader of this essay, will not win their jackpot. What we would be doing is predicting the likelihood of that premises, and others like it being burgled, which would be accurate at least until a new modus operandi and/or level of offender motivation influenced by market prices, and illicit demand and supply factors, bring significant change to the arms race between offenders and wider society. At which point it will be necessary to re-calculate the odds and then address the vulnerability of the premises and the motivation and abilities of potential offenders in order to reduce the victimisation risk.

Thinking about crime in this way enables us to propose a new definition of criminal opportunity:

A criminal opportunity comprises a juncture of circumstances, discovered or orchestrated by an offender, which they may perceive to be probably, but not certainly, favourable to the successful completion of a crime.

No definition should ever be mistaken as a hypothesis or a theory. Ratortunity provides us with an explanation that is based on a rule of thumb model that tells us essentially that offenders commit crimes because they can. That is no better at helping us to understand the causes of crime than old belief systems based on the idea that a witch or wizard must have done it. To understand how this is so David Deutsch has recorded an excellent lecture on good explanations in science. He teaches us that good explanations are difficult to vary and easy to refute, which is exactly the opposite of the infinitely variable and impossible to refute truism that is ratortunity.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor Ken Pease, Professor Graham Farrell and Professor Nick Tilley for kindly indulging me by debating and discussing the subject of this paper. While I remain open to any disconfirming evidence that the RAT notion of opportunity is wrong - to date in my opinion - nothing persuasive has yet been forthcoming.

References

Anderson, J. (2010). Australian Institute of Criminology. Research in Practice. Handbook No. 11. Bushfire Arson prevention Handbook. Australian Government. http://www.aic.gov.au/publications/current%20series/rip/1-10/11.aspx

Barthes, R. (1973) Mythologies. St Albans. Granada Publishing Ltd: Paladin.

Brantingham, P.L. and Brantingham. P. J. Environment, Routine, and Situation: Towards a Pattern Theory of Crime. In Clarke, R.V. and Felson, M. (eds) Advances in Criminological Theory. VOl. 5. New Brunswick. Transactions Publishers.

Clarke, R. V. (1984) Opportunity-Based Crime Rates: The Difficulties of Further Refinement. British Journal of Criminology. Vol. 24. No1. pp. 74-83

Clarke, R. V. and Mayhew, P. (1989) Crime as Opportunity: A Note on Domestic Gas Suicide in Britain and the Netherlands. British Journal of Criminology, Delinquency and Deviant Social Behaviour. 29:1. Winter. pp.35-46

Cohen, L. E. and Felson, M. (1979) Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 558-608.

Curtis. G.N.(undated) The Fallacy Files: http://www.fallacyfiles.org/ambiguit.html

Einstradtler, W. and Henry, S. (1995) Criminological Theory: An Analysis of Its Underlying Assumptions. Orlando. Harcourt Brace College Publishers.

Farrell, G. Phillips. C. and Pease, K. (1995) Like Taking Candy: Why Does Repeat Victimization Occur? British Journal of Criminology. Vol. 35. Summer. pp. 384-399

Farrell, G. Clark, K, Ellingworth, D. and Pease, K. (2005) OF TARGETS AND SUPERTARGETS: A ROUTINE ACTIVITY THEORY OF HIGH CRIME RATES. Internet Journal of Criminology.http://www.internetjournalofcriminology.com/Farrell,%20Clark,%20Ellingworth%20&%20Pease%20-%20Supertargets.pdf

Felson, M. and Clarke, R.V. (1998) Opportunity Makes the Thief. Paper No. 98. Police Research Series. London. Home Office.

Felson, M. (2002) Crime and Everyday Life (third Edition). London. Sage.

Felson, M. and Boba, R. (2010) Crime and Everyday Life. London. Sage

Felson, R. B. (1993) Predatory and Dispute-related Violence: A Social Interactionist Approach. In Clarke, R.V. and Felson, M. (eds) Advances in Criminological Theory. VOl. 5. New Brunswick. Transactions Publishers.

Garwood, J. (2011) A quasi-experimental investigation of self-reported offending and perception of criminal opportunity in undergraduate students. Security Journal. Vol. 24. 1. pp. 37-51.

James, W. (2008 – reprint) A Pluralistic Universe. Herbert Lectures at ManchesterCollege On the Present Situation in Philosophy. Maryland. ArcManor

Laycock, G. (2003). Launching Crime Science. Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science. University College London. ISBN 0-9545607-1-X http://www.ucl.ac.uk/jdi/downloads/publications/crime_science_short_reports/launching_crime_science.pdf

Note: Although it had been published and online by UCL since 2003, the above article by Professor Gloria Laycock has been, for some unknown reason, removed from the Internet - despite being cited by scholars at least six times according to Google's academic citation index. Anyone interested in the history of scientific theory formation and development, wishing to obtain the original pdf copy , may do so, I'm told, by emailing crimescience@hotmail.com

Maranda, P. (ed) (1972) Introducton. Mythology. Harmondsworth. Penguin Books.

Mayhew, P. Clarke, R. V. and Elliot, D. (1989) The Howard Journal of Criminal Justice Volume 28, Issue 1, pp.1–8.

Parke, R. L. 2000 Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pease, K, (2008). How to Behave Like a Scientist? Policing http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~ssgf/KP/2008_Pease_Behaving_Badly.pdf

Popper, K. (1976). Unended quest: An intellectual autobiography. LaSalle, IL: Open Court.

Read, T., and N. Tilley (2000). Not Rocket Science? Problem–Solving and Crime Reduction. Crime Reduction Research Series. Paper No. 6. London: Home Office Policing and Reducing Crime Unit. http://www.popcenter.org/tools/implementing_responses/PDFs/Read.pdf

Sutton, M. (1998) Handling Stolen Goods and Theft: A Market Reduction Approach. Home Office Research Study 178. Home Office. London.

Sutton, M. (2010) Stolen Goods Markets. Problem Oriented Policing Guide No. 57. U.S.A. Department of Justice COPS Programme. (Peer reviewed international policing guide. http://www.popcenter.org/problems/stolen_goods/

Sutton, M (2012) Contingency Makes or Breaks the Thief: Introducing the Perception Contingency Process Hypothesis. Best Thinking.com

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Tilley, N. and Laycock, G. (2002). Working out what to do: Evidence based crime reduction. Crime Reduction Series Paper 11. London Home Office https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/193161.pdf

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Wanjek, C, (2003) Bad Medicine: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, From Distance Healing to Vitamin O. Hoboken New Jersey, John Wiley and Sons.

Weaver, F.M. and Carroll, J. S. (1985) Crime Perceptions in a Natural Setting by Expert and Novice Shoplifters. Social Psychology Quarterly. Vol 48. No 4. 349-359.

Willison, R. (2000) Understanding and Addressing Criminal Opportunity: The Application of Situational Crime Prevention to IS Security. Journal of Financial Crime. Vol. 7. No. 3. pp 201-210.

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SPIN@GE USA Beware of t...

2011-01-03T11:30:16-05:00

Postscript 1 May 2012 by the author:

In light of the facts revealed in this paper, published by Best Thinking in 2011, I am grateful to the USDA for deleting their misleading spread sheet from the Internet, which claimed that drinking Florida grapefruit juice would help humans to absorb two to four times as much iron from spinach as would otherwise be possible. I now have another request for the USDA: Given that a pregnant woman would need to eat at least 14 pounds or 6kg (yes 6kg!) of spinach every single day, to have the slightest chance of absorbing her recommended daily amount of iron from that source alone, isn't it about time that you ceased promoting spinach as a good source of iron in your nutrition tables? Otherwise, it appears that the USDA might well be promoting agricultural interests over those of individuals. This is an important issue because low iron levels is one of the major nutrition problems among women in the USA, leading to disability and early death. Moreover, the most common source of poisoning of children in the USA is from young children overdosing on iron pills in the home. If proper advice is not given regarding the best nutritional food sources of iron then it seem reasonable to hypothesise that more supplements will be taken - leading to more infants suffering from accidental iron overdose.

*****

The main aim of the article is to reveal and explain why the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is publishing harmful counterknowledge on the Internet to promote spinach consumption.

The story in this article has never before been told and, because of the complexity of the subject matter, could fairly be described as long and involved. It is written and published in the public interest with the hope that it will bring influence to bear upon the USDA to cease promoting spinach as a good source of iron and to cease publishing potentially harmful counterknowledge about the benefits of vitamin C as an aid to iron absorption from spinach for those who are low in iron.

A personal anecdote

Last year I got married. In June 2010 my American in-laws, flew over from New York as guests for the wedding in Nottingham, England. Two of them, Elorie Stevens and Dawn Manning, are social work managers in Massachusetts. Both are black Jamaican American women. Both have low iron levels.

At a sunny back garden barbeque the week after the wedding Elorie and Dawn listened indulgently as the topic of conversation was humorously turned by my wife Elaine from serial killers to my crime research on the impact of bad data upon policymaking.

Elaine, with a curious mixture of pride outweighed by amusement, told how my latest research had dragged me out of my social science criminology comfort zone into the field of biochemistry myth busting about spinach (Sutton 2010a; 2010b). Elorie and Dawn were amused but also agog to hear that, contrary to popular belief, spinach is not a good nutritional source of iron. Both were advised by their primary health providers to eat spinach in order to get more iron from their diet, and both had been religiously eating it ever since.

“Good grief! Why?” I asked.

Background Information

I told Elorie and Dawn that they had been fed a load of old bull and that they would be better off eating eggs, liver and red meat and perhaps – but I was not sure - dried apricots. What really annoyed me at the time, and to this day, is that I am a social science criminologist, not a medical doctor, nutritionist or biochemist, and yet I know more about iron nutrition than their general medical practitioners across the Atlantic. Surely that can’t be right.

As a criminologist, with no formal education in nutrition or bio-chemistry, I began my research in this area by studying scholarly work on nutrition written by orthodox experts who conducted scientific research and supported all of their assertions with verifiable references. It was, as they say, a steep learning curve.

Iron, I learned, is an essential part of most living organisms on Earth. Low iron is one of the most common nutrient deficiencies in the USA and in the world (Ackerman, 2003). A sufficient supply of iron in our diet is essential for human health, while too much is toxic. Overdosing on iron pills is a leading cause of childhood poisoning (Morris 2000; Tenenbein 2005). People who have low stores of iron in their body often feel tired, lack energy and may have spoon shaped nails.

In 2010, I published two articles that debunked a widely held belief in what turns out to be a long standing myth about spinach. In those articles I showed that what I call the Spinach Popeye Decimal Error Story (SPIDES) is a two-pronged myth. Firstly, because the cartoon character Popeye in fact ate spinach for vitamin A (Sutton 2010 a) and never for iron, and secondly because – despite what you might read on countless websites and in orthodox and authoritative academic textbooks and scholarly articles - there never was a 19^th century typographical decimal error made in recording the iron content of spinach (Sutton 2010b), and furthermore there was no long-standing erroneous 19^th Century data that remained influential in the 20^th Century until German scientists re-checked the figures in the 1930’s.

With exquisitely excruciating unintended irony the SPIDES has been perversely used by orthodox experts for years as an example of the need for scholars to check their sources and facts, rather than merely citing the unsubstantiated work of others.

I first became embroiled in debunking the SPIDES by happenstance while fact checking it as a widely believed example of the impact of bad data on policymaking (see Sutton 2010a). When I started out, all I wanted was a reputable reference to support the story that I too believed was true. What I soon found, through conducting proper research, however is that it is a complete myth that is widely yet erroneously believed by top scientists and journalists publishing, amongst thousands of other examples, in the British Medical Journal (Hamblin 1981), The European Molecular Biology Organization (Weigman 2005), The New York Times (Emsley 2008), The Royal Society of Chemistry (Coultate 2009), Cambridge University Press (Gustavii, 2008), the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC 2006) and The Guardian (Gabbatt 2009).

Braced myths

I hypothesise that when orthodox and respected sceptics believe, or disingenuously, use a myth to support the need to be sceptical that they brace-the myth – making it deeply entrenched and harder to eradicate (Supermyths 2010). By way of example, at the time of writing, despite all the verifiable and fully referenced evidence that I have carefully presented by way of my 2010 articles in this area – the Wikipedians in charge of editorial decisions on both the Spinach and Popeye pages in Wikipedia appear to find it impossible to accept that the SPIDES is a myth and it seems that, without so much as seeking to check the latest research, they have simply deleted any mention of it being debunked. For example, a page about the SPIDES itself was completely deleted by Wikipedia, but it can be found elsewhere, because on the Internet delete never actually means delete. See, for example, Wikibin (2010) and Annex Wikia (2010).

Such blind deletion and re-publishing of deleted content elsewhere on the Internet is something that appears to work both in favour of perverse censorship of scholarly myth busting and the mythmongering it seeks to correct; whether or not it favours one over the other is an area worthy of further research.

Next, I present the results of my research and my latest myth busting findings to reveal how the USDA is misinforming the general public and their nutritional advisors.

The USDA Began Publishing Misinformation About Spinach Over 100 Years Ago

Contrary to what we now believe to be true, the U.S.A. nutritionist H.C. Sherman advised at length in an early USDA publication that eating plants rather than meat, liver and eggs was the most effective way for us to get iron from natural dietary sources (Sherman 1907:57-58):

“The iron content of eggs is also high, but the cost of these is sometimes almost prohibitive for families of limited means, while present methods of drying and preserving tend to equalise the cost and increase the available variety of fruits and vegetables throughout the year. The ratio of iron to fuel value is also high in lean meat, but here, as has already been pointed out, the iron exists largely in the form of haemoglobin, which appears to be of distinctly lower nutritive value than the iron compounds of milk, eggs and foods of vegetable origin. Moreover, there is now a general agreement among medical authorities that little meat should be used in the dietaries of young children, where, as already explained, the supply of food-iron is of the greatest importance.”

We now know that advice was wrong, because subsequent research reveals that the most efficient and effective way to get easily absorbable iron from natural dietary sources is by eating liver, eggs and red meat - rather than nonheme iron from plant sources.

By 1935 it was quite widely known that scientists had discovered not only that the iron content of spinach was not as great as previously believed (see Sutton 2010a and 2010b) but that it was difficult for humans to absorb it from that hardy little plant. On 17^th August 1935 the Society for Science and the Public (The Science News-Letter 1935) wrote:

“Science is coming to the defense of the youngster who refuses to eat his spinach.

Mother, it seems, is only partly right when she pleads with junior to “Eat your spinach-it’s good for you.”

“It’s good for him, but not nearly as good as its cracked up to be. It just can’t be spinach that enables Popeye the Sailor to perform those red blooded feats in the movies. For spinach contains iron, but new studies at the University of Wisconsin, carried on in those agricultural chemistry laboratories which have already made countless contributions to the knowledge of vitamins and minerals, show that 25 per cent of the iron in spinach is “available”, as scientists put it. That is, only one-quarter of it is in a form that is usable by the body. Other vegetables are no better than spinach in this respect.”

Today the US Government Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS 2007) advise that:

“Vegetarians who exclude all animal products from their diet may need almost twice as much dietary iron each day as non-vegetarians because of the lower intestinal absorption of nonheme iron in plant foods.”

The ODS and the USDA also recommend vegetarians to consider taking vitamin C to help absorb nonheme iron. But does research evidence support such confident advice?

In order to appreciate the significance of the question, it is important to understand exactly what the presence of oxalic acid in spinach means for those who believe that eating it with vitamin C will help to ensure they have enough iron in their diet. This is explained below.

The questionable benefit of vitamin C in this role is the central theme of this article and we will be returning to it shortly.

At this point, however, before examining the evidence for the iron absorption benefits of consuming it with vitamin C, it is a necessary exercise, given the huge popularity of spinach in the USA, to consider - for example - how many cans of Popeye brand spinach consumed on its own – or a similar standard can of spinach - will provide a person with enough daily iron to be healthy.

To answer this question we first need to know what experts recommended our daily intake of iron should be. This is known as our recommended daily allowance (RDA). There is, unfortunately, no one size fits all RDA for iron because it varies by age and gender. Pregnant women, for example, require far higher amounts of iron than any other group.

Iron RDA information is easy to find from official sources. The information in Table 1 is taken from ODS (2007).

Table 1: Recommended Dietary Allowances for Iron for Infants (7 to 12 months), Children (1 to 18 years), and Adults

Age	Males (mg/day)	Females (mg/day)	Pregnancy (mg/day)	Lactation (mg/day)
7 to 12 months	11	11	N/A	N/A
1 to 3 years	7	7	N/A	N/A
4 to 8 years	10	10	N/A	N/A
9 to 13 years	8	8	N/A	N/A
14 to 18 years	11	15	27	10
19 to 50 years	8	18	27	9
51+ years	8	8	N/A	N/A

USDA tables (2010) inform us that canned spinach, drained of the brine it is canned with, has 2.3 mg of iron per 100g. A standard 13.5 oz (383 gram) can once drained is equivalent to 10oz (283 grams) of such spinach. Rounding this drained figure up to 300 grams - to help us err generously on the iron in spinach-favourable side of caution - allows us to estimate with a fair degree of confidence that a standard can of spinach contains no more than some 6.6 mg of iron.

Taking things at face value

Working at face value on official US guidelines that vegetarians need to eat twice as much dietary iron as those who eat meat, if no other source of iron was available, that would mean that each day a man aged 19-50 should eat some two and a half 13.5 oz cans of Popeye spinach, a woman aged 19-50 should eat five and a half cans, and a pregnant woman should eat eight cans. But such face value calculations would be completely wrong. Because we should not forget that it is difficult for humans to absorb such nonheme iron. In fact, such canned quantities would be nowhere near enough spinach to meet the daily requirements of these 19-50 year old men and women, because experts (e.g. Harvard 2010; Akerman 2003) conclude that research shows that at best we can only absorb only between 2 and 20 percent of nonheme iron, and that iron from spinach is particularly difficult to absorb since spinach contains oxalic acid.

There are no definitive answers on the issue of exactly how much iron we can absorb from spinach

Research by McMillan and Johnston (1951) found the best case scenario was where their subjects were able to absorb 13 percent of the iron from spinach when they consumed it with other foodstuffs such as meat that aided absorption of nonheme iron. And an overview of later research by Campen and Welch (1980) found much lower figures than this for human subjects. In my calculations below, therefore, I am working on the “at best” assumption, from the research or the experts, that it is ordinarily possible for humans to absorb 15 percent of the iron from spinach – when in reality the figure is probably much lower.

All males aged 19-50 or, for example, pregnant female vegetarians reading the ODS (2007) advice, who are unaware of the effect of oxalic acids upon iron absorption from spinach, would be patently misled if they were to believe that by simply eating twice as much nonheme iron as heme iron that they need only eat 16, 36 or 54 mg, respectively, of iron in spinach. To repeat the point already made, they would be mistaken in this belief because we are all, are at best, able to absorb only 15 percent of the iron from spinach.

This means that current research suggests that we can absorb no more than 1 mg of the 6.6 mg of iron that is at most likely to be found in a standard 13.5 oz of spinach. This means that if no other source of iron is available, a man aged 19-50 would in fact need to eat at least eight cans of spinach every day to get his required level of iron, a woman of the same age would need to eat 18 cans and a pregnant woman would need to consume a nauseating 27, which - at 10 oz of solid matter when drained - is well over a stone (14 lb) of the stuff.

Yet the USDA tables tell us that spinach is high source of iron and quite amazingly, Campen and Welch (1980), of the USDA conclude that spinach should not be abandoned as a potentially valuable source of our dietary iron without further study.

Further Study: Spinach and the Good Source of Iron Fallacy

The Ohio State University Online fact sheet (2010) describes what constitutes a “good source of iron”.

“A good food source of iron contains a substantial amount of iron in relation to its calorie content and contributes at least 10% of the U.S. Recommended Dietary Allowance (U.S. RDA) for iron in a selected serving size. The U.S. RDA for iron is the amount of the mineral used as a standard in nutrition labelling of foods, which is 18 milligrams per day for iron.”

I argue that there are two troubling elements in this official “good source of iron” classification system. Firstly and of least seriousness is that the RDA that everyone sees on all US food labelling is based on non pregnant females aged 19-50 – when men of the same age group need less then half as much and research shows that American men as a group consume too much iron on the whole (See: Ohio State University National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (2010)[1]. Secondly, the most important problem with this classification is that a foodstuff, such as cooked spinach, is seen to be a good source of iron merely because of its iron content in proportion to its calorie content.

Surely, completely failing to take account of the fact that some 85 percent of iron in cooked or raw spinach cannot be absorbed by humans is bad science?

Let us begin by trying to give the USDA the benefit of the doubt on this one. Perhaps the reason why they recommend spinach for adults and children (USDA (2) as a good source of iron is because they hope it will be consumed with vitamin C to help with absorbing its iron? Here we can now turn at last to examine the big vitamin C question.

Researching the vitamin C question

As we have seen, current research clearly shows the difficulties of absorbing iron from spinach. And the US Government Office of Dietary Supplements (ODS) is clear about the difficulties of absorbing iron from such plant matter and advises that vitamin C is best taken to help absorb nonheme iron. The problem is they appear very foggy regarding exactly how much is required. Breaking the rule about avoiding repetition, let us revisit one last time that quotation from the ODS (2007):

“Total dietary iron intake in vegetarian diets may meet recommended levels; however that iron is less available for absorption than in diets that include meat. Vegetarians who exclude all animal products from their diet may need almost twice as much dietary iron each day as non-vegetarians because of the lower intestinal absorption of nonheme iron in plant foods. Vegetarians should consider consuming nonheme iron sources together with a good source of vitamin C, such as citrus fruits, to improve the absorption of nonheme iron.”

So what exactly is known about how vitamin C might aid iron absorption from spinach? Unfortunately, the official advice is so unspecific as to be, effectively useless. For example, this is what else the ODS (2007) Fact Sheet on Iron has to say on the matter:

“Absorption of heme iron from meat proteins is efficient. Absorption of heme iron ranges from 15% to 35%, and is not significantly affected by diet. In contrast, 2% to 20% of nonheme iron in plant foods such as rice, maize, black beans, soybeans and wheat is absorbed . Nonheme iron absorption is significantly influenced by various food components. Meat proteins and vitamin C will improve the absorption of nonheme iron. Tannins (found in tea), calcium, polyphenols, and phytates (found in legumes and whole grains) can decrease absorption of nonheme iron. Some proteins found in soybeans also inhibit nonheme iron absorption. It is most important to include foods that enhance nonheme iron absorption when daily iron intake is less than recommended, when iron losses are high (which may occur with heavy menstrual losses), when iron requirements are high (as in pregnancy), and when only vegetarian nonheme sources of iron are consumed.”

The problem is where eating spinach, or any other nonheme source of iron, is concerned we are not told how much vitamin C we should consume with it. At the time of writing, the USDA is similarly foggy when it comes to explaining exactly how much vitamin C is required to improve the otherwise, at best,15 percent absorption rate of iron from spinach. Presumably this is because nobody actually knows. And as for how much tea and coffee, soybeans and whole grains and legumes to avoid and how much meat to eat with your greens – you’ll get no answer from official sources.

As I am sure you will agree, this is no help at all. Anyone who wishes to maximise their iron absorption from spinach, or any other greens, reading current ODS information would not have a clue how to go about doing so.

In search of answers, in the summer of 2010, I undertook some mind numbingly extensive online research, which revealed exactly what I was looking for.

Using the search term “spinach iron” within the USDA’s Economic Research Service’s (ERS) website, I found a spreadsheet they published that extols the nutrient benefits of grapefruit juice (See: USDA 1).

Amongst all the USDA’s other data is a text box with the following statement:

“Seventy-seven percent of American women under the age of 50 are iron deficient.

Consuming citrus foods like grapefruit and grapefruit juice can help boost the absorption of the iron found in plants. So, if you drink a glass of grapefruit juice before you eat a spinach salad, your body absorbs two to four times as much iron.^”

“Eureka!” I cried, because I was delighted at last to find such specific advice.

Every other official publication (e.g. USDA 2005) I had read on this issue failed to provide so much as a vague clue as to how much vitamin C rich food, or mg of vitamin C was required to help with any degree of iron absorption from spinach. But then I quickly realised that in providing their Grapefruit Spinach Salad Advice the USDA annoyingly neglects to say whether they mean a shot glass, wine glass or pint glass. Nevertheless, their positive advice is the most specific official advice I have found. I followed up on the reference used in support of their advice.

Scientific Research Suggests the USDA is Spreading Bull on the Internet

On their spreadsheet, the USDA cites the source of this positive information - another website called Floridajuice.com[2].

Floridajuice.com is the website of The Florida Department of Citrus (FDOC), which is an executive agency of the Florida government. The FDOC explains that they are:

“… charged with the marketing, research and regulation of the Florida citrus industry”, and that their mission is: ..” to grow the market for the Florida citrus industry in order to enhance the economic well-being of the Florida citrus grower, the citrus industry and the State of Florida.”

In doing so they write that they:

“… market both Florida citrus juices and fresh fruit with a focus on the health and wellness benefits the products have to offer. Marketing activities are conducted in the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia to reach consumers, key influencers and health professionals.”

Peculiarly, the FDOC appear much less sure than the USDA that a non-specific glass-sized quantity of citrus juice will empower you to absorb two to four times the amount of otherwise unavailable iron from spinach. With annoyingly familiar fogginess the advice of the FDOC is as vague as every other source I was able to find on this particular area of expert advice:

“Vitamin C can help increase iron absorption. Iron deficiency is one of the most common nutritional deficiencies worldwide and has been reported in 9%-16% of the adolescent and adult female population in the United States.Vitamin C can help boost the absorption of non-heme iron (the iron found in plants, not meat products). So including a glass of grapefruit juice before eating a spinach salad may help your body absorb more iron from the spinach. Vitamin C-rich foods should be included daily to get the most iron out of foods.”

Here seems like a good point to pause in order to, digest the information so far provided.

Of late I have taken to reading a little philosophy in order to try to make sense of complex issues regarding junk science and pseudo scholarship. Currently, one of my favourite essays is Harry Frankfurt’s (2005) “On Bullshit”. In this essay, Professor Frankfurt, a Princeton University moral philosopher, concludes that bull is worse and potentially more dangerous than lying because the liar cares that he is wrong and deliberately intends to mislead the recipient of his message, while the bullshitter cares not a jot for the truth and merely wishes to sound plausible in order to promote his own standing. Perhaps Frankfurt’s writing on bull is the key to what is going on with the USDA’s advice on spinach?

Could the USDA be bull-spreading world-wide?

Perplexed that the USDA referenced the vague advice of FDOC as the source of their more precise claim about the incredible powers of grapefruit juice, I looked for what evidence the FDOC cited to support its assertion on this issue.

‘Would a pint glass’, I wondered, amazingly ‘quadruple my absorption and a half pint glass double it?’ Did the USDA and FDOC know something more than scientists reporting their painstaking research findings on this subject in peer reviewed journals? What about the double-blind trials conducted by Hunt, Gallagher, and Johnson, L.K. (1994), which found that vitamin C did very little at all to help women to absorb iron from food? What about Cook and Reddy’s (2001) research that found no increase in nonheme-iron absorption during realistic long-term supplementation – as opposed to earlier experiments involving unrealistic prior fasting and one meal only? Perhaps the USDA had found evidence produced by the FDOC to refute the findings of Teucher, Olivares and Cori (2004),who found that to promote absorption of iron from food, in the presence of high levels of inhibitors, vitamin C needs to be added at a molar ratio in excess of 4:1 (which is rather impractical to say the least).

As it turned out, answers to my questions were not going to be easy to find. For a start, I was disappointed to discover that the USDA reference was not at all what it purported to be.

As far as I can tell, the FDOC has not conducted any research to support what the USDA write about the benefits of grapefruit juice as an aid to iron absorption from spinach. Even though the USDA reference the FDOC as the source of their super grapefruit juice knowledge, the reference provided by the FDOC to support their own recommendation that vitamin C – by way of citrus juice - may help with iron absorption from spinach turns out to be a hugely expensive two volume text book (Bowman and Russell 2006), which in its 9^th edition retails for $110. These volumes entitled “Present Knowledge on Nutrition” are, I found, generally unavailable second hand for less than $75. Fortunately, as an academic, I was quickly and easily able to use my computer to order a copy on interlibrary loan from my university. Obviously, this is not something that members the general public are likely to go to the effort of doing. Most people have little choice, or inclination, to fact check expert health advice from a US Government department – they are going to take it on faith. Not me.

Twaddle cloaked in obscurity

Having ordered the books, I awaited eagerly their arrival in hope that they would reveal the scientific basis for the incredible effects of grapefruit juice upon spinach.By this point, however, I suspected that the shabby referencing might indicate the USDA is guilty of publishing pseudo scholarship counterknowledge about the benefits of spinach and vitamin C. Let me explain the source of my suspicions in this regard.

Thompson (2008) tells us that a common trick used by those who promote pseudoscience is to reference obscure sources and to tie readers up in a labyrinth of mind numbingly tangled information sources; something that David McKie (see: Wheen 2004) of the UK Guardian newspaper neatly describes as: “…twaddle cloaked in obscurity.”

Tellingly, the expensive two-volume texts “Present Knowledge in Nutrition” run to 967 pages and yet the USDA do not provide a page number for their assertion on this difficult and well obscured subject.

After two hours of wading through Bowman and Russell (2006), I was unable to find a single mention of spinach. After thoroughly reading and re-reading various sections of the books, especially those on iron and on vitamin C, I had what is probably the source of the bold USDA statement that: “… if you drink a glass of grapefruit juice before you eat a spinach salad, your body absorbs two to four times as much iron.^”It is in the chapter on vitamin C by Carol S. Johnson (PhD) of the Department of Nutrition, Arizona State University. Dr Johnson has quite an expert mouthful to say on the subject (p.237):

“Iron absorption from test meals is enhanced 2-3 fold in the presence of 25 to 70 mg of vitamin C, presumably due to ascorbate-induced reduction of ferric iron to ferrous iron, which is less likely to form insoluble complexes with phytates. However, indices of iron status, including haemoglobin, serum ferritin, and percent transferring saturation, are generally not improved in iron deficient subjects consuming vitamin C-fortified diets.”

So it is clear from the outset that expert available scientific evidence suggests that taking vitamin C will not in fact help boost iron absorption in people who are low in iron.

Other key issues here, I determined as best as I could as a non-expert, from this difficult scientific text, are that Dr Johnson is referring to test meals – not any one specific source of food such as spinach. To check this, I needed to examine the research that Johnson cites to support her assertions (Garcia, Diaz and Rosaldo 2003). After all, the research subjects could have been fed meals entirely of spinach and nothing else. That said, even if they were, it is important not to forget that Dr Johnson tells us quite unambiguously that the extremely limited research in this area suggests that people who are low in iron do not benefit from taking ascorbic acid (AA) – otherwise known as vitamin C - with their food.

This is what Garcia et al (2003) – the obscure source of the USDA’s confident advice on the iron boosting wonders of Florida grapefruit juice – write that is pertinent to our enquiry about it:

“ Background: Although ascorbic acid (AA) increases dietary iron bioavailability, there has been no food-based community trial of its efficacy in improving iron status.

Objective: The objective was to assess the efficacy of 25 mgAA as agua de limón (limeade), consumed with each of 2 daily meals, in improving the iron status of iron-deficient women.

Design: Two rural Mexican populations were randomly assigned to an AA or a placebo group, each with 18 iron-deficient women.The AA group was given 500 ml limeade containing 25 mg AA twice a day, 6 d/wk, for 8 mo. The placebo group was given a lime-flavored beverage free of AA or citric acid. Beverages were consumed within 30 min of 2 main daily meals. Data were collected on morbidity (3 times/wk), dietary intake (on 6 d), socioeconomic status, parasites (twice), medical history, and response to treatment. Blood samples at 0, 2, 4, 6, and 8 mo were analyzedf or hemoglobin, plasma AA, plasma ferritin, transferrin receptors,and C-reactive protein.

Conclusion:“Increasing dietary AA by 25 mg at each of 2 meals did not improve iron status in iron-deficient women consuming diets high in phytate and nonheme iron.”

In sum, no mention is made of the specific action of vitamin C (ascorbic acid) on iron absorption from spinach. Presumably, this is why the USDA reference Dr Johns as the source of their bull, rather than citing Garcia et al directly. It appears to me that they sought to keep the bull hidden like the dangerous mythical Minotaur within a labyrinth of difficult to check sources.

And if that is not enough to shame the USDA for cloaking its pseudoscience spinach advice with misleading references, an expert overview of research, at the time of writing, reveals that we do not yet have anything even approaching a clear picture regarding the extent to which vitamin C improves iron absorption (Beard et al 2007).

Adopting Frankfurt’s (2005) philosophical distinction between lies and bull, only two possible conclusions can be drawn from all this. The first is that the USDA is spreading bull on the Internet. The second is that blatant and deliberate lies are being told by a person or persons within the USDA simply to encourage the consumption of home grown spinach and Florida grapefruit juice.

As I write these words, I wonder what would happen if I were to set up in business canning Texas spinach in Florida grapefruit juice instead of brine?

I could name my invention “Superspinach.” And, because nobody else has ever done it before, I could patent the concept and advertise internationally that the USDA has claimed that leading nutritional science proves that this new Superspinach provides between double and four times as much iron as ordinary spinach.

Superspinach might sell so well that I get rich at the expense of the health and wellbeing of others. But this is an evil pipe dream, because to knowingly do such a thing would be a crime against humanity in my opinion. And yet there are plenty of quackmongers and other charlatans with a stronger stomach than mine for profiteering from pseudoscience. This is a field, strangely ignored by criminologists, in need of further research.

In the USA, the official government advice is that spinach is a good source of iron. In the UK the official UK advice is the opposite. Perhaps experts in the British Food Standards Agency (FSA) were having a subtle dig at those within the USDA when they penned the following plain and simple, objective, advice on their website? (FSA 1):

“Some people think that spinach is a good source of iron, but spinach contains a substance that makes it harder for the body to absorb the iron from it.”

Conclusion

The USDA has erroneously promoted spinach for over 100 years – often in the teeth of scientific evidence against it. By way of contrast, the fully referenced and verifiable evidence presented in this article makes the case that the USDA should at once cease its promotion of junk science advice. The truth is that, contrary to USDA advice, cooked spinach – like raw spinach - is not a good source or iron.

Current scientific knowledge does not support the USDA claim that taking vitamin C (ascorbic acid) in any form significantly increases our iron absorption from Popeye’s favourite fast food.

As a non-expert who has studied the literature on this subject, I argue that officially encouraging spinach consumption with meat and perhaps accompanied by a vitamin C rich fruit juice – to maximise iron absorption from spinach - is dangerous pseudoscience. The amount of iron obtained from spinach is so low, even in these circumstances, that it is grossly misleading to tell people - who may need to increase their daily iron intake - that choosing cooked spinach will provide them with a good source of iron.

Many women in the USA and elsewhere in the world are low in iron. The danger with the current advice system on food labelling in the USA is that people may be relieved to believe that ½ a cup portion (60ml; 2 fl. oz.), or even an entire can of spinach, will conveniently provide a good dietary source of iron. Nothing could be further from the truth.The USA needs to ensure spinach products are properly labelled so as not to mislead the public on such an important area of nutrition. And the USDA should cease and desist publishing harmful spuriofacts.

Dr Mike Sutton

Forthcoming

In my next paper “Spin@ge II USA” I examine the case of the most peculiar defense of spinach made by the US Council of Foods in 1937. In Spin@ge III (forthcoming 2011) I examine problematic science behind the promotion of spinach as a good source of beta carotene for the production of vitamin A and its possible consequences for nutrition policy in developing nations.

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USDA (1) (Undated): Economic Research Service Grapefruit. http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/FruitVegetableCosts/Grapefruit.xls

USDA (2) (Undated) Nibbles for health 24. Iron in Foods: Does my child get enough? Nutrition Newsletters for Parents of Young Children. Available online: http://www.fns.usda.gov/tn/resources/Nibbles/iron.pdf

USDA (2005) Dietary Guidelines for Americans. US Department of Health and Human Services. US Department of Agriculture.http://www.health.gov/dietaryguidelines/dga2005/document/pdf/DGA2005.pdf

USDA. (2010). United States Department of Agriculture National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference, Release 22 http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/cgi-bin/list_nut_edit.pl

Wheen, F. (2004). How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World. London. Harper Perenial.

Weigman, K. (2005) The consequence of errors. European Molecular Biology Organization Report. April 6 (4) pp 306-309.

Wikibin (2010) Spinach Popeye Iron Decimal Error Myth. Available online at: http://wikibin.org/articles/spinach-popeye-iron-decimal-error-myth.html

[1] See: Ohio State University Extension Fact Sheet. Human Nutrition (2010): Iron HYG-5559-05. Available online: http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/5000/5559.html

[2] http://www.floridajuice.com/gj_nutrition_facts.php

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A Debate About the Bene...

2012-05-11T17:35:14-04:00

The science magazine Nature recently published an article entitled Controversial Research: Good Science Bad Science which points out that some types of scientific research could damage global security whereas others could create painful ethical dilemmas

The science magazine Nature recently published an article entitled "Controversial Research: Good Science Bad Science" (1) which points out that some types of scientific research could seriously damage global security and others could create painful ethical dilemmas for families. The article calls for an open and frank debate about the balance between the beneficial and detrimental uses of scientific research.

It picks out four examples of controversial research, although more could be given, which give an idea of how frequently scientists should ask themselves whether the benefits of their research outweigh the risks.

One example is research in which scientists mutate the H5N1 bird flu virus, a rare but deadly virus, so that they have a better chance of recognizing dangerous emerging strains. This sounds like a great idea but the studies could create a virus that is easier to transmit and produce. The results could be helpful to terrorists looking for biological agents to use as a weapon.

Another example is research on brain scanners - machines able to accurately read a person's thoughts. Such a device could be extraordinarily useful — by enabling counter-terrorist officials to catch terrorists before they act, for example, or by helping some brain-damaged patients who cannot move or communicate. But such a device could also be “the stuff of science-fiction nightmares, raising the spectre of Big Brother and ever-vigilant thought police”. Shades of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (first published in 1949).

The third example, involves the development of geo-engineering methods to reduce the effects of global warming. This would mean manipulating Earth's environment on a planetary scale by managing solar radiation — perhaps by injecting tiny particles high into the stratosphere to cool the atmosphere down by reflecting some of the incident sunlight or by seeding the ocean with iron to create algal blooms that would absorb carbon dioxide from the air and then carry the algae down to the bottom of the ocean where they would die, thus removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Critics argue that geo-engineering would be very reckless because it might exacerbate climate change.

The fourth example is the use of lasers to separate radioactive isotopes. Laser isotope separation (LIS) could be used to quickly and efficiently produce fuel for nuclear-power reactors and to produce radioactive isotopes for medical use. Such a technology is, on first sight, very attractive. But there is a down side. LIS could also be used to produce the fissile material, particularly highly-enriched uranium, needed to fabricate nuclear weapons. It would be possible to carry out LIS clandestinely, making it easy to conceal a nuclear-weapon programme. This is a major concern for those worried about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Is this a valid concern?

Laser isotope separation

The use of LIS to separate the isotope uranium-235 from uranium-238 in natural uranium is a very topical issue given the current concerns about the dangers of the proliferation of nuclear weapons. The separation of a desired isotope of a chemical element from the remaining isotopes effectively and inexpensively has been a challenge for a long time.

Traditionally, isotopes have been separated using techniques based on either gaseous diffusion or gas centrifuge. Scientists and engineers, particularly at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Livermore, California have developed another technique, fundamentally different and much more efficient than the other two, using LIS (2).

The technique is based on the fact that different isotopes of the same element, while chemically identical, absorb different colors of laser light. Therefore, a laser can be precisely tuned to ionize only atoms of the desired isotope, which are then drawn to electrically charged collector plates.

When mined, natural uranium consists mainly (about 99.284 per cent) of the isotope uranium-238 (U-238). U-238 is not a fissile isotope – it cannot sustain the kind of runaway fission chain reaction required to produce a nuclear explosion. Just 0.711 per cent of natural uranium is uranium-235 (U-235). U-235 is a fissile isotope and can produce a fission chain reaction.

U-235 is the only isotope existing in any significant amount in nature that is fissile with neutrons travelling at low velocities (called thermal neutrons). U-238 can only be fissioned using very fast neutrons. Because of this difference, U-235 can be used as a fuel for nuclear-power reactors and as the fissile material in nuclear weapons.

For use as a nuclear fuel for civil nuclear power generation, the amount of U-235 in natural uranium is increased (enriched) to between 3 and 5 per cent. If the amount of U-235 in natural uranium is enriched to more than 90%, it can be used to fabricate a nuclear weapon. The process of uranium isotope separation to increase the percentage of U-235 in natural uranium (called uranium enrichment) is, therefore, key both to produce nuclear fuel and to fabricate nuclear weapons.

Because the chemistry of U-235 and U-238 is almost identical, separating one from another is not straightforward. It can be done by gaseous diffusion methods or using gas centrifuges. Gaseous diffusion consumes a great deal of energy. Gaseous centrifuges, however, consume only about 6 per cent as much energy as gaseous diffusion for a given degree of enrichment. Gaseous diffusion is, therefore, rarely used nowadays to enrich uranium commercially. Gas centrifuges are normally used instead.

Today's uranium-enrichment technology is expensive and time consuming, involving cascades of thousands of gas centrifuges. It requires space, a lot of electricity, special materials, precision-machined parts, and time. LIS is attractive because it will be more efficient in terms of the energy input for the same degree of enrichment. We can, therefore, expect it to be the next method of uranium enrichment to be commercialized.

LIS can be more efficient because it makes use of tiny differences in the mass of the nuclei of U-235 and U-238. These differences alter the energy levels of their electron shells. Finely-tuned lasers can excite just the levels associated with the desired isotope and can be used to separate the U-235 from the U-238. The work can be done quickly and secretly. This is why LIS increases the risk of the spread of nuclear weapons.

In 2004, it was discovered that scientists in South Korea had used lasers to enrich small quantities of uranium-235 to a level required for nuclear weapons in a matter of weeks. This work was not discovered until years later when it was reported to inspectors working for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the international nuclear watchdog.

Today, with the advent of cheap and tuneable lasers, LIS is within relatively easy reach of physicists the world over. The nuclear industry is understandably very enthusiastic about using LIS to produce fuel for nuclear-power reactors.

General Electric (G.E.) claims to have successfully tested LIS for three years and is currently seeking US government permission to build a LIS plant, at a facility at Wilmington, North Carolina, costing a billion US dollars, which would produce large amounts of fuel for nuclear-reactors. Details of the plant are kept secret. The work is being done by Global Laser Enrichment (GLE), a subsidiary of G.E. and Hitachi.

GLE was set up in 2008 to commercialize SILEX technology. SILEX (an acronym for Separation of Isotopes by Laser Excitation) was developed in Australia by SILEX Systems Limited in the 1990s for the production of enriched uranium using LIS.

As William J. Broad points out, in an article published in the New York Times on 20 August 2011, entitled "Laser Advances in Uranium Enrichment May Risk Bomb Spread" (3), critics fear that if General Electric (G.E.) “succeeds and the secret gets out, rogue states and terrorists could make bomb fuel in much smaller plants that are difficult to detect. Iran has already succeeded with laser enrichment in the lab, and nuclear experts worry that G.E.’s accomplishment might inspire Tehran to build a plant easily hidden from the world’s eyes”.

Broad goes on to say that it is impossible to independently verify G.E.’s “claim because the federal government has classified the laser technology as top secret. But G.E. officials say that the achievement is genuine and that they are accelerating plans for a larger complex at the Wilmington site”.

As Broad says, experts are concerned about possible harm from the commercialization of laser enrichment not only because of “pilfered secrets, but also in the public revelation that a half-century of laser failure seems to be ending. Their concern goes to the nature of invention. The demonstration of a new technology often begets a burst of emulation because the advance opens a new window on what is possible”.

“Arms controllers”, he goes on, “fear that laser enrichment is now poised for that kind of activity. News of its feasibility could spur wide reinvestigation. Dr. Slakey of the American Physical Society noted that the State Department a dozen years ago warned that the success of SILEX could ‘renew interest’ in laser enrichment for good or ill — to light cities or destroy them. That moment, he said, now seems close at hand”.

As the Nature article "Controversial Research: Good Science Bad Science" emphasizes, an open and public debate about the benefits and risks of LIS is urgently required. This should happen soon, before the technology is successfully established. It will then be too late.

References

1. Geoff Brumfiel, "Controversial Research: Good Science Bad Science", Nature, 25 April 2012, London.

2. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Laser Technology Separation, Follows in Lawrence’s Footsteps, Laser Isotope Separation – LLNL, http://www.llnl.gov/str/Hargrove.html

3. William J. Broad, "Laser Advances in Uranium Enrichment May Risk Bomb Spread", New York Times, 20 August 2011 http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/b/william_j_broad/index.html

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Self Respect: I Don't K...

2012-05-11T17:07:01-04:00

Those seven words pushed me over the edge. Not the edge of a cliff but the edge of a relationship. When I first met Bob, there was an immediate connection, both physical and intellectual. He was nice looking, had a great smile, and the sense of adventure I was seeking. Even though we were both in our seventies, he offered me an exciting future of travel, companionship, caring and other good stuff. We both shared a passion for exercise and healthy living. To top it off, he was a professional writer.

Written communication was important to us both and I believed that we had the ingredients necessary for a wonderful Long Term Relationship, or, as he liked to say, be “intimate companions” for the rest of our lives. One of my friends said to me shortly after I began this relationship, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” She further added that all men are “pond scum.” Indeed!! She later called to apologize to me and since I know that she is a good friend and had some personal baggage, I accepted the apology and our friendship has grown even stronger since that remark was uttered. But that comment proved to be prophetic, or at least a foreshadowing of future events.

Remember those red flags, or warnings, I may have mentioned in previous articles? Again, I chose to ignore them. I began to put a great deal of faith in words and ignored the behaviors and those good old red banners. Frankly, there aren’t a lot of attractive, worthy men in my age group out there, so I used the 80-20 rule. If you like 80% of him, then try to adjust to the 20% you don’t like. Sometimes, when you are caught up in the moment, the numbers get garbled. The acid test is to spend time away alone with the person. With 24/7 time, you get to see and experience a lot of mishigas. Traveling is what separates the men from the boys. It’s a hardship, at best, and there are lots of opportunities for one’s true colors to come shining through... alongside the red of those pennants.

I agreed to a long weekend away to New York City and from the first moment, trouble was brewing. When we got to the airport, there was a long line ahead of us. Bob doesn’t like to wait on line and he barged ahead of about ten people and proceeded to stand on line. When I questioned this, he claimed that he doesn’t have to follow silly rules. I, of course, did not accompany him, but took my rightful turn. What was the point of Bob doing this? He had to wait for me anyway since I had the plane tickets.

While on the plane, he ignored me completely and had his nose in a book. When it was time to deplane, he ran ahead of me, totally failing to see to the needs of a very old, feeble man who shared the row with us on the plane. I helped the man off the plane and he nearly collapsed in the process. This was only the first of a series of red flags.

We arrived at the hotel which Bob arranged for, and, what a shocker! It was in the middle of a commercial area, very dirty, and the room was tiny. But it was sure cheap!! This unexpected surprise was from a man who constantly bragged about how financially well off he was. Instead of immediately checking out, we stayed until the weekend when hotel rates were somewhat cheaper. We eventually found a nicer hotel. Bob continuously said that I deserved better than this, but we stayed at the flea bag anyway. He also rented a car for one day to visit some people out of state on his own. I foolishly used my cell phone minutes to call every car rental agency to get the cheapest rate and finally after an hour of my efforts, he went with the first company that I called. There was justice ahead because while on his solo excursion, he lost his brand new cell phone.

His true colors appeared repeatedly in restaurants. Bob continuously made a scene and attracted attention. It was an embarrassment to me when one evening at dinner with my grown children, he insisted on having a free after dinner drink. It was the former policy of the restaurant to offer this perk, but they no longer did. He made a fuss about it even though no one else in our party cared much about it one way or the other. He countered by asserting that he should get what he is entitled to and doesn’t like to be “taken.” When Bob felt that some one was doing the wrong thing to him, he threatens and thinks “law suit.” He gave me some claptrap excuse that he was the victim of anti-semitism by German-Americans during his growing up years in Queens during World War II.

It is immature to constantly blame events in your past in order to excuse poor behavior in the present. We all have skeletons in our closet and events that proved to be “defining moments,” as Dr. Phil likes to say. When we dredge them up, it prevents us from moving forward. We all tend to do it, but it is not productive. We have to stop ourselves. If you’re not happy with the way you turned out, then fix it. Don’t play the blame game.

Yes, I went away with Bob again, fool that I am. This time we embarked on an extended vacation in a resort area in Massachusetts. Soon after we arrived, I again began to have trepidations, which I attributed to travel disorientation. Things will improve once we settle in, I thought, and we started to enjoy what the area had to offer. I was not happy with my relationship with Bob, however, because he was rude, judgmental, and self-centered. He said whatever he wanted to say no matter what, and was operating on a very short fuse. I’m reminded of the expression from my teaching days, “Engage brain before putting mouth in gear.” The fallout of his words did not matter to him and his need to exert an air of authority wherever he was, was humiliating, in my mind.

I gave him many gentle warnings, but it was useless. As I told him in my parting words, “Maybe once you could get away with that behavior but now you are not so famous or important. And even if you are, there is no excuse for berating other people. You say you devoted your life to helping other people and yet, you don’t really. You wimp out when you should be strong if you encounter some one who you feel is in a position of power, while you degrade those who you feel are inferior to you in some way.” In response, Bob continuously uttered these words in a monotone, “I don’t know what you are talking about,” while I was explaining my reasons for leaving him.

Love has nothing to do with self-respect and my self-respect was more important than the affection I thought I felt for him, because without that, I would have nothing. During all these explanations of why I was leaving the relationship, Bob sat without saying much except for, “I don’t know what you are talking about.” He looked like a little boy caught with his hands in the cookie jar. Not a single word of apology. His final words were, “Can I have the theater ticket you paid for so my son could use it?” I was livid. My answer was filled with incredulity. “No,” I said in an icy tone, “I am going to donate this ticket to the theater company.You absolutely, positively can’t have it.”

This “gentleman” did not even help me out the door with my two heavy suitcases. I had to call a private taxi to take me fifty miles through winding country roads to the nearest airport so I could get as far away as possible from this inconsiderate excuse for a man, a self anointed lothario.

So, you may ask what is the point of bothering when there is such hurt and disappointment at the end? Why spend three months in a relationship only to have it end it so badly? In all fairness there were many lovely moments along the way, and I enjoyed the ride while it lasted. I ignored the red flags because I so much wanted to be in a relationship and part of a couple again. I was not happy in my own skin and felt I needed a life partner of the opposite sex.

After the breakup, I was very hard on myself for being so blind and stupid. Upon reflection and some distancing, I realize that I am a worthy person and I would find love one day. In the future, I will not compromise and ignore unacceptable behavior. I am happy and grateful for the gifts that I’ve been given: family, friends, emotional and physical strength, good health, and sunshine. If a man comes into my life who will cherish me, make me happy, and allow me to do the same for him, then that will be the sprinkles on my hot fudge sundae. For now, I am taking a short break from dating and loving the freedom to feel those “good vibrations “ (as the song goes) that people around me are sending.

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Euler and Divergent Mat...

2011-11-23T17:59:18-05:00

7. Logarithmic Divergence

Part 1 of this five-part series began with an introduction to the concept of regularisation of a divergent series and showed how it applies to elementary series such as the geometric series. In the second part of this article we develop the concept further by considering logarithmically divergent series and those series which Euler described as being divergent par excellence.

It should be stated from the outset that the regularisation of those series which diverge logarithmically such as the harmonic series is a much different proposition to regularisation of the geometric series. To observe this, if let us put in Equivalence (12). Then we find that

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where -log(0) has been replaced by log( ). The problem with this result is that it has been obtained by integrating the singularity in the geometric series. Note that the singularity is now situated at rather than at because has been replaced by in Equivalence (12). As yet a theory of integrating singularities does not exist and it could well be that there may be a missing term like a constant in performing the integration. That is, more rigorous mathematics is required to establish whether the above equivalence is correct.

The quantity on the lhs of the above result is very famous, again due to Euler, who found that it yielded a constant. Although he was not aware of it, Euler was effectively regularising the harmonic series. Today, the constant that remains in this regularisation process is known as Euler’s constant [10]. Sometimes it is called the Euler-Mascheroni constant since the latter calculated it to 32 decimal places. Not long after his calculation, a controversy arose about the result. Eventually it was discovered by Gauss and Nicolai that the last 12 decimal places Mascheroni had calculated were indeed incorrect. Specifically, Euler found that

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Because of this result, one cannot simply subtract a logarithmic infinity from an integrated divergent series at its most singular point as in Equivalence (37). In Part 1 we were able to regularise the geometric series by introducing the gamma function into the analysis. Let us do the same by multiplying the summand of by and introducing the integral representation for the gamma function in the numerator. Then the harmonic series can be written as

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The above integral is not singular at the lower limit, but is logarithmically divergent at the upper limit. Since is obtained by integrating between 0 and , we subtract the integral from the rhs of the above result in order to regularise it. Thus, the rhs becomes

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which, according to No. 8367(6) of Ref.16, becomes the integral representation for Euler’s constant. That is, the above result is finite, not equal to zero as is implied by Equivalence (37).

Euler’s regularisation formula provides us with a method or scheme for handling logarithmically divergent series with far more complicated summands than that appearing n the harmonic series. In such cases, all we need to do is subtract the entire harmonic series and add Euler’s constant. For example, consider the following series

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By introducing Euler’s regularisation formula into the above result, we find that is now finite. In fact, multiplying this result by -1, we see that according to No. 8.362(1) of Ref.16, it equals the digamma function, where the latter is defined as the derivative of the logarithm of the gamma function. That is, .

Regularisation of a logarithmically divergent series is a different process from regularisation of a divergent series with an algebraic infinity such as the geometric series because in Eq. (38) we can truncate the series at replace by and still come up with an accurate approximation to . That is, Eq. (38) as an approximation becomes

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As increases, the lhs becomes more and more accurate as an approximation to Euler’s constant. In fact, this is the standard method for evaluating . In our study of the geometric series we could not expect to obtain an accurate approximation to the limit of for outside of the disk of absolute convergence by truncating the series at ever increasing values of and then subtracting the value of instead of infinity.

Euler’s formula for is a unique example of a mathematical quantity that has been first evaluated by employing the concept of regularisation, albeit of a logarithmically diverging series. Only recently has a rapidly converging formula for been discovered in terms of an infinite set of relatively novel numbers known as the reciprocal logarithm numbers, [17]. According to p. 137 of Ref.18, the magnitudes of these numbers have been referred to in the past as either the Gregory or the Cauchy numbers, but important properties for them have only appeared for the first time in Ref. 17. There, the result for ^[1], which is known as Hurst’s formula, is given as

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where and

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Furthermore, by using the properties of Volterra functions and the orthogonality of Laguerre polynomials, Apelblat on p. 156 of Ref. 18 obtains an alternative formulation for the which for is given by

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If this result is introduced into Hurst’s formula and the order of the integration and summation are interchanged, then with the aid of the lower result in Equivalence (12), namely the equation form, we arrive at a new integral representation for Euler’s constant. This becomes

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8. Regularisation versus Renormalisation

The regularisation formula discovered by Euler can also be used to see whether it is consistent with the physicist’s concept of renormalisation. As an example, let us consider the longitudinal dielectric response function of an electron-positron plasma in an external magnetic field This quantity, which is denoted by (q arises in the response theory of particle-anti-particle plasmas [19]. The quantum mechanical form of the longiitudinal dielectric response function can be separated into particle and vacuum parts which will be denoted by subscripts p and v respectively. Because quantum mechanics is involved, it must be renormalised in accordance with standard quantum electrodynamic theory or QED. This means that the divergent vacuum polarisation term must be removed from the original form resulting in

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In this renormalised equation the field-free vacuum term is represented by the following divergent integral:

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Because the last two terms of Eq. (47) diverge, they are both renormalised by introducing - Re after the second term on the rhs and + Re before the final term. This results in the emergence of a quantity known as the longitudinal static uniform polarisability, which is defined as

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In Eq. (49), for 0," src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black{n}>{0},$" /> , while for

For those with a physical bent, and represent the charge and mass of an electron, while the momentum is expressed in components and Hence, in the vacuum term where each component of the momentum ranges from to The summation over arises from summing over the Landau levels that result from the solutions for the Dirac equation. The introduction of a magnetic field into response theory has the effect of suppressing the and components of the momentum. That is, takes on the role of .

The first term on the rhs of Eq. (49) is logarithmically divergent, which can be observed by evaluating the integral over . With the aid of No. 2.271(6) in Ref. 16, we find that

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The series in Eq. (50) can be regularised by introducing Euler’s regularisation formula. Denoting the finite part by , where , we obtain

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From No. 8.362(1) of Ref. 16, which states that the digamma function is given by

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we arrive at Then by introducing this result into Eq. (51) one finds that

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Now let us examine when the static uniform polarisability is renormalised according to the physicist’s approach. First, it is found that the free-field vacuum term or the second term on the rhs of Eq. (49) is logarithmically divergent, but does not match the 0" src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black{B}\mapsto{0}$" /> limit of the preceding term, which is also logarithmically divergent. Consequently, the second term on the rhs is replaced by the 0" src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black{B}\to{0}$" /> limit of the first term. Then with the aid of Eq. (50) the static uniform polarisability becomes

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Converting the last term to an integral yields a logarithmically divergent integral, but it is difficult to match with the first term when the latter is converted into an integral. Instead, the process of renormalisation involves: 1) converting the first term into an integral by replacing with , 2) interchanging the order of the summation and integration and 3) subtracting the 0" src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black{B}\mapsto{0}$" /> limit of the resulting integral. This yields

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By introducing some of the integral identities that appear in Secs. 8.361 and 8.367 of Ref. 16, one eventually arrives at

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Eq. (56) was first obtained by Bakshi, Cover and Kalman in Ref. 20.

By comparing the rhs of Equivalence (56) with the rhs of Eq. (53), we see that there is a discrepancy of in the bracketed terms. Hence, we have seen that the mathematical approach to regularising a divergent series yields a different result from the physicist’s approach of renormalisation. That is, regularising a divergent mathematical quantity arising out of a physical theory may not necessarily yield the correct physical result.

9. Terminants

All the divergent series that have been considered so far have been rather elementary, but in order to develop a theory of divergent series, more sophisticated examples need to be studied. Although this is well and truly beyond the scope of this five-part series, we can at least discuss the issue of regularising those series, which Euler referred to as divergent par excellence. Previously, it was remarked that such series had rapidly diverging coefficients which were equal to In fact, these series can be generalised by replacing the factor in the coefficients by the gamma function Then they become what are known today as terminants. This terminology was introduced by Dingle [14] after he noticed that the late terms in many asymptotic expansions for the special functions of mathematical physics could be approximated by them. Specifically, there are two types of such series: the first type being defined as

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while the second type is defined as

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In the above results is referred to as the truncation parameter.

Since the limit point is zero in the above series, both types of terminant are referred to as small asymptotic series. Had they been expressed in powers of which is how Dingle defines them originally in Ref. 12, then they would have been referred to as large asymptotic series. By asymptotic we mean the Poincaré definition or prescription in standard asymptotics given on p. 151 of Ref. 8, which is also discussed in Part 5. Basically, this definition means that for sufficiently small values of , namely , we can truncate the series after a few terms and still come up with an accurate approximation to the actual value of the original function from which the series has been derived. Furthermore, the point at which the approximation begins to break down, which is known as the optimal point of truncation, increases or diverges to infinity as 0." src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black{z}\mapsto{0}.$" /> For those unfamiliar with the concept of optimal truncation, consult Sec. 4.6 of Ref. 21. As long as or even for one can still obtain an accurate approximation to the original function. However, the accuracy of the approximation wanes dramatically as 0," src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black{N}_{{T}}\mapsto{0},$" /> so that truncation of the series is no longer a valid option for those values of in either the intermediate region, typically given by , or for large values of greater than 2. As a consequence, since asymptotic series possess limited ranges of applicability and suffer from deficiencies in accuracy, standard asymptotics as a mathematical discipline has often been ridiculed by pure mathematicians, who point out that mathematics is supposed to be an exact science, not composed of vague concepts like those adopted in standard asymptotics. In actual fact, it is the process of truncation due to the adoption of the over-permissive or loose Poincaré prescription that is to blame for this state of affairs. We shall see when we carry out a spectacular numerical study in Part 4.

Because of the rapid divergence in the coefficients of both types of terminants, which results in these series possessing a radius of absolute convergence that is equal to zero, they also represent a different proposition to regularise compared with the geometric series studied earlier. So, how do we regularise them? When discussing regularisation of the geometric series above, we introduced the integral representation for the gamma function in the numerator, interchanged the order of the summation and integration and finally evaluated the sum. We also applied the same steps for logarithmically divergent series in Sec.7. This approach to obtaining limits to divergent series is a familiar technique to practitioners in asymptotics and is known as Borel summation. Therefore, by carrying out Borel summation of the first type of terminant, we arrive at

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Now we see that the first type of terminant has been expressed in terms of the geometric series. Therefore, if we introduce the regularised value of the latter series into the above result, then we obtain the regularised value of the first type of terminant. In addition, according to our analysis of the geometric series it is conditionally convergent for Re As t ranges from 0 to infinity, this means that the terminant is conditionally convergent for Re 0" src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black{z}>{0}$" /> and divergent for all other values of As a consequence, it can be seen that an asymptotic series need not always be divergent, a surprising result indeed.

The introduction of the regularised value of the geometric series into Eq. (59) yields

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Since we have already stated that the geometric series is bijective within the principal branch of the complex plane or for the regularised value of the first type of terminant given by the above Cauchy integral is also bijective. That is, there is a definite or unique value for each value of within the principal branch of the complex plane. This means that we are again striking a chord with Euler's unorthodox view of there being a definite value connected with each divergent series. On the other hand, if in Equivalence (60) we replace with where can be any integer, then we find that

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We can express the above result as a contour integral in terms of the complex variable and the line contour along the positive real axis. Then the above equivalence becomes

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where or The problem with Equivalence (62) is that it appears to yield the same regularised value for any value of That is, the regularised value appears to be the same for all branches of the complex plane when we might expect it to be different. This is because when asymptotic series including terminants are derived, they are usually in powers of such as where 1." src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black\beta>{1}.$" /> For example, the asymptotic expansion for the complementary error function, which is given as No. 7.1.23 in Ref. 22, is

Used only with express written permission

According to Equivalence (62) we would expect that the value of to equal . Yet, the former yields a value of 0.663282..., while the latter equals 7.117400...x10^-24. Therefore, the above result must be restricted to one branch given by or . Then we are left with the problem of deciding whether Equivalence (63) is valid for either , , within the principal branch of the complex plane.

Another problem with Equivalences (60) and (61) is: What do we do when ? For these values of the Cauchy integral is singular. Whilst this might not be a serious problem with Equivalence (60) where nearly all the principal branch of the complex plane has been covered anyway, for asymptotic expansions written in terms of , where 1," src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black\beta>{1},$" /> it will mean that the regularised value will be singular well within inside the principal branch. In the case of the complementary error function presented above, the Cauchy integral is singular along the positive and negative imaginary axes.

These issues can be resolved as a result of a remarkable discovery made in 1857 by Stokes [23] of what is known today as the Stokes phenomenon. Stokes found that as one moved across specific sectors of the complex plane now known as Stokes sectors, asymptotic expansions suddenly acquired extra or jump discontinuous terms. These terms appear at specific rays in the complex plane, which are known as Stokes lines. Along these lines the regularised value as seen by the Cauchy integral in Equivalence (62) is singular. Moreover, Ch. 1 of Ref. 14 states that Stokes lines occur at those values of where all the terms in the terminants are of the same sign and homogeneous in phase. For the first type of terminant this means they occur whenever where can be any integer. Hence, the regularised value given by Equivalence (61) develops extra terms as moves across these lines. In addition, the Cauchy integral on the lines of discontinuity will also have to be modified.

It should be emphasised that Stokes sectors and lines are fictitious with regard to the original function from which an asymptotic expansion is derived. That is, although the asymptotic expansion develops jump discontinuities as the argument of variable in the expansion changes in the complex plane, it does not necessarily mean that the original function is discontinuous. In fact, it is more often than not continuous across the lines of discontinuity.

Now the only problem that remains is determining the value of for which Equivalence (61) is valid. In actual fact, this value is arbitrary, but once it is fixed, the regularised value will change on reaching the Stokes lines at its boundaries and then from each Stokes line to the adjacent Stokes sectors. Because of the arbitrariness in the choice of a primary Stokes sector one can no longer only provide a regularised value to a series expansion to represent a function. Accompanying the regularised value must also be the values of for which it is valid. This applies to both Stokes sectors and lines. We shall refer to the combination of the series expansion, the regularised value and the Stokes sector or line over which the latter is valid as an asymptotic form.

Frequently, asymptotic expansions are derived when the argument of the variable is real, positive and situated in the principal branch of the complex plane. If this is the case, then the primary Stokes sector for Equivalence (61) is given by or in other words, by . Hence, Equivalence (60) as an asymptotic form becomes

Used only with express written permission

Let us now turn our attention to the second type of terminant given by Eq. (58). Borel summation of this result yields

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If is again replaced by where can be any integer, then Equivalence (65) becomes

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Whilst the integral in the above equivalence is defined for complex values of it is singular for positive real values of This turns out to be a problem since it has already been stated that whenever a Type II asymptotic expansion is derived, it is usually for these values of The situation, however, can be resolved by noting that the Stokes lines for this type of terminant occur at where, once again, can be any integer. Consequently, instead of nominating a primary Stokes sector, we must now nominate a primary Stokes line. Again, this is arbitrary, but we shall take it to be the line. Furthermore, in accordance with the rules for the Stokes phenomenon [14], as soon as moves off this line in either direction, the regularised value must acquire jump discontinuous terms. This produces two more problems:

Because of the singularity occurring at how do we interpret the Equivalence (66) along the primary Stokes line?
What are the jump discontinuous terms when does not equal zero?

Note that these problems apply to the first type of terminant when reaches the boundary of the principal branch of the complex plane, i.e. when = ± We shall be able to consider this situation once the Type II situation has been resolved.

Both of the problems mentioned in the equal previous paragraph are addressed and have been resolved by Dingle in Ch. 21 of his book [14]. For the first problem he points out that since the variable and terms in the series are all positive and real along the primary Stokes line, which we have taken to be an initially real function cannot acquire an imaginary part. This is evidently based on the pioneering work of Zwaan [24]. In Ref. 9 this is referred to as the Zwaan-Dingle principle. Basically, it means that the regularised value must be real when is situated on a Stokes line initially. Furthermore, the singularity at =1/ results in a complex term according to Cauchy’s residue theorem. So, in order to guarantee that the regularised value is real along the primary Stokes line, we need to evaluate the Cauchy principal value of the integral in Equivalence (60). Hence, the asymptotic form for the second type of terminant is given by

Used only with express written permission

The second issue has also been solved by Dingle. Using remarkable insight, he points out on p. 411 of Ref. 14 that the discontinuous terms in the Stokes phenomenon arise from the pole in the singular integral of Equivalence (66). In fact, the jump discontinuous terms in the regularised value when moves off the primary Stokes line in either direction are related to the residue at The residue is found to be

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The above result has been derived by converting the integral in Equivalence (66) to a complex integral along the positive real axis where the variable t has been replaced by the complex variable Eq. (68) follows once is set equal to in the vicinity of the singularity and the limit 0" src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black\epsilon\to{0}$" /> is taken. Moreover, the question of whether an anti-clockwise rotation or clockwise rotation around the residue should be taken has been left open for the time being with the introduction of in the upper limit of the integral. If is situated just above the positive real axis, then the semi-circular contour around is taken in a clockwise direction in order to be consistent with attempting to avoid its contribution as we did when evaluating the Cauchy principal value. Hence, in this case =- . Conversely, if is situated just below the positive real axis, then the semi-circular contour is taken in an anti-clockwise direction, i.e. = . In both cases because the semi-residue contribution is removed completely in the process of evaluating the Cauchy principal value in Equivalence (67), we must remove the semi-residue contributions from the integral in Equivalence (66). Therefore, the regularised value of the second type of terminant becomes

Used only with express written permission

Since we have seen that it is the residues of the Cauchy integrals which are responsible for the jump discontinuities in the Stokes phenomenon, we can now examine the change in the regularised value when encounters a Stokes line, viz. when, = ± for the first type of terminant. In both cases we expect that the Cauchy integral given in Equivalence (62) will form part of the regularised value except that it will have to be modified so that only the principal value is evaluated. Furthermore, the extra terms or jump discontinuous terms to the regularised value along the Stokes lines will be dependent upon the semi-residue contributions, while as moves off the Stokes lines, the extra contributions to the regularised value will become full-residue contributions.

As discussed in Ref. 9, where both types of terminants are generalised by replacing and with and respectively, moving to a higher Stokes sector means that or rather undergoes an anti-clockwise rotation of This means that we need to consider terminants with or in Equivalence (62). According to Sec. 10.1 of Ref. 9, the difference between the regularised value of the first terminant for

and that for can be derived via the theory of Mellin transforms [25] and is given by

, (70)

where represents the integral on the rhs of Equivalence (62). The residue for this integral is found to be

Used only with express written permission

By introducing the regularised value for the second term on the lhs of Equivalence (70), i.e. Equivalence (64), and Eq. (71) on the rhs, one obtains the regularised value of the first series on the lhs, which is

Used only with express written permission

In the above result is the line contour along the positive real axis and while To obtain the regularised value when all we need to do is average the two results for the adjacent Stokes sectors, viz. Equivalences (64)

and (72), while ensuring that only the Cauchy principal value is evaluated in the resulting integral. Then for we find that the regularised value of the first type of terminant is given by

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To determine the asymptotic forms for other or higher Stokes sectors and lines, we continue with more anti-clockwise rotations of In fact, the generalisation of Equivalence (70) to rotations yields

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For , we replace the second term on the lhs by introducing the version of Equivalence (74). We continue this process recursively stopping only when we reach the rhs of Equivalence (70). Hence, we see that for the higher Stokes sectors the regularised value is given by the rhs of Equivalence (70) except the second term becomes a sum over all the residues from to That is, we arrive at

Used only with express written permission

Replacing by where now , we find that the regularised value of the first type of terminant becomes

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where . For the Stokes line of the regularised value of the first type of terminant is obtained by averaging the regularised values of the abutting Stokes sectors, whilst ensuring that the principal value is evaluated for the resulting contour integral. Therefore, we find that

Used only with express written permission

To determine the regularised value for , we need to consider clockwise rotations of For example, Equivalence (70) then becomes

Used only with express written permission

which is merely the complex conjugate. Consequently, the regularised value of the first type of terminant for negative values of will be the complex conjugate of the corresponding regularised value for the complex conjugate of Hence, the regularised value of the first type terminant for is given by

Used only with express written permission

where . Similarly, for the Stokes lines, where we find that

Used only with express written permission

Naturally, moving to higher Stokes sectors or branches of the complex plane will also affect the regularised value of the second type of terminant. For this type of terminant the theory of Mellin transforms [25] yields

Used only with express written permission

The second series on the lhs can be expressed in terms of by replacing with in the above result. We continue this process until Then with the introduction of the lower form of Equivalence (69) we obtain the regularised value of the second type of terminant for which is

Used only with express written permission

In Equivalence (82) again represents the line contour along the positive real axis. For the regularised value is simply the complex conjugate of the above result.

For the Stokes line of we can again average the regularised value for each of the abutting Stokes sectors, whilst at the same time ensuring that only the principal value of the resulting integral is evaluated. Then the regularised value of this terminant can be expressed as

Used only with express written permission

For the regularised value is given by the complex conjugate of the above result.

In Ref. 9 the preceding analysis is applied to the generalised versions of both types of terminant as mentioned previously. There, the regularised values of both types of terminant are derived for all values of The final expressions simplify drastically for the cases of equal to the reciprocal of an integer including unity and Furthermore, Borel summation is then extended in the following chapter by eliminating the need for the gamma function to appear in the coefficients of the asymptotic series. Instead, since it is regularisation of the geometric series, which lies at the heart of Borel summation, all we need to do in deriving the regularised value is to replace in Eq. (1) by where is a Mellin transform, viz. .

Although Borel summation has been used to sum divergent series for more than a century, it is only recently that it has been shown to be a method for regularising divergent series. As a result of this alternative view, the technique can be extended to situations in which the in Eq. (1) need no longer to be expressed in terms of the gamma function, but in terms of Mellin transforms. That is, Borel summation is more general than originally thought. Nevertheless, there still exists a great number of divergent series in theoretical physics and applied mathematics, which cannot be regularised by extending this technique. Even in the cases where extended Borel summation is applicable, we still do not know if the regularised values produced by the technique are correct. Clearly, an alternative technique for regularising divergent series would be most advantageous in developing a theory of divergent series. Until 1993 there was no such alternative technique, but then the situation changed with the discovery of Mellin-Barnes regularisation. This extremely powerful and versatile technique for regularising divergent series becomes the main topic of Part 3.

Explore the rest of this five-part series on BestThinking:

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 1

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 2

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 3

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 4

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 5

A companion piece to this five-part article is published in the European Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics. See V. Kowalenko, "Euler and Divergent Series", Eur. J. Pure Appl. Math., 4(4) (2011), pp. 370-423.

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RIO+20, Sustainable Dev...

2012-05-05T03:26:48-04:00

The Millennium Development Goals, RIO+20, and the emerging sustainable development goals (SGDs) are intricately interwoven with one another and with the initiatives of other agencies and UN regimes. This paper develops those interrelationships and positions the roles of nongovernmental organizations as the boundary institutions that encourage those goals to be mobilized into action at the local and global levels.

Successful policy interlinks efforts to address ecological, social, economic and cultural issues. It interweaves local and regional actions with regional, national and multilateral processes and agreements which can become permanent and binding, yet flexible. The current Kyoto Protocol is a top-down agreement that has proven to be unmanageably rigid in an increasingly complex societal context. It is dominated by market mechanisms with insufficient regard for social and environmental values and methods. Pushing the legal framework in advance of institutional revisions weakens an already brittle structure. Strength, stability and binding authorities must develop rather than launch prematurelyⁱ offering incentives such that no state benefits from withholding and no state accrues benefits by failing to comply.

With complementary climate, disaster risk reduction and other agreements, the Kyoto Protocol could transform from what many see as the only structure providing a legal basis for energy and climate change action into a more workable system within our emerging multi-polar world. Rather than “saving” Kyoto in its current form, trade and climate change in cooperative alliance can act together to dissolve arbitrary barriers and include the appropriate actors at the right points in the process for swift and durable movement.

Civil Society, Millennium Development Goals, RIO+ 20 and post 2015 are intricately linked. The world cannot afford to wait for lengthy process actions before tackling the broader challenges threatening sustainable development, poverty, climate change and other global issues that affect local people. Rio +20 is an important staging ground for negotiating a new framework. Another key event is the MDG Review Summit in 2013 where these discussions need to be formalized. Further, a UN summit to adopt a new framework for when the MDGs expire in 2015 should be organized. Key to success of this summit is that it must be aligned with, and facilitate progress in other global, regional and local processes.

LINKS BETWEEN RIO+20, SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND MDGS

Sustainable development and in particular the sustainable development goals (SDGs) have received criticism due to their similarities with the post-2015 development agenda, which includes MDGs and post-MDG processes. They are linked and mutually supportive, rather than redundant as some have suggested. For example, the MDGs, despite their notable achievements to date, namely, improvements in the poverty level, increased aid from industrialized countries, and promotion of the various forms of stakeholder participation are charged with 1) neglecting issues in developed countries, 2) not considering the real needs in recipient countries, particularly those of marginalized populations, and 3) utilizing a donor-driven design, which led to 1) and 2) above.

For these and other reasons, the current MDG framework, including potential post-MDGs, do not or cannot fully address emerging and/or urgent issues, such as climate change, energy security, loss of biodiversity, disaster preparedness and resilience. In one example, MDG7 stipulates environmental but not quantitative goals, and in particular, goals related to forest issues and CO2 emissions are less ambitious than for other areas. Therefore, it should be clarified that SDGs are not an alternative to the past or ongoing frameworks, including MDGs, but can address the shortcomings and challenges facing MDGs, and broaden their goals to reflect other SD objectives, as already agreed to by governments. For example, poverty eradication—which is a key objective of MDGs—is also one of the overarching objectives of SD and thus should be fully articulated in SDGs, alongside the other objectives of environmental protection and sustainable consumption and production . Based upon the experiences of MDGs, ensuring multi-layer, multi-stakeholder participation throughout the development process of SDGs is the key for successful implementation.

The previous two Earth Summits, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992 and the World Summit on Sustainable Development (WSSD ) in 2002 together with the Convention on Biological Diversity’s (CBD) Aichi Biodiversity Targets, the Hyogo Framework for Action 2005-2015 and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) provide a framework for achieving sustainable development. Implementation has been incomplete and many gaps remain in areas ranging from human health, to disaster reduction, migration and the oceans. For example, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) could achieve a renewed prominence through integration with other sustainable development initiatives. The current MDG framework does not address growth or governance in its 60 goals for peace, development, the environment, human rights, the vulnerable, hungry, and poor, Africa, or the United Nations. Rio+20 provides an opportunity to directly and purposefully link the MDGs to SDGs and establish targets beyond 2015. Similar opportunities exist with other actions and frameworks that affect the success of a revised sustainable development process.

Specific Action Recommendations:

Education. In January 2012, Ban Ki-moon, presented his action agenda for the next five years highlighting priorities both in the final work towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, and to promote sustainable development goals beyond 2015. As Ban Ki-moon stated, education is a vital key to linking RIO+20, sustainable development and the MDGs.

Inclusion of other initiatives and frameworks. Linking other initiatives specifically including the Hyogo Framework for Action to the MDG Review Summit in 2013 in evaluating the MDG framework and post-MDG scenario discussions contribute to the process of formulating SDGs that are flexible to new learning, commitment structures and partnership relationships while remaining robust.

Addressing changing modalities of international collaboration surrounding sustainable development. As the modes change from North-South to a new type of collective action involving all countries and stakeholders, it moves swiftly past replacing North-South partnerships with South-South or even triangular cooperation; instead the model is now a network of collaborators. A vital part of this network is the public-private partnerships that are increasingly crucial for solving common problems and advancing shared interests.

It is vitally important that the SDGs are complementary to the MDGs and support their attainment. The SDGs must be fully integrated into a global overarching post-2015 development framework, as it would be both inefficient and short-sighted to develop them in isolation. The MDGs remain vital development objectives and having measurable targets has helped to focus global attention on progress towards the eradication of poverty, improvement of health and universal education, among others.

TRANSITIONS AND LINKS BETWEEN SDGS AND THE POST 2015 PROCESSES

Incorporating successes and working mechanisms into combined multilateral standpoints that reward political support for sustainability and climate change action, discourage free-riding, and leverage actions such as RTAs (regional trade agreements) with strong commitments for GHC emissions, health and adaptation commitments. The broad issues outlined for international attention to sustainability include the following:

Combating Poverty

Altering Consumption Patterns

Promoting Sustainable Human Settlement Development

Migration

Climate Change Adaptation

Disaster Risk Reduction and Management

Biodiversity and Forests

Oceans

Water Resources

Advancing Food Security

Energy, including from renewable sources

Current modalities used to address these issues do not sufficiently account for local knowledge, localized conditions (environmentally, socially and politically) or the impediments and motivations for local action. Working at this type of knowledge interface of cultures, disciplines and interests involves people at the community level in policy-relevant participation, in gathering data, in interpreting expert opinions within local contexts, and in direct participation in national level discourse that transcends sectoral priorities and offers suggestions that can be replicated in other global locations through integration into the UN regime structures. What is needed is a method trough which to enhance the sustainable development concept using appropriate indicators. By using the universal and measurable indicator of human health in action frameworks, which is evidenced in successes and failure metrics by agriculture, disaster risk reduction, energy, climate change, trade and labor policies among others, the pillars of sustainable development are aligned with appropriate attention to the social and environmental values that operate to support healthy global economies.

The primary objective of SDGs is to further the MDG vision while reaffirming the past political commitments of all actors as well as ensuring tangible actions to take place towards sustainable development. If SDGs are to offer a more comprehensive framework to respond to these needs while also envisioning poverty eradication as an overarching goal, transitions must be in place between SDGs and post 2015. In order to do this, adoption of an ambitious SDG mandate at Rio+20 is critical in order to realign and reignite worldwide efforts towards creating the future. As a first step towards integrating the SDG processes and other initiatives into a single unified process, defining these transitions at RIO+20 would be highly advantageous as this would set out a clear post-2015 framework with measurements that extend far beyond GDP.

Factors that could be integrated include MDG implementation and review, post-MDG preparation, and the Secretary General’s “Sustainable Energy for All by 2030” initiative. In this regard, it is crucial to define near-term benchmarks while envisioning long-term goals (tentatively set for 2030). At the same time, consistency between national and global policies should be ensured while setting appropriate minimums for common/ global goals, as well as allowing countries to dictate their own national targets according to domestic priorities and capacities. Taking into account the above-mentioned objective of SDGs, a recap of the existing commitments, including Agenda 21, the Hyogo Framework for Action, and the Johannesburg Plan of Implementation (JPoI) helps identify the potential scope of SDGs. Creating blueprint for the scope of SDGs based on these and other existing documents, but embraces the broader challenges as well as emerging possibilities.

ENGAGING CIVIL SOCIETY FOR GREATER POLICY AND IMPLEMENTATION IMPACT

UN regimes increasingly stress the need to more completely integrate civil society into the processes. What are the roles of civil society? The development of the post 2015 framework (and its monitoring) must include an extensive consultation involving all stakeholders at local, national, regional and global levels. This must include a formalized and meaningful process for civil society engagement. The process as well as the acts of creating a post-2015 development framework must be transparent, participatory and open. It needs to engage people affected by poverty, particularly those who experience marginalization, such as women, disabled people, and indigenous people. The process by which the SDGs are created will be key to its success. This means significantly changing the paradigm and how civil society is included. Inclusion extends far beyond observation. Civil society itself has been marginalized in prior processes by being denied access to timely information and discussions, and through having input dismissed or discounted unless vetted under specific partner endorsements (whether those be larger, more UN mainstream NGOs or UN agencies or national governments). As civil society has struggled to find a meaningful voice, trust in the UN system, its processes, outputs and outcomes have suffered.

Trust is a prerequisite to durable legally binding agreements. Rebuilding confidence and trust in the US system is served by eliminating arbitrary divisions between countries, sectors and within systems to increase flexibility to changing science, political and economic systems while supporting incentives and reordering priorities that put people and the environment on a par with market systems and technologies. A more flexible process requires a restructured interaction among policy actors to reflect the interdependence between local, national and multilateral processes. Concepts like the European concept of variable geometry in policy negotiations (also known as enhanced cooperation) can enhance and make the global sustainability system more viable, more realistic, and more trustedⁱⁱ.

NGOs, frequently cited as the most effective local implementation agents for poverty eradication, education and capacity building, adaptation and disaster reduction and relief, need direct and specific support from the multilateral system and from governments rather than being considered either competitive or a “necessary inconvenience.” Directly involving civil society in setting policy as well as in local implementation of action supports prioritizing institutional development over the development of a legal framework - a necessary requirement to rebuild trust. It also gives local interests a voice in policy because NGOs as boundary organizations can represent those interests more authentically than governmental bodies whose foci are sufficiently (and often appropriately) different from those of the local community. Convening groups of countries for bilateral and regional sustainable development and environmental agreements and purposefully including the diverse range of institutions now relegated to non-decision making, Civil Society Organizations, in current regime complexesⁱⁱⁱ creates a stronger bond between decisions and community-level implementation.

A more meaningful inclusion of civil society can’t wait for the normal mechanisms taken by the UN to change at their normal pace of operations. While 2015 is the target for new frameworks, new actions need to be undertaken WHILE these frameworks are being constructed. They will be taken on the ground, not just in the halls of negotiating bodies. Unless a flexible, organic mechanism is created that integrates the intentions of the MDGs and other formal agreements like the Hyogo Framework for Action, local actions will continue to focus more on disaster relief than on planning, changing lifestyles and local decisions to more sustainable directions, and including the people of nations to participate alongside their governments in creating locally viable and globally necessary solutions.

ⁱBodansky, D. and Diringer, E., 2007. Towards an Integrated Multi-Track Climate Framework. Pew Center on Global Climate Change.

ⁱⁱExamples of this approach include the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, WTO and the creation of the Montreal Protocol.

ⁱⁱⁱKeohane, R., and Victor, D., 2011. “The Regime Complex for Climate Change” in Perspectives on Politics, 9(1), 7-23.

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Liability Law and Stung...

2012-05-06T19:52:07-04:00

This is a story about the nature of law, what is like to feel like an outsider in court. It is about laws of liability which are rational, reasonable, and legitimate by local standards. However, as I think that the following example shows, such assumptions about liability and law are always embedded in the unspoken culture that is the epistemology, which gives cultural life meaning.

The encounter discussed below took place in Tanzania in 1986 when I was working for the Lutheran World Federation’s refugee development programs. As part of the program, I was sent to buy oxen for an ox training program we had started in western Tanzania. On this particular trip, I went with a large covered truck, and was accompanied by three Tanzanians, including an ox trainer truck driver, and an assistant driver. Three of us (myself, the truck driver, and the assistant driver), were outsiders, and did not speak the local Kisukuma language, only the national language of Tanzania, Kiswahili. But our ox trainer was a “local” from the region where the oxen were to be purchased, and spoke Kisukuma. The market was in a town near Lake Victoria where the monthly cattle market was held in an empty field by the Sukuma people of the region who were well-known for having high quality oxen. At this cattle market, anyone who had legal title to a cow could bring the cow with its papers, and negotiate to sell it to any buyer. You would examine the cattle you wanted, and then haggle with the owner over the price. It was capitalism at its best!

But this article is not about open air markets, capitalism, or even about how to distinguish between an ox and a bull, although I learned about each.. Rather it is about legal epistemology, or more specifically the traditional laws about rights, responsibility, liability, and responsibility found in an open field in Tanzania. This encounter created confusion within me vis a vis the moral obligations I had to another man. Indeed, I still have doubts about whether I ever fulfilled the moral rights I had under Sukuma traditional law. More importantly though, this story illustrates how people who are in unfamiliar legal situations shrink from confrontation. I know I did.

On the particular trip during which my legal dispute arose, I purchased 12 oxen. By the second day of the trip, we had purchased enough oxen that we needed to rent a tree under which we could graze them while completing our purchases. After paying a nominal sum to the owner of the tree to do this, we returned to purchase the rest of the oxen. At midmorning, however, I was approached by the truck driver, and told that there was something of a crisis back at the tree. Our oxen had excited a beehive in the tree above them, and the bees had in turn created some havoc among the tree owner’s flock of ducks. The driver agreed with my initial assessment that the claim itself was probably based on the farmer’s interest in squeezing money out of a rich foreigner. The driver also agreed that the bees probably had swarmed spontaneously, without reference to our oxen, and that the victimization of the ducks was not really our fault. Nevertheless, he also pointed out that if it was in fact our oxen that had excited be bees, we would in fact be liable for any damage incurred by the owner of the ducks. On a more practical level, the driver pointed out that under Sukuma traditional law, we would not be able to reclaim our oxen from underneath the tree until the claim was settled: It was not something that could be simply walked away from This led to an immediate parley near the tree, because all present agreed that I was potentially liable for the ducks.

The parley quickly turned into a paralegal affair conducted near our still-content oxen (they hadn’t been stung!). The “trial” was conducted in the Kisukuma language by a judge who I was told was a local elder of some authority. We were represented, I was told by an advocate who immediately turned to the ox trainer in our group, as he was the only one who spoke Kisukuma. It was his responsibility to translate the proceedings into Kiswahilii, the national language of Tanzania, for the benefit of the truck driver and myself.

The first order of business went surprisingly quickly, and the elder determined that yes, I was liable for any damages that my oxen might have caused by exciting the bees, who in turn stung the ducks. In effect, my oxen were guilty, and therefore as their owner, I was liable. I don’t know what legal doctrine this involves, but it was apparent to everyone else present that this conclusion was indeed reasonable. I am not sure how the “guilt” of my oxen were determined, but it was impressed on me that I had lost the case in very quick order. All that remained was to assess the amount of damages, which it was agreed should follow the local market’s price. I offered to pay the market price for a dead duck. And indeed this would have been easy if one of the ducks had died, and the (damaged) meat sold in the market, but this turned out to be problematic, given that all of the ducks had survived. But, it was pointed out that the duck meat may well have been damaged by the bee stings; so a value needed to be set on the ducks’ pain and suffering. This led to further discussions, and an impasse. How to value the pain and suffering of ducks?

An impasse reached, our Kisukuma-speaking defender decided to try another legal tactic. He pointed out that the farmer had failed to obtain a government permit for a beehive in the first place. There is a formal requirement for a license for many things in Tanzania, but in fact such laws are rarely enforced. But all agreed that this fact was irrelevant, since indeed, there was such a law, and therefore the bees were in fact illegal under traditional and national law. Therefore our cattle were not liable for exciting what were in fact illegal bees. Even though this technicality was going to get me off, I pointed out that the law was generally unenforced. But then, I was the only one present who had never heard of this licensing requirements, and because it helped my case, I agreed to take the licensing requirement very seriously.

Anyway, this whole process took place over a period of about 6 hours, and at the end it was finally concluded that I was not responsible for the ducks’ pain and suffering. I was permitted to load my oxen on the truck, and we drove back home without paying the duck owner anything.

Moral of the story: Avoid courts, any courts at all costs. And if you can’t avoid court, be sure to have a clever lawyer, well-versed in the language, laws, and nuance of the local place, and listen very carefully. And finally, be very very patient.

Adapted from Tony Waters (1999), Crime and Immigrant Youth, pp. 209-210. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications.

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Think or Feel?...or May...

2012-05-01T14:51:52-04:00

Throughout our lives we have been operating according to a pre-established social code that rules our behaviors, actions and countless decisions. These decision makers are based on stereotypes of what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s successful, what’s considered a failure, what does happiness look like and how problems and issues are supposed to be.

All of these stereotypes are created by conceptualization and a decision making process in our minds and in our thoughts. Possibly during the early stages of human species evolution, this was natural. It was the critical way to act because we needed so solve basic survival issues such as food and shelter. We succeed living that way. Now it seems through technology our basic needs are being taking care of. Technology is ingrained in our minds and oriented to external needs which have evolved successfully. But what about any technology from our hearts and oriented to internal issues? There’s truly a gap between the speeds of evolution of these two technologies to develop.

So when facing a problem you ask: What do you think the solution is?

When meeting somebody you question what you think about this person.

The answers that come up are based on rational mental algorithms based on the software we have pre-installed in our minds by society and family.

You would answer: The solution for that problem is ABC based on the fact of this, this and that, according to either a scientific explanation or a society pre-established rule.

You might jump to a conclusion and say, “I believe a person is truly happy because he is the CEO of a big firm, or he has a wife and kids, money or a fancy car.” Social stereotype of happiness match with this list of attributes according to rational rules, but it doesn’t necessarily mean is true.

We’ve been leading most all of our lives using the great potential of our minds, but it is not the only powerful tool we humans have. There is also the heart with its unlimited feelings and intuition.

I believe that a mature person is a rational creature. Yet, he or she thinks of their emotions and heart’s decisions as being immature. They simply minimize the wisdom of their hearts. If we feel emotional over an event, we often try to pretend not to be emotional; we fight against our own feelings; and try to find a mind-oriented statement that makes sense according to our society codes.

But what if, we reset ourselves and decide to live and make decisions based on the wisdom of our hearts? What if we decided to maximize our intuition-based decisions, and minimize our rational decisions?

Maybe we will consider ourselves crazy, as day dreamers and unrealistic. But what is reality? Is it reality when the wealthy CEO with lots of money- and lots of stress- is happier than a taxi driver who sets his own schedule, and enjoys talking to lots of people while still earning enough money to lead a modest- but decent life?

The heart is such a critical vital organ. It is obviously as important as the brain, so why don’t we give it a little more credit and decide to trust it on impulses? If we change the question, “What do you think about this person?” to “How do you feel about this person?” Maybe a new spectrum of possibilities and realities will flourish. We’ll be more compassionate and more humans. We can even be super humans because we would not only be equipped with one “tool”, the mind and its thought-bullets of reason. But also a second powerful tool of the heart with its feelings-bullets made of intuition is available to us. We could use both tools according to the challenges in front of us: two instruments instead of one will heighten the probability of success or at least make our path easier. We will develop both our outer and inner technology.

Taking decisions based on our heart may bring more happiness, true happiness. After all, our brain does not make one feel either happy or unhappy. It is our heart which commands emotions. So if we make decisions based on our heart it will be highly likely that our whole being could be more fulfilled and happy. If our minds give feelings of achievement, while our hearts give us happiness, then both things are important in our evolution as human beings. As in everything in this world of dualities (ying-yang), “Mind is more Methodological while heart is more Random”, making us exercise both parts of our brain. This is challenging, and exciting! Could even trigger a new video game or cyber product? Who knows?

We should cast a little humor from our heart development and take it out of this “dreamy-drama” world where it is positioned. Let’s make it look more attainable for normal working individuals in the main stream. The heart development path should not only be available and paved to “artistic souls”, but also for technical ones. So finding a bridge to convey the messages of heart development, with its random nature, in a more structured and updated way will make the message of love more understandable for many kinds of personalities. I’m sure humor can do a lot on this matter also.

If we would listen more our hearts, we will be able to develop our heart wisdom. As humans, we hold a powerful tool called intuition that has been underutilized for eons. I believe we all have felt love and the power of love in numerous ways. This power is as strong as the power of a good idea and sometimes is even more powerful. So why don’t we all give the heart all the credit it deserves?

I invite you to start listening to your heart, to start getting familiar with it for decision-making. You have an additional tool besides your brain, so if we can master the use of both of them (heart and mind) we can increase our human powers, be wiser and happier. Breaking the rules of reason that have been enforced all our lives may open a greater universe of possibilities and balance.

I encourage you to approach decisions in a different way, and instead of deciding based on a rationale that follows other’s, meaning society’s ideas, please take a moment to listen to your heart and decide based on your own rules. Yes, it may feel strange and uncomfortable initially, but with practice and with a better understanding of your own self, you will learn to trust your intuition with this additional tool for the rest of your life. You may find a balance in your mind/heart thought/and feelings. Your final outcomes will be the benefit of simply being wiser.

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Wheel of Praise

2012-05-06T12:40:07-04:00

Wheel of Praise

WHEEL OF PRAISE

In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats"

I walked among my roses this morning
To catch my breath, to feel my heart beat.

Around back I gazed at the Cottonwood,
The Sweetgum, and the Pine, all the same height,

Swaying in the wind, gleaming in the sun,
And remembered as a boy climbing trees.

I squeezed the tomatoes, just about ripe,
And checked the perfect curl of the cucumber vine.

By today's rules I am a poor man,
And powerless, insignificant, small,

And I have watched my life be swallowed up
By those who crow they're not going down

But will feast on the likes of me all they please,
Our idealism the tender fare they crave —

And insatiable their appetite to hoard.
And so I die like billions before me.

But when I imagine my final moment,
Somehow, inside, quiet, patient, ready,

(I can't understand this, try as I might),
I also feel communion fear can't quell,

Or greed belittle, or dogma disdain,
Or lust seduce to illusory truth —

Say, I feel star-stuff, or the plainest earth,
Or hear songs of poets long departed,

Or just say this: seeing no man is free,
I have been bound upon a wheel of praise

That my own tears do scald my tongue of words
That can tell me who it is that I am.

R. Allen Shoaf

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Deep Relativity - A Bri...

2012-05-04T09:28:34-04:00

Deep Relativity - A Brief Explanation of Place-Time

By Alan Rayner

I was recently asked by someone to provide a brief explanation of how the natural inclusional perception of physical reality as ‘place-time’ could change the way we understand Nature and human nature, and how this could relate to classical philosophy and spirituality. Here is my response:

“Your question is quite critical to the way in which we perceive 'self-identity' either rationalistically, as a 'definitive figural presence' or 'inert massy body' singled out from spatial and temporal context (a unitary static reality or 'fixed form', as associated classically with the 'doctrine of Parmenides') or, natural-inclusionally as a dynamic local energetic inclusion of 'space somewhere' within 'space everywhere' (a flow-form, as related to Heraclitus's perception of all 'objects' as continually changing 'harmonies of opposite/complementary tensions').

We enter here the paradoxical way in which 'motion' is perceived, measured and explained when any bodily form, human or otherwise, is rigidly defined as a 'whole' - a 'discrete object' or 'local mass, as by Newton (following the Aristotelian/Parmenidean line). No sooner have you (logically and/or mathematically) completely defined a body of any size, from infinitesimal to astronomical, as an inert whole or absolute independent figure of singleness or 'point-mass', you can only explain its movement in terms of an extrinsic 'push or pull force', and you can only detect and measure its movement by reference to a fixed frame of space and/or time. This requires you to impose structure and discontinuity upon space and/or time, as if space and/or time were TANGIBLE COMMODITIES.

Take a look at Newton's most basic equation of motion:

Force (~energy) = Mass x acceleration (rate of increase in distance [~space] travelled per unit of duration [~time])

There you have it: energy, space, time and matter as independently definable commodities, which, if sufficiently accurately measured, enable the future to be completely determined/predicted through their inter-action from present ('initial') conditions. (This is the root of 'determinism').

But what if - as makes sense of our NATURAL experience and makes consistent NATURAL sense - space and/or time are NOT tangible commodities that can be cut away from or confined exclusively within material bodies? What if the 'present' does not and cannot CUT the 'past' free from the 'future'? What if the boundary of a body does not and cannot CUT its inside off from its outside? How then to detect, explain and measure 'change'/movement?

Einstein climbed part of the way out of atomistic abstraction by recognising the non-exclusivity/mutuality respectively of space/time and energy/matter. But he retained the independence of space-time and energy-matter in a mutually instructive dialectic (space-time tells matter how to move, matter tells space-time how to curve). This is what I call 'shallow relativity', whereby space-time and energy-matter are objectified into inter-active agencies. By contrast, the 'deep relativity' of 'natural inclusionality' recognises the distinctness but mutual inter-play of space, time, energy and matter in 'place-time' as 'natural energy flow'. Energy and time (recall how energy is measured in terms of frequency/rate of movement!) are understood as INTRINSIC within flow-form as 'dynamic locality' (fluid-place) and space as permissive/receptive presence is everywhere, within, throughout and beyond dynamic locality. In other words, space is not a 'void absence of presence', without influence. Space is an intangible presence, with qualities vital to the very possibility of cosmic evolution. SPACE HAS INFLUENCE, which INDUCES ENERGETIC FORM INTO CIRCULATORY FLOW.

Space is continuous, intangible, receptive; boundaries are fluid, energetic, formative. Each within the other, with space in its infinite depth ultimately being both innermost and outermost, produces the natural energy flow of ‘place-time’; neither, alone, is capable of forming anything capable of moving anywhere.

Further reading

Rayner, A.D.M. (2004) Inclusionality and the role of place, space and dynamic boundaries in evolutionary processes. Philosophica 73, 51-70.

Rayner, A.D.M. (2008) Natural Communion: Poems and Paintings About Our Human Inclusion in the Evolutionary Flow of Place-time. Available from http://www.inclusional-research.org/furtherreading/naturalcommunion.pdf

Rayner, A.D.M. (2010). Natural co-creation. www.bestthinking.com

Rayner, A.D.M. (2010). From field theories to pool theory: the inclusional basis of natural physicality (with Philip Tattersall). www.bestthinking.com

Rayner, A.D.M. (2010). Intangible presence. www.bestthinking.com

Rayner, A.D.M. (2010). Heart of darkness. www.bestthinking.com

Rayner, A.D.M. (2011). A summary of natural inclusionality. www.bestthinking.com

Rayner, A.D.M. (2011) Space Cannot Be Cut: why self-identity naturally includes neighbourhood. Integrative Psychological and Behavioural Science 45, 161-184.

Rayner, A.D.M. (2012). Place-Time: the Flow Geometry of Space (with Ben Sidebottom, David Peleshok and Philip Tattersall). www.bestthinking.com

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Frank Marshall Davis: B...

2012-05-01T09:31:20-04:00

Joe Arpaio, Prominent Sheriff, Unveils Results Of Investigation Into Obama Birth

Huffington Post Headline, 3/12/2012

For me he was someone who in 1977 I needed to interview for my dissertation research. Excited to be in the midst of a very profitable seeking out of living primary sources, the men who had known, interacted with, and worked for Claude Barnett and his Associated Negro Press news service, I had travelled to numerous locations across the country to seek them out. It was one thing however for a PhD candidate with a wife and two young children and no permanent teaching position, to interview the likes of Roy Wilkins and Ernest Johnson in New York City close to my home in Stamford, Connecticut, and Harry Richardon and C.A. Scott in Atlanta while attending an Organization of American Historians meeting. It was another thing entirely to find the where with all to travel to Honolulu, Hawaii to speak with the former executive editor of the Associated Negro Press and close confidant and friend of Claude and Etta Moten Barnett. I was thankful when, after a bit of back and forth correspondence between Bloomington, Indiana and Honolulu, my much sought after primary source agreed to record his responses to questions I would pose to him. Unbeknownst to me at the time I was conversing with the man who in the election of 2008 would become controversially known as candidate Barack Obama’s “Communist Uncle Frank.”

At some point during the Presidential campaign of 2008 in what we have come to call the vetting process that all candidates for office are now subject to, someone in the anti-Barack Obama camp came across the following paragraph in candidate for president Obama’s book, Dreams From My Father. It referenced for Obama a moment from his growing up years with his grandfather in Hawaii that he seems to have looked back on with a funny and warm feeling of nostalgia.

There was a poet named Frank who lived in a dilapidated house in a run-down section of Waikiki. He had enjoyed some modest notoriety once, was a contemporary of Richard Wright and Langston Hughes during his years in Chicago—Gramps once showed me some of his work anthologized in a book of black poetry. But by the time I met Frank he must have been pushing eighty, with a big, dewlapped face and an ill-kempt gray Afro that made him look like an old, shaggy-maned lion. He would read us his poetry whenever we stopped by his house, sharing whiskey with Gramps out of an emptied jelly jar. As the night wore on, the two of them would solicit my help in composing dirty limericks. Eventually the conversation would turn to laments about women.

www.moonbattery.comUsed only with express written permission

One wonders what exactly it was about this passage that aroused the vetter’s curiosity. But for that vetter, and for the other strident voices that joined in what became a chorus of anti- Obama suspicion and accusation, the conversation the adult Barack Obama recalled from his impressionable growing up years listening to Gramps and “Uncle Frank” clearly involved more than dirty limericks and laments about women. Much to the vetter’s delight, “Uncle Frank,” who he came to be tagged by the candidate’s opponents, turned out to be Frank Marshall Davis. Research revealed Davis emerging from the political wars of the middle part of 20^th century America at worst from the researcher’s point of view as a “fellow traveller” at a time in our nation’s history when that was enough to condemn a man as un-American. Or even better, as the vetter would discover at least to his own satisfaction, the “Uncle” who was now out of Barack Obama’s closet and could be tagged as an avowed member of the Communist Party of the United States of America. Once this news hit the internet, everyone and their sisters and cousins and uncles and aunts by the dozens appear to have weighed in on what became one of the more interesting back and forth skirmishes of that election campaign.

The debate that ensued among partisans and opponents of the Obama candidacy revolved around what this association with so questionable a character at so impressionable an age should mean for your view of the candidate’s fitness to be President of the United States. When it became clear that “Uncle Frank” could on the basis of available evidence be reasonably classified as a Communist radical critic of the America of his day, the answer to that question of how this youthful association should impact on one’s estimate of the Democratic candidate’s fitness for office devolved into how substantial an influence “Uncle Frank” had been in shaping the world view of Obama. From the Communist side of the ledger Gerald Horne, a contributing editor to the Communist Party of the United States’ Political Affairs opined that Frank Marshall Davis was "a decisive influence in helping Obama to find his present identity" as an African-American. From the opposite side of the 2008 election time political spectrum came the virulently anti-Obama book The Obama Nation by Jerome Corsi. Corsi shares with Horne the notion of a decisive role for “Uncle Frank,” in shaping the young boy into a candidate who now in the author’s view, because of his ideological make up, was unfit to be President of the United States. Not surprisingly the Democratic nominee for president’s campaign staff immediately produced a lengthy response suggesting a new title – Unfit For Publication – for Corsi’s anti-Obama screed.

www.moonbattery.comUsed only with express written permission

The Frank Marshall Davis who occupies a small place for Barack Obama in Dreams of My Father is an avuncular figure who shared with grandpa Stanley Kansas roots, growing up 50 miles apart near Wichita. He would be recalled by the adult Obama as someone from a time and place that in his person and beliefs was frozen in time. Barack Obama’s “Uncle Frank” was someone who saw little progress in race relations from the days in the 1930s when he first came to work for Claude Barnett at the Associated Negro Press.

As Obama remembered,

It made me smile, thinking back on Frank and his old Black Power, dashiki self. In some ways he was as incurable as my mother, as certain in his faith, living in the same sixties time warp that Hawaii had created.

The President to be also remembered Frank later in life when he took a job in South Chicago as a community organizer and took some time one day to visit the areas where Frank Marshall Davis had lived, "I imagined Frank in a baggy suit and wide lapels, standing in front of the old Regal Theatre, waiting to see Duke or Ella emerge from a gig."

Sounds innocent enough. But google up Frank Marshall Davis on the net and one gets lost in sorting through a maze of conspiratorial notions originating in the heat of the 2008 campaign about the Davis and Obama connection ranging from claims that Davis is President Obama’s real father – to notions of him being an FBI undercover informant at the same time that he was part of a Communist conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States – to his being a sex pervert having authored a hard core pornographic novel under the pseudonym Bob Greene – all of which is aimed at proving that Barack Obama was a communist? socialist? leftist radical? maybe even sexual threat? who we were in danger of placing in the White House as our Commander In Chief. I try to sort all this out and make some sense of it - not an easy task given who Davis was for me back in 1977 when he generously gave me wonderfully valuable insights into the working of the Associated Negro Press that he served as executive editor in the late 1930s and early 1940s. As I read back into the transcript of the responses that came to me from distant Hawaii to the questions I posed, the picture that emerges in my mind is of a talented and very professional journalist so far distant from the man pictured in the election controversy as to make it seem that the Frank Marshall Davis of the 2008 election cycle was on a different planet in a different universe than my Frank Marshall Davis of 1977.

What was lacking in all this back and forth partisan sniping is “Uncle Frank” speaking for himself. Let’s let him do that. So here I put aside whether he was or wasn’t a Communist and sexual pervert; or if he was, what impact that should have on one’s view of Barack Obama as candidate and now president; and simply try to give you as accurately as I can who he was for me as aspiring PhD candidate and budding professional historian in search of as accurate and full a picture as possible of the history and role of the Associated Negro Press, as I pursued early in my journey into the African American past the elusive Black Clio of history.

THE ROAD INTO JOURNALISM

I was born in in Arkansas City, Kansas. After finishing high school there I attended for a year the Quaker Friends School in Wichita, Kansas, taking sort of a general course. It was then that I decided to enter the Department of Journalism at Kansas State College, in Manhattan, Kansas. At the time there were only five colleges in Kansas that were state supported, three teachers colleges, Kansas State, and the University of Kansas. I did not want to go to the University of Kansas because it had such an inordinate amount of prejudice. At the same time I also did not want to teach, which was the career, along with medicine and the law that were preferred by black students. After reading the catalogue at Kansas State I hit upon the idea of studying journalism. It seemed to offer me a much more interesting field than say business or commerce, or music or things of that nature. It also did not require mathematics. And I disliked mathematics. So I hit upon the idea of journalism. I knew very little about the black press at the time. Outside of the Crisis Magazine ( organ of the NAACP) and an occasional glance at the Chicago Defender (leading Black national weekly of that day), it was, so far as I was concerned, virtually nonexistent.

My mother died in the summer of 1926. My lone Aunt Haddy began writing me. She was full of remorse at not having kept in touch with her sister. She also induced her estranged husband, C. W. Reynolds, himself a frustrated newspaperman, to write. Reynolds was a Pullman Porter, but he had been a sort of correspondent for the Indianapolis Freeman (a venerable Black newspaper of the later 19^th and early 20^th centuries) years before. Between the two of them they got me interested in Chicago. Reynolds also sent me copies of the Light and Heebie Jeebies, a magazine put out by Claude Barnett and P. L. Prattis.

In 1927 after the end of my first semester and in the middle of my junior year I decided to go to Chicago. I knew no one there at all. I had corresponded with my uncle, but that is as far as it went. I think I reached Chicago with thirty six dollars in my pocket. This was in February when it was as cold as the devil. So I had a very interesting time there as I began finding out about things.

www.lib.k-state.eduUsed only with express written permission

At that time the Chicago Defender was just a few doors away from the offices of the Associated Negro press. Claude Barnett and Robert Abbott apparently did not like each other. So you did have that conflict. Anyway, I soon learned that there were very few trained black newspapermen. The opportunities in the white field for black reporters were exceedingly limited. I knew of only two. Lester Walton who later became minister to Liberia, was then a star re-write man for the old Herald Tribune in New York. The other was Eugene Gordon who was a feature editor for the Boston Globe. There were a very few other black men in the field that had been trained as newspapermen. One was Dewey Jones who was city editor of the Defender. And shortly afterward they added into the field one of the sons of P. B. Young of the Norfolk Journal and Guide.

Opportunities were so limited that it was difficult to have depth and actually survive, because those who were experienced in the field were holding on to all of their jobs for dear life. So I had a devil of a time around Chicago. I finally got hooked up with two men, Perry Thompson and Henry Brown, who were trying to put out something called the National News and Feature Service, a magazine that was to be circulated to all the Negro newspapers. So I was involved in these until one day somebody came in and told us that there was being installed all the facilities for a daily newspaper around 37^th and Indiana. This became the Chicago Evening Bulletin . The owners of this project had no experience at all in the field of journalism. They both were real estate men. They had enough money to continue for a year even if nothing came in from sales or advertising. We hooked up with the Evening Bulletin and Billboard Jackson who was a former entertainer who was identified with Billboard Magazine and acted as entertainment editor. It was not long before the paper started falling apart because of lack of funds and not enough financing.

Then to complicate matters there came into existence, which lasted for only a short time, the Chicago Sun, another black daily newspaper. Both of them went under, and I was out in the cold again. Then I got into the editorial set over that the Chicago Whip, edited by Joseph B. Bibb who later became one of the state officials of Illinois. So I stayed there until the Whip began to have financial troubles. Then I went up to Gary, Indiana to the Gary American edited by Chauncey Townsend who was also one of the few black journalists well trained. He was from the University of Southern California. I became managing editor there.

Shortly after that I decided to return to Kansas State. I had already established somewhat of a reputation as a poet at Kansas State, and the Department of Journalism there was anxious for me to come back and finish my schooling there. So I returned. I spent another year there, but this was just as the depression started. I left in the middle of my senior year hoping to come back for the other half year and get my degree, but I became one of the depression causalities and never did return.

Anyway, I returned to Gary, Indiana and worked again as managing editor of the Gary American until one day a fellow with the name of W. A. Scott came to Gary to look for an editor for the Atlanta World. He had been sent over by Claude Barnett whom I had met before.

Now Claude Barnett was very tall, especially during that particular time when people were not as tall as they are now. He was also very suave, very soft spoken and very easy to get along with. He apparently had developed an appreciation for my ability in the field, so when C. A Scott came to him asking for an editor I was named as the person who would suit what he wanted.

So then I went to Atlanta. The Atlanta World at that time was published twice a week. Shortly after I got there it became a tri-weekly. Then after a year it became a daily newspaper, and it still is a daily. I had the privilege of editing it into a daily newspaper and this was the first successful black daily in the nation. I stayed there from 1931 through 1934 when I returned to Chicago, with a little bit more on the Gary American, and then went to work for the Associated Negro Press as a feature editor. This was in 1935.

It was there that I became quite well acquainted with the problems of most of the black newspapers throughout the country. The Associated Negro Press was making every effort to fill the need of a news gathering agency to supply all the black papers. We were trying to be a combination of what in the white world were the Associated Press, United Press, and such organizations. So we had our job cut out for us. Particularly since most of the black newspapers were very poor and could not afford even the small fees that were being charged by ANP. Now the big black newspapers-there were about four or five of them-could pay. They did what they could along this particular line, but that was not quite enough to take care of all that was necessary.

THE BLACK PRESS

Black newspapers came into existence to counteract the extreme bias of most of the white press. Very few articles were printed in the white press which were other than being condemnatory of Negroes. And there was no social news, or anything of that nature. The black press therefore printed the other side of the news as seen from the black view point. We also had social notes and items of general interest which instilled a certain amount of pride in the black reader. And that in itself was a very strong reason for the existence of the black press. Now until the black press became comparatively powerful the white press could do and get by with just about anything they wished. Then later on after the black readers became alerted to what was going on, the black press was able to counteract much of the stuff that was going on. I was in Atlanta in 1931 just a few months after the Scottsboro case in which these nine black kids were arrested and almost railroaded to execution. The black press gave this full coverage, and it went a long way toward stopping not only the miscarriage of justice there, but in other events and other happening throughout the nation. So the black press has had a very significant part to play in advancing the welfare of black America.

********

Five years later we get a taste of the sharpness and passion for presenting the black side of the news that Davis brought to his reporting and commentary in a selection from a column he wrote from his ANP desk on the still simmering Scottsboro case

Once again justice has been administered in the world infamous Scottsboro case. Heywood Patterson, the first of those to be re-tried, has been given a seventy five year prison term for daring to ride a train which was also being use by two female bums. If the railroad had provided one boxcar with a sign “For Negro Hoboes Only,” this case might never have gone to court.

The nine defendants have already spent five years in prison. If these long terms are to be the best that can be obtained for the lads under the defense group, then the Reds may well have dominated the trials. Between execution and seventy five years in an Alabama prison, many sensible people would prefer death.

********

The ANP under those circumstances was as highly subjective as one could find. Our bias naturally was in favor of blacks, so therefore what we did was to serve in many instances to give an entirely different side to the picture which first appeared in the daily white newspapers.

Now Claude Barnett personally was quite conservative. I frankly was and still am quite radical. But we served as a very good counter balance to each other. We did not get in each others’ way. I was responsible almost solely for whatever went out in our releases. We usually had two releases going out a week. One on Friday that was our big release, and one on Monday, our deadline release. And anything else of importance developed we would wire our subscriber newspapers. Whatever I sent out I tried to make it completely newsworthy. And in all fairness I sent out many articles that were communist inspired. But unless that was something that was newsworthy, it didn’t go out across my desk.

www.reformation.org and Chicago Historical SocietyUsed only with express written permission

Left: Frank Marshall Davis (image courtesy www.reformation.org). Center: Associated Negro Press Pass (image courtesy Chicago Historical Society). Right: Claude A. Barnett (image courtesy Chicago Historical Society).

By my saying that he was conservative and I was radical, we both had the same goal in mind which is common to just about all members of the black press. And that was full equality, and an end to discrimination and racism. He thought he would get it on one side of the street, the conservative side. I thought I could get more of it on the radical side. So we sort of complemented each other without either of us being at all antagonistic toward each other. As a matter of fact on one or two occasions Claude, when he was an assistant in the Federal Department of Agriculture, was accused by the FBI of being present at some very left wing or radical meetings, and as being a key speaker. In actuality, I was the person who was responsible for the speeches that were made, which to my way of thinking showed how reliable the FBI could be. So we had these things which we had to consider.

Whatever Frank Marshall Davis would become in the midst of the partisan presidential politics of 2008, he clearly had the respect of his boss for his professionalism. Writing in 1954 to Corrine Murrow in the midst of the McCarthy hunt for subversives in government and the public sector, Claude Barnett would say this about his former managing editor.

I recall telling him we were interested in news about Republicans, Democrats, Socialists, Communists, so long as it was news and that we would use news about anarchists which was the worst word I knew if it had a news relationship to Negroes. I told him that under no circumstances would we brook any political propaganda. Mr. Davis agreed and never to my knowledge did he use this vehicle in other but an honorable fashion.

Well there he is, primary source and walking history text whose testimony would impact in important ways on what I would say about the Associated Negro Press and Claude Barnett in what became A Black National News Service: The Associated Negro Press and Claude Barnett. “Uncle Frank” to be would give me considerably more detail than what appears in these selections from his interview transcription, and would advance in productive ways my understanding both of the working of the Associated Negro Press, of the make-up and character of Claude Barnett and other ANP hands, and of the world Frank Marshall Davis lived in and reported on.

Thirty years later Frank Marshall Davis, African American journalist, would be presented to the American electorate as “Uncle Frank,” and on at least one occasion as "Father Frank," made into someone decidedly different than the man I knew as primary history source, as the 2008 salvos were fired from a variety of sources on the net and in print in an effort to impugn the fitness of character of the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.

"Does anyone believe for one second that if John McCain or Sarah Palin were mentored by a self-admitted child rapist and general pervert that it wouldn't be the singular focus of multiple news cycles, questioning how such a relationship was damaging to their delicate and emerging psychologies, rendering them too unreliable for the Presidency, or perhaps darkly suggesting that the candidate might have been abused by such a mentor themselves?"

"Sometime between 1927 and 1948, Frank Marshall Davis was recruited as a special agent or informer for the FBI—Federal Bureau of Inquisition....As a newspaperman, Davis had the perfect opportunity to know what was happening in Chicago. As a left wing or "Communist" sympathizer, no one would suspect him of association with the ultra right wing FBI."

"Ann Dunham graduated from Mercer Island High School in Washington State, in 1960. Her family moved to Hawaii that same year where she attended the University of Hawaii."

www.reformation.orgUsed only with express written permission

Ann Dunham

"It was there that she had an affair with Davis and the result was baby Obama!!"

www.reformation.orgUsed only with express written permission

Ann Dunham & baby Obama

I’ll be darned! Frank Marshall Davis, Barack Obama’s “Communist Uncle Frank” – and his “real” father to boot! Frank Marshall Davis, Executive Editor, Associated Negro Press, primary source extraordinaire for historian Lawrence Hogan.

And most recently with news from Arizona about Sheriff Joe and his investigation that is splashed over the net, the hunt for a past that would disqualify Barack Obama for the Presidency he now holds has come back into today’s news cycle.

Joe Arpaio, Prominent Sheriff, Unveils Results Of Investigation Into Obama Birth

Huffington Post Headline, 3/12/2012

Sheriff Joe, you forgot to investigate “Uncle Frank.”

Different planet! Different universe!

Opportunities for Further Engagement

Voices from America’s Black Past: Black Exemplars from Slavery Times to "Thank God Almighty, Free At Last." Lawrence Hogan. Thinker Media, Inc.

Dreams From My Father. Barack Obama.

A Black National News Service: The Associated Negro Press and Claude Barnett. Lawrence Hogan. St. Johann Press, Haworth, New Jersey.

Livin' the Blues. Frank Marshall Davis.

Writings of Frank Marshall Davis: A Voice of the Black Press, ed. by John Edgar Tidwell.

The Obama Nation. Frank Corsi.

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Opportunity is a very b...

2011-07-28T09:31:39-04:00

I begin this short essay by asking what is a good explanation for any phenomenon? We might wish to consider Newton’s Law of gravity as an explanation for why apples fall out of trees rather than fly upwards. But I'm actually interested in the social phenomenon of crime. Can science explain crime?

In his latest book, the world’s leading quantum computing scientist Professor David Deutsch (2011) of Oxford University tells us that good explanations are:

(1) Hard to vary – in that you cannot alter them after your experiments or observations in order to make them fit your data post-hoc.

(2) They are refutable. In other words, they can be shown to be either right or wrong.

Let’s move on now to Crime Science, while bearing these two crucial points in mind.

Here I refer the reader to Professor Gloria Laycock’s (2003) online publication, by the Department of Security and Crime Science within the Jill Dando Institute of Security and Crime Science at University College London (UCL), which is entitled “Launching Crime Science” and is published on the UCL website with its own ISBN number. Google Scholar reveals that this paper has been officially cited in several scholarly articles. This is the paper that launched Crime Science. It has an incredibly optimistic and glowing foreword written by the broadcaster Nick Ross and is likely to be of major interest to all criminologists, scholars of the history of scientific progress, policy makers, police officers, and Crime Scientists.

In her (2003) paper, Professor Laycock’s main explanation for crime is that the single most significant cause of crime is opportunity (see also Tilley and Laycock 2002 to find the exact same claim). She, her fellow crime scientists, and some criminologists such as Professor Marcus Felson (Cohen and Felson 1979), define the existence of crime opportunity as comprising three necessary elements that all come together in one place. These essential components of the crime act occurring in a place are:

(1) A suitably motivated and capable offender

(2) a suitable target (person, place or thing) for that offender and

(3) the absence of a capable guardian to protect the target or keep the offender in check

This ubiquitous crime as opportunity explanation seeks to explain every kind of crime known to mankind – from someone opportunistically keeping the £50 they just happened to spy sticking out of an ATM, burglaries carried out by opportunity seeking prolific burglars, to the most audaciously and carefully planned and executed jewel robbery.

With all crimes, there must have been a crime opportunity for it to have occurred. Therefore, with all crimes – at least once they have been committed – it is obvious that the perpetrator exploited an opportunity. How else could the crime have happened? This is what is known in philosophy as a truism.

The opportunity explanation for crime is very handy because it is easy to vary.

In order to handily explain the reason for any crime, Crime Scientists simply vary the extent to which the offender is deemed to be motivated, the target suitable, or the guardian incapable. In other words, if the crime happened it was because the guardian did not have sufficient 'capability' to defend the object or target against the infinitely variable degree of motivation and/or infinitely variable capabilities of the offender and the related infinitely variable degree of 'suitability' of the target. If the potential crime never happens, then that is because of the relative capability of the guardian to one or both of the other elements. This fool-proof post-hoc 'matter of fact' variation makes the explanation for crime occurring and not occurring impossible to refute. In short, the opportunity explanation is always tweaked by itself to perfectly fit the data it is used to explain.

Crime Science appears to be based on the premise that it is these easy to vary and impossible to refute self-tweaking characteristics that make opportunity the best explanation for crime because that means that no one can refute it. Of course, many scientists would disagree.

Crime opportunity, however much you might seek to vary its three integral parts, is an essential characteristic of all crime and as such it is in fact not an explanation at all. It is actually the crime data that Crime Science is seeking to explain. As a mere truism, crime opportunity explains nothing we do not already know. Put simply, data (of any kind) cannot explain itself.

In science, the fact that hydrogen and oxygen are essential parts of water does not explain why water is what it is, or how it came to be. For that you need an explanation of causes. Explanations for causality of a thing are not descriptions of the characteristics or behaviour of that thing. Saying that opportunity is a cause of crime is like saying hydrogen and oxygen are the cause of water. Whereas knowledge about what causes water is the explanation embodied in the discovery of the physical law that governs the way atoms stick.

The crime as opportunity explanation merely describes, albeit to an extremely limited extent, the behaviour and characteristics of people and targets at the scene of every successful crime in progress, or crime prevented (it does not for example explain failed but attempted crimes or discovered criminal conspiracies).

The criminological notion of crime as opportunity does not explain what it is in society that brought the three core components of the crime scene in progress together as offenders, defenders and targets. It does not explain what motivates, rewards or causes someone – such as a prolific burglar - to set out and look for these so called opportunities. The crime as opportunity explanation does not explain, partially or wholly, the cause of crime. Therefore, it seems erroneous to state (e.g. Laycock 2003: p.5) that: “The most significant and universal cause of crime is opportunity.” And it, therefore, appears wrong to believe that the opportunity element of Routine Activities Theory (e.g. Laycock 2010 p.227) provides some kind of underlying principle to explain crime.

My own position on criminology and a natural science criminology

This brief essay is totally concerned with the fact that Laycock’s – and by default Crime Science’s perception of science, arguably, does not take account of what many natural scientists think science is. For example, the same type of error of confusing (or mixing together) of explanations (theory) with the data to be explained was deemed unscientific by an amicus curiae brief of 73 Nobel Laureates in the earlier Louisiana Creation Case (Shermer 1991). I throw my hat in with them. So that my position is that the notion of science is in fact governed by a number of broad “principles” that have their roots in the philosophy of science. And the one just stated is arguably the most fundamental principle of the natural sciences. Laycock writes that she wants crime science to be like the natural sciences.

I think that crime as opportunity - combining the Brantingham's (1991) five necessary components of crime: law, place, offender, target, victim with Felson’s (Cohen and Felson 1979) description of the crime act: capable offender, suitable victim./target in the absence of capable guardian for a crime in commission (or thwarted) is in fact an excellent observation and description of the data. And, to repeat the point already made, since it always occurs it is a truism (like H2O is water), but that does not explain its causes. Therefore, it is not an explanatory theory or hypotheses of causality.

Even if you were so contrary as to seek to break that fundamental principle of the physical sciences that you should not confuse your explanations with the data you seek to explain - just to weirdly argue that crime as opportunity is an explanation – then the fact that in criminology the notion of opportunity is an infinitely post-hoc variable truism makes is a useless explanation in science. Such handy variability is much better suited to post-hoc rhetorical story telling. Ironically, such ‘making of stuff up’ after the event in order to be wise about what you never predicted would be coming is the sort of thing that I beleive crime scientists would criticise as being mere rhetorical fallacy.

Regarding whether I think crime can be explained by a real crime science informed criminology, that might one day predict the future of crime, my answer is that I just don’t know. Even Popper’s work on the fallacy of induction had to rely upon past and current failures to refute the usefulness of such induction as a predictive method. So who knows, one day an Antiswan might replace his white and black swans? After all, Popper’s black swans are the unimaginable and unimagined future. And Popper never imagined the possibility that one day man might overcome the problem of induction. In short – I keep an open mind. Who knows what man can achieve in the next 1000 years. I wrote a blog on my open minded Antiswan (Sutton 2011) that considers the possibility. If I had to bet on it I'd say that accurately predicting what will happen next in the affairs of man is a problem to be solved and that man may one day solve the problem. Perhaps not in my lifetime, but perhaps a 100 or 1000 years from now. Ultimately, because I am an optimist, I think Real Crime Science is a worthwhile project. And I think we should start on it today.

Conclusion

Science does not confuse its data (such as crime) with the theories (ideas) that seek to explain it. It keeps them separate. Being a truism, the crime as opportunity explanation is in fact an excellent comprehensive summary, by way of concise description, of key elements at all successful crime scenes in progress. This description is about how all crimes takes place, but it is not about why they take place. How something happens does not explain why it happens. For that we need an explanation in the form of a hypothesis or theory. Good explanations are expressed as hypothesis or theories and are easy to refute and hard to vary. The crime as opportunity explanation is impossible to refute and infinitely easy to vary. In fact, varying it is what is necessary in order to make it fit the data. Contrary to what Crime Scientists weirdly believe, this makes it a bad explanation for crime.

On the other hand, to give a most eminent Crime Scientist the last word, an alternative argument is that it is good enough for the science in Crime Science to be defined by explanations that he gleaned only from Wikipedia (see: Pease 2008).

References

Brantingham, P. J. & Brantingham, P. L. (1991). Environmental Criminology. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press

Cohen, L. E. and Felson, M. (1979) Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach. American Sociological Review, 44, 558-608.

Deutsch, D. (2011) The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that transform the world. London. Penguin Books.

Laycock, G. (2003). Launching Crime Science. Jill Dando Institute of Crime Science. University College London. ISBN 0-9545607-1-X

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/jdi/downloads/publications/crime_science_short_reports/launching_crime_science.pdf If for some reason this publication remains weirdly removed from the Internet, despite its having an ISBN number and having been cited in several scholarly texts, anyone unable to obtain a copy can get a free copy of the original by emailing crimescience@hotmail.com and simply asking for it to be returned by email.

Laycock, G. (2010) Crime Science. Encyclopaedia of Victimology and Crime Prevention. Thousand Oakes. Sage.

Pease, K, (2008). How to Behave Like a Scientist? Policing http://www-staff.lboro.ac.uk/~ssgf/KP/2008_Pease_Behaving_Badly.pdf

Shermer, M.B. (1991). Science Defended, Science Defined: The Louisianan Creationism Case. Science Technology and Human Values. Vol 16. No. 4. 517-539. http://www.jstor.org/stable/689806

Sutton, M. (2011) On the Antiswan. BestThinking.com. Criminology: The Blog of Mike Sutton: http://www.bestthinking.com/thinkers/science/social_sciences/sociology/mike-sutton?tab=blog&blogpostid=12179%2c12179

Tilley, N. and Laycock, G. (2002). Working out what to do: Evidence based crime reduction. Crime Reduction Series Paper 11. London Home Office.

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Looking Back at Radical...

2009-09-15T15:24:20-04:00

The following comes in modified form from my book Radicalism in the Mountain West (2007) in the hope of generating some thoughts and discussion.

Historian W. J. Cash observed some years ago that the South is not simply a geographical division of the United States. Rather, one finds in this region “a complex of established relationships and habits of thought, sentiments, prejudices, standards, and values, and association of ideas,” shared by most people, that distinguishes the area from others. While one is not altogether certain the same thing can be said of the Mountain West -- Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming -- these states do share a common history of interest to students of radicalism.

Used only with express written permission

Radicalism in the Mountain West (2007)

The Mountain West in the last decade of the Nineteenth Century and the first two decades of the Twentieth Century was a place where radicals – people who wanted to replace the capitalist system, not simply reform it – were active on both the political and industrial fronts. They sought immediate reforms to loosen the grip of giant corporations and give workers greater control over their government and jobs.

The states and territories of the Mountain West first caught the attention of nationally prominent Socialists not so much because they saw these places as filled with potential radicals, but because these places had so few inhabitants that the leaders felt they would be great places to establish Socialist colonies. Eugene Debs and other prominent radicals dreamed of the Socialist electoral victories that could be realized by moving large numbers of radicals into sparsely settled states like Nevada or Idaho. As the region began to grow in the late nineteenth century, however, national leaders thought less about the size of the population and more about the possibility of immediate and fundamental political and economic change growing out of the emerging anti-corporate reform effort, at the core of which, as they saw it, were the grievances of a new class conscious industrial work force in mining areas.

Radicals liked to think of the workers in the Mountain West as something special in both their willingness to stand up to the boss on the job and in their eagerness to use the ballot to pursue revolutionary ends. Writing about workers in the west in general, one radical expressed the view that their spirit of independence was due to the rough frontier environment that stripped away a man’s “effete artificialities” and forced him “to stand upon his own two feet if he would stand at all.” The end product, at any rate, was a “strong and courageous race” eager for freedom who would not give in to the new industrial system or to capitalist bosses.”People working in and around mines, the radicals argued, stood to be the most radical of the radicals because of their experiences in the East, the severity of the industrial conditions they faced, or both of these causes.

Socialist parties burst on the scene in the Mountain West during the late 1890s and early 1900s as part of both a national movement and a continuation of the regional anti-corporate political reform effort which had featured the emergence of a labor-centered Populist movement.

Mountain West Socialists absorbed much of the Populist platform, some of their leaders and some of their following in the electorate, especially in mining areas. Yet, while, the Socialist parties in the Mountain West took up the “lost cause” of Populism, they also added their own particular ideological interpretations and prescriptions. They contributed to the anti-corporate platform of the Populists, by giving it a deeper, more theoretical underpinning, rooted in what they offered as scientific theory. They also offered fundamental reform – a way out of wage slavery through the establishment of a cooperative commonwealth which would replace capitalism. Members though differed somewhat over how and how soon this was to be done.

By the early 1900s, the Socialist movement in the Mountain West began to acquire the reputation of being home to the most radical of the radicals – the stronghold of the IWW and revolutionaries like Bill Haywood whose version of direct action meant sabotage and industrial violence and, in the end, one big union which would overthrow the capitalist system through a national general strike.

One finds a broad streak of revolutionary direct action in Mountain West radicalism – a willingness to go to a no holds barred war to the finish with the capitalists at the point of production -- that made the region somewhat unique. Still, the extent and importance of this aspect of the radical element in the movement can be overstated. This reputation stems in large part from the widespread attention given to the violent labor wars in the mining areas of the region -- wars in which Socialists as union leaders and members were frequently involved and in which Socialist party leaders expressed their support for the workers -- and by the widespread attention given in the media to the IWW and prominent radicals associated with that organization.

On the left wing-right wing scale, Mountain West Socialist party members tended to be directed toward the left wing. This is generally shown, for example, when we compare how Socialists in the area stood on issues voted upon by party members on a national basis. On the other hand, party functionaries throughout the region, generally took party building seriously. In practice, they championed a variety of reform proposals (immediate demands), sought out middle class as well as working class support, and developed close relations with craft unions as well as industrial ones.

Militant direct action and strike activity which characterized the radical movement on the industrial front may have helped build a sense of worker solidarity that benefitted the Socialist parties but party leaders in the region often felt that the resulting violence and the revolutionary utterances of the radical unionists, especially those who led the IWW, got in the way of party building. When it came to membership, the parties in many places attracted respected middle class members of society. The IWW as it developed had an altogether different membership base than the Socialist parties –drawing unskilled drifters and seasonal workers who were not interested in party politics or voting.

Mountain West parties were often led by middle class people, many of whom had deep roots in their communities and felt comfortable getting involved in civic and political activities. While not abandoning long-term radical goals or the interests of working people, they set out to build moderate reform-minded political parties under the Socialist banner. Overall, Mountain West Socialist parties did well compared to their counterparts in other regions in terms of membership, picking up votes, and winning elections. Socialist candidates in the Mountain West also did relatively well on the local level, again showing a moderate side. These victories often came by riding a protest vote against corruption in local government and incompetent local administrations. Downplaying revolutionary rhetoric, Socialists pledged clean and efficient administrations and focused on such practical problems as getting the government out of debt, improving the local water supply and sewer system and making gains in health and sanitation standards.

Compared to Socialists elsewhere, Mountain West Socialists had several things going for them. They benefitted from an ongoing anti-corporate reform effort which was all the more potent because of its ties to anti-colonial, anti-eastern sentiment. They drew upon the momentum built up by a relatively successful labor-centered Populist crusade. Discontent in mining areas and the activities of the Western Federation of Miners drove the radical cause. The Mountain West was a place where industrialization was just beginning and working conditions , especially in isolated mining camps, were among the worst in the country -- the type of conditions out of which one might expect revolutions to be made. Also, Socialists found themselves in a political party system which, for various reasons, was unusually favorable to third parties efforts.

That the Socialists did not do better in an absolute sense, may be attributed to a variety of factors some of which in varying degrees affected Socialist parties elsewhere and some such as the opposition of the Mormon Church that were unique to the region. When it comes to barriers the story is much the same throughout the region -- the disinterest or downright hostility of workers, the opposition of newly enfranchised women voters, the opposition of church leaders, the fear of town-builders that radicals would scare off investors, the determined, sometimes ruthless, resistance of the mining companies, the use of state and federal troops to subdue striking workers, the popularity of conspiracy theories linking radicals to Germany’s side in the First World War -- presented formidable barriers to the radicals.

Too, the impact of the party movement was sapped by thunder stealing reformers and by some self-inflicted wounds, especially the inability to keep the radical forces together. Radicals argued over goals and tactics and just about everything else. The movement was tragically torn between those who placed emphasis on political action and those who favored direct action on the industrial field. Ultimately the direction actionists went their own way but the resulting violence on the industrial field rebounded not only against the industrial radicals but those who were trying to build conventional political parties.

Looking back though we find Mountain West radicals had played active and important roles in expressing economic and social discontent, agitating for reform, educating the public, building support for innovation, and compelling the major parties to change their policy positions. They functioned as a means through which ordinary people protested conditions and tried to regain control over their lives, their jobs, and their government. They built the agenda for change, and perhaps most all, by frightening the powers that be into making reforms that helped democratize the political system, increase public control of corporations, and further the protection of working people.

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Neuroscience for Milita...

2012-04-27T13:15:05-04:00

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system

The London-based Royal Society is a Fellowship of the world's most eminent scientists and is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence. The learned society’s role is to promote the natural and applied sciences; it is a self-governing Fellowship of many of the world’s most distinguished scientists drawn from all areas of science, engineering, and medicine.

Since its foundation in 1660, it has recognized, promoted, and supported excellence in science and encouraged the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity. It provides scientific advice for policy, fosters international and global cooperation and education and public engagement in science.

The Royal Society recently published a report entitled Brain Waves Module 3: Neuroscience, conflict and security (1), which is one of four published by the Royal Society analyzing the current and potential impact of neuroscience on society and policy, the law, and education. In particular, it examines some of the military and law enforcement applications arising from key advances in neuroscience.

According to Rod Flower, Professor of Biochemical Pharmacology at Queen Mary University of London and the Chairman of the working group that prepared the report: “The application of neuroscience research in the development of enhancement and degradation technologies for military and law enforcement use raises significant ethical considerations. Support for this type of research is potentially diverting funding and resources away from other important social applications such as the treatment of neurological impairment, disease and psychiatric illness. This is why it should be subject to ethical review and as transparent as possible”.

Neuroscience

Neuroscience is the scientific study of the human nervous system - the intelligence, and the biological basis of perception, insight, remembrance, and learning. The brain and the nervous system are the physical establishment of the human learning procedure. Neuroscience associates our observations about cognitive actions with the definite physical processes that sustain such an action.

Traditionally, neuroscience has been seen as a branch of biology. However, it is currently an interdisciplinary science that collaborates with other fields such as chemistry, computer science, engineering, linguistics, mathematics, medicine and allied disciplines, philosophy, physics, and psychology. The term neurobiology is usually used interchangeably with the term neuroscience, although the former refers specifically to the biology of the nervous system, whereas the latter refers to the entire science of the nervous system.

The scope of neuroscience has broadened to include different approaches used to study the molecular, cellular, developmental, structural, functional, evolutionary, computational, and medical aspects of the nervous system. The techniques used by neuroscientists have also expanded enormously, from molecular and cellular studies of individual nerve cells to imaging of sensory and motor tasks in the brain.

Neuroscience is a rapidly advancing field encompassing a range of applications and technologies that are likely to provide significant benefits to society, particularly in the treatment of neurological impairment, disease, and psychiatric illness. However, this new knowledge also suggests a number of potential military and law enforcement applications.

These applications tend to serve one of two main goals. Performance enhancing applications seek to improve the efficiency of one’s own military forces – for example by optimizing recruitment, training and operational performance or improving treatments for rehabilitation. Performance degrading applications seek to diminish the performance of one’s enemy – for example through the development of weapons such as incapacitating chemicals.

The report

The report considers some of the key advances in neuroscience, including neuropharmacology, functional neuroimaging (a group of technologies that non-invasively acquire measurements of the brain’s structure, biochemistry or function) and neural interface systems, which could impact upon these developments and the policy implications for the international community, the national government and the scientific community.

The report argues that: neuroscientists have a responsibility to be aware from an early stage of their training that knowledge and technologies used for beneficial purposes can also be misused for harmful purposes; and the development of an absolutely safe incapacitating chemical weapon is not technically feasible because of inherent variables such as the size, health and age of the target population, secondary injury and the requirement for medical aftercare.

It also states that countries adhering to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) should address the definition and status of incapacitating chemical weapons under the CWC at the next (third) Review Conference in 2013. The CWC is an arms control agreement which prohibits (outlaws) the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons. Its full name is the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction.

The CWC bans the development and use of all toxic chemicals as weapons, including those that cause temporary incapacitation. The Convention includes, however, an exemption for ‘law enforcement purposes including domestic riot control’; this is open to some ambiguity as to range of toxic chemicals permissible.

Even though the CWC is in force, a number of countries, including the USA and Russia, continue to be interested in the development of incapacitating chemical agents. Other countries, such as the UK, “are interested in the hostile applications of neuroscience in order to evaluate and counter the threat that such weapons could pose to national security and public order”.

Concern over the development of incapacitating chemical weapons was enhanced by the actual use of such agents by the Russian authorities during the Moscow theatre siege on 23 October 2002. A group of armed Chechen separatists attacked the Dubrovka theatre in Moscow taking about 800 people hostage. They threatened to kill their hostages if their demand that Russian troops were withdrawn for Chechnya was not met.

On 26 October, Russian Special Forces disseminated an incapacitating chemical agent through the ventilation system of the theatre, rendering both the hostages and the hostage-takers unconscious. The troops then stormed the building killing all the hostage-takers and 129 of the hostages. Many others suffered serious and long-term injuries. The Russian Special Forces initially refused to identify the incapacitating chemical agent used, preventing emergency medical personnel from responding effectively. Russia has apparently continued research into incapacitating chemical agents after the Moscow theatre siege.

Conclusions

A conclusion of the Royal Society report is that: "Studies suggest that the great majority of scientists have little to no knowledge of their obligations under these treaties (the CWC and the Biological Weapon Convention {BWC}), nor a wide awareness of the potential malign applications of their research".

In the words of Malcolm Dando, Professor of International Security at the University of Bradford and one of the authors of the report: “Given what we know of the lack of coverage of dual use, biosecurity, the BWC and the CWC in rather more general biotechnology courses around the world, it seems likely that this gap in the education of neuroscientists is likely to be widespread. Clearly, a vast improvement and spread of dual-use education will be required”.

Neuroscientists need to be aware that knowledge and technologies used for beneficial purposes can also be misused for harmful purposes. The destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 made nuclear physicists aware to the possible harmful effects of their research. Neuroscientists need to learn the lesson. Only time will tell whether or not they will.

Fortunately, there is time. Dando points out that the changes neuroscience could bring about will mostly happen in the future, so that experts will have time to assess their impact and “weigh up the pros and cons".

Reference

1. The Royal Society, Brain Waves Module 3: Neuroscience, conflict and security, February 2012, The Royal Society, 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AG. http://royalsociety.org/policy/projects/brain-waves/conflict-security/

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Special Mentors in My L...

2012-04-27T11:25:45-04:00

I am reading the biography of a well-known author. Like other biographies, one of the wonderful aspects of such writing is appreciating those people who have had a profound influence on the life of the person whose biography is being read. We all know about the usual influences from family members, teachers, friends, colleagues and sometimes people whose influence was one of those haphazard accidents of circumstance and nature. Sometimes it might be a book or lecture, movie, poem or piece of music that has had such an impact on a person’s life that they attribute who they are, in least in part of that particular person or event.

I can identify a small number of people, events or books that had such a profound influence on my life and I sometimes wonder what would have happened had those influences not occurred. Of course I had a number of teachers in primary and secondary school that were inspirational and supportive of my inquisitive nature as well as some who were quite suppressive of my interests that were somehow outside the formal structure of the school system. One example of a suppressive spirit was an English teacher I had in junior high school who after reviewing the books proposed for in-depth book reports as a special project literally “forbad” me from reading Thomas Wolfe’s classic Look Homeward Angel which I had in fact already read, but because of her dictum was not able to use it for the book report—her motivation was her self-internalized Catholic beliefs and the negative view of such a book by the Catholic Church—such a prohibition would not be acceptable currently, but at that time had a profound influence on me as she told me the book was “evil” when I had found it inspiring—both components of the event influenced my views of the Church which had not been particularly positive as a young Jewish boy knowledgeable of the history of the Church in Jewish history, the events of the Inquisition, and most recently the Holocaust. Wolfe remained one of my favourite authors throughout the rest of my developmental years. The official Catholic prohibition against the reading of certain books was reversed by an official Papal decree published on the 15 June 1966.

The negative influence of certain teachers, books and events which often had the opposite effect of the intended or expected was more than balanced by those individuals, books and events that helped nurture those aspects of my personality and value systems that ultimately were instrumental in my ultimate choice of profession and my deeply ingrained value systems which were incorporated into my personality inclinations.

It was in my first year at Brooklyn College, that I entered in 1958 after graduating from the exceptional Brooklyn Technical High School which set the stage for my life-long interest in science, engineering and the desire and ability to “fix things” a character trait supported by my father’s engineering profession and his personal capabilities as a perpetual “fixer” of all things that had a mechanical source of function. The two first year college teachers were quite different, but their influence was similarly profound. I had entered college as a pre-medical student which was a decisive change in my original post-high school goal that was to apply for a degree in engineering, in the footsteps of my father. This decision was changed by a book I read during my last year of high school which profoundly changed my educational directive and in essence the course of my adult life.

I do not recall the reason I chose to read The Citadel by A.J. Cronin. I was an avid reader, but why this particular book caught my attention is no longer part of my recollective capacity. It may very well have been one of those events that “just happened”, the book was there and it looked interesting. The result was dramatic. I suddenly thought about studying medicine rather than engineering which had been my direction. Soon after I read the book I visited a dear friend, a girl about whom I had romantic fantasies, but who looked to me as a close friend which in the absence of the alternative coming to pass I cherished. I mentioned to her my musings about medicine and she said with great certainty and passion, “You would make a much better doctor that engineer—do it”. I left her house and within about 10 minutes I pondered her statement as I arrived home where I informed my parents about my decision (which during that 10 minute walk had been finally determined). I could see that my father was pleased, but he was not a very verbally expressive person. My mother said, “Oh it is such a long time of study”, but I got the sense that she was pleased as well. At this point there were no doctors in my extended family although other than my mother all of my immediate elders despite coming from immigrant uneducated parents had finished at least undergraduate university degrees. So this would be a new venture for my extended family that ultimately produced a number of physicians—including a very close first cousin and a number of second cousins.

The decision on my part to study in Scotland was the result of spending six months traveling around Europe during my junior year at Brooklyn College, an undertaking stimulated by one of my first professors in social sciences in my first year required course. Edgar Z. Friedenberg, who beyond mesmerizing me in his classes and stimulating me to want to travel, engaged me on my return from my sojourn through Europe that eventually completely changed the direction of my life and studies, as a research assistant for one of his seminal books, The Vanishing Adolescent published a year after I left for medical school. He had such a profound influence on my thinking and the range of my intellectual interests that I felt honoured that he kept in touch with me, even arranging a couple of trips with him to overseas destinations while I was studying medicine in Dundee Scotland. He left the United States and immigrated to Canada to teach at Dalhousie University. His move to Canada mirrored a similar move I made in 1968 also for the same reason—in opposition to the Vietnam War, not as a pacifist, but because I felt the war was a terrible mistake of United States policy.

In medical school in Dundee had a number of mentors that influenced my views of medicine and my approach to the concepts of the “story” of medicine and during my post-graduate years my views of the relationship between the humanities and medicine. The renowned Sir Ian Hill, our professor of medicine taught the art of the lecture that enchants, elevates and deeply engrosses an audience into the mysteries, meanderings and miracles of medicine. His description of the famous Zermatt typhoid fever outbreak of 1963, the year after I started medical school, will never be forgotten and still acts as a model for me for the wonders of the sleuthing required of public health challenges. It was Professor William Walker, our head of Midwifery (Obstetrics and Gynecology in North American parlance) who during my final oral examination asked me why I had a Scottish family name that allowed me to weave my family’s genealogy tale to the point of using up all of my time short of one quick obstetrical question and that resulted in the 500 pound prize. That windfall ultimately financed my trip to Israel that resulted in my connecting to the country in a way that had an impact on my life as almost nothing else has in my adult years.

It was another William Walker who went from the Department of Medicine in Dundee to Aberdeen who I followed there for my first house job (internship) who had the profound influence on my appreciation that one could combine a love for the humanities and medicine. While in Dundee he gave a series of after-hours lectures on “Humanism” which had a profound effect on my world view, already having been primed by my previous exposure during undergraduate education and range of reading. I was so impressed with him that in the culture and practice of post-graduate training in Scotland in those days I deliberately requested on a personal basis that he take me on in the department he was to head in Aberdeen, which he did, and that turned out to be one of the best clinical experiences of my career.

It was the five months following my Aberdeen house job that had the most profound effect on the trajectory of my life. With the 500 pound prize that followed my midwifery examination, I received permission to use it to fund a second “house job” in midwifery in Haifa Israel, a place I had visited as a medical student two years previously. It was during that student visit that I had an epiphany in terms of my identity. Although I was raised in a Jewish family, mostly of secular Jewish persuasion other than my paternal grandparents, I had not a particular interest in that identity other than from the strong historical and cultural ties that I felt. I had a strong sense of the importance of the Holocaust on the history of my people, but Israel itself held no particular powerful attraction to me as it did for many other people with my background. However, in response to many questions from family members why I did not visit Israel while already being on the “other side” of the Atlantic I decided to combine one of my summer medical training experiences to include Greece for a month with a follow-up month in Israel which was “just across the Mediterranean.”

I had arranged to work at the Rambam Hospital in Haifa, named after the great ancient Jewish medical scholar and sage also known by his more complete name (Moses ben-Maimon, or more commonly Maimonides).

The profound experience I had occurred on the second day after settling into my small prefabricated hut that acted as housing for interns, residents and visiting students like me. I went to the beach that was adjacent to the hospital which sat on the Mediterranean shore and as I looked around at the throngs of people, many with small children, somewhat reminiscent of my exposure to Brighton Beach where I was raised, I had a sudden wave of recognition. I thought to myself, even though these people were strangers, “these are my people”, every single one of them. When I went on the local service bus the next day I had the same revelation. I kept looking at the different faces, clearly from different parts of the world, light skinned like myself, Slavic looking women with high cheek bones, but fair eyes, dark skinned men with almost black eyes, all speaking what I knew must be Hebrew despite my limited exposure to that language during my upbringing other than what I learned mostly by rote for my Bar Mitzvah. I kept thinking, “I share a history with all of these people”.

I started working the next day and met the head of the department among other members of the staff. Professor Aharon Peretz welcomed me warmly, asked about my heritage and established that he and my grandparents came from Lithuania which I could see meant a lot to him. He asked me what I wanted to learn and when I said “anything and everything” he said I could shadow him in all his clinics as well as other members of staff and if I wanted to assist him in the operating room that too would be fine. I could not believe my good fortune as being in the operating room at that point in my studies was still an exciting option which I did not have that much access to at medical school. I did not realize that the interns on the service would be more than happy to have someone else stand during surgeries and hold retractors which for me was still very exciting as the professor explained everything that he was doing and pointed out all the anatomic landmarks that I had seen only on my anatomy cadaver.

I learned a lot during that month and was given a great deal of latitude in what I could do. I observed Professor Peretz interview patients with various gynecological problems who had been holocaust survivors and were applying for reparations. I noted that whatever the condition which he was very good at explaining to the patient in Hebrew or Yiddish or Russian or it seemed whatever language was necessary, he then explained to me and then signed the necessary reparations form which I learned went to an adjudication committee in Germany which decided on the merits of the claim. When I naively asked if all the conditions were Holocaust related, he paused for a moment, looked at me deeply, drew in a breath and said in perfect English, “As far as I am concerned, every gynecologic problem that afflicts these women either directly came from the holocaust experience or was exacerbated or complicated by that experience. I could see from the look on his face that he felt this was a mission of his to make some sort of amends for what these women had experienced during their years as prisoners, refugees, people in hiding or just experiencing the cold, hunger and monumental trauma and grief related to those dark years of their lives. I only found out later that he was one of the key witnesses during the Eichmann trial in Israel in 1961-62. During a recent visit to a special exhibit at Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Museum) in Jerusalem I saw a picture of him bearing witness at the Eichmann trial, and seeing him there brought back a flood of memories of my time with him in Haifa.

When I left to return to Scotland, I recall the great sense of a new chapter of my life opening up that I did not realize was there. On my return to Dundee I had not formulated a definite plan of return, but knew that in one way or another I would be back to the country I had discovered resonated in my inner-most consciousness. After I received the prize in midwifery and confirmed with my professor that I could use the 500 pounds for a repeat visit to Israel to do in essence part of my internship in obstetrics and gynecology, my plan began to solidify. I would do my first 6 months of post-graduate training as a house-officer under the supervision of Dr. Walker the internist-humanist who had moved to Aberdeen where he agreed to take me on, and then I would return to Israel, a visit I looked to with great anticipation.

Dr. Walker in Aberdeen had a profound effect on my approach to medicine, but also to all the people with whom he came into contact. It was from his modeling and style that I realized the importance of acknowledging and asking the opinion of nurses with whom we were doing rounds, a practice that I integrated into my style of practice after witnessing its positive impact on the staff during that six month period. He deferred at times to the opinion of the head nurse and always sought the input and opinions of the house officers with whom he did rounds, sometimes writing in the chart that a certain idea or suggestion came from one of us—something I had never witnessed before from a staff physician. He could be critical in a very instructive way, but when he praised me for something I did he gave me such a lift and that too became part of my practice-style when I entered into the role of a medical teacher and mentor.

As I came closer to my career choice I had the various influences of rotations, specialties and probably most important the mentors in my life. As it turned out when I ended up settling in Toronto, rather than pursuing a career in nuclear medicine which I had come for, but soon found that the lack of patient contact made it not particularly attractive for me. It was then the influence of two wonderful physicians in Toronto that pointed me in the direction of geriatrics: the first was Dr. Abe Rapoport, an internist and kidney specialist that I had met and gave a lift to in Jerusalem just prior to my move to Toronto, ostensibly to learn nuclear medicine and bring it back to Israel where it had not yet been developed in any substantive way. While driving him back from Hadassah Hospital where he had given a seminar that I attended to the centre of Jerusalem I mentioned that I was going to spend a couple of years in Toronto. He said, “If I can help you when you are there, please feel free to contact me.”

After a number of months doing nuclear medicine it became clear to me that it was not a specialty suited to my medical interests and personality, I did seek out the advice of Dr. Rapoport. After I told him about myself he suggested I look into Geriatrics and contact the people at Baycrest while at the same time pursuing a chief residency position that I became aware or at Mt. Sinai Hospital. When he mentioned geriatrics as something that might satisfy my desire to continue in a broad based specialty in internal medicine and not focus on just one organ system or realm of diseases (such a specialty in infectious disease might provide) I conjured up recollections of the wonderful geriatric unit in Dundee where among other things the staff physicians were among the best in the medical school and the patients were delightful—often referred to with endearment as auld wifies.

I followed up with a visit to Baycrest and when I was offered the position of chief resident at Mt. Sinai Hospital with which Baycrest was affiliated I requested of my second wonderful mentor, Dr. Barney Berris, the head of the department with whom I would be working if I could do the Baycrest consultations who were at Mt. Sinai while I was working for him. He agreed and besides being a mentor in terms of gentleness, clinical brilliance, and warmth he helped me formulate my career in geriatrics which when I passed my Royal College examinations that fall, resulted in him and another mentor, Dr. Henry Himel, the chief of medicine at Baycrest offering me a conjoint position which I accepted—thus determining my career path.

For many years my roles and path of academic development moved in a very satisfying direction with areas of great satisfaction in many domains especially in teaching and writing. I had always had an interest in writing, but with my academic roles the opportunities grew and I was able to undertake initially academic articles and then in 1981 my first book was published, Old Enough to Feel Better: A Medical Guide for Seniors. With it a new aspect of my career was launched that of author and over the years since that time a number of other books in addition to articles for the professional and lay press where the objects of my writing interests, all of which reflected my experiences in medicine and the care of the elderly.

As the various challenges of geriatric medicine began to coalesce in my practice I became increasing interested in the ethical aspects of eldercare which resulted in my completing a masters in ethics which was soon followed by an interest and the incorporation into my clinical and administrative practice palliative and end-life care—with all these threads of these special interests intersecting in a very meaningful way.

This eventually resulted in the focus of my clinical care, ethical deliberations, writings and teaching to become increasingly focused on dementia, especially the later stages where special aspects of care and caring come into play and where ethical conundrums become very common. The culmination of these influences has been my most recent book, Late Stage Dementia: Combining Compassion, Comfort and Care. The result has been a dramatic shift in my approach to my clinical ambulatory practice and focus on my teaching of trainees who accompany me in the clinic and my role helping those in our palliative care unit understand the special challenges of caring for those with non-malignant disease especially those with dementia, an increasing challenge in the long-term care system.

I have been very fortunate along the path of my career to have had many teachers and mentors who have inspired, guided and influenced me on the path that finally became my own and now gives me the opportunity to do the same for my students and medical trainees. It goes back to one of the tenets of the teaching of medicine, that one has the duty to learn and then the duty to teach so that the continuity of the wonderful art and science of medicine is assured for the future.

About the Author

Dr. Michael Gordon is currently medical program director of Palliative Care at Baycrest, co-director of their ethics program and a professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto. He is a prolific writer with his latest book Late-Stage Dementia: Promoting Comfort, Compassion, and Care and previous two books being Moments that Matter: Cases in Ethical Eldercare followed shortly on his memoir: Brooklyn Beginnings-A Geriatrician’s Odyssey. For more information log on to www.drmichaelgordon.com.

Reprinted with permission from HealthPlexus.Net, April 11, 2012.

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Advancing Translational...

2012-04-27T10:52:56-04:00

Translational Research Success Requires Return to Contract Program at NIH

The Fiscal Year 2013 budget for Federal agencies includes $639 million for a new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), with $575 million currently authorized. This is a response to a long-unmet need from the other National Institutes of Health to again deliver some practical products to the public, as they certainly did in the 1960-1980 period. In January of 1998, an article on “The Future of Biomedical Implants” (Pharmaceutical News, Vol 5, No.1, 1998, pages 25-29) reviewed the State of Science, 1997, the State of Economics, 1997, Long Term Prospects, New Frontiers, and the need for an Expanded Role of the NIH, summarized briefly here:

Expanded Role of the NIH

One of the functions of the NIH should be to promote inter-disciplinary studies and evaluation of biomaterials and biomedical implants. The problems encountered call for the collaboration of physical and biomedical scientists, without which the substantial advances of the early years (1965-1975) would not have resulted.

After a decade of individual-investigator awards, it is advisable to again promote long-term funding of at least a few national teams (or the stimulation of a limited number of program project grants), independent of their physical proximity, of a critical mass of biomaterials scientists and engineers; conversant biological and medical investigators; and suitable laboratory facilities. In addition to their own research activities, these teams should undertake comparative studies of the same materials and devices, and thus eliminate the controversies in the field. Such teams should be organized in collaboration with FDA and perhaps also with the medical device industry. The advanced transportation network of the United States, and the regular travel habits of most senior investigators, favor the organization of these teams on a critical skill rather than parish basis.

NIH also should regain its sponsorship of an annual Contractors meeting and specialized workshops, since the earlier leavening influence of these annual reunions was well recognized, and the publications that resulted served a major educational function of information and technology-transfer both nationally and internationally.

Since NIH does not have an explicit mandate to oversee technology as well as science, in a limited interpretation of its role, NIH has not proceeded with any ongoing assessments of the limiting role of biomaterials in the development of biomedical implant technology, and has not taken appropriate action when material unavailability became the bottleneck to progress. NIH must be more interested in the assessment of medical device technology in the light of medical, social, ethical, and legal values. In the distant past, NIH’s Artificial Heart Program was the primary focus of such attention, but other applications of implant technology did not equally benefit from similar scrutiny.

NIH also should encourage the generation of occasional white papers reviewing — from both an expert and critical vantage — the body of knowledge already accumulated (and mostly uncirculated) in the previous annual reports of contractor organizations/faculties.

A CURRENT VIEW

The news remains full of reports that "tissue-engineering" will advance synthetic biomedical implants and biomaterials beyond their successes in wound repair, and past their current troubles as litigation-bound hip replacements, to a better future as agents of regeneration of natural biological structure and function. This has not yet been at an acceptable risk/benefit ratio, or approvable by public regulatory agencies, since it has not been satisfactorily demonstrated that aseptic processing procedures or new sterilization modalities will protect against acquisition/transmission of vectors of disease (including prions, viruses, bacteria, and immune system adjuvants). Further, continued unavailability of suitable synthetic materials as scaffolds for "seed" cultures of cells (meant to generate new tissues) seriously impedes progress from laboratory to clinical utility. This problem is exacerbated by the departure of newly trained entrants to "tissue engineering," from the creed of the field's founders: scaffolds must be temporary at every step of placement/digestion/elimination from their human hosts. Regulation of tissue-engineered products will become even more vigilant and disallow any non-absorbable, remnant materials proposed for tissue-engineered products. This is especially true with regard to the commercial commodity polymers that have been withdrawn as privately marketed so-called "biomaterials." Practitioners must display increased professional responsibility to prevent introduction of non-sterile or persistent components of tissue-engineered products to human implantation.

The under-exploited and better near-term alternative of the 1990's was "bioprosthetic devices," part synthetic/part biological in origin and completely safe (by prior sterilization) at the time of implantation. These could still be the practical tissue-engineered prostheses needed for public health while the required basic science has been so slow to develop for live-tissue products in the past decades.

As an example of "reverse progress" in this field, consider the recent withdrawal from manufacture of limb-saving products crafted from human umbilical cords, after 30 years of safe and effective clinical benefit from material previously cast away with other remnants of the afterbirth following delivery of normal healthy children. Human umbilical cord vein grafts have now become too expensive to fabricate because of additional regulations about harvesting and safely preserving these naturally fragile biological tissues, while guaranteeing absolute safety from risks of new diseases in spite of their history of good clinical function over the past three decades in thousands of grateful recipients. The surgical photo below shows such a graft in the process of a limb-saving vascular replacement operation, now relegated to the use of less satisfactory synthetic graft materials. The new National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences should take up the cause of making these biosynthetic implants again affordable for general clinical use!

Used only with express written permission

STATE OF THE SCIENCE, 2012

Inadequacies of prior testing and quality control of some traditionally available medical devices and biomaterials also continue to hold back progress with numerous other implants. Before the turn of the Century, devices such as pump-oxygenators, pacemakers, vascular grafts, prosthetic valves and artificial hearts all showed significant advances based on the ready availability of commercial materials which have since mostly been withdrawn from the medical marketplace. Progress in design is now contingent upon the identification of substantially equivalent materials from other sources or the synthesis of new construction materials. The service lives of most current implantable devices have reached their limits, as noted in the unacceptable deterioration under load of otherwise acceptable materials (polyethylene and cobalt-chromium alloys in acetabular cups; polytetrafluoroethylene in jaw joints) in contact with body tissues, or with the adverse longer term reactions of body tissues to the presence of breakdown products from other prosthetic devices (silicone implants). Desired closer interactions have not occurred between materials science and such basic biological sciences as molecular and cellular pathology, immunology and hematology. Post-2000 progress with biomedical devices has been limited by the absence of breakthroughs in design or de novo synthesis of new classes of materials yet to be attained. Knowledge of "biomaterials" of predictable biological response is still seriously lacking in the public domain, so pressing clinical needs for new or improved devices which could improve both the diagnosis and treatment of heart, lung and blood diseases, among others, are held hostage to the world's dependence on once-withdrawn and now slowly re-introduced commodity polymers.

Here is a continuing problem: Except for commercially pure titanium and a few other "osseointegrating" implants, all other "biomaterials" induce a "foreign body" reaction when introduced to a biological environment. They are either walled off by a reorganization of surrounding tissues, or become coated with poorly described biological materials derived from these tissues. Most often, the outcome is characterized as "inflammatory response" in the extravascular space, and as "thrombosis" in the cardiovascular system, both terms being misleading in their disguise of un-deciphered complexity. These responses engage complex biological processes involving the interactions of many different biomolecules and cells at the foreign interfaces. Still not understood are at least two main phases of response: an acute phase characterized predominantly by protein and cellular activity; and a chronic phase in which the changes are slower, leaving "passivated" surfaces. There has not been the needed widespread or deeper inquiry into the complexity of these processes by materials scientists, engineers and physicians, and there have not yet been sufficient efforts to purify and standardize biomaterials using the sophisticated physico-chemical and biological test methods necessary for characterizing these interactions. For nearly 30 years, increases in knowledge and improvements in assays have not been sufficient to support the desired pace of introduction of new clinical devices and implants. Surface properties expressed as outermost chemical arrays, polymer configurations, charges and topographic variations that trigger the biological responses, have been investigated mainly in academic labs and not well-translated to clinical benefit. A reason for this is that correlations linking surface properties and biological responses have not met general agreement. There is no consensus about which "animal model" or "test system" is best. Rheology (flow factors) influences and, in some cases, dominates the biological responses, but again the test systems applicable to discerning such effects remain elusive.

Here is a continuing "bad example" of work yet to be accomplished:

This is a photograph of the unexpectedly "worn down" dome of a TMJ (TemporoMandibular Joint) implant, originally placed with a perfect hemispherical shape into a young woman's jaw.

Used only with express written permission

When a patient was suffering from the pain of such a no-longer-well-functioning appliance, and from her body's reaction to the wear debris then collecting behind her ear prompted additional surgery, the implanter's response was often to replace this polymer-on-metal joint with an all metal-on-metal joint, surface features of which are displayed here:

Used only with express written permission

This is the type of metal-on-metal articulation that is now causing serious problems in hip resurfacing applications for orthopedic patients, and has gone mostly unreported in the TMJ population also needing removal of these pain-provoking implants.

STATE OF THE ECONOMICS, 2012

After quieting, but not really overcoming, the "Biomaterials Availability Crisis" of the 1990's, there has not been the needed support of applied as well as fundamental biomaterials research in close collaboration with clinical investigations. Advances that are critically dependent upon the availability of complex and expensive facilities were retarded by segregation of research projects into separate investigator-initiated academic units. Practical aspects of experimental procedures, and interactions among implant and biomaterials research groups were not adequately stimulated, and there was little provision for the exchange of materials between laboratories, or mutual visits by scientists and technicians. The exclusive dependence in the past 30 years on limited-focus, investigator-initiated grant-supported programs -- at the expense of the break-up of the multidisciplinary physician-engineer-scientist teams that accounted for most of the progress in biomedical implants in the decade 1965-1975 -- denied the public of new device concepts or implant materials. Rather, there has continued to be inefficiency and the re-treading of many of the well-worn paths of prior investigators. As a result, biomaterials and implant research still stagnates, not yet "rescued" by the bold plan to "leapfrog" the problems of the past by proclaiming a new era of "tissue engineering", without overcoming the obvious difficulties of having no raw materials substituted for those (many withdrawn by their commercial owners, to avoid litigation) still successfully used--with varying success-- for implantable devices.

NEEDED TRANSLATIONAL KNOWLEDGE FOR PRACTICAL IMPLANTABLE DEVICES

Most published information regarding tissue-material and blood-material interactions has been obtained invasively, intermittently, and very early in the processes. Knowledge of these phenomena is fragmented rather than coherent, descriptive rather than analytical, and only relevant to the initial aspects of the interactions.

Progress in the synthesis of new polymers, copolymers, blends and composites has not led, over the past many years, to the formulation of any new FDA-approved materials designed to meet the exacting structural requirements of flexing parts in orthopedic or cardiovascular prostheses. The effects of cyclic loads and stresses on surface structure and thus on biological oucomes, remain to be investigated. With a longer time perspective, reliability testing under the cycling conditions of actual use has been slow in leading to decisions in the screening process. There is a need to validate techniques for accelerated testing of the mechanical properties of new polymers to be used in implant devices. A special effort must be made to assure that the materials' surface properties are preserved in clinically relevant states during such testing, avoiding the now-common use of ink markings and deliberate cuts that court "stress corrosion cracking", in non-physiological ways. The illustration below is of a Finite Element Analysis , computer-based method for quickly predicting and designing around excess stresses that might be encountered in structural ceramics now proposed for substitution of the failing polymeric and metallic TMJ prostheses.

Used only with express written permission

Another limiting aspect is the required comparative testing of large numbers of candidate implant materials. Since the degree of confidence which can be placed in assays described in the literature is low; few have been standardized. Simple, reproducible, quantitative assays for testing of tissue-material and blood-material interactions remain to be developed. The chemical and materials-products industries will not screen or provide candidate materials and make them available for device development, in light of the extremely negative consequences for those companies caught up in "class-action" implant-related legal proceedings.

The predictive significance of bulk and surface properties of biomaterials has not been high enough to guide materials scientists in the formulation and synthesis of new implantable compounds. Variable bulk molecular composition and structures, uncontrolled surface configurations and topographies, extractable contaminants in "medical grade" materials, and neglect of surface characteristics and local flow effects have been noted in prior years. Correction will require a broader availability of expensive analytical equipment (e.g. for various modes of spectroscopy) which is not commonly installed in academic biomedical or even materials science laboratories.

There also is a need to provide investigators with "primary reference materials" having well-characterized and reproducible properties; indeed for "families" of primary reference materials, such as segmented polyurethanes and acrylic copolymers.

As implantable devices are now expected to perform safely and effectively for progressively longer periods of use, it has become critical to better assess the degradation and corrosion of materials exposed to biological environments. In bioresorbable polymer scaffolds for tissue engineering, for instance, average chain length or molecular weight may actually increase in the first stage of degradation because of the preferential hydrolysis of smaller chains. Leaching of polymer additives or finishing agents, or conversely absorption or adsorption of chemicals present in a biological environment by an implanted polymer, also present problems for devices installed in the body for longer periods. Silicone rubber prostheses that "take up" birth control pill ingredients, and store them for years, are an unhappy example.

LONGER TERM PROSPECTS FOR IMPROVED TISSUE-MATERIAL AND BLOOD-MATERIAL INTERACTIONS

More information is needed about the time course of formation, stabilization, modification, decay and replacement of tissue-material and blood-material interfaces. The general chemical history of the material may be well known, and the fabrication, sterilization and storage history of the device may be similarly documented. Details must be gathered concerning transition from storage to implantation, the initial events at the tissue-material or blood-material interface, and the time course of interactions as new interfaces are formed, stabilized and then undergo "reconstructions" which lead to tolerance or rejection of the devices. In comparison with other systems where synthetic or engineering materials confront biological phases, such as in dental or oceanic environments, considerations of the "climax communities" of adherent cells/organisms must be addressed.

Protein adsorption studies, already widely performed, should continue with major new goals focused on "processing" of the initially deposited films by arriving and attaching cells. A frustrating problem encountered in animal studies and human implants is calcification of portions of devices which are subject to a significant degree of flexing. The mechanisms of calcification in cardiovascular devices, such as bioprosthetic heart valves, must be elucidated if progress is to be made in these implants. This problem may be resolved by design or material modifications, or by pharmacologic treatment of the subject bearing the device (or some combination). The phenomenon seems to be more pronounced in growing hosts than in adults. Clear differentiation of surface calcification (scale formation) versus tissue mineralization (as in neointima embrittlement) must be attempted.

Prior decades of macroscopic and microscopic observations have not successfully demonstrated roles of surface geometry, texture, or local fluid dynamics in material-blood or material-tissue compatibility. Surface roughness and topography, the presence of particulate matter or trapped air bubbles, the local changes in fluid dynamics and cell-material interactions due to defects, cracks and devices, and conversely the beneficial effects of some surface coatings, all have been found to be important determinants of device acceptance and functional survival in certain circumstances. One can minimize problems by appropriate fabrication, processing and implantation techniques, but the real challenge is to document the contribution of rheology to the long-term performance of implant-medical devices.

Animal models should give way almost entirely to in vitro assays in the coming years. Various animal species, test systems, device designs, implant and contact sites, and resultant acute vs chronic responses all have been tested sufficiently to show there is no single ideal animal model for all clinical devices and implants. Increased efforts should be made to acquire and analyze the 40-year human, ongoing in vivo experience with current implants, and develop an outcome database from this retrospective information as the devices are retrieved from diverse human hosts who may bequeath these to science.

Pump-oxygenators, cardiac pacemakers, vascular grafts, dental implants, intra-ocular lenses, prosthetic valves, circulatory assist devices and artificial hearts have not seen significant development in the past twenty years, and major advances have not occurred. Small vascular prostheses for peripheral and coronary vessels still present a major challenge, and the widespread acceptance of aorta-coronary bypass surgery now demands a substitute for saphenous veins in cases where these vessels are not available, or have already been used in previous operations.

Since vascular grafts typically fail at the ends and not in the middle, materials and designs for small vascular prostheses must include systems for safe, effective anastomotic junctions between vessels and prostheses. Adhesives, bioresorbable clips and other junction systems do offer alternatives to suturing and stapling techniques. Evidence for stress-cracking and/or chemical etching of some of the current materials must be organized and assessed, and countermeasures sought.

Percutaneous coronary angioplasty, once considered established as a therapeutic modality, has an unacceptable recurrence of arterial stenosis following the intervention. Implantable angioplasty stabilizers or stents may extend the benefit of invasive procedures, but still lack appropriate materials and implantation techniques.

Development of percutaneous leads for substance or energy transmission remains a serious need, as well. Material-tissue interactions have not yet been well matched to the biological characteristics of the cell systems the materials contact. The clinical need is acute in relation to cardiovascular devices, but developing long-term stability for percutaneous leads also will benefit other fields of medicine, including nephrology, neurology and rehabilitation. Neuro-modulatory devices for pain or tremor control are especially in need of more safe and effective electrodes that do not become surrounded with a salty "moat" within a "foreign body scar" capsule, the currently most frequent outcome.

NEW FRONTIERS

Fewer than 20 -- and all of these commercial, proprietary -- polymers, metals and ceramics have been successfully incorporated in biomedical devices and implants. Experience suggests that the standard polymers should be replaced by blends, composites and laminates which more nearly achieve desired properties (e.g. water vapor permeability resistance for the flexing parts of ventricular assist devices).

Pharmacologically active biomaterials, originally as heparinized surfaces for long-term contact with blood, have been expanded to include bound antithrombins, antiplatelet aggregation agents and fibrinolytic enzymes. Implantable drug delivery systems contain drugs, and in addition to enzymes, can accommodate organelles or live cells in the future.

"Tissue engineering" requires synthetic or modified biological bioresorbable materials to be used as transient scaffolds and inducers of tissue growth or regeneration in various prosthetic replacements. Progress in cross-linking of collagen and fabrication of synthetic polyesters, well established for surgical sutures, is ready for expansion to more complex implants.

There is a long-unfulfilled need for instrumentation which allows continuous or even intermittent monitoring of the biotransformation of implants. Fiber-optic catheters remain to be developed for remote, transvascular monitoring of blood-material or tissue-material interfaces in vivo by appropriate spectroscopic techniques. Strain gauges or acoustic sensors linked to the outside by telemetry have provided some information on implanted heart valves and arterial grafts, and the piezoelectric and pyroelectric properties of some polymers have been used to monitor changes in the mechanical properties of some implanted materials. These efforts should be extended.

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Update on the Single Be...

2012-04-27T09:17:09-04:00

Update on The Single Best Tech Stock in 2012 If Obama Loses

The Technology Stock Advisor, a weekly online newsletter for technology stock investors, published by Thomas Vass, an investment manager located in Raleigh, N. C., released a news update today on Badger Meter (BMI).

The Technology Stock Advisor selected Badger Meter on January 2, 2012, as the single best technology stock to buy if Obama loses the election in November. At the time of selection, the stock was trading around $28 per share, and the target price to buy issued by TSA was under $30 per share.

“I advised my readers in January that eager beaver investors may soon start anticipating an Obama loss, and start piling into this stock pushing the price up,” said Vass. The stock price is currently around $38 per share. The chart below shows the past six months of price movement of BMI (Chart from Yahoo Finance).

Used only with express written permission

Investment Disclosure: The past performance of an investment is no guarantee of future performance. All investments bear risk of loss of principal invested. There are no guarantees related to investing. Please visit technologystockadvisor.com to read the IM&I ADV Part II Disclosure Document. Stocks mentioned in this release may be owned in the personal and business accounts of the investment advisor.

Badger Meter, Inc. (BMI) engages in manufacturing and marketing liquid flow measurement and control technology products worldwide. Its products are used in various applications, including water, oil, and chemicals. The company offers water meters, and related technologies and services for use by water utilities, as well as for other water-based purposes, including irrigation, water reclamation, and industrial process applications. It also provides other meters, and related technologies and services for measuring various fluids in industries, such as food and beverage, pharmaceutical production, petroleum, heating, and ventilating and air conditioning; and measuring and dispensing automotive fluids. In addition, the company sells registers and radios to upgrade existing meters in the field, as well as radio technology to natural gas utilities for installation on their gas meters.

BMI is a Technology Stock Advisor A-rated stock, which means it should not be as risky and volatile as the TSA B or C rated stocks. It has a current dividend yield of 2%, and the target price to buy is at or below $30 per share.

Vass cautioned readers that the stock price is about $8 above the target price to buy, and is not currently an investment candidate for his readers, unless the stock falls back under $30 per share.

“As I mentioned back in January,” said Vass, “if Obama loses, there is going to be a lot of OOUK and dark matter that will need to be pumped out of Washington, D. C. and BMI has the right stuff to do the job… under a new President.”

“On the other hand, if Obama wins, BMI will probably drop way below $30 per share, along with most of the other stocks domiciled in America, and would probably be a fire-sale stock for years to come,” noted Vass.

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North Carolina’s New Ne...

2012-04-20T09:42:36-04:00

North Carolina’s New Nexus of Innovation: Where Social Capital Meets Crowd Funding In The State’s Community of Small Technolog

North Carolina’s New Nexus of Innovation: Where Local Capital In N. C. Cities Funds Local Investment Opportunities In Technology Commercialization

Revitalizing The State’s Small Technology Manufacturers Through Internet Crowd Funding

Thomas E. Vass, President, The Private Capital Market, Inc.

A Historical Entrepreneurial Opportunity If Only The Elected Representatives Will Seize It

A recent revision to the 1933 Securities Act allows small companies to raise small amounts of capital using the internet to attract potential investors. Section 4 of the Securities Act of 1933 (15 U.S.C. 77d) was amended to allow companies to solicit investors via internet social media.

The 1933 law contained two barriers to raising capital that were no longer valid in the era of the internet. The first prior barrier concerned public solicitation of investors, and the second barrier concerned a minimum net worth of $1 million for potential investors.

Under the new law, private companies can raise up to $1 million a year, with the provision of non-audited financial statements. Companies can raise up to $2 million if they provide audited financial statements to potential investors.

For investors with an annual income under $100,000, the limit of investment in a single company, per year, is the greater of $2,000 or 5 percent of the annual income.

For investors with annual income or net worth is greater than $100,000, the investment limit per year is 10% of income, up to an annual cap of $100,000 total investment for all company investments.

Most of the media attention on the new law has missed the historical significance of how the law’s provision of small amounts of capital will stimulate technological innovation. And, all of the press on the new law has missed the story that most of the social media for small companies will occur in distinct metro regional economies.

In other words, the big story of crowd funding is that local companies will be able to obtain local capital using internet social media. The local capital investment will stimulate technological progress, and create stable high-paying jobs.

The new law presents the citizens of North Carolina with a historical economic opportunity, if only the elected leaders of the state will seize it.

Seizing The Local Social Media Innovation Moment

Internet social media allows for the creation and exchange of communication. Nothing about the new crowd funding law, however, changes the local dynamic of raising private capital. Most capital is currently raised within 50 miles of where the company is located, and that fact is not going to change because of the new law.

What the new law does, however, is create a new way for local knowledge to be shared in a local geographical setting, which is called local social capital. Social capital combines with investment capital to create the conditions of local technological innovation.

In their research article, “A New Social Network Built on the Ashes of the Old Social Network,” Shaul M. Gabbay and Roger Leenders, (1999) identify the most important resource that small manufacturers have in competing with the large corporations, which they called corporate social capital.

What they concluded was that small manufacturers had a potential advantage over large corporations if the small manufacturers replicated the corporate technical knowledge in local social business networks.

In their research, they described social capital as “the set of resources, tangible or virtual, that accrue to a corporate player through the player’s social relationships, facilitating the attainment of goals. The assets from which entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial teams in deal-making and competition are embedded within and made available through social networks, or alternatively the assets entrepreneurs look for to strengthen their strategic position may be found in new social networks and through networking.”

In “The Locus of Innovation in Small and Medium-sized Firms: The Importance of Social Capital and Networking in Innovative Entrepreneurship,” Willem Hulsink, Tom Elfring and Wouter Stam (HES) describe how local economic communities are replacing large multi-national corporate innovation networks by organizing new social capital networks to promote economic innovation. (ERIM Report Series, ERS-2008-041, July 2008).

They find that the source of new information and ideas in knowledge-intensive industries is explored and exploited collectively by local inter-firm partnerships and mutual learning.

Using a stratified random sample of 227 manufacturers located in the Midwest of the United States, they investigated a hypothesis regarding the relationship between bridging ties, participation in regional institutions and the acquisition of competitive capabilities by firms operating within the same geographical cluster.

They found two important results:

Entrepreneurs with heterogeneous networks are significantly more likely to engage in innovative behavior than those with homogenous networks. This suggests that diversity combines the feedback benefits of social ties with the lack of pressure to conform associated with directed ties.

Entrepreneurs with ties that are directed at the concrete activities of other actors are found to be more innovative and those with ties directed to the abstract discussion of ideas in expert discourse (e.g. the business press) to be less innovative than entrepreneurs relying on weak ties.

HES explained in their research that innovation requires various kinds of input, skills and combinative capabilities. They cited the work of Thomas Edison and James Dyson who put inventions together from what they already knew and recombined existing ideas and practices from other industries and innovators.

They noted that “Many SMEs have insufficient organizational resources, knowledge or capabilities to develop innovations by themselves. These are all reasons why smaller firms may seek larger parties for the purposes of collaboration in social networks that provide a context for social action.”

Andrew B. Hargadon (2003) has also presented evidence about the sources of local knowledge networks in small manufacturers. He notes that there is an inherent paradox in the innovation process: on the one hand, innovators need wide-ranging ties from distant environments to generate their sketchy innovative ideas, mostly about how new products may work. On the other hand, Hargadon noted that small companies needed the backing of solid and determined local partners to mobilize support for their emerging innovations.

Interestingly, Hargadon found that those determined partners are drawn from the same universe of small manufacturing firms who constitute the regional social capital networks.

North Carolina’s New Technology Small Manufacturing Innovation Strategy

In a prior time, around 1985, the RTP’s social capital networks for innovation included scientists and engineers from the large corporations who had been recruited to open branch operations in the regional economy during the late ‘60’s and 70’s.

The large companies bought goods and services from the small RTP manufacturers, who absorbed much of the internal corporate knowledge of the large corporations. This two-way trade between large companies and their small North Carolina supply firms proved very successful for a short period of time.

Most of those innovation research functions at the MNCs have been re-located to India and China, where the large corporations now buy goods and services from the small manufacturing communities in those countries.

The experience in the RTP is exactly the same as the experience in North Carolina’s other 7 metro regions. When the big companies left the state, they took both jobs and the ability for small manufacturers to innovate with them. The state’s over-reliance and dependence of small manufacturers on the large corporations did not work.

The state’s economy never recovered from this experience. But, a new strategy based on small manufacturing would re-start the state’s economy with exactly the same magnitude of income and employment multipliers for economic growth, as was the case in 1983 with the state government’s forecasts of economic decline.

In December of 1983, the North Carolina Department of Labor distributed a research paper to other state government agencies entitled “The Economic Development and Labor Market Implications of Computer Integrated Manufacturing in North Carolina.”

The two most important findings of the research were that:

By the year 2000, only 7% of the North Carolina labor force would be employed in manufacturing. The estimate for employment in manufacturing was about 245,000 workers in manufacturing, down from 824,000 in 1980.

By 1997, the Department of Labor predicted that 90% of the lower skilled jobs in N. C. manufacturing would be eliminated and 65% of the mid-level skilled jobs, including managers and supervisors will be displaced.

The direct loss of jobs in manufacturing would lead, said the report, to dramatic loss of income and jobs in other sectors of the state’s economy, as a result of the income multiplier effect of lost manufacturing jobs.

“In other words,” the report noted, “for every dollar of income withdrawn from the North Carolina economy as a result of labor displacement in the apparel industry, for example, an additional 79 cents of income is withdrawn from the state’s economy.”

The average range of lost income as a result of labor market displacement in the top 6 industrial sectors was about 65 cents. In other words, the report predicted that, as the large corporations moved their production facilities off-shore, the state’s economy would suffer a loss of 65 cents for every dollar lost in production.

When the state’s over-dependence of small manufacturing firms on large corporations is replaced with a new reliance on local technological innovation partnerships in metro regional industrial value chains, the income and employment multipliers of decline would turn into economic growth multipliers.

This is the fundamental economic fact of life that the state’s elected leaders must grasp. The old economic strategy of industrial recruitment did not work because it did not produce lasting economic prosperity for the state’s citizens.

Seizing The Historical Opportunity Presented By Crowd Funding

“More than ever before in financial history,” wrote the New York Times in 1919, “the small investor in the United States may be an important factor in financing business and building.”

The New York Times was reporting on a new idea in New York to pool the capital of small investors into a type of “fund” that would have trustees that would direct the capital to small businesses. (Small Investors Wanted, Published: April 27, 1919 Copyright © The New York Times).

The Times concluded their story by suggesting that a market mechanism needed to be created that allowed small companies to easily meet small investors. Citing the U. S. Department of Labor, the article stated, “It is essential, in the opinion of the Department of Labor, to devise ways and means of availing of the small investors' capital.”

Soon thereafter, the U. S. economy was engulfed in a terrible economic decline that precipitated the passage of new government regulations on raising capital, among them the 1933 Securities Act. Some of the onerous regulations of that Act have now been amended by the passage of the JOBS Act in 2012.

The provisions of the Crowd Funding Act do not change the dynamics of local economic growth, they only change how investors and entrepreneurs can communicate, via social media, about investment opportunities.

The great majority of capital for both existing small manufacturing firms and for startup ventures is currently raised, and will be continued to be raised, within 50 miles of location of the firm. This same 50-mile envelope also influences other important factors related to the commercial success of small high tech manufacturing firms.

Most knowledge about technological innovation is created and diffused in face-to-face communication networks (tacit knowledge) within 50 miles of the borders of a metro region. Most of that knowledge will be continued to be shared among a region’s firms in the regional industrial value chains.

And, in terms of the veil of trust for engaging in risky private investments, the extent and range of trust, and the ability to extend trust to strangers in capital market transactions, occurs within this 50 mile envelope.

The highly skilled workers for most scientific and engineering small firms live within 50 miles of where they work. The pool of scientific and technical skills in the local labor markets is a precursor agent in both coming up with new ideas for product innovation and providing the occupational infrastructure to implement and commercialize new product ideas.

Seizing the historical opportunity presented by crowd funding in North Carolina means that elected leaders must allow the creation of a private sector regional capital market infrastructure in eight metro regions so that investors and companies (buyers and sellers of capital) can transact business in a local setting.

In their research, “Entrepreneurial Theory and the History of Globalization,” Geoffrey Jones and R. Daniel Wadhwani, describe the historical interplay between an individual’s act of entrepreneurship and the surrounding environment. (Business History Conference, 2007).

“Studies using controlled experiments,” they wrote, “have revealed the importance of individual self-efficacy in determining if a subject interprets information from the market as an opportunity. A subjects’ perceptions of their self-efficacy shape whether or not they interpret a development in the market as an opportunity they can exploit. One relevant finding is that organizations can nurture or suppress the perceived self-efficacy of their employees and managers.”

The big story of crowd funding for North Carolina is that local companies will be able to obtain local capital using internet social media. The local capital investment will stimulate technological progress, and create stable high-paying jobs.

The new law presents the citizens of North Carolina with a historical economic opportunity, if only the elected leaders of the state will seize it. In other words, if only they will create the political environment that nurtures, and does not suppress, the entrepreneurial initiatives of the state’s small manufacturing firms.

Crowd funding, based upon internet technologies, provides the mechanism for local investment of capital from one generation of technological innovation to the next, unleashing a torrent of capital and an explosion of job creation in the state’s eight metropolitan regions.

About Thomas E. Vass: Vass is fee-based investment portfolio manager and regional economist located in Raleigh, N. C. He is the author of Predicting Technology: Identifying Future Market Opportunities and Disruptive Technologies, (2007) which explains his theory of technology evolution. His theory formed the basis of his 2007 patent that explains his method for selecting technology stocks for inclusion in an investment account. He manages online crowd funding websites, among them, The Private Capital Market.com. Please visit his economic research papers on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) at http://ssrn.com/author=831853

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Contingency Makes or Br...

2012-03-27T10:34:27-04:00

Introduction

Three essays on crime and so called criminal ‘opportunity’ are published on my website Dysology.org (Sutton 2011, 2012a). See: Opportunity Does Not Make the Thief (Sutton 2012) for an overiview. In those essays, I explain in detail why, with one exceptional reinterpretation ( Farrell et al 1995), the Routine Activities Theory (RAT) notion of opportunity is a truism that has been overcomplicated and dressed up as a theory of crime causality. In those earlier essays logic is used to reveal that RAT ‘opportunity’ is no more than a very precise description of the data of any successfully completed crime in commission, which is something that can only be known after the event of its successful completion.

No data can explain itself. To explain data, a theory that is separate from that data is required. And yet RAT uses Felson's classic crime 'opportunity' triangle (which is no more than an elegant description of the data of a successfully completed crime) to propose that this mere description of the data of crime is a theory for how it causes itself. Weirdly, Crime Opportunity theorists refer to this impossible premise as a Crime Opportunity Theory.

The fact that the RAT notion of 'opportunity' (ratortunity) is based upon the irrational premise that every successfully completed crime caused itself to happen makes it completely wrong as an explanation for crime causality. And yet US and UK government crime reduction policy making and policing is based in no small part on this illogical premise.

In this fourth essay on crime and opportunity, I propose a new way of understanding crime opportunity that puts motivation at the centre of a process that is larger than the traditional focus upon the crime act. This new way of understanding crime opportunities might provide a potential route to a unified theory of crime. Firstly, however, I make the argument that the next task for criminology, if it is to move forward from mistaking simple truisms about the data of crimes as hypotheses and theories to explain that data, is to collect and examine many examples from case studies that represent disconfirming evidence for the usefulness of the RAT crime triangle. By doing this we can see exactly why it is not only logically wrong, but also the extent to which it has been seriously misleading criminologists and policy makers by claiming that the RAT notion of ‘opportunity’ is a cause of crime. To provide an example of how useful this approach might be, one specific example of disconfirming evidence for RAT opportunity is discussed next.

An untypical burglary dramatically reveals how offenders’ perceptions are part of a process that is contingent and equally applicable to the mundane reality of everyday crimes

Let us consider some rather unusual and dramatic crime evidence from Nottingham in the UK, which enables us to see in stark detail exactly why the RAT Crime Triangle cannot be used to explain what happened in one particular case. The particular example of disconfirming evidence that I am about to reveal gets the point across very dramatically. However, the same logic, which is briefly set out here and in more detail in a number of other essays (Sutton 2011, 2012, 2012a), shows that Crime Opportunity Theory is wrong for all crime. And that means it is equally wrong in terms of explaining the causes of commonplace and oftentimes more mundane crimes that Crime Opportunity theorists believe the RAT Crime Triangle and its associated theory are most suited to explaining.

The following news report is from the front page of the Nottingham Post (Howell 2012):

‘A Father who killed a burglar by attacking him with a meat cleaver was “justified”, a Notts coroner has ruled.

Steven Shaw and his brother Craig broke into a house in Morrell Bank on the Bestwood Estate in March 31 last year.

In a “harrowing and brutal” attack, which lasted between 10 and 15 minutes, they assaulted taxi driver Xiaopeng Wang and his wife, and also left the couple’s baby injured.

The violence only stopped when Mr Wang found a meat cleaver and hit Mr Shaw with it, causing a “sharp force trauma” to his head.

At Mr Shaw’s inquest yesterday, Notts Coroner Mairin Casey recorded a verdict of lawful killing and said: “The defensive action taken by Mr Wang was proportionate and justified.

“This was a harrowing and brutal experience for all of them, and I understand they are still traumatised.”

She also said that the attack was “random” – the Shaw brothers had never before met the Wangs – and that the motive for the break-in was a financial one.

The court heard that Steven Shaw, 32, originally from Cedar Road Forrest Fields, punched Mrs Wang in the face and she was forced to watch as her husband was assaulted.

Toxicology reports found traces of cocaine and alcohol in Mr Shaw’s bloodstream.’

We can examine whether or not the Classic Rat Crime Triangle can help us to understand the ‘cause’ of this particular crime.

Figure 1.

The triangle in Figure 1 depicts the RAT explanation for Opportunity Theory’s notion of opportunity as a cause of crime. According to RAT, crime is thought to be ‘caused’ by the coming together of (1) motivated ‘likely’ capable offenders, (2) a target that they deem suitable and (3) the absence of a capable guardian against them.

It seems reasonable that Nottinghamshire’s Steven Shaw and his Brother Craig Shaw, and their getaway driver Daniel Miller (See: Howell 2012, p.3) perceived the Wang family to be relatively incapable guardians of themselves and their home. Had the Shaw brothers and their accomplice managed to complete their crime successfully then the RAT crime triangle would have provided a post-event record of the essential data of the successful crime act in commission. However, since they were thwarted from completing the burglary to their planned script, their initial perception of the guardianship capabilities of Mr Wang proved wrong. And yet Mr Wang and his family were both criminally assaulted and burgled. So does the fact that they were incapable guardians, until the point at which meat cleaver was used in self-defence, explain why the Wang home was burgled and the family assaulted? Up until the point when Mr Wang used the meat cleaver to fight back, the Shaw brothers were the capable offenders and the Wangs were incapable guardians.

What if Mr Wang had chopped off the hand of the first of the Shaw brothers coming in through his window or door? Or what of the fact that Mr Wang was not standing outside his own home swinging a meat cleaver? Does his armed absence from the front of his house prove that the reason the house was burgled in the first place was because the Wangs were incapable guardians of the outside of their home?

What if Mr Wang had gone further and also killed Craig Shaw with a cleaver blow to the back of the head as he tried to leave the house? If that had occurred, it is quite likely that Mr Wang would have been found guilty of using inappropriate force. Could such a crime of manslaughter then be explained by the fact that the Shaw brothers were incapable guardians against the motivated and capable householder Mr Wang?

From this news story of a real, if somewhat unusually dramatic, burglary we can see that both the guardianship and offender capability elements of the crime triangle can be known only after the crime has been successfully completed. Therefore, the RAT Crime Triangle depicted in Figure 1 cannot logically be used to make the claim that this notion of ‘opportunity’ is a cause of crime. And yet that is exactly how Crime Opportunity theorists currently use it.

So what might be a better way of thinking about crime opportunities?

I propose that the best way forward for Crime Opportunity Theory is to consider criminal events as something much larger and detailed than the act with which the law concerns itself. Nottinghamshire's Shaw brothers and their getaway driver, like all offenders, were following a crime script that necessarily contains impromptu characteristics. The crime script for the burglary of the Wang’s home could be read from the moment they awoke to the death of Steven Shaw. Such crime scripts are a process involving a sequential chain of discrete actions informed by offender perceptions of target value and relative vulnerability. Each discrete action has an intended outcome but is always shadowed by possible unintended outcomes. We might call this the Perception Contingency Process (PCP).

Figures 2 and 3 below are simple informatics that describe the proposed Perception Contingency Process from the point of view of a typical problem drug using burglar. Based on less dramatic events than those involved in the Shaw brothers burglary of the Wang's home, these more typical crime scripts are exemplars that depict the necessary objectives that thieves need to complete as part of a wider process surrounding typical domestic burglaries. The two figures reveal this wider process by showing that the thief’s concerns, and his need to 'safely' complete a series of objectives linked to those concerns, is something that begins before and extends beyond the precise act of burglary, or attempted burglary.

Figure 2

All Rights Researved Dr Mike SuttonUsed only with express written permission

Figure 3

One of the reasons why the RAT crime triangle is so unsuitable as an explanation for crime is that it is essentially concerned with the same essential legal focus upon of the scene of the criminal act itself.

Alternatively, the informatics in Figures 2 and 3 provide just one generalized example from what is likely to be a more useful account of the larger number of alternative and ever-evolving scripts held by active prolific offenders. These two informatics are based upon over 100 in-depth qualitative interviews that I have conducted with prolific burglars and other thieves over the past 20 years. Consequently, in this essay they are merely a pastiche created to demonstrate what a typical burglary crime script tends to involve. Each of the 24 hexagons contained in Figures 2 and 3 represents an individual objective. Each objective, until it is successfully completed, is shadowed by unforeseen events (for example: such as householders unexpectedly wielding meat cleavers). If the problem drug using burglar depicted in Figures 2 and 3 is unable to complete any one of these 24 objectives then his main aim of taking drugs and avoiding detection that day is thwarted. For example, he may have to go out and steal before he can take his first drugs of the day because he was unable to keep enough stashed for the morning. Such a start to the day is very risky. To begin with, doing a burglary while 'clucking' - to use the street vernacular - is known to be extremely unpleasant for the offender. It is also high risk because less care is taken at such times of desperation. And selling stolen goods in such a state brings further risks to stolen goods dealers who should not be seen trading with obvious twitchy ‘smack-heads’. Other things can go wrong. For example, in the event of a householder returning home the burglar's lookout might flee the scene without raising the alarm. Or he might sneakily return to steal the stash of stolen goods for himself. The burglar may be arrested in possession of the stolen goods while transporting them to the point of sale. Or he may be stopped in his tracks by people to whom he owes money and lose his drugs money. Given that any number of things can go wrong in the course of the crime script, the PCP Crime Opportunity hypothesis, is that: contingency makes or breaks the thief. The crime reduction hypotheses that follows is that intervening in any one of a multitude of typical key offending objectives in order to load the dice against offenders might work to reduce crime rates.

It is proposed that crime scripts have key common features that enable us to generalize about individual offenders. However the number and type of objectives in crime scripts will vary between different types of offence as well as between different offenders committing the same type of offence. Different motives will have different objectives. And what happens in the course of a crime script will most certainly shape it. For example, if a burglary haul is not particularly lucrative then the problem drug using burglar will try to commit another burglary, or perhaps go shoplifting, in order to get enough money to the buy the drugs he wants to consume. Unlike Felson's RAT crime triangle, crime scripts are necessarily dynamic. And it is this dynamic property that provides potential for crime reduction through disruption of the PCP.

Crime scripts will usually overlap with those of other offenders. This is obvious in the following examples: the burglar and his lookout, the burglar and his fence, the fence and the final consumer, and the burglar and his drug dealer and the drug dealer and all his customers and co-offenders.

The PCP focus upon the offender's main aim seems compellingly sensible in the case of the problem drug using burglar. In other cases it may be less apt. For example, what of the wealthy gangster? What is his main aim for dealing in drugs? Is it to stay alive in his own neighbourhood? Is it to wield power and influence? Is it to bully others? Is it to attain further wealth? Are any of these inseparable from staying alive in his own neighbourhood given his history?

Motive is important, and there may be multiple motives, and seeking to better understand how motives match aims and objectives is where further research is needed. Meanwhile, each typical objective and possible contingency in the particular crime process we are interested in allows us greater potential to see that there are many possible areas where crime reduction and police work might aim to intervene to prevent an offender from achieving the main aim that motivates their offending.

Nothing is certain, nothing ‘known’ until the contingency is over

Crime as opportunity theory and Routine Activity Theory are wrong, because these theories are based on the premise that the characteristics of a criminal opportunity are certain. Yet only once a crime has been unsuccessfully attempted, or successfully completed, are its offender and guardianship characteristics certain. Only then does the opportunity relinquish all its uncertainty. Up until that point, offenders are rolling the dice. They might think those dice are loaded in their favour, sometimes they might think the opposite and still attempt the crime. But they never ‘know’ how the dice might bounce and land.

Discussion, Conclusion and the Way Forward

Figure 4 below shows the key differences between the proposed PCP and current RAT based Crime Opportunity Theory. The essentially difference is that PCP reflects the reality of the uncertainty of crime, whereas Crime Opportunity Theory is currently based on the illogical and weird premise that successful criminal outcomes cause themselves to happen because they exist before the crime is completed and that offenders can perceive such certainties and so act upon them.

Figure 4

In the interests of absolute clarity, Figure 5 shows the essential similarities of agreed definitions between PCP and current Crime Opportunity Theory.

Figure 5

Because Crime Opportunity Theorists have typically sought to support rather than disprove their hypotheses, they have relied heavily upon unapt examples, such as gas suicides and motor cycle helmet legislation (Sutton 2012) to support their beliefs, whilst paying scant regard to the needs of sound scholarship with regard to purposely seeking out disconfirming evidence. For this reason it is important to seek to redress the balance. From that cause, and by way of example of what is needed, I provide two more real-life examples in this essay that show why opportunity is uncertain until after the crime is successfully committed. Both are taken from the same edition of the newspaper that reported on the Shaw brother’s aggravated burglary of the Home of the Wang family. Both show how, to varying extents, the offenders crime scripts did not go quite to plan when their perceptions of relatively incapable guardianship were controverted. Firstly, page 4 of the Nottingham Post, March 27th 2012 reports on another burglary involving a meat cleaver:

‘Police are appealing for information to help trace a knife-wielding burglar.

The offender was with Jason Fisher, who was caught at a house in Ednaston Road, Dunkirk, just after midnight on Friday, February 24, carrying a meat cleaver.

Students living in the house disarmed the 27 year old, sat him down in a corner and hemmed him in with chairs until police arrived.

…A second offender, who was carrying a knife as the pair entered the house fled the scene and has not been traced.’

Secondly, page 7 reports on yet another burglary:

‘Two rings were stolen after a thief climbed through a into a house in Wollaton.

The incident happened at around 8.20pm on Wednesday March 14. The suspect escaped with two rings when he was disturbed by residents.'

We need now to move forward by collecting and examining the properties of many more such case studies of disconfirming evidence for the RAT notion of crime opportunity that currently underpins all Crime Opportunity Theories. This exercise is important because the simple and compellingly attractive, yet completely illogical, notion of RAT ‘opportunity’ is currently central to much crime reduction policy making and policing.

Merely concerning ourselves with the properties of action that fulfils the legal criteria for different offences (as RAT ‘opportunity theory’ has done to date) hinders our understanding of all offences and how we might better seek to reduce them.

The current focus of Crime Opportunity Theory has been deliberately trained upon the crime scene. Consequently, there has been, to date, no adequate unification of the properties of the crime scene with the much wider ‘scene’ of necessary situationaly linked objectives that must be overcome by offenders seeking to achieve their crime motivating aims. This insufficiency is likely to be in no small part a consequence of opportunity theorists accepting the ‘lens of common concept’ (Elkins 1995) that is the law. Looking beyond the law of the immediate crime scene of current Opportunity Theory preoccupation, we can see that key offender objectives are proximal to it. And these objectives are likely to be close to one another and that crime scene in both time and geography. In terms of high volume crimes such as domestic burglary they are likely to be attempted within any 12 hour period of one another and that particular crime scene. Each key PCP objective is situated in a physical place and dependent upon ‘opportunities’ that are created, sought out or otherwise acted upon by strength of potential offender motivation, and they are all perceived and contingent upon the relative vulnerably of potential victims and actual relative capability or absence of policing and other ‘guardians’ of the law and potential offender controllers (for controllers see Felson and Boba's 2010 development of the notion of 'handlers').

In sum, offenders operate by means of crime scripts (Cornish 1994; Sutton 2010) that involve a process with an aim and a linked series of objectives involving actions, some intrinsically legal, some not. These scripts all begin before and continue after a particular crime act.

Opportunities for crime might be understood more accurately, therefore, if we focus our attention upon how offenders’ main daily aims are dependent upon their personal perceptions of a number of linked situations that are each, in turn, shadowed by contingencies. Here, there is likely to be new potential for crime reduction and policing to be informed by new empirical research to develop and experiment with new ways of reducing crime across the board by seeking to thwart individual criminal objectives in order to deny offenders their main aims – such as consuming illegal drugs – which motivate them to offend.

The ‘Opportunity’ Myth has had a significant impact on policing and crime reduction policy making. Because the RAT notion of crime 'opportunity' as a cause of crime is widely supported by both the British Home Office and the US Department of Justice (e.g. Parliament UK 2010; US Department of Justice 2012) . Such dominant support has undoubtedly focused policing and crime reduction attention upon crime scenes that are immediately related to the crime statistics that these governments are aiming to reduce. This has, inevitably and systematically, diverted policing attention from the wider and more complex offender objectives that are intrinsically involved in offending as a wider process (see: e.g Metropolitan Police 2012), leading them to completely limit their crime prevention advice to such unrealistic and neurotic extremes as telling people not to even leave a window open for a minute whenever they intend to leave their house. What kind of life is that to settle for? Surely we can do better? Surely we should all hope to be able to leave our windows open one day. Apparently not. Because such idealism is considered naive. Perhaps that is so because we have become like those apocryphal boiled frogs in that we have had our lives and ambitions and ideals incrementally poached by official neurosis without realizing what has been happening.

If we take domestic burglary as just one particular example of what this tight focus on the crime scene has led to, we can see that the current focus has inevitably resulted in an official preoccupation with household security improvements at burglary scenes. Hence, there has been a policing and government good practice preoccupation with crime hot spot analysis, locks and bolts, alarms, property marking, forensic investigation, repeat victimisation and the establishment of neighbourhood watch programmes in areas with high rates of burglary. The problem with this is that the recommended solutions are, necessarily, limited. For example, security improvements are often dependent upon (1) the ability of potential victims to pay for them, and (2) security as an idea about what to do about crime does not really offer the public very much that is new that they are not already aware of. After all, locks and bolts and alarms of various types have been around for thousands of years. These devices were not invented by academic criminologists, governments or police services. So nothing intrinsically new and necessarily more effective in the long term is on offer here.

We know that after decades-long evolutionary arms races between technology and offending techniques that involve target hardening things like parked cars and banks and bank vaults and security vans that superior technology does eventually significantly reduce robbery and theft of certain targets. The problem with domestic burglary, however, is that ordinary people are not dwelling in banks, cars or security vans. If people are to enjoy some semblance of a normal existence they will often need to leave their homes unoccupied, their windows open, alarms off, doors and windows unlocked and valuable goods within plain sight of windows. To live without fearful obsession, people need to limit the amount of time they spend each day securing and capably guarding their possessions against the possibility of theft. Moreover, neighbourhood watch has never been even remotely proven to be effective at reducing crime; although administrative criminologist sometimes tie themselves up in knots trying their very hardest to explain how it might work if only it did (e.g. Laycock 2001) and neither has any kind of property marking ever been proven to reduce theft (Sutton 2010). And yet it is a favorite police tactic oftentimes sold by ex police officers to senior police officers who then retire and go on to work for the same property marking firm from whom they previously ordered vast amounts of ineffective property marking equipment, so that they are well placed to sell more of it.

Ultimately, what I am proposing in this essay is that we need to think outside the crime scene box, as well as within it, in the same way that offenders think and organise their wider offending. Counterintuitively, therefore, we should pay much greater attention to the interconnected objectives and main aims of offenders that reside outside of the actual criminal acts we are trying to reduce. Modus operandi should be considered as a mode of operating as a criminal - not simply as the specific method used to commit a particular crime act.

The lens of common concept that has focused the attention of administrative criminologists and others working in the area of Crime Opportunity Theory so closely upon the crime scene is one possible explanation for why a widely believed braced myth took hold from a UK Home Office publication regarding foot patrol beat policing. However, foot patrol beat policing that is focused upon offenders' main aims and linked objectives, as well as just crime scenes, might prove to be effective at reducing crime.

One of the major criticisms of Crime Opportunity Theory, particularly its RAT and Situational Crime Prevention elements (e.g. Haywood 2007), is that it takes offender motivation and wider cultural issues for granted. PCP, however, takes motive into account and sees it as central to opportunity as a contingent process. Therefore, PCP provides a potential means to examine, explain and better understand crime opportunities in a way that might allow critical criminologists, 'administrative criminologists' and 'crime scientists' to work toward a unified opportunity theory of crime causation and reduction.

References

Elkins, D. (1995) Beyond Sovereignty. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Farrell, G. Phillips. C. and Pease, K. (1995) Like Taking Candy: Why Does Repeat Victimization Occur? British Journal of Criminology. Vol. 35. Summer. pp. 384-399

Felson, M. and Boba, R. (2010). Crime and Everyday Life. London. Sage.Hayward, K. ( 2007 ) Situational Crime Prevention and its Discontents: Rational Choice Theory versus the ‘Culture of Now’ Social Policy and Administration. Vol 4. No. 3. 232-250

Howell, D. (2012) Killing Thief With Cleaver Was Lawful: Coroner’s verdict after dad fought raiders in his home. Nottingham Post. p.1 (and p.3). Tuesday March 27. See: http://www.thisisnottingham.co.uk/Bestwood-father-killed-burglar-justified-coroner/story-15634898-detail/story.html

Laycock, G (2001) Research for Police: Who Needs It? US Department of Justice. http://www.leoprd.org/reading/police%20research.pdf

Metropolitan Police (2012): Home Security: Burglary prevention. Mayor’s office for Policing and Crime: http://www.met.police.uk/crimeprevention/burglary.htm

Parliament UK (2010) The Government's Approach to Crime Prevention - Home Affairs Committee: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmhaff/242/24208.htm

Sutton, M. (2011, 2012a) On Opportunity and Crime. Dysology.org. http://dysology.org/page8.html

Sutton, M. (2012) Opportunity does not make the thief: Busting the Myth that opportunity is a Cause of Crime. Best Thinking.Com.

http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/science/social_sciences/sociology/opportunity-does-not-make-the-thief-busting-the-myth-that-opportunity-is-a-cause-of-crime

US Department of Justice (2012) Crime Analysis for Problem Solvers in 60 Small Steps: Know that Opportunity Makes the Thief (2012):: Office of Community Oriented Policing Services. Cops Programme, Centre for Problem Oriented Policing. http://www.popcenter.org/learning/60steps/index.cfm?stepNum=

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Badness - or Bad Idea?

2012-04-17T10:38:46-04:00

Undeniably, there are some aspects of life that many, if not all of us human beings don’t like and may even find repugnant: for example, our capacities to suffer, age, die, defecate, urinate, feel randy, sweat, smell, vomit and feel fear, anger, hunger, thirst, depression, etc. Throughout history, people have desired and sought to remove these aspects in order to make life and themselves ‘better’ in one way or another – and the modern era is no exception. This desire has become deeply embedded in the way we think and act, epitomized by Darwin’s notion of ‘natural selection’ as ‘the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life’.

Our resultant perfectionism is, however, underlain by a profoundly questionable and potentially misleading and damaging idea – that what we don’t like arises from ‘badness’ as an intrinsic quality of both Nature and human nature. With this idea firmly placed in mind, the stage is set for remorseless conflict between what are perceived as the ‘forces’ of ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’. We define our selves and Nature into good and bad categories, and in so doing alienate ourselves from one another, Nature and our own psyches in a fearful process of ‘othering’.

But what if what we perceive as ‘badness’ is actually vital to the very possibility of living and loving? What a bad, self-destructive idea it would be to seek to remove it!

Perhaps the very notion of ‘badness’ is, in itself, a ‘bad idea’, which makes us do horrible things to our selves and others in order to purify the world and our selves from what we don’t like but is nonetheless vital. If so, we had better re-think our thinking, because that bad idea is firmly entrenched in the divisive logic of abstract rationality that has set us at odds with each other and Nature for millennia. At the root of abstract rationality is the lust to gain power over ‘other’, ultimately through the removal or confinement of intangible space, as ‘darkness’, from or by definitive structure or ‘light’. Such imposition of absolute definition upon what cannot be defined absolutely cannot and does not make sense of life as an evolutionary process (Rayner 2011). But we carry on doing it, regardless, and in so doing needlessly aggravate the suffering of our selves and those we ‘other’. This doesn’t make us ‘bad people’ – just people afflicted by a ‘bad idea’ that we really do need to let go.

This is why the understanding of ‘natural inclusionality’ (Rayner 2011, and described in many 'best thinking' essays) is so vital for us, if we are to be able to live, love and be loved in a sustainable way that makes natural sense, not unsustainable non-sense. Natural inclusionality enables us truly to love (accept and care for) all that life needfully entails, whether we like it or not.

Reference

ADM Rayner (2011) Space Cannot Be Cut: why self-identity naturally includes neighbourhood. Integrative Psychological and Behavioural Science 45, 161-184.

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Are We Heading for a Wo...

2012-04-16T13:55:38-04:00

TEXT

On 26 and 27 March 2012, the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit was held in Seoul, South Korea, the second edition of the conference after the 2010 Nuclear Security Summit, which took place in Washington DC. Leaders from 47 countries from every region of the world participated in the Seoul Summit. They committed themselves to work together to tackle the threat of nuclear terrorism and agreed to cooperate on securing all nuclear material by 2014.

President Barack Obama at the beginning of the historic Summit: “We have the opportunity, as individual nations, to take specific and concrete actions to secure the nuclear materials in our countries and to prevent illicit trafficking and smuggling. We have the opportunity to strengthen the International Atomic Energy Agency, the IAEA, with the resources and authorities it needs to meet its responsibilities. We have the opportunity, as an international community, to deepen our cooperation and to strengthen the institutions and partnerships that help prevent nuclear materials from ever falling into the hands of terrorists. And we have the opportunity, as partners, to ensure that our progress is not a fleeting moment, but part of a serious and sustained effort”.

At the end of the Summit, President Obama said: "The security of the world depends on the actions that we take. There are still too many bad actors in search of these dangerous materials and these dangerous materials are still vulnerable in too many places. It would not take much — just a handful or so of these materials — to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people."

Obama believes that the danger of nuclear terrorism is the “most immediate and extreme threat to global security”. He argues that the best, and perhaps the only, way to deal with the danger of nuclear attack is to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Hence, his vision of a world free of nuclear weapons - a vision he first set out in a speech he made in Prague, Czech Republic on 5 April 2009.

Nicholas Clegg, the UK’s Deputy Prime Minister, announced that his country would share with other countries some previously secret ways of detecting radiological material. "We have for some time had specialist teams ready to deploy, detect and ... defuse a terrorist nuclear device". He revealed that Britain intended to establish a new nuclear forensics laboratory that would share detection techniques with allies.

It is not easy, to say the least, for President Obama to promote his vision. The American right is skeptical; remaining convinced that the existing numbers of nuclear weapons are necessary for American security. And there is the possibility that Iran will acquire nuclear weapons and the loudening “drumbeat of war” in the Middle East. Pre-emptive military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities is likely to escalate hostility in the Middle East and accelerate, rather than delay, Iran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.

However, the United Nations Conference on the establishment of a Weapons of Mass Destruction-Free Zone (WMDFZ) (a zone free of weapons of mass destruction, biological, chemical and nuclear) in the Middle East, scheduled to take place just after the American election, offers an opportune moment to encourage engagement between the countries in the region. And there are also opportunities for further talks between the USA and Russia on reducing the nuclear arsenals.

Global stocks of fissile materials

The nuclear (fissile) materials at the heart of the 2012 Nuclear Security Summit are highly enriched uranium (HEU) or plutonium. A terrorist would need to acquire enough of one on these fissile materials to produce the fission chain reaction that causes a nuclear explosion. A fissile material can sustain an explosive fission chain reaction which can release a massive amount of energy. Fissile material is, in other words, the essential ingredient required to produce the chain reaction that causes a nuclear explosion.

The amounts of these materials in the world today are estimated in the report, entitled Global Fissile Material Report 2011: Nuclear Weapon and Fissile Material Stockpiles and Production, recently published by the authoritative International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM) (1). The IPFM is an independent group of arms control and nonproliferation experts from sixteen countries, including both nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear-weapon states.

The report estimated that, in 2011, the global stockpile of nuclear weapons was more than 19,000 weapons, including operational warheads and warheads awaiting dismantlement; of these, the USA and Russia together held more than 18,000 and the other seven nuclear-weapon countries held a total of about 1,000 weapons. All nine nuclear-weapon countries are currently modernizing their arsenals.

Global Fissile Material Report 2011 estimates that the global stockpile of HEU in 2011 was about 1,440 (plus or minus 125) tons. About 98 per cent of this HEU was held by the nuclear-weapon states, mainly by the USA and Russia. The non-nuclear-weapon states held only about 20 tons of HEU, almost all of which was provided to them, as fuel for research reactors, by the nuclear-weapon states (predominantly by the USA and Russia).

The global stockpile of separated plutonium in 2011 was estimated by the IPFM at about 495 (plus or minus 10) tons. About a half of this stockpile was produced for nuclear weapons and the other half was produced for civil purposes as part of civil plutonium reprocessing programmes (in which plutonium is chemically removed, in reprocessing plants, from the spent fuel from civil nuclear-power reactors). Currently, about 98 per cent of all separated plutonium is in the nuclear-weapon states.

Increasing availability of civil plutonium

Because of civil reprocessing, plutonium is becoming more available and it is increasingly possible for terrorist groups to steal or otherwise illegally acquire some. The terrorists could then use the material to fabricate a primitive nuclear weapon. Almost all civilian plutonium (about 250 tons of it) is stockpiled in France, Japan, Russia, the UK, and the USA. By far the largest civil stockpiles are held by France, Russia, and the UK. Small amounts are owned by Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden, and possibly other countries.

Of particular concern is the increasing civil use of mixed-oxide (MOX) nuclear fuel in civil nuclear-power reactors. MOX is produced by mixing uranium dioxide with plutonium dioxide. It is transported from the MOX plants to the countries using it as reactor fuel. If terrorists acquire MOX fuel, they could relatively easily remove, by straightforward chemical methods, the plutonium and fabricate a nuclear explosive.

This situation is worrying enough but it will become much worse as fast breeder reactors (FBRs) are used commercially. Interest in FBRs arises from concerns about the future availability of sufficient amounts of uranium for use to fuel nuclear reactors. Breeder reactors can be fuelled with plutonium, needing only small amounts of uranium.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the known recoverable uranium resources are 4.7 million tons. Currently, the world’s nuclear-power reactors consume uranium at the rate of about 63,000 tons a year. If this rate stays constant, known uranium reserves will last for less than 70 years.

The quality of the uranium ores is, in practice, more important than the quantity of them. The quality can be measured in terms of the net energy, which is the energy produced per ton of uranium nuclear fuel minus the energy used to produce the reactor fuel elements to be used in the reactor, including that used for mining, refining, and enriching the uranium and manufacturing the fuel elements.

If nuclear power (a relatively low carbon source of electricity) is to meet energy needs while mitigating climate change, the quality of the world’s uranium resources all important. According to some experts, the net energy from uranium will fall to zero by about the year 2070. Any increase in the use of nuclear power will, of course, result in the net energy from uranium falling to zero by an earlier date.

Others argue that fears about the shortage of uranium are exaggerated. The dispute about the world’s resources of high-quality uranium has yet to be satisfactorily resolved. Nevertheless, the debate about the nature of any large increase in the use of nuclear power to generate electricity (the so-called nuclear renaissance) and the need to use breeder reactors on a significant scale goes on. In India, Russia, and China, for example, there are considerable concerns about supplies of uranium in the short-term and new experimental breeder reactors are being constructed.

The nuclear industry, not very surprisingly, is very enthusiastic about the future of FBRs, hoping that they will be used commercially after about 2050. If they are, we face the prospect of a world in which large amounts of plutonium will be in circulation. Any country that chooses to operate FBRs in the future will have relatively easy access to plutonium, of a type usable as the fissile material in the most efficient nuclear weapons, and will have competent physicists and engineers that could deign and fabricate them.

Because they could produce a nuclear-weapon force in a short time - weeks rather than months – these countries would be regarded as latent nuclear-weapon powers. It must be expected that some of them will take the political decision to become actual nuclear-weapon powers. There will also be a much increased risk that terrorists will acquire plutonium, fabricate a nuclear weapon and detonate it.

The more nuclear-weapon powers there are, the greater the risk of nuclear war. We may be heading for a world of nuclear anarchy, which will be very difficult to manage. Let’s hope that the political leaders at the Nuclear Security Summit soon fulfill their commitment to tackle the threat of nuclear terrorism and successfully cooperate on securing all nuclear material, particularly plutonium.

Reference

1. International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), Global Fissile Material Report 2011: Nuclear Weapon and Fissile Material Stockpiles and Production, Sixth Annual Report of the IPFM, January 2012. Available from the Program on Science and Global Security, Princeton University, 221 Nassau Street, Princeton, NJ 08542, USA.

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Evidence for Color-by-C...

2011-04-13T14:41:45-04:00

I. Introduction

In White (2010-f) and White (2010-y) it is shown that form factors (f_i), which represent the fraction of quark (Q)/anti-quark (Q*) states, originally produced in the formation of a given vector meson, that make a transition to a QQ* state comprising quarks of the next lowest mass, figure prominently in the width calculations of said vector mesons via the Gluon Emission Model (GEM) theoretical structure describing the formation and decay of vector mesons. Specifically, it is found that for the ψ-series mesons, characterized by i = 1,

f₁ = (1-q_s²) = (8/9) , (1a)

where q_s = -1/3 represents the charge of the strange (s) quark, and for the Y-series mesons more massive than the Y(1S), characterized by i = 2,

f₂ = (1-q_c²) = (5/9) , (1b)

where q_c = 2/3 represents the charge of the charm (c) quark;

for the Y(1S) f₃ = 1 . (1c)

In the present work we will be almost exclusively concerned with the electron/positron (ee) partial widths (from which the above form factors are readily obtainable) associated with various vector mesons in the ψ- and Y-series. The role that form factors play in the ee partial width calculations (see White (2010-f) & White (2010-y) for details) is exhibited below. Denoting the ee partial width associated with vector meson “X” of mass “M_X” by “Γ_ee”, we find from White (2010-y), for example, where “f_x” represents the appropriate form factor:

Γ_ee = f_x [ (α /2π)(10,042)(2m_e)(m_ρ/M_X)³(q_z)⁴ + (1-f_x){(α /2π)(10,042)(2m_e)(m_ρ/M_X)³(q_x)⁴}] . (2)

In Eq. 2 α = (1/137.036) represents the fine structure constant, m_e = 0.511 Mev represents the mass of the electron, m_ρ = 776 Mev represents the mass of the ρ-meson, q_x represents the charge associated with the original QQ* state comprising X, and q_z represents the charge associated with the quark of next lowest mass relative to the original QQ* structure. Specifically, then, for the ψ-series mesons

Γ_ee(ψN)=f₁[(α /2π)(10,042)(2m_e)(mρ/M_ψN)³(q_s)⁴+(1-f₁){(α/2π)(10,042)(2m_e)(m_ρ/M_ψN)³(q_c)⁴}], (3a)

where N represents the series designate in terms of an identification as per “ψ(NS)”. Similarly,

Γ_ee(YN)=f₂[(α/2π)(10,042)(2m_e)(m_ρ/M_YN)³(q_c)⁴+(1-f₂){(α/2π)(10,042)(2m_e)(m_ρ/M_YN)³(q_b)⁴}], (3b)

where q_b = -1/3 represents the charge of the bottom (b) quark, describes the ee partial width associated with the Y-series mesons. Hadronic partial widths may also be determined for the ψ-series mesons by replacing “α” by α_s = 1.2[ln(M_ψN/50 Mev)]^-1, the strong coupling parameter derived via the GEM (see White (2010-f), White (2010-y), White (2009-a)), and carrying out the relevant calculations associated with appropriate Feynman Diagrams. For example (see White (2010-y)), the hadronic width of the ψ(1S) is determined via the GEM to be 82.0 Kev, which represents nearly an exact match to the most recent report of the Particle Data Group (PDG) of (81.7 ± 1.8) Kev (see PDG (2009-M)). The Y(1S) hadronic width is calculated via the GEM (White (2010-y) again nearly exactly in accord with experiment assuming f_i = f₃ = 1 and the existence of a two-gluon route of decay, as the GEM yields 50.09 Kev compared to the PDG (2009-M) report of (49.99 ± 1.16) Kev. Hence, the GEM is, in general, extremely successful in determining the hadronic widths of the ψ-series and Y-series mesons. The form factors, f_i, however, are derived from observation of the relevant leptonic partial widths. We may calculate f₁ and f₂ directly, in fact, through utilization of Eq. 3a and 3b, respectively, by inserting the appropriate experimental data into said equations and solving for f_i. In each case a quadratic equation is obtained whose solutions are exhibited below:

f₁ = (1/32C)[17C + {289C² – 64CΓ_ee(PDG)}^1/2 ] ; (4a)

f₂ = (1/2C) [17C – {289C² – 4CΓ_ee(PDG)}^1/2] . (4b)

In Eq. 4 Γ_ee(PDG) represents the ee partial width as reported in PDG (2009-M) and

C = (α /2π)(10,042)(2m_e)(m_ρ/M_X)³(1/3)⁴ . (5)

Thus, for i = 1 M_X = M_ψN , and for i = 2 or 3 M_X = M_YN .

In Section II we will calculate f₁ as associated with the ψ(1S), the ψ(2S), the ψ(4040), the ψ(4160), and the ψ(4415) assuming, at first, for each one all three quark colors are participating in lepton production. We shall find, however, that f₁ = (8/9) is realized in the case of the ψ(2S) only if two quark colors are operative in lepton production; in the cases of the ψ(4040), the ψ(4160), and the ψ(4415), f₁ = (8/9) is realized only if one quark color is operative in lepton production. In Section III we will calculate f₂ as associated with the Y(2S), the Y(3S), the Y(4S), the Y(10860), and the Y(11020). The leptonic widths of the Y-series mesons are not as precisely determined as those of the ψ-series, but we believe we can demonstrate that the same sequential color disengagement from lepton production as seen in the ψ-series is at work in the Y-series. All experimental data in Sections II and III (and Section IV) comes from PDG (2009-M).

II. Calculation of f₁ , the Form Factor of the Ψ-Series

A. The Ψ(1S)

Assuming that all quark colors are operative in the leptonic decay mode of the Ψ (1S), as the GEM as presented so far does, and inserting appropriate experimental quantities (with M_Ψ1 = 3097 Mev) into Eq. 3a yields

Γ_ee(GEM) = 5.72 Kev,

where Γ_ee(GEM), here and onward, represents the relevant ee partial width as determined via the GEM. The PDG (2009-M) reports

Γ_ee(PDG) = (5.55 ± 0.16) Kev.

Thus, Γ_ee(GEM) is just out of the experimental range of the currently accepted ee partial width of the Ψ(1S). Turning now to Eq. 4a, in which C = 2.3149, we find:

f₁(Ψ1) = 0.8951 = (8/9){1.0070} . (6)

Hence, the form factor associated with the Ψ(1S), viz., f₁(Ψ1), is seen to be calculated as very nearly the GEM-theoretical value of f₁ = (8/9), thus indicating that, indeed, all quark colors do participate in the leptonic decay mode of the Ψ(1S).

B. The Ψ(2S)

Again, assuming that all quark colors are operative in the leptonic decay of the Ψ(2S) and inserting the appropriate experimental quantities into Eq. 3a (with M_Ψ2= 3686 Mev), we obtain

Γ_ee(GEM) = 3.39 Kev,

whereas Γ_ee(PDG) = (2.36 ± 0.04) Kev.

We first note that if we were to assume that each quark color contributes the same amount to Γee and that one color has disengaged from the process of lepton production, then

Γ_ee(GEM) → (2/3)3.39 Kev = 2.26 Kev,

which, again, lies just outside the PDG’s range. Now, again assuming a two color contribution to Γee , C = (2/3)[1.3731] = 0.9154, from which we find

f₁(Ψ2) = 0.8792 = (8/9){0.9891} . (7)

Basing our confidence level on the relative closeness of f₁(Ψ2) to “(8/9)”, we are ~ 99% sure that

f₁(Ψ2) = f₁ = (8/9)

and, in turn, ~99% sure that one quark color has disengaged from lepton production as associated with the Ψ(2S).

C. The Ψ(4040) [Our Designation: Ψ(3S)]

Again, assuming that all quark colors are operative in the leptonic decay of the Ψ(3S) and inserting the appropriate experimental quantities into Eq. 3a (with M_Ψ3 = 4039 Mev), we obtain

Γ_ee(GEM) = 2.58 Kev,

whereas Γ_ee(PDG) = (0.86 ± 0.07) Kev.

If we now assume that two colors are now inoperative, i.e., only one color participates in lepton production associated with the Ψ(3S),

Γ_ee(GEM) →(1/3) 2.58 Kev = 0.86 Kev,

which represents an exact match to Γ_ee(PDG). Commensurately, C = (1/3)[1.0437] = 0.3479, which translates to

f₁(Ψ3) = 0.8886 = (8/9){0.9997}. (8)

We are essentially 100% confident, therefore, that now two quark colors have disengaged from lepton production by the time we reach the (assumed) “3S” level.

D. The Ψ(4160) [Our designation: Ψ(4S)]

Again, assuming that all quark colors are operative in the leptonic decay of the Ψ(4S) and inserting the appropriate experimental quantities into Eq. 3a (with M_Ψ4 = 4153 Mev), we obtain

Γ_ee(GEM) = 2.37 Kev,

whereas Γ_ee(PDG) = (0.83 ± 0.07) Kev.

If we again assume that only one color participates in lepton production associated with the Ψ(4S),

Γ_ee(GEM) →(1/3) 2.37 Kev = 0.79 Kev,

which represents a statistical match to Γ_ee(PDG). Commensurately, C = (1/3)[0.9600] = 0.3200, which translates to

f₁(Ψ4) = 0.8778 = (8/9){0.9876} . (9)

We are therefore ~99% confident that only one color participates in lepton production as associated with the Ψ(4S).

E. The Ψ(4415) [Our designation: Ψ(5S)]

Again, assuming that all quark colors are operative in the leptonic decay of the Ψ(5S) and inserting the appropriate experimental quantities into Eq. 3a (with M_Ψ5 = 4421 Mev), we obtain

Γ_ee(GEM) = 1.96 Kev,

whereas Γ_ee(PDG) = (0.58 ± 0.07) Kev.

If we again assume that only one color participates in lepton production associated with the Ψ(5S),

Γ_ee(GEM) →(1/3) 1.96 Kev = 0.65 Kev,

which again represents a statistical match to Γ_ee(PDG). Commensurately, C = (1/3)[0.7958] = 0.2653, which translates to

f₁(Ψ5) = 0.9128 = (8/9){1.0269} . (10)

We are therefore ~97% confident that only one color participates in lepton production as associated with the Ψ(5S).

F. Short Summary of Section II

Of great interest is the fact that the average number multiplying “(8/9)” in Eq. 6 – 10 is given by (to three significant figures)

〈n〉= 1.00 ± 0.01 , (11)

which suggests with very high confidence that (1) f₁ = (8/9) for all Ψ-series objects and that (2) sequential quark color disengagement from the process of lepton production takes place with increasing energy in the Ψ-series mesons. Chart 1 below illustrates the phenomenon as per Section II.

Used only with express written permission

III. Calculation of f₂ , the Form Factor of the Y-Series

For the exposition in Section III to follow, it proves to be convenient to add a subscript, j = 1, 2, or 3, to certain previously-defined variables, where “j” indicates the number of quark colors assumed to be operative in lepton decay. For example, “Γ_ee1(GEM)” indicates a leptonic width per the GEM theory assuming only one color participates in ee production, and “f₂₁” indicates the associated form factor, f₂ , under such condition. All calculations follow along the lines seen in Section II with Eq. 3a and 4a supplanted by Eq. 3b and 4b, respectively. In addition, as the methodology for determining leptonic widths and form factors is by now clear, our presentation in the present section will not feature the entire set of detailed information put forth in Section II.

A. The Y(2S)

Inserting M_Y2 = 10023 Mev into Eq. 3b, we obtain

Γ_ee3(GEM) = 0.624 Kev,

a figure just outside of the experimental range, given by

Γ_ee(PDG) = (0.612 ± 0.011) Kev.

The resulting form factor is found from Eq. 4b to be

f₂₃ = 0.5446 = (5/9){0.9803}. (12)

We are thus ~98% sure that three colors are operative in the leptonic decay of the Y(2S) and that f₂ = (5/9).

B. The Y(3S)

Inserting M_Y3 = 10355 Mev into Eq. 3b, we obtain

Γ_ee3(GEM) = 0.566 Kev,

a figure well outside of the experimental range, given by

Γ_ee(PDG) = (0.443 ± 0.008) Kev.

We find Γ_ee2(GEM) = 0.377 Kev, which is well below the above experimental range of values. However, we do note that

〈Γ_ee3+2(GEM)〉= (1/2)[ Γ_ee3(GEM) + Γ_ee2(GEM)] = 0.471 Kev, a figure which is

only ~6% discrepant with experiment. Furthermore, we find

〈f₂〉= (1/2)[f₂₃ + f₂₂] = (1/2)[0.4217 + 0.6565] = 0.5441 = (5/9){0.9794} (13)

Hence, we obtain the same confidence level as to f₂ from the Y(3S) data as we did from the Y(2S) data if it is assumed that the leptonic decay of the Y(3S) takes place with an even mix of two and three color participation. Viewed in such manner, the Y(3S) would represent the very threshold for the onset of color non-participation in lepton decay associated with the Y-series mesons.

C. The Y(4S)

Inserting M_Y4 = 10579 Mev into Eq. 3b, we obtain

Γ_ee3(GEM) = 0.531 Kev,

a figure well outside of the experimental range, given by

Γ_ee(PDG) = (0.272 ± 0.029) Kev.

Assuming only two colors operative, we obtain Γ_ee2(GEM) = 0.354 Kev, and assuming one operative color, we obtain Γ_ee1(GEM) = 0.177 Kev. We now note that

〈Γ_ee2+1(GEM)〉 = (1/2)[ Γ_ee2(GEM) + Γ_ee1(GEM)] = 0.266 Kev,

which represents a statistical match to Γ_ee(PDG) above. Thus, by assuming f₂ = (5/9) and that lepton decay of the Y(4S) takes place with an even mix of one and two color participation, we realize excellent agreement with experiment.

D. The Y(10860) [Our Designation: Y(5S)]

Inserting M_Y5 = 10860 Mev into Eq. 3b, we obtain

Γ_ee3(GEM) = 0.490 Kev,

a figure well outside of the experimental range, given by

Γ_ee(PDG) = (0.31 ± 0.07) Kev.

We note, however, that Γ_ee2(GEM) = 0.33 Kev with an associated f₂₂ = 0.5271 = (5/9){0.9488}, thus indicating ~95% confidence that two colors are operating in the leptonic decay of the Y(5S) and that f₂ = (5/9).

E. The Y(11020) [Our Designation: Y(6S)]

Inserting M_Y6 = 11019 Mev into Eq. 3b, we obtain

Γ_ee3(GEM) = 0.470 Kev,

a figure well outside of the experimental range, given by

Γ_ee(PDG) = (0.130 ± 0.030) Kev.

We note, however, that Γ_ee1(GEM) = 0.157 Kev, which is in the experimental range of Γ_ee(PDG) above, thus indicating that only one color is operating in the leptonic decay of the Y(6S) and that f₂ = (5/9).

F. Short Summary of Section III

There is clear indication of color disengagement from lepton production in conjunction with f₂ = (5/9) as associated with the Y-series mesons. Assuming the color participation outlined below in Chart 2 along with assuming that f₂ = (5/9) throughout, the average relative discrepancy between Γee(GEM) and Γee(PDG) associated with the Y-series mesons is only 7.5%, whereas the data set itself has an average imprecision of 12.0%.

Used only with express written permission

Concluding Remarks

We find the phenomenon of “color shutdown” as to the process of lepton production in the ψ-series and Y-series mesons extremely interesting. The confidence level is seen to be extremely high (at least regarding the ψ-series mesons) that the phenomenon exists, but what causes it? Because of the color-by-color sequential nature of the color turn-off with increasing mass within the subset of integer number of colors operative in lepton decay, it is unlikely that the phenomenon has its basis in color screening effects. The phenomenon we have explored above looks much too quantized for that. As interesting and, frankly, mysterious, as the color-by-color turn-off phenomenon is, the half-integer turn-offs are far more so. There is even an example of possibly a “three-quarter color” turn-off not yet explored in the present work, to which we turn presently:

The ψ(3770) (M_ψ(3770) = 3773 Mev) has an anomalously small ee partial width, viz.,

Γ_ee(PDG) = (0.265 ± 0.018) Kev.

Assuming f₁ = (8/9) and that Γ_ee is due to an even mix of zero color participation in the ψ(3770) lepton decay and one-half color participation in same, the GEM yields via Eq. 4a Γ_ee(GEM) = 0.264 Kev, a figure representing nearly an exact match to experiment. On average, then, the ψ(3770) has only ¼ of a color participating in lepton production. We have characterized the half-integer color participations in Section III as representations of even mixes in contribution to lepton decay from “k” colors operative and “k-1” colors operative. If such representation is accurate, then in some instances it must be the case that one quark of the di-quark meson system has “k” colors operative in lepton decay, while the other has “k-1” colors operative. Such would explain the half-integer color contributions exhibited in Section III. The case of the ψ(3770), however, suggests something else entirely, as its leptonic width result must be explained by an even mix of zero color contribution to lepton production and one-half color contribution to same. Unless the case of the ψ(3770) represents merely a numerical coincidence, an alternative explanation would have to be that we have uncovered a new feature associated with quarks … that of “shade”, in that each color must possess two “shades” (“light”? and “dark”?) in order to explain the quarter-integer color contribution to lepton production of the ψ(3770).

In any event we may estimate the threshold for the complete turn-off of lepton production in the ψ-series and in the Y-series by plotting the number of operative colors versus (M_ψN / M_ψ1) and (M_YN / M_Y2), respectively, omitting the ψ-(3770) outlier case, and estimating where on said plots N_C = 0.5 (our definition for the above-mentioned threshold), where N_C represents the number of operative colors from Charts 1 and 2. From Fig. 1 we note that

N_C ≈ 3 x₁^-3.5 , where x₁ = (M_ψN / M_ψ1). (14a)

Hence, x₁ ≈ (5/3) when N_c = ½ , thus indicating a lepton shut-down threshold for the ψ-series at about 5170 Mev. From Fig. 2 we note that

N_C ≈ 3 x₂^-9.75 , where x₂ = (M_YN / M_Y2). (14b)

Hence, x₂ ≈ (6/5) when N_c = ½ , thus indicating a lepton shut-down threshold for the ψ-series at about 12050 Mev. Comparing the color shut-down behaviors, as exhibited by Eqs. 14a and 14b, it is apparent that the Y-series shutdown with increasing energy is much more rapid, relatively speaking, than is that of the ψ-series. As a final word, we remark that whether quark colors each can be either “light” or “dark” … or not … the color shut-down phenomenon is extremely interesting and should prove to be the subject of future research in high energy physics theoretical work.

Figures

Used only with express written permission

D. White (2010), “ Evidence for Color-by-Color Disengagement from the Process of Lepton Production Associated with the ψ-Series and Y-Series Mesons”, Communications in Mathematics and Applications, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 183 – 193.
References

D. White (2010-f), “Form Factor Analysis Derived from the Gluon Emission Model Applied to the ψ(2S) and the Y(2S)”, Communications in Mathematics and Applications. Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 165 – 181.
D. White (2010-y), “GEM and the Y(1S)”, The Journal of Informatics and Mathematical Sciences, Vol. 2, Nos. 2 & 3, pp. 71 – 93.
D. White (2009-a), “Mathematical Modeling of the Strong Coupling Parameter Based upon the Gluon Emission Model for Hadron Production Associated with Vector Meson Decay”, Journal of Interdisciplinary Mathematics, Vol. 12, No. 6, pp.825 – 838.
PDG (2009-M), pdg.lbl.gov, “Meson Table”.

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Believing Is Seeing

2012-04-07T12:50:09-04:00

This is my dragon. He found me today.
He had been searching for me a long time.
I lost him many years ago when I was young.

I took a wrong turn. Some had called it life.
So many have died of what they call life,
In vain their dragons searching for them,

I know I am fortunate, unlike them—
My dragon found me and shared his fire with me
Before he breathed his last in the disguise

He had worn all these years calling for me
(Dragons who must hide must also die).
He opened his mouth as if to swallow me,

But only whispered his dream for me—
I forfeited flight when I ran from my dream
But I can still believe his dream in me.

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How to Start Seeds for ...

2010-03-15T17:36:55-04:00

SEED STARTING

What could be better than the special satisfaction that comes from harvesting the bounty of a particular plant that was once only a tiny speck of a seed in the palm of your hand? For some, it is knowing that you can buy a packet of seeds which will grow 50 plants for about the same price it would cost to buy one plant. For others, that you can choose exactly the varieties you want for an earlier harvest, a better flavor or a more beautiful color. Or maybe you want to know that you have the healthiest, most vigorous seedlings available to take full advantage of our ever changing climate. Whatever your reason, this pod cast will provide you with some useful, straightforward tips that will help you successfully navigate the seed starting process.

What you’ll need (EQUIPMENT/TOOLS)

SOIL THERMOMETER: Why? So you know the temperature of your soil! Most seeds don't like cold wet soil and will refuse to germinate, even rot! Also since I use a heating mat to give my seeds a head start, I can make sure that the soil isn't getting too hot. The first year I used a plant heating mat, I couldn't understand why none of the seeds were germinating. I checked the soil temp and found out that the soil was nearly one hundred degrees! So, I used some wood slats and raised the seed flats off the mats by an inch or two and within a few days, seedlings started to emerge! I learned that since I start my seeds indoors and the average room temperature is around seventy, the mats got too hot when in direct contact with the flats! So by raising them, I got the temp closer to 70-75 degrees and the seeds germinated!

For general seed germination, the soil temp should be in the 60-75 degree range. If your soil temp is staying too warm, then the heat needs to be turned down or preferably off in the room where the seed flats are at. Seedlings like a nighttime temp of 50-60 degrees so the plants can harden off gradually. I had my heat mats plugged into my timer so at night when the lights and fan turned off, so did the heat mats. Once the seeds have germinated, turn off the heat mats permanently. They don't need them and you want your seedlings to grow up stout and ready to go outside in the real world!

For outdoor temperatures here is a general rule: Generally speaking, the soil temp stays more consistent than the air temperature and is usually an average of ten degrees cooler in the summer and retains about the same degrees in heat over air in the winter. So, if your daytime spring day temperature is seventy, you can bet your soil temperature is not over sixty. Stick that soil thermometer all the way down in your garden soil to get a true reading before planting seeds outside. Conversely, if your winter daytime temperature is 35, then your soil temperature is probably hovering around 45-50! Good news when you are judging when to pull late fall crops.

HOUSEHOLD FAN: Another reason for seed failure is a fungus called "damping off". The fungus attacks the tender stems at the soil level and before you know it, your precious seedlings have fallen over and are dying. Nothing you can do at that point. So, the trick here is prevention!

This is where the household fan comes in. By maintaining a steady low flow of air circulating in your seedling room, you help keep the top layer of soil dry enough that the fungus doesn't grow. I have had no seedling damping off since I tried this years ago and continue faithfully to use the fan every spring. I have my fan hooked up to my timer so that when the lights come on, the fan comes on, too! Works great!

TIMER: On to the timer; this is where it gets tricky. Some plants are light sensitive, such as marigolds, while others could care less. So for simplicity's sake, let's stick with tomatoes.

I start my seedlings in late February. I will start out my daylight hours with the timer set to eight hours on and sixteen hours off. Then as the plants grow, I gradually extend the daylight hours until I hit twelve and twelve. This seems to work great, especially for tomatoes.

By the time they are ready for moving into my outdoor cold frame in April, they are nice and stout, deep green and look fabulous. Also by using a timer, I don't have to worry if we are out of town a few days. The plants will never miss me!

WATERING CAN: Well, this is a no brainer. I use a gallon milk jug oftentimes so I can mix my fertilizer correctly, then pour that mixture into a watering can for individual pot watering.

OK, here is the Number One Cause of seed failure: Overwatering! Don't drown your seedlings. The soil should never be more than slightly damp. If the soil feels damp, don't water!

For fertilizing, I use a liquid fertilizer that is balanced and has all the nutrients that the plant needs. Of course, general products such as Miracle Grow are just fine, too, but remember to dilute the solution to half the recommended concentration. I feel that the plants get a sustainable and constant feeding this way. You wouldn't want to go for three days on just water, then get a mega meal to make up! Plants are constantly growing and need nutrients, just like children!

PLANT TAGS AND PERMANENT MARKER: A must-have before you even start planting. Believe me, you won't be able to remember what every tray has in it. Then when you are ready to transplant, you already have the tag and it goes right in with the plant in its new pot! Nothing more frustrating than "mystery plants"!

Containers:

Try all kinds to see what works for you. Make sure they are clean and have good drainage. If you are using a fiber or peat pot, soak it well before adding soil. Dry fiber pots draw moisture away from the soil.

Container choices. Convenience, cost, and reusability will determine which containers you use. If you won't be around to water daily or don't plan to transplant seedlings into another container before planting them out, use 2- to 4-inch-diameter containers or flats with individual cells.

Plastic foam flats with tapered individual cells are sold by nurseries and through seed catalogs. They come in several cell sizes; some have capillary matting that draws water from a reservoir, making seedling care much easier.

In addition to the containers listed above, you can use household items -- plastic cups, yogurt containers, cut-down milk cartons or foil baking pans. Be sure to punch several drainage holes in any container that lacks them, since seedlings will die if water collects around their roots. If you're reusing old pots, scrub them out and soak them for 30 minutes in a solution of 9 parts water to 1 part household bleach to destroy any disease organisms.

Plastic flats with no dividers are an old favorite. They're readily available from garden supply stores and mail-order catalogs, and free when you buy seedlings at nurseries.

Plastic cell-packs and 2- to 4-inch plastic pots, recycled from nursery purchases, are easy to obtain and use.

Peat pots are inexpensive but not reusable. But because you plant out seedlings pot and all, such pots minimize disturbance to roots. Keep them moist (so roots can penetrate them easily).

There are five basic requirements for successful seed starting: good seeds, good light, good starting medium, proper watering and, finally, a sense of adventure. Most annual flowers and vegetables should be sown 4 to 8 weeks in advance. Let’s take a look at these important points one at a time.

GOOD SEEDS

No matter how careful you are with all the other aspects of seed starting, you will not be satisfied with the results unless you have heeded the call for good seeds. None of the other factors can compensate for seeds that are not strong and vigorous. Most seed companies provide high quality, healthy seeds because their livelihood depends on customers purchasing again next year. (See the IFCGA web page for an extensive list of seed sources.) Even the 10 cent packets are generally good seeds, although sometimes the quality is inconsistent. If you have any concerns about the quality of seeds you have purchased or saved, it is easy to do a simple germination test:

Roll up the paper towel with the seeds inside and place it inside a plastic bag.
Partially close the plastic bag -- do not seal.
After ten days or so, count how many seeds have germinated, multiply by ten and you have the germination rate. For rates under 70%, adjust the number of seeds you sow accordingly.

GOOD LIGHT

Good lighting is essential to ensure sturdy, strong seedlings ready to take on the rigors of the Idaho climate. Even a bright, sunny window does not provide sufficient light to avoid leggy, weak-stemmed seedlings.

The system I have used with excellent results for the last several years is simple and inexpensive: a standard shoplight with one warm white and one cool white florescent bulbs suspended so that the lights are never more than 3 inches from the plants. You can hang the lights from a ceiling or, as I do, from the shelves of a three-tiered plant stand that will hold 12 flats of plants.

For optimal growth, most plants require 16-18 hours of light (once germinated) with a few hours of rest. (A timer is handy for this purpose.) Special full spectrum bulbs are available but cost about 10 times more than florescent bulbs and in my experience do not improve the results enough to justify the extra cost.

As the seedlings grow, be sure to repot them in larger pots as they start crowding one another. This not only provides more root space but spreads them out so that the leaves have more surface area exposed to the light. A final hint: replace your florescent bulbs each year with new ones so that the light is as intense as possible.

Some seeds require light to germinate while others prefer total darkness. Your seed packet should tell you what your seed's requirements are. Once germinated, all seedlings need light to develop into strong, healthy plants. Supplement the natural light with florescent bulbs if necessary.

GOOD PLANTING MEDIUM

This is an easy one -- don’t use soil! Do use any good, light, soiless planting mix, many types of which are readily available at garden centers. A soiless planting medium is preferred for several reasons; it is light and open to encourage those tiny sprouts to push up to the surface; it can hold generous amounts of water without becoming water-logged; and because it is sterilized, it will not harbor the harmful bacteria which cause damping off. If you are going to re-use planting containers from last year, be sure to disinfect them in a 9/1 water-to-bleach solution. Nothing beats a good commercial medium because it is sterile and free of unwanted weed seeds. If you want to make your own, here are a couple of good recipes:

Cornell Mix:

4 quarts of shredded peat moss or sphagnum
4 tablespoons 5-10-10 fertilizer

Simple Mix:

1 part loam
1 part clean sand or perlite
1 part leaf mold or moist peat

PROPER WATERING

This aspect of starting seeds is probably the most troublesome. It requires some practice (and not a few failures) to get the hang of what we gardeners mean when we say "Well, keep them wet enough but not too wet".

The best explanation I can offer is that the soil should be consistently slightly moist but not at all soggy. It is OK for the surface to be a bit dry, but if the leaves are beginning to droop or a shiny leaf is starting to look dull, it is a sign that the roots do not have adequate moisture down deep.

While it is probably better to err on the side of too little water rather than too much, either extreme will stress the plants and produce a weaker seedling. In my experience, the best method for watering seedlings is bottom watering. It avoids wetting the leaves and assures even and thorough watering of the planting medium, as well as teaches the roots to travel downward for moisture and nutrients. Just add 2-4” of water/nutrient mix to the container’s tray and set your pots into the water. The water will slowly filter upwards through the planting medium until the surface is wet. As soon as you begin to see the surface darkening, lift the pots from the water, drain for a moment or two and return them to their place under the lights.

When the seeds are newly planted and covered with plastic, you will need to water much less frequently than when the plants have grown to 5 or 6” and have more leaf surface area transpiring. Watch carefully during your first seed-starting season and you will soon get the hang of it.

Use a fine sprayer to water newly planted seeds and tiny seedlings. If you can,

PLANTING

Getting the seeds in the planting mix is one of the most enjoyable parts of the process. You will need:

Planting containers -- I use re-useable, deep, 6-cell planters, but you can use almost any container that has good drainage. All nurseries have convenient trays, cell planters and plastic domes.
Plant markers for identifying the seeds planted (I use plastic milk cartons cut into strips)
A notebook for taking notes on when, how and what you’ve done (you’ll love yourself next year!)

Fill the containers with planting mix and pack it down gently. Check seed packets for proper planting depth*, plant several seeds in each container, and cover with planting mix according to the directions. (Later, after the seedlings have their first set of true leaves, you will either transplant the extras or clip them out with a pair of small scissors.)

Gently water each individual container thoroughly, label each container and then cover with a clear plastic bag or a plastic dome. Put into a warm place like the top of your refrigerator.

Some seeds will germinate in 3-4 days, so keep a close eye on them because as soon as the seedlings are up, they need to be moved immediately under lights. Other seeds can take up to three weeks to germinate, so read your packets. Remember to check on the moisture level periodically.

Some seeds require light to germinate so read the packets carefully -- sprinkle these on the surface and water very gently.

Fill pots or flats to within 1/4 inch of the top with your potting mixture and level the surface. It's a good idea to water the soil and allow it to drain thoroughly before sowing the seeds. Make a hole for each seed with your finger or a pencil. Keep in mind that most seeds need to be planted four times as deep as the seed is wide. If your seeds are very fine, cover them with a fine layer of soil.

When the seedlings have developed their second set of true leaves, it's time to transplant or thin them. If you don't need many plants, you can thin them in place: just pinch or snip off the excess seedlings, leaving the remaining ones spaced about 2 inches apart.

Seedlings in individual pots or cells should be thinned to one plant per pot or cell. If you want to save most of the plants that have germinated, you'll need to transplant them to larger containers for growth to planting-out size. It's best to use individual pots or cell-packs for this purpose, so that seedlings won't suffer much root disturbance when planted out in the garden.

To transplant seedlings, fill each new container with moist planting mix. Loosen the soil around the seedlings (a kitchen fork or spoon is handy for this); then carefully lift them out, one at a time. Or lift a clump of seedlings and gently separate individual plants by carefully teasing apart the tangled mass of roots. Handle seedlings by their leaves to avoid damaging the tender stems. Poke a hole in the new container's planting mix, place the seedling in the hole, and firm soil around it. Water the transplant right away. Keep the containers out of direct sunlight for a few days to let the transplants recover from the move.

Seedling Care

The care you give your seedlings in the weeks following germination is critical. Keep it moist, but not dripping. Small pots and flats dry out quickly, so check it often. If your seedlings are growing in a windowsill, turn often to encourage straight stems.

The first two leaves you will see on the plant are not true leaves but food storage cells called cotyledons. Once the first true leaves have developed, it's time to start fertilizing. Choose a good liquid organic fertilizer and use a weak solution once a week.

Special Seed Handling Techniques

Many seeds require special handling, so there are a few tricks you should know to ensure that your seeds will sprout. The seed packet should list any special requirements.

Treatment	Description	Seeds That Should Be Treated
Scarification	Seeds with especially hard outer shells often benefit from this abuse. Rub the outer shell of the seed with sandpaper or a file. It takes a little practice to make a cut that's deep enough to help, but not deep enough to damage the plant.	Lupine Mallow Morning Glory Sweet Pea Blue Indigo, Wild Indigo
Soaking	Seeds that have a hard outer coat will germinate faster if they are soaked in water overnight.	Asparagus Lilyturf Lupine Mallow Morning Glory Okra Perennial Pea Parsley Thrift
Stratification	This process helps recreate the natural seasons so that the seed knows it's time to germinate. For cold stratification, place the seeds in moist peat moss or vermiculite in the refrigerator. For warm stratification, place the container in a warm spot. After the first month or so, examine the seeds regularly for signs of germination. As soon as the small white primary root appears, plant the seed in soil.	Angelica Christmas Rose Daylily Gas Plant Globeflower Lavender Ornamental Cabbage Phlox Primrose Tahoka Daisy Viola, Violet, Pansy Wake Robin

Seeds That Need Light to Germinate

Seeds That Need Dark to Germinate

Balloon Flowers
Basket of Gold
Begonia
Bellflower
Bells of Ireland
Blanket Flower
Browallia
Coleus
Columbine
Creeping Zinnia
Dill
Flossflower
Flowering tobacco
Impatiens
Leopard's-Bane
Lettuce
Maltese-Cross
Feverfew

Mexican Sunflower
Reseda Ordata
Oriental Poppy
Ornamental Pepper
Ornamental Cabbage
Petunia
Primrose
Rock Cress
Salvia
Savory
Shasta Daisy
Snapdragon
Stock
Strawflower
Sweet alyssum
Tickseed
Transvaal Daisy
Yarrow

Bachelor's Buttons
Borage
Butterfly Flower
Chinese Primrose
Coriander
Forget-me-not
Larkspur
Nemesia
Painted Tongue
Periwinkle
Phlox
Poppy
Pot Marigold
Sweet Pea
Treasure Flower
Verbena

FEEDING SEEDLINGS Once your seedlings have their first set of true leaves, you can begin feeding them at every other watering. Any good plant food with a balanced N-P-K will do, but be sure to use it at ¼ strength for the first few weeks and ½ strength later.

HARDENING OFF It will make you crazy if you successfully get your plants to the point at which they are ready to go outside and then you damage or kill them by skipping this step, so even though you are really anxious to get them out of your living room and into the dirt, please take the time to follow this step.

The process of hardening off readies the plant to withstand the rigors of the outdoors and can be accomplished in about 4-10 days, dependent on the weather. Start out by taking the plants outside on a calm day for about an hour. Bring them back under the lights. Repeat the process each day doubling the time until they are out all day. Now they are ready to go into the soil. If the weather gets particularly cold or windy you may want to abort the process and begin again when the weather improves. This is definitely worth doing!

A cold frame is useful for hardening off seedlings. Over the next week or so, gradually increase exposure until the plants are in full sun all day (shade lovers are an exception; they shouldn't be exposed to day-long sun).

IT’S AN ADVENTURE This is the final and maybe most important of the five basic requirements I mentioned at the start. Growing your own plants gives you the opportunity to learn about growth and nurturing, about patience and perseverance. It will ignite your imagination and your sense of the possible if you let it. Be willing to try what you haven’t, accept the failures you will undoubtedly experience and realize that, as with most of life, if you stick with it, learn from your mistakes and keep trying, you will keep growing and enjoying your own bountiful harvest.

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Killing the Golden Goos...

2012-03-16T11:41:52-04:00

It is no good getting useless products to market quickly.

Mike Emmanual, Janssen Pharmaceuticals, 1991

Did Business Process Reengineering murder the Pharmaceutical Industry?

Before going any further, and at the risk of giving the game away, you should probably know that this is a rhetorical question.

In the 1990s the pharmaceutical industry embraced Business Process Reengineering (BPR) in a big way. Pharmaceutical companies strove to minimize time to market thus maximizing the period of patent protection for new molecular entities (NMEs).

The thinking was to take tasks normally performed in serial order and, except where subject to the laws of physics or nature, develop new and innovative ways to re-invent the business by pushing said development tasks into parallel. The effect was to increase the development burn rate while reducing the time to market. Or at least that was thinking.

However, there's a catch.

And it's a real doozy!

The catch is that this doesn't work for high risk business processes.

Pushing tasks into parallel to fast-track projects with high attrition rates will actually increase time to market.

High risk business processes such as pharmaceutical development.

Pushing tasks into parallel to fast-track projects with high attrition rates will actually increase time to market.

In focusing on minimizing time to market, the industry hoped to maximize returns on R&D investment. Reducing the development time of successful molecules was achieved by a) pushing more and more development activities into parallel, and b) bringing development tasks forward in the development process.

This works well if you are working on successful molecules.

Sadly for the industry the majority of molecules are unsuccessful.

This means we have optimized a process around that tiny minority of molecules that make it to market.

Even worse, strategies directed at increasing development speed and reducing the development time for successful compounds can actually increase the expected time to market^[1].

This gives rise to the Development Speed Paradox – the observation that the shorter the cycle time, the longer the expected time to first marketing authorization approval (EMAA).

By addressing development speed without tackling the high attrition rates in pharmaceutical development, business process reengineering had the opposite effect on R&D productivity.

Maximising development speed clogged the development pipeline with marginal or failing medicines.

The industry became really slick at delivering late-stage failures to the marketplace.

Norman Einstein, CEO Scientific Radicals

So how did this come about?

Well the problem stems from a failure to recognize the stochastic nature of pharmaceutical development.

The following discussion considers the simplest case where the development process is divided into just two phases – a “discovery” phase followed by a “development” phase. However, this model can be extended to include multiple decision points, multiple therapeutic targets and a range of time and development costs.

The Quick-Kill model assumes that drug discovery is a stochastic process. The simplest form assumes a binomial process with probability of discovery p such that the expected number of failures before the first success has a geometric distribution with a mean of 1/p.

If the costs of killing a drug candidate are C_kill and the development cost for a successful product is C_success then the expected costs for each successful market launch are

E(Cost) = (1/p) C_kill +C_success

Similarly, if the time to kill a compound is t_killand the development time for a successful drug is t_success and discovery is a binomial process then the expected time to marketing authorisation approval (EMAA) or expected time to market (ETTM)

EMAA = (1/p) t_kill +t_success

This latter finding means that the EMAA is a function not just of the development time for successful compounds but the amount of time unsuccessful compounds spend in the development pipeline. Depending upon the discovery rate p the development time for unsuccessful compounds can have a significant impact on the EMAA.

In Fail Fast, Fail Cheap, Fail Often we used this simple model to calculate the average time to market launch and the average cost of each new launch.

But we can do better than that.

Using the expected costs and the EMAA we can calculate the average number of products launched per US$bn R&D spend.

Better still, we can calculate the relative efficiency of a development strategy by comparing the average number of products launched per annum per US$bn spend.

Let’s take a look at the impact of reengineering the development process.

Table 1 below shows the current development costs for the original process and the expected costs for the reengineered process.

Used only with express written permission

_{Table 1: Key time costs and financial costs for the discovery and development phases in the Original Development Process and the Reengineered Development Process. Superficially, the Reengineered Process looks more attractive saving a full year on the total development time and saving $35m in development costs.}

From Table 1 we can see that the original process involves a discovery phase costing around US$15m and taking three years followed by a development phase for successful NMEs taking 10 years and costing US$400m.

Superficially, the reengineered process looks rather attractive.

The discovery phase is slightly longer at four years and the costs slightly greater at US$20m but thereafter the development costs are significantly less. In total the reengineered process is one year shorter than the current process and the total development cost is US$35m.

The decision to adopt the reengineered process looks a no-brainer.

But this ignores the stochastic nature of drug development.

For while the development time for successful molecules is shorter and development costs lower for the reengineered process, this ignores the fact that most of the time we will not be working on successful molecules.

Before we get to a successful molecule we have to clear the pipeline of the unsuccessful molecules.

In pharmaceutical development, attrition rates (1-p) are high and the probability of success correspondingly low. In the following calculations we have assumed an attrition rate of 90% making the probability of success 10%.

Once we factor in an attrition rate of 90% then the reengineered process looks rather less attractive than Table 1 would have us believe.

Table 2 compares the relative performance of the reengineered process to the original process using a number of key metrics:

The average or expected time to marketing authorization approval (EMAA)
The average R&D costs per successful product launch
The average number of launches for every US$1bn spent in R&D
The average number of launches per annum for every US$1bn spent in R&D

Used only with express written permission

_{Table 2: Key Metrics for the Reengineered and Original Development Process. Despite the initial attractiveness of the Reengineered Development Process it performs poorly compared to the Original Development Process.}

While the reengineered process looks good on paper Table 2 tells a rather different story.

From Table 2 we see that while the cycle time for successful molecules is shorter for the reengineered process the EMAA is on average 20% longer.

We can also see that although the development costs for successful molecules is US$35m lower for the reengineered process the expected cost per market launch is actually 2% greater than for the original process.

Furthermore, the number of molecules successfully launched for every US$bn spent in R&D is actually lower for the new, reengineered process than for the original.

And, most importantly, the number of NMEs launched per annum for every US$bn spent in R&D is significantly lower for the reengineered process – almost 20% fewer launches per annum for every US$bn.

Did Business Process Reengineering screw the pharmaceutical industry?

Well, it probably increased the expected time to market launch.
And it almost certainly increased R&D costs.
Furthermore, it probably reduced the number of successful launches for every US$bn R&D spend.
Moreover, it almost definitely reduced the number of successful launches per annum for every US$bn R&D spend.

Otherwise, it was a stunning success.

Reference

^[1] Lendrem, D 1995 A clear case of more haste, less development speed. Scrip Magazine, Dec 1995, pp22-23

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"Could be Worse" Brief ...

2012-01-29T09:32:08-05:00

This essay begins in February 2009, and picks up again in November 2011. In both months I had a chance to meet and talk with prisoners in California who had been sent to prison on a sentence of “Life without parole,” or LWOPed in the acronym-plagued prison system. LWOP is the most severe penalty for murderers in California, exceeded only by the rarely used death penalty. It is a form of degradation California reserves for people who are convicted of particularly venial types of murder.

I do not of course meet such people very often in my daily life at Chico State where I teach Sociology. But from 2008-2010 I was involved in a study of vocational education programs in California’s prisons which was funded by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. There I met my first prisoner on a LWOP sentence in the unusual circumstances described below. Then last month, I took my criminology class to Chowchilla Women’s prison for a standard tour where I met my second LWOPed inmate. So that’s the context for these stories which are not only about punishment, but about the human spirit, and particularly optimism in the face of degradation and humiliation.

Could Be Worse!

I was taken inside the Administrative Segregation Unit at a California State Prison in the middle of the desert in February 2009. The prison is one of thirty three in California, but the only one located below sea level. We went there to observe vocational education classes, but when we arrived we found out that the prison was on lock-down due to gang activity. So after talking to the voc ed teachers, we looked for something else to do. Our hosts offered us a tour of the “Administration Segregation” unit—the jail within the prison, known in prison jargon as solitary, or “the hole.” After dressing us in the stab-proof vests that all non-prisoners in Ad Seg wear, we were brought into the building where inmates are confined.

“Ad Seg” is the place where inmates from the maximum security level 4 yard are taken for punishment. To get there, you have to assault a guard, seriously assault another prisoner, be caught with a lot of drugs, be a nasty gang leader, or have been a real problem. The Ad Seg Unit at this prison had 200 beds. Inmates are bunked two to a cell, and permitted outside for only ten hours per week. When outside the cell, prisoners wear handcuffs, and are shackled at the waist. The handcuffs are removed only when they are in the cell, or in the outdoors exercise cage. If they must wait in the hallway for a lawyer appointment, medical appointment, or so forth, they are locked standing in 3’ by 3’ by 7’ cages.

Meals are prepared by the officers, and eaten either in a hallway, or inside the locked cells. Indeed, this is what makes Ad Seg so expensive. Tasks normally undertaken by prisoners themselves for 8-19 cents per hour, such as cooking, cleaning, and so forth. In Ad Seg, professional prison officers do all this.

The cells are perhaps 10’ x 8’ and have two bunks, a sink, and a toilet. The two bunks are concrete, with a 3”-4” thick mattress. Inmates are housed by race. Showering is down the hall and is twice per week. They shower one at a time.

Inmates brought into Ad Seg are isolated for their first three bowel movements in a special cell. This is done so they cannot smuggle drugs, weapons, or other contraband by swallowing them. They are then assigned to a cell. To be removed from the cell, they put their hands through a window for cuffing, and are always accompanied by a guard when outside. They are moved around their area in their underwear. If they are being let out for their hours of exercise, the cuffs are removed after they are in a cage, which actually looks like a dog run.

The ten hours exercise per week are in an outdoor exercise cage of about 15 by 30 feet. The cage is open to sun for half of its area, and shaded on the back half. The cement on the ground is well-polished since it seems that one form of exercise that the inmates really like is polishing the concrete with a wet rag.

When we came into the exercise cage area, there were three inmates in two adjacent cages, which is really the focus of this essay. Two in their late twenties shared one exercise cages—they were also cellmates. Another younger inmate was in the adjacent cage. All looked white, though I guess they could have been Hispanic. We started to talk to one of the inmates who was in the cage with his cellee (cellmate). He had a 37 year to life sentence, and was really interested in our study of vocational education because he believes that the parole board requires a lot of classes and a BA degree before they will authorize his release. He had a Mohawk haircut, and a pierced nipple. (I wanted to point out to him that a better strategy than a BA might be to avoid doing things that get you sent to Ad Seg, but let it go.)

Gradually I drifted over to the inmate in the adjacent cage. He was small, dressed in a t-shirt and boxer shorts, and had bandages on his knees. He had a small goatee, and was missing his two front teeth. At first he was hesitant to talk to me, but warmed up after pleasantries. His favorite phrase seemed to be “Could be worse!” which he actually said with a smile and some cheer. As in “How are you?” Answer: “Could be worse!”

I asked him how old he was—he was 21. He said that he had been locked up for three years, after being arrested at age 18. He spent three years in the Los Angeles County Jail until being sent to this prison the previous November. And already he had done something to get himself put in Ad Seg. He told me that he was from Los Angeles, and from a particular neighborhood, but only from south of some particular street. Indeed, he noted, the first time he ever went north of that street was when he was arrested and taken to LA County Jail. He told me he like to read vampire novels.

I asked him how long his sentence was. He responded, “Life without parole!” I think he noticed the surprised look on my face. There are only about 3000 prisoners in California with such a long sentence, and he was still smiling when telling me. His response to my surprised look was his trademark “Could be worse!” This surprised me again. How, I thought, could it be worse? This 21 year old, was three years into a sentence which would last probably fifty or sixty years. He had killed someone in a particularly venial fashion in order to get the sentence in the first place. Then he had done something really bad in prison to get himself arrested again, and put into administrative segregation. He was 21 years old and had the next-to-worst-sentence California offers, on a good day he would be in a maximum security level four prison in some desert. On that good day he would be pressured to be part of prison gangs, maybe work in the prison kitchen, do dishes, and clean the floor with a mop that has a handle. And unless he was transferred to another prison on a bus in daylight, he would likely never even see a tree for the entire time. On a bad day, he would be arrested, and be stuck in another cell in administrative segregation where someone would be counting his bowel movements. To this Ph.D. it was obvious that things could not get much worse.

Ok, I didn’t tell him all that, but I did manage to stutter out, “but how could it be worse? You are in on a Life without Parole sentence, and in here, in a cage!”

But he thought the answer was obvious. What could be worse than this? “Hey, I don’t have the death penalty!” Uh, yeah, good point, I guess. And I am the one with the Ph.D.?

The next question I asked him was about his legs. They were covered with red burn scars from the feet up to the bottom of his boxers. He told me that the burns occurred in an auto accident in which his legs were burned by gasoline after which he was arrested (apparently he was fleeing the police). He was proud that he had recently had surgery to permit him to walk again—grafts had been taken from his stomach (he showed me the patches from which the skin had been taken), and put onto the back of his knees so that he could straighten out his legs again. He was actually quite pleased with this condition. “After all,” he said, “Could be worse!”

I have spent some time on the internet trying to figure out who Mr. Could-be-Worse is. I Googled around, but could not find any murderers who met his description: Murder in 2006, three years in LA County Jail, conviction in November 2008, born about 1988, and severely burned upon arrest following a police chase. I couldn’t find him in any of the newspapers.

Which brings up a final point about prison, which is that things never are as they seem, and manipulation and deception are normal and routine. Officers and prisoners are agreed on this. So what do I really know about this guy? He was locked in a dog kennel in one of California’s maximum security prison, was severely burned, small, and young. The rest I have only his word—

We Need the Death Penalty for the truly Evil—I’ve Seen Absolute Evil—Some People Indeed are Worse!

Which brings me up to the present day (November 2011). I took my criminology class on a prison-tour three weeks ago, and met my second LWOP prisoner, this time at Chowchilla Prison for women. At the end of the tour, we asked the Lieutenant if we could talk to inmates. He brought out two women who were part of the leadership liaison for the prisoners and administration. As it turned out, both women had life sentences. One had been in prison since 1994 and had a plain old life sentence. She later told us that she was 42 years old. The other woman, who appeared older (perhaps she was 50) was down for a sentence of “Life Without Parole.”

Unlike the 21 year-old LWOPed prisoner in the desert, though, this inmate was a respected part of the prison leadership. Indeed, as our tour guide indicated, he really liked working with such inmates because they are among the more stable in the prison. Lifers are less likely to cause trouble for the prison officers, and can even control the more volatile younger prisoners. After all, as another prison officer once pointed out to me, the lifers are there for good, and regard it as their home. They do not want their home defiled by the antics of young hooligans.

Anyway, one of the Chico State students asked the two women a classic question about whether criminals are “born” or made that way by society. This is when we got a rather strange response from the LWOPed woman. She responded that she believed in the death penalty, because there are some people so evil that they are irredeemable. She went on to add that she had seen true evil at Chowchilla (which also houses the “condemned row” in California for 19 women awaiting execution). This, I mused, was an unusual way to answer such a question from someone who had missed the death penalty herself by not very far.

But, I suspect as with Mr. Could-Be-Worse, this is ultimately a relative statement. Status, and ultimately a sense of self-identity is established relative to whoever you can plausibly compare yourself with. In essence, for the LWOPed inmates I met, the death penalty provides reassurance that there is something worse than themselves. This is a very human reaction, I suspect—all of us at some level are comparing ourselves to those around us and concluding that we ourselves are at least a little better than the others. I guess to go on with life we need to believe that things could be worse, even when we are in the “hole” of one of California’s prisons.

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Google Glasses and Wear...

2012-04-05T21:07:18-04:00

Google unveiled today (and Apple will soon follow) yet another forward-looking technology device -- voice-commanded eyeglasses with lenses that are actually transparent screens to display online digital images (and probably eventually also sound from the earpieces). These are a new category of "wearable computers".

"These surely promise to become much more intimate accessories tied more closely to our personal space and identity. Can you imagine how attractive these will be to youngsters of all ages and the pressure on parents to buy them? And the teen fads? 'Parents see spectacle: Girls and guys eyeing Google goggles go gaga.' And how will you control them? And then they will spread to the fashion world...Parents too must be "forward-looking" in anticipating challenges from these new devices. New technologies will keep coming fast, so how will parents and educators help children benefit, rather than be hurt by their use?" asks Eitan Schwarz, MD, a veteran Chicago child psychiatrist, faculty member at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine, and expert on children and technology.

"Our truly brilliant engineers deliver great innovations to serve us as tools. But in the hands of children, most will be coveted as toys, much as computers, mobile phones and tablets have been, and difficult to control. Yes, recent guidance by the National Association for the Education of Young Children and Fred Rogers Center describes potential educational benefits to young children, moderating earlier warnings by the American Academy of Pediatrics and essentially sanctioning greater parental discretion. However, while digital devices have great potential to benefit kids and families, studies are showing that unsupervised widespread use causes disturbances in learning, attention, normal play, and social skills especially in the 20% of more vulnerable kids," according to Dr. Schwarz.

Dr. Schwarz, inventor of ZillyDilly for iPad, is concerned that parents are mostly on their own managing their kids with these devices, "Each family seems to cope in its own way, and some do very well. Many don't."

Dr. Schwarz has innovated a comprehensive way of thinking and a solution, "After over a decade of Wild West excitement and chaos, It is now time for parents to begin systematically and throughly teaching their children through their teens positive media habits at home, where they have the home court advantage. I urge parents to anchor media usage firmly within family life, starting even as early as the pre-school years. Make all tech devices family and school appliances. Prevent alone use except for reading and homework. Create face-to-face media-free human interactivity zones and times and prevent interference with mealtimes, family drives, recess, and other togetherness opportunities. Parents -- park your device before interacting with family. Charge devices in central common family areas subject to age-dependent limits on private use and alone time."

Dr. Schwarz outlines additional lifestyle changes that will help youngsters cope with their digital world now and in the future:

- Follow a simple tenet, "A device only belongs in my child's hands or in my home only if I am sure that it will enrich my children's development and my family's health."

- Make sure media are truly effective as educational, and not just claimed to be. Check with your child's teachers before you buy.

- Balance content, prioritizing family, values, social skills, and education while limiting entertainment.

- Tie media consumption to developmental age and maturity: Introduce preschoolers to various media only in a fully-involved, thoughtful and focused way; be flexible and respectful, and avoid major conflict; gradually expand privileges for responsible, mature kids to eventually allow media independence by mid to late teens; and accommodate special needs individuals.

- Teach that healthy media self-care is an ongoing process that starts early, like good hygiene and nutrition, and includes self-discipline, zeal for discovery essential for excellence, time and information management, and planning and organizational skills.

- Keep positive media consumption and its monitoring an ongoing family project and conversation topic.

- Use devices as much as possible for social, multi-person interactivity

- Gently and firmly introduce new rules

- Always focus children on how tech devices can benefit family life

- Include grandparents and siblings

- Use diverse free Internet content as well as apps to balance entertainment with enrichment of family relationships, socialization, values education, and extra-curricular learning to develop a well- rounded, informed, and competent children

- Demythologize the magic while at the same time appreciating the actual workings of these technologies and brilliant man-made design and engineering skills your kids too could someday emulate.

"I urge parents to take charge from the start, set rules, limit time, and provide a balance of experiences appropriate to the age and needs of each child," states Dr. Schwarz, also a researcher in technology use in play therapy and author of Kids, Parents & Technology: A Guide for Young Families.

Refs:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/technology/google-offers-look-at-internet-connected-glasses.html?

http://www.naeyc.org/files/naeyc/file/positions/PS_technology_WEB2.pdf

###

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‘Joe Frazier ‘Champ’ a ...

2012-04-04T09:21:35-04:00

‘Joe Frazier ‘Champ’ a boxing legend remembered. Interview with nephew Rashad’

He had just returned to work that day from his travels sitting in the studio hunched down in the chair with his usual peaceful look open yet tired almost to exhaustion. Unassuming and friendly he asked me about my business and I started talking about my newsletter. After some talk and a welcome back from his General Manager, I asked about his absence since he did not seem refreshed but maybe a recovery of some sort. He had mentioned the changing neighborhood in Philly and so many Chinese restaurants. He explained the reason why he had traveled to Philly, his home town and the attendance of a funeral. The 'Homegoing' or Homecoming he emphasized since he had not recalled hearing the word funeral of his uncle Joe Frazier! He spoke about being close to his uncle, his mother's brother. I asked if he would be willing do an interview. I had just posted a comment about his loss on my Facebook page thanking Joe Frazier with an attached article from the New York Times. I wondered if his demeanor was the same as his Uncle's, after all Joe Frazier and his Mom were reared by the same Mother! Rashad may have been a reflection of the legacy Joe Frazier left unspoken: kind, respectful, understated, patient, a quiet curiosity, and gentle spirit. Even as Rashad spoke about his uncle's funeral being larger than that of Teddy Pendagrass, he told a humorous story about men with bags setting up near the crowded church selling t-shirts, which were beautiful and even purchased by his relatives! Rashad a proud Islamic name masked all awareness of his family's infamous uncle. After reading the above introduction to begin our interview, it started with the emphatic statement below.

Rashad: Let’s Go!

LT: After reading materials and recognizing that your uncle Joe Frazier is one of the greatest boxers of all time except he came along with a few other good ones that overshadowed his accomplishments. The beauty of Joe Frazier him being a product of what it means to reach your potential in this country…just being told by his father that he could be a Joe Louis…planted the seed for his greatness.

What was mostly written about Joe Frazier’s public professional life and challenges may have missed a personal side of him only his family could speak to, his true character. As I look at Rashad (so unassuming) I think I may see some of his characteristics, making his life beyond boxing so fascinating to explore.

LT: What could we learn about your uncle that we do not know?

Rashad: One of the things was he very, very determined and hard worker. He instilled that in his children and those who surrounded him in the family. I don’t know if I took it to heart, these characteristics of hard work, but I became pretty close to him when he gave me a job after high school since I did not go straight to college. ‘I did not want to go; I wanted to work.’

I worked with him for about a year and traveled. That was a pretty good experience for me. I was young, right out of high school, a teenager, so I got allot of tongue lashing from him for not doing things on time. It was like being a ball boy; I was a water boy instead in a sense. In boxing I needed to get all this equipment and stuff prepared for practice. Being new to this boxing game was something that I didn’t get right away. When things where not in place on time, I would get a lashing. Once I got into the groove, my uncle would tell me that I had gotten better with doing those things I needed to do. Learning to get this thing or to get that thing, how to tape his hand, get this equipment and that equipment, after awhile I became pretty good at the routine.

LT: That was great coaching!

Rashad: ‘Many asked why I did not become a boxer…well, I didn’t want that lifestyle.’ There is a piece of equipment called the speed bag, don’t know if you have ever seen it where boxers roll their hands between. I guess my hand and eye coordination was not good enough. As a result, I never wanted to be a boxer, never got into the ring. , friends of mine, who knew I was Joe Frazier’s nephew, got into boxing including my brother and some of my cousins, but I never did. I was a basketball and football player. That’s what I did.

Rashad getting Dad’s advice

Traveling with him was a good experience. NYC was not far from Philadelphia, where there were allot of professional athletes and part of the business and advertising world. I sat in on commercial shootings of my uncle (for promotions) and got a chance to see how they were cut. I also saw allot of people, the hanger’s on, gold diggers both men and women. I think that was revealing. I was mostly an observer. I was still very young and was getting paid (not a whole lot of money). My father objected (to working with my uncle long term). He was a union man ( who loved the union) and said it was ok for me to work for my uncle and to just know that while I may have been into the good times he (Joe Frazier), was not getting benefits (life and health insurance) like the union provided.

LT: It was fantastic that you were so close to your uncle.

Rashad on being the favorite nephew:

Yes and I came to find out later on the truth after my uncle would say ‘you are my favorite nephew’ which I believed until I heard him tell everybody they were his favorites too! I guess he was just showing fairness by having no favorites. Then there were serious (times)… in fact, when I was looking to go to college, opportunity came through him (my uncle). While I was applying to A&T, Morgan State, Cheney State around the Philadelphia area, two representatives from St. Augustine College (Vice President and another gentleman) came to Philadelphia, to convince my uncle to come visit the campus. They ended up talking to me during that visit. They sent me an application which I filled out and was accepted! It happed through my uncle and ‘I am really thankful for that’. Later several years later I transferred to Shaw University as a mass communications major.

Rashad on becoming Muslim and Uncle’s reaction:

I became Muslim. It occurred during the time and when attention was being given to both him (Joe Frazier) and Ali. When my uncle found out, ‘he blew his top’.

LT: Why did you become Muslim, you knew he was struggling with the Ali thing?

Rashad: I became Muslim, because ‘there was something that came upon my heart that I believed’. It had nothing to do with Muhammad Ali or anything. I went into it through the Nation of Islam but at that time, I later learned it wasn’t the whole practice of Islam. At 18 or 19 as part of the Muslim organization, the word spread like wildfire to my relatives, friends, and throughout the neighborhood resulting in a comment like ‘he has gone crazy’. I had a cousin named Alexander from Brooklyn, who went to Lincoln University. One day when visiting, we went by my uncle’s gymnasium; I didn’t join him that time instead choosing to wait outside. He later told me what my uncle had said. ‘It was quick how things turned around’. He said, my uncle said, “you are still my nephew and I still love you”. There were things going on during those turbulent times between him and Muhammad Ali. But as I remember working with my uncle around that time in Philadelphia, Ali was living, I believe, in Cherry Hill, across the river in New Jersey. I remember being in my uncle’s office when he was talking to Muhammad Ali on the telephone, speaking like ‘friends talk on the telephone’, about how could then get this second fight together. I remember them joking around. It was a very friendly conversation. “There was more between them, than I guess the public knew.”

LT: Wonder what Joe Frazier said when he got off the phone?

Rashad on Frazier and Ali talking business:

He said, ‘that was Clay’ on the telephone. I was just all ears, being noisy. There were other people in the office, so I did not ask questions. But from the conversation, I suppose they were talking about how to get a second fight together.

LT: Joe Frazier was the winner of their first fight and was very gracious to agree to a 50-50 split on the fight yielding Ali $2.5 million according to articles. I guess he was feeling good about the relationship at that point. Was there a time that he wasn’t feeling good about that relationship?

Rashad on relationship with Ali going sour:

I recall it was before the last fight. Things went sour after the ‘Thrilla in a Manila’. When Ali called him bad names (like gorilla) and other things said knowing that he (Joe Frazier) had helped him (Ali) out. Did you see the HBO Special called the ‘Thrilla in Manila’? That would give you a real good view of another side of Mohammad Ali, whereby his character may have been called into question…his persona. Of course what he did for Civil Rights was good, but there was another side that changed allot of people’s mind about him, like Dr. Michael Dyson and some others who saw this documentary. They commented ‘wait a minute’, Joe Frazier was just as ‘Black’ as Mohammed Ali. He was as much for the cause. I suggest you look at that documentary.

LT: I think your uncle was shocked that Muhammad Ali had shifted. He (Joe Frazier) understood the drama, but Ali shifted to degrading Joe Frazier racially, while making himself (Ali), I guess, the Messiah of the race describing Joe Frazier as someone representing the status quo, or whatever.

Rashad on meeting Khalilah Ali:

Yes, yes, but you know, through all those years my family had met Ali. For me it was always like he just left. Once I was visiting and would go by my uncle’s gym and they would say, ‘Muhammad Ali just left’. So I never really got a chance to meet him. But I did have a chance to see him and meet his (second) wife, Khalilah Ali, at my uncle’s funeral. In talking with her I found out she had known my sister for quite awhile since traveled to Manila to babysit my uncle’s children. My sister told me she had a chance to meet Khalilah Ali and they hung out. Mrs. Ali had remembered my sister from all those years including the time she went to Zaire when Ali was fighting George Foreman. When I introduced myself, I told her (Khalilah Ali) that I was the Muslim in the family no one talked about. She laughed. It was real nice meeting her.

Rashad on the last time I saw his uncle:

I don’t know if you are going to ask me but the last time I saw him alive was at my aunt’s funeral in South Carolina. Whenever I would talk with him, I would call him ‘Champ’. When you become a champion, everyone refers to you that way as the ‘Champ’ He would always give me the Islamic greeting ‘As-Salamu Alaykum’ (Peace be with you). When I saw him, he was not looking that good.

LT When was that?

Rashad:

It was two years ago. He had back surgery. Come to find out it may have been misdiagnosed. This is documented that his illness may have been misdiagnosed.

Rashad on being related to Joe Frazier twice through relatives:

In fact, Joe Frazier was related to me twice. Joe’s wife was my father’s neice. Joe Frazier wife’s mother and my father were brothers and sisters. (They are no longer together.) ‘So that was his niece he married, and of course my mother is Joe’s sister so we are related twice.’ His children along with my siblings (we) always looked at ourselves almost like brothers and sisters. Yeah…

LT: I will have to rerun that. It was real complicated!

Rashad:

Yeah (ha, ha)…right. I remember the first time, when they first fought, (Joe with Ali), we were listening to it on the radio with my brother and sisters because my mother and father had gone to New York City to see the fight. When announcers were giving the details on the final victory the decision was made that my uncle, Joe Frazier had won the fight. We turned to another station which played Quincy Jones’ song ‘Killer Joe”. I grew fond of that song.

LT: I love that song. I think Valerie Simpson may have song it; she was with him (Quincy) at that time.

Rashad on meeting celebrity friends and important people around Joe Frazier:

Oh yeah, during that time I got a chance to meet some celebrities. He was good friends with Elizabeth Taylor’s husband, Richard Burton. I met Joey Bishop. I got a chance to meet politicians, again I was young and thought, ’who were these people’? When I reflect back I realize ‘wow’ I met those people!

LT: Recall anyone else?

Rashad on meeting Howard Cosell:

I met some local celebrities from Philadelphia. I remember going to a charitable event and met some football players from the NY Jets, I could not remember their names. I was just amazed. I was not a big guy, but they did not look that big, though larger than life on TV, yet only just a little bigger than me! I did meet Howard Cosell in the elevator, during the same event, where we ended up all together momentarily. I guess, since he was not in front of the camera, he was subdued and a nice guy.

Rashad on rides with Joe Frazier when young in South Carolina:

When I was much younger I visited South Carolina. My uncle who was the youngest child, my mother was the eldest, would take me for a drive. I remember the moss hanging from the trees being especially frightening at night when driving on those two road ways.

LT: Did your uncle act fearless at that time? How was that expressed from what you could remember?

Rashad:

He would have me ride in his lap while driving. He would take all of us (my cousins) one at a time to let us ride in his lap to experience driving the car. It was allot of fun. All in all, we knew he was a boxer and just looked at him as our uncle and our relative. My uncle was a real good and gracious man and always kind to me. If I did something wrong, he would take care of it or tell my Mother or my Father. “He had three choices and none of them were good (for me, ha, ha).”

LT: Some kids used to hang out with him growing up because he had a build that would run off bullies. In some ways he must have felt like a protector.

Rashad on Joe Frazier his fans and being patient:

Yep! When I was working or not working with him, people would ask for an autograph, he was real nice to people, signed autographs, stopped and talk to people. I was impatient and ready to go. I always had to make sure he was on time, but he would stop and talk, I waited too, because I did not want him yelling at me!

He had a Cadillac. When I had just gotten my driver’s license, he visited our house and wanted me to park his Cadillac then drive him to his office. I tried to park it but hit a car behind me. When I pulled away the fender came off. Then I thought, ‘I was going to get killed’. The insurance company took care of it. My uncle said when you park a car, don’t let something like that happen again, and it didn’t because I never got to drive his car again!

LT: That’s funny. I used to be a very good parker.

Rashad:

Well I had driven my father’s car before, that Cadillac was so big, I was trying to get it into the spot, but apparently the parking space was too small, so that’s what happened.

LT: Where there family gatherings?

Rashad:

Yes. Family reunions and weddings, I would see him there. Wherever there was a family event, he was there. He was a family guy and he always came by to see my mother, his sister. There was another thing. I don’t know what it is with me. It would always be that someone important had just left (when I arrived). I’m surprised to be talking with you on the phone, I rarely do; however, I would talk to him (my uncle) on the phone. I asked how he was doing; he’d asked why was I in town. I would tell him ‘to see my Mother and if I do not have the chance to see you, to take care Champ’. Regardless of how distant the relatives were, whenever he was invited, he would come. Although, he did not come to my wedding here in North Carolina in and I don’t know why. His wife and my cousins did come when I got married here in Raleigh in 1977.

LT: Did he send you a gift? Talk to you about it?

Rashad:

Later on he met my wife and children. In fact, (as I understand it) they are planning on doing a movie about his life.

LT: You say he was generous. What about your Grandmother?

Rashad:

She was a wonderful woman….92 when she passed away about six years ago. She was a God conscious woman. She was outspoken like allot of African-American women. Her parents came out of slavery. She was a very ‘very’ nice woman, a hard worker, she was a nice, gracious lady and the first that I had seen smoke a pipe.

LT: What kind of pipe did your grandmother have?

Rashad:

I remember it was a short pipe, it looked like hardwood she would put tobacco in there and light it and I would say “wow”. In later years, she became recognizable from a distance by her pipe and cane.

LT: Did she stay in Beauford, South Carolina?

Rashad:

Yes, she stayed in Beauford, South Carolina.

LT: Your uncle was told by his father that he had to leave when he was very young because he was always be ready to fight, according to one of the articles about him.

Rashad:

Did you know they have recognized him with a one of their favorite sons awards in South Carolina?

LT: Did he go down to get it? He was invited and he attended?

Rashad:

Yes, Yes.

LT: I am really curious about the gym he managed. Tell me about the Gymnasium.

Rashad:

It is a furniture store now. I think they are going to make it a historical landmark in Philadelphia. There is controversial stature about a mystical figure of ‘Rocky’ and not one for Joe Frazier. So the mayor of Philadelphia and former Governor of Pennsylvania, Ed Rendell, also formerly the mayor was at my uncle’s funeral, said they were going to have a statue made of Joe Frazier. Of course Jesse Jackson was there and said there would be a statue to commemorate my uncle for what he had done for the city of Philadelphia. ‘They are apparently working on that; it came out of their mouths.’

My home was about six blocks from the gymnasium. I would walk there; my uncle had his office and apartment there as well. It was very nice, but I don’t know what happened. He lost that property, I don’t know… Hopefully they will make it a historical landmark.

LT: I think I may look that up and see how that is going. I am interested in historical landmarks in African American communities. It would be good to know more about the building itself.

Rashad:

It was something else before it became a gymnasium. It was refurbished to make it into a gymnasium. It was a good gym for people who wanted to get into boxing; they would go there and train. The facility was a training ground for young boxers professional as well as amateurs. It was useful in developing boxers out of that building.

LT: So what did the inside look like?

Rashad:

It had a boxing ring, office, locker rooms, punching bags around the walls all that.

LT: It was a little economic engine?

Rashad:

Yes, he hired trainers, including maintenance people.

LT: Who did you strike a relationship with that was on your uncle’s staff?

Rashad:

My uncle’s chauffer was Lee Grant. I had a good relationship with him. He was very ‘very’ funny guy, always cracking jokes. He also had a security guard, a former police officer. On one hand the driver would tell jokes and the other, the security/body guard, would be serious.

LT: Anything else?

Rashad:

I was surprise that at his funeral, he got a real good send off. Muhammad Ali was there, the minister for Whitney Houston’s funeral was there and sang, and of course Jesse Jackson. They had video tributes from Mike Tyson, the actor Mickey Roarke (apparently a good friend of my uncle) and believe it or not Donald Trump. In attendance were allot of boxers from PHILLY, which was known as the capital for boxers. There were many family and friends, so he had a good send off.

LT: What would the one word or so you would want the nation to know about your uncle Joe Frazier?

Rashad:

Determination….he was very determined.

LT: Thank you Rashad Abdul-Muhamin you would make your uncle the ‘Champ’ proud.

Written by Lillian Thompson for Trends Navigator newsletter © Trends Management Consulting, Inc. Photo by James R. Mitchell, Jr. of Brooklyn, New York.

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"Obamacare": The Great ...

2012-03-28T20:55:13-04:00

“Obamacare"- the Great Debate

Like a lot of other people I am watching the proceedings at the Supreme Court with a lot of interest. Unlike many others I am concerned that if the Court simply elects to throw out the law I am concerned about plan B.

I have been involved with health care in at least a peripheral sense for better than 30 years, but only anecdotally as a consumer. As a practicing human resources manager and executive I was involved as a provider. We didn’t of course directly provide health care and health care management services to our employees, but we had a very important role as we paid for those services for our employees and their dependents.

I recognize I am dating myself, but I remember when health care benefits were part of what we referred to as fringe benefits- an ancillary cost to providing competitive wages to our employees. In those days with inflation and wages going up at 13 and 14% per year we barely kept our eye on the ball in this area. Then a funny thing happened- wage inflation slowed down, but medical inflation did not. It suddenly hit our radar screen that this fringe benefit wasn’t so fringy anymore. That trend has continued with the cost of providing health and retirement benefits now consuming a huge part of most organizations talent acquisition and retention costs, especially in the public sector.

There are a number of factors that cause the U.S. to have one of the highest cost/lowest efficiency health management and health care delivery systems in industrial societies. We spend well over 17% of our GDP annually delivering health care and that number continues to move up- not down.

By contrast Switzerland spends 11% and Taiwan 7%.

Some of the factors causing that include technology, distribution, inefficiency, and a lot of other contributors. Bluntly over 60% of our health care expenditures are directly related to patient/consumer behavior. We do a poor job of managing heath and involving consumers in a meaningful way in the management and responsibility for their own health.

Our outcomes aren’t particularly spectacular either; while it is true that if you can afford it some of the best care in the world is available in the U.S., but our national health measured by mortality and morbidity as an average is pretty mediocre.

We are consistent, a recent study by the International Federation of Health Plans examined the costs of 23 different medical procedures ranging from routine checkups to MRIs to Lipitor and found that the costs for the services was higher in the U.S. than any other participating country for 22 out of 23 services. No other participating country currently spends more than 12% of GDP in providing care. That means we are spending 41% more than the least efficient of those other countries.

When I was new to the game, my employers used the standard solutions to address many of these issues:

Begin a long and arduous process of “cost sharing” with our employees ranging from methods like higher deductibles and co-pays to eliminating coverage and scaling back coverage for retirees, dependents and other groups.

Cutting out the “middle man” and moving to self- insurance to gain administrative savings.

Some enlightened employers embraced managed care pretty aggressively. By managing health care delivery more efficiently we could affect costs.

I was in that group. Not being that smart and having recently been exposed to new concepts like total quality management and process improvement I didn’t understand why we couldn’t apply many of those techniques to the management of health and the delivery of health care. I even promoted more radical thinking- actually engaging and involving employees and their dependents in the management of their own health and health care. The interesting thing is that we saw significant positive outcomes not only directly to our bottom line, but indirectly as morale improved and employees felt more engaged and valued- go figure.

I recognize that may not sound particularly enlightened today, but this was 30 years ago.

One of the things I began to understand back then is a concept that we now refer to as social literacy. The truth is the process of delivering, pricing, and administering health care in the U.S. is incredibly opaque, obscure, and arcane. It scares and confuses the average person enormously. It has a language all of its own spoken of in hushed tones using acronyms and language that shuts people out.

There are other factors at play as well that the Average American has little or no appreciation or understanding of as it relates to health care.

One of those concepts is what we call adverse selection. Adverse selection is what the principle of insurance tries to mitigate or correct for across a group. At its most simplistic it means that we only want to pay for a service when we need it rather than preventatively. Given a choice only sick people or people who anticipate a need for a service want to pay for it. A great illustration is for any of us who have had the opportunity to pay for closer to the true costs of providing health insurance either by virtue of self -employment or losing our employer based coverage and looking at paying for coverage under COBRA.

The interesting thing about COBRA is that even though there is sticker shock you are still looking at coverage that is advantageous both in its breadth and depth and in its cost as you are seeing a group rate.

Most individual policies offer much more limited coverage and much higher rates. To illustrate the effects of adverse selection even more graphically the sickest 5% of our population account for 50% of the total health care expenditures.

We have actually added to that issue through the contraction of the economy. As more Americans lose employer based coverage the solution in many cases is to do without. What the result is that much of our health care delivery has shifted to emergency rooms to treat situations that have hit critical mass. To compound that issue even further much of that care is delivered by not for profit organizations or public institutions so the provider is not reimbursed. The effect is those costs get shifted to those with insurance or paying patients just like the costs of shop lifting gets passed along.

We have also done very little over the last three decades about managing demand. Obesity, direct and indirect costs related to work related stress and economic insecurity and other factors costs us billions annually.

Studies show that literally 60% of health care related costs in the U.S. are directly related to and can be affected by changes in individual behavior; to put it simply taking proactive rather than reactive action.

So you might ask yourself why we aren’t addressing this. I would posture several reasons:

Role definition. I have heard and continue to hear from employers for over 30 years that “we aren’t in the health care business”. While I don’t disagree entirely I could make the same argument about working with a key supplier about components in your manufacturing or production process. What the total quality movement, or TQM taught us is that by partnering with key suppliers we could improve our own efficiency and sustainability.

Systemic versus silo thinking. In truth very few people think systemically and have a full appreciation for how things work together. We “get” our part.

Inertia. Changing behavior and patterns is hard. Few of us will make meaningful changes without a crisis as a catalyst. If my employer has always “taken care of” this issue I am not inclined to find it broken. Previous solutions included off shoring, outsourcing, etc.

Partial solutions. I do not see the current plan as a panacea. One of my biggest concerns is that it addresses almost exclusively the supply side of the house- the delivery of care. It does little to address the management of health or encourage individuals to participate in the management of their health other than paying for care.

Flawed models. Our current financial model is deeply rooted in health care delivery. You get paid for delivering care not preventative medicine.

As you might suspect I am a pretty big advocate of wellness and managing health not delivering health care as a singular solution. The best health management strategies incorporate several dimensions:

Behavioral/lifestyle changes

Exercise and movement

Ongoing communication and consumer engagement

Reinforcement and incentivization

If you look at those elements neither the health care industry or government is well positioned to address all of those elements. If on the other hand we look at the issue systemically and government, health care, the educational system, and employers combine to create a collaborative integrated model we can see results and see them pretty quickly.

Integrated models in several thought leading organizations are yielding per capita reductions ranging from 5 to 12% per annum in as short a time frame as 12 to 18 months! That represents literally billions of dollars annually.

My point here is that when the Court decides which way to land on this issue we need to ask ourselves – “What is Plan B?”

We are facing a time in our history and society where many of the old models don’t work.

C level compensation the last couple years has increased an average of 20% per annum while the average American has seen a 2% increase in their wages, but we have people who don’t understand the anger and the frustration of the “99%”.

The market is up, but unemployment and underemployment remain very high.

I am passionately committed to concepts like personal responsibility, personal competency and a free market society.

I don’t want to see more government, especially in areas I feel they are not well positioned, well informed, or accountable for outcomes as well as process.

When the Court makes its decision it has the luxury of being held harmless from providing any alternative solutions or asking themselves the impact on our economy or quality of life. They can address this issue entirely in the abstract- an academic exercise. Unfortunately if you are an employer or consumer the same can’t be said.

I in candor find much of the political rhetoric we are being subjected to on both sides of the aisle as being tiresome and bad theater. I guess I just wish I was seeing a bit more focus on solutions and a little less investment in pyrrhic victories.

I would like to see a little more execution and execution as defined by Larry Bossidy-

The ability to mesh strategy with reality, align people with goals, and achieve the promised result.

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The Porous Nature of Co...

2012-03-23T13:46:11-04:00

On April 17th, 2011 and article for Applied and Environmental Microbiology was written about fungal species and water damaged building materials. "Associations between Fungal Species and Water-Damaged Buildings". It was copyrighted in 2011 by the American Society for Microbiology. (see www.ncbi.nim.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3131638/?tool=pubmed )( see Google www.ncbi.nlm.gov/pubmed/21531835 )Note, it was published ahead of print on April 29th, 2011. This study was done in many diverse places in Denmark and and Greenland, both residences and businesses were investigated. There were five members of the study. They are Birgette Andersen, Jens C. Frisvad, lb Sondergaard, lb S. Rasmussen, and Lisbeth S. Larsen. The first three worked for The Center for Microbial Biotechnology, for the University of Denmark and the last two worked at The Danish Technological Institute, in Denmark.

I will use the results of this study to assert that concrete is the exact method by which molds (which are the same as fungi) enter structures. Of course molds enter via other ways however the focus of this article is respect to molds and concrete. I will show, by direct statistical evidence from this study that molds enter buildings in a specific manner. That is, they are "wicked up" from the ground, where they grow, into the structures above them. Note many buildings have concrete slabs (or pads) that form the basis for the structure. I will use the results from this study to demonstrate that fact. The authors of this study did not consider this conclusion from the data that they (the authors of the study, sited above ) in fact collected. The author of this article concluded it, having already discovered this fact, and discovered this study and used it's results to back up his conclusions.

First, however lets look at the basic idea it is that many molds grow in the soils. This is because they have an environment where moisture, air and material that has been alive. For example humus lies in the soil from its past life as a living organism. This humus is the molds food source, in addition there exists water and air contained in the soil. It is also known that the mold spores are very small, mircroscopic in size. Concrete is well known to be porous to water. Thus, what occurs here is that the microscopic molds attach to the water in the soil and then are carried up to the floor of the structure where they are found to grow, now inside the building.

The study looked at some 5,300 surface samples of molds by means of V8 contact plates from materials with visible fungal growth. They then contrasted both the quality and quantitative frequencies of the building materials in the water damaged structures. In table form the datum was displayed and the results are very striking in that there are 18 molds listed as being present in the study. (see www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3131638/table/T3/ ). An astounding 17 of the 18 molds listed grew in soils. This high incidence of soil molds is evidence that the authors assumption is correct. Also, the incidence of molds overall on the table is an indication that the assumption is correct. One other fact is pronounced and that is on table 1. ( see www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3131638/table/T1/ ). This table contrasts 12 different types of building materials including linoleum. It is clear (note linoleum is listed LAST on the table with a quality of 2 and a quantity of 3.5 these are out of some 5,353 samples). The quan score was listed at 3.5. What this implies is that linoleum has no porous nature as concrete does and lies as a covering over the concrete, thus the mold could not get into the structures interiors. Note, in building construction linoleum is generally glued to the concrete floor.

Given the above data, the author concludes that a novel and newly dscovered way molds find their way into buildings is now stated. This conclusion has wide ramifications in that molds do not just find there way into water damaged buildings, they find their way into all buildings that have concrete slabs for their construction. Thus, this study implies the need to take action with respect to not allowing molds to enter inside spaces of structures. A final note, if the building is built on a slab of concrete and has a doorway leading to the structure then molds via the air will get into the attached structure. Moreover, if the structure (even a high rise one) has a concrete slab in the basement then the molds can find their way into the offices or apartments above via the elevators or the heating and cooling systems. One way to insure this does not happen is to live or work on a higher floor that is isolated from the concrete, for example a second floor of a building that has a concrete pad but no air contact with the concrete. Note, if the structure is built using a crawl space then the molds do not enter the spaces above and this article is moot. The idea that building codes need to be reflective of the danger involved in allowing bare concrete to exist, in that form, without a covering that will stop the water and associated molds to be "wicked up" into a structure. Thus, there will be a cost associated with covering the concrete surfaces and there will be an associated health benefit for the people who inhabit these structures. Finally, new information with respect to humans and molds harmful and toxic effects on them has been well documented, in particular for discovering the harm molds can have on humans can be found on Bestthinking.com by this author.

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Is Dual Use Bird Flu Re...

2012-03-27T12:08:48-04:00

A pandemic is one of the biggest challenges in public health. One can only imagine if the bird flu, polio, anthrax, Ebola, Legionnaire’s disease, smallpox, or SARS could create the deadliest scenario in history. Currently, the H5N1 bird flu, which first surfaced in Hong Kong in 1997 killing six people, is of special interest to public health officials.

The bird flu does not frequently infect humans, but in nature it can spread from birds to mammals. The virus has not acquired the mutations enabling the spread from mammal to mammal potentially leading to a pandemic. In order to better understand mammal to mammal transmission, NIH funded research which led to creating five mutations in two genes producing a highly transmissible form of the virus.

Wearing respirators and full body suits, the researchers introduced the virus in to the nasal passages of ferrets which subsequently infected other ferrets through airborne transmission. Understandably, news of the H5N1 bird flu research raised public concerns. What is at stake here is that compared to the 2.5 percent mortality rate of the 1918 Spanish influenza which killed roughly 50 million people, according to the World Health Organization the H5N1 bird flu virus has a roughly 60 percent mortality rate.

Bird Flu Research Fallout

When research has consequences of this magnitude, it is the responsibility of governments and public health officials to take proactive steps. Subsequently, several developments have taken place. The fallout includes a moratorium on research and censorship on publishing the details of the research.

Going forward in a new age of biosecurity risks, governments and public health officials must consider the possibility of a pandemic created by human manipulation of these deadly viruses. What if the mutated viruses accidentally escaped from the lab? Some basic scientific research has dual use applications. As one can use research on nuclear energy for nuclear weapons, they can also use research on viruses for bioweapons. What if terrorists were able to steal the viruses from a lab?

H5N1 bird flu research is not the first case where policy makers and health officials evaluated the risks and benefits of biological research. At the 1975 Asilomar Conference, leaders in the genetic engineering field met to discuss how to wisely proceed with research inside the laboratory. Scientists developed self-imposed safety guidelines for lab research. After adopting a voluntary code of self-governance, the technology has remained harmless.

Similarly, both teams of scientists involved with the bird flu research have agreed to suspend their research indefinitely. Interestingly, media coverage reveals that the researchers used Biosafety Level Three (BSL-3) labs, not BSL-4 which has the highest containment rating. What is it that the average citizen is supposed to take from this message, pandemics killing millions of people are not the worst possible scenario?

In preparing vaccines for the next pandemic created by natural causes, cooperation among researchers by sharing their findings in public databases, articles, e-mails, and conferences will in theory provide faster results. NIH‘s Public Access Policy mandates that funded research is placed in the public database PubMed. A bill introduced in the House, The Research Works Act H.R. 3699, aims to reverse NIH’s policy.

Past Dual Use Biological Research

As genome sequencing and synthesizing technologies became more affordable and powerful, researchers have performed research on deadly organisms and published the research details. In 2001, Australian scientists reported in the Journal of Virology that while developing a contraceptive vaccine to control rodent populations, researchers had inserted a gene for an immune system protein into a mousepox virus. This unexpectedly made the normally mild virus lethal in mice, even to those that were naturally resistant to mouse pox or that they had vaccinated against it.

Then, in 2002 a group of researchers at SUNY led by virologist Eckard Wimmer, assembled a DNA template for the RNA poliovirus using a published nucleotide sequence from the internet and from customized mail order oligonucleotides, DNA sequences 50-100 base pairs long. The synthesized poliovirus caused paralysis in animals confirming that scientists could recreate the deadly virus from its nucleotide sequence. Commenting on the potential for terrorism, Wimmer said the process is so tedious that terrorists would find it much easier to use an existing virus found in nature.

In prior research on influenza viruses, scientists were extremely interested in the 1918 pandemic created by the Spanish influenza virus which killed an estimated 50 million people. Most people have some immunity to the 1918 virus because they have exposure to more recent strains partially derived from it. However, the CDC reports even with current vaccines and antiviral drugs, it is possible that a new strain of the virus could potentially kill over 100 million people. So, scientists began searching for answers to several puzzling questions. What are its origins? Why was it so lethal? Why did some waves of the virus target healthy people while other waves target the most vulnerable; the young, elderly, and infirm? Nearly half of the victims were in the 20-40 age group. Why do some viruses hit at certain times of year? Why was the death rate much higher than expected?

Scientists went directly to the pathogen that was so destructive during the 1918 pandemic for answers. Jeffery Taubenberger of the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology attempted to sequence the virus, but preserved tissue samples from victims which were stored at his institute had degraded. Fortunately, researchers were able to recover viral RNA from lung tissue samples found in an Inuit woman preserved in the northern Alaska permafrost. In 2005, a group of scientists were able to determine the genetic sequence of the responsible pathogen including its eight genes.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) used the genetic sequence to synthesize the virus in the laboratory. After the researchers created a synthetic virus, in a matter of days it killed mice and chicken embryos in the lab. In a controversial move, the federal government labs placed Taubenberger’s viral sequence in an online database maintained by NIH. After deliberating on covering the story the editors of Nature and Science also decided to publish articles giving the details of how scientists sequenced and brought to life the lethal virus. Both journals decided the benefits of publication outweighed the risks. According to Donald Kennedy, the former editor-in-chief of Science, scientists needed access to the research as they try to develop vaccines and antiviral medications against potential future pandemic agents.

Then in 2006, James Randerson, a science reporter with The Guardian, investigated if it was possible to order the biological parts necessary for synthesizing a deadly virus. [1] Acting responsibly, Randerson contacted synthetic biologist Drew Endy for advice on the story. For safety reasons, they discussed a slightly altered partial sequence of the smallpox virus. The reporter then ordered the partial sequence via the internet to see what would happen. The supplier delivered the sequences not aware it coded for a destructive organism. In response, similar to Wimmer, a group of scientists and policy analysts disclosed in a report financed by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, that terrorists would find it easier to work with naturally occurring pathogens than synthesizing them.

In these cases, science journals decided the benefit of publication, potentially developing vaccines and antiviral medications, outweighed the risks. In addition, an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation report determined that terrorists would find it easier to work with naturally occurring pathogens than synthesizing them.

Fisking Anti-Censorship Arguments

Dual use biological research requires oversight on a case by case basis. Until H5N1 bird flu research, the public’s concerns did not faze the scientific and publishing communities enough to pause and rethink strategies for disseminating information. The current situation has unfortunately placed the publishing community in a dilemma of either creating a barrier to research that leads to a vaccine or either providing a how-to manual to terrorists.

The U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB), created after the 2001 anthrax attacks, asked two major science journals not to publish the key details of the bird flu experiments, rather edited versions. The NSABB decided that in publishing the full details of the research the potential risk is high and outweighs the benefits.

Even with the possibility of creating a pandemic, some analysts have argued in favor of publishing the full details of the research. Their arguments include science requires transparency and openness to operate [2], the ability to publish cutting edge science papers is important in the recruitment of researchers and the process of vetting scientists is too complicated [3], and that censorship will encourage theft and hacking [4].

However, history reveals physicists have had restricted dissemination of their work for decades. Take, for example, the Manhattan Project. Also, the Defense Department and NASA’s space program currently operate successfully without openness and transparency. With censored physics research, it was possible to successfully recruit the best and brightest physicists leading to groundbreaking results in defense, space exploration, and nuclear engineering.

Policy makers have used Presidential Executive Orders and Acts of Congress to restrict information from the general public. In the vetting process, the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 made it possible for the U.S. government to allow private companies to obtain restricted technical information and exchange information with foreign nations through multiple levels of security clearance. [5]

It is not only the right of the government to censor or classify certain information, but its duty to protect the general welfare of its citizens. To ensure compliance with restricted access, those responsible for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information are accomplices and held accountable for any terrorist’s acts.

It is not obvious why the average person wants to know the technical details of making destructive viruses or even needs to know. It is, however, obvious why terrorists would want to know. Given the magnitude of the consequences of a pandemic created either naturally or by humans, censorship or redacted publication of the research until safeguards and countermeasures are in place for any high risk scenarios relating to public health is a wise decision.

The Future of Dual Use Biological Research

Public health officials and policy makers are now in the unenviable position of deciding how to move forward not only with H5N1 bird flu research, but setting a precedent for future dual use biological research. Adequate oversight will require international cooperation and flexibility in the oversight of funding, censorship, and biosafety.

Although the details of the bird flu research will temporarily remain secret, contrary to the NSABB’s recommendations a panel of WHO experts has concluded that the benefits of public access to the details of the bird flu research outweigh the risk of bioterrorism. [6] Paul Keim, chair of the NSABB, hopes to develop a protocol that enables sharing the research with responsible scientists who request it. With sensitive physics research, censorship of technical information varied in its duration and the NSABB could follow this successful strategy and release the research details at the appropriate time.

Prior to funding dual use biological research, it is NIH’s responsibility to take more proactive steps in anticipating the public’s reaction. In order to address public concerns, before funding and performing research on these deadly viruses it is important that mechanisms are in place to ensure research labs provide maximum biosafety precautions and for disseminating the details of the research. Security analyst Lynn Klotz suggests that in the future the first step is to have an advisory panel discuss and agree that performing the dual use research is actually a good idea.

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Top Producer by Norb Vo...

2012-03-30T13:01:22-04:00

THE TRUST, my next novel will be in stores July 2012. It is the second book in my Grove O'Rourke series of financial thrillers. TOP PRODUCER introduces Grove O'Rourke. Enjoy.

- Norb Vonnegut

Chapter One

Six weeks ago I was a rising star at a white-shoe investment bank and brokerage firm. I was Babe Ruth on my way from Boston to New York City, John F. Kennedy connecting with crowds during the presidential elections. The markets were rocking during the first half of 2007. And it seemed clear that one day I would become a titan of finance, a fixture on the business pages of The New York Times.

My job is the occupation formerly known as "stockbroker." But it has been years since anyone called me that. "Stockbroker" sounds oily. Glengarry Glen Ross. The word makes clients twitch. Even brokerage houses, institutions that profit from legions of smiling, dialing, cold-calling robotrons, cast about for less unctuous titles. Stockbrokers are "investment professionals" over at Goldman. Morgan Stanley can't decide whether its people are "investment representatives" or "financial advisers." Another competitor is toying with "private bankers." After eight years in the industry, I have grown numb to all the angst.

I focus on a different name. Wall Street calls its most successful salespeople "top producers." Think of us as rainmakers, the folks who butter the bread. We are a brash bunch at the office. We have opinions about everything and say what we want, for we understand three axioms about our industry.

One: Investors hire advisers with strong points of view. The more impassioned our convictions, the better.

Two: As long as we generate revenues, bosses tolerate our quirks and leave us the hell alone.

Three: Wall Street firms pay ridiculous money to top producers. And that, my friend, is a beautiful thing if you've ever been poor.

I was a top producer, the captain of a cramped cubicle rigged with a twenty-one-inch flat-screen monitor and an even bigger television hanging from the ceiling. Around my desk the stacks of investment research often crested five feet before toppling like dominos into nearby aisles.

Who needs space to make money?

I managed ideas, not clutter. My job was to cut through all the market chaos and sniff out the truth. Wall Street coughs up so much investment phlegm. If I weren't on the phone guarding clients, "my guys" to use the industry vernacular, I wasn't making money. Bold, opinionated, you bet. I had all the answers and then some.

On hedge funds: "Would you let someone play Vegas with your money and give them twenty percent of the winnings?"

On McKinsey's alumni, the ex-consultants infiltrating the ranks of Wall Street's management: "Fucking revenge of the nerds. One day, those people will suck our industry dry of testosterone and everything good."

On money management: "Wall Street is the only place in the world where thirty seconds swing ten million dollars into place. Try buying real estate for the same amount and you'll grow old as lawyers negotiate the fine points."

Finance was fast. It was furious. And I thrived on the frenzied pace. I had broken into the big leagues of capitalism and brought my "A" game to the office every day. So I thought. The last six weeks changed everything. My world unraveled the night Charlie Kelemen hosted his wife's birthday bash in the New England Aquarium. Best friend, savior, a man who wore Brioni suits the way sweet Italian sausages split their fatty innards over open flames—that was Charlie Kelemen. He did so much for me. He did so much for all his friends. I still can't believe what Charlie did to us.

The signs were all there. We should have seen it coming.

Chapter Two

"No, Grove. It's not happening," Charlie argued over the phone, his voice firm.

I just had to persist. And now I live with the guilt. "The Aquarium is the perfect place to surprise Sam."

"Won't happen. I'm hiring a yacht to cruise around Manhattan. It's romantic. It's glamorous."

"It's boring. Been there. Done that."

"But the Aquarium is in Boston," Charlie objected.

"What do you care?" Whenever I argued, my faint Southern drawl intensified. "You almost live there now. You're always visiting your in-laws on Beacon Hill."

"Sam's parents would rather fly here. They love New York City."

"Trust me. Boston gives them home court advantage. They can help with the preparations. Besides—"

"Besides what?" he interrupted.

"It's the only way to surprise Sam. She'll never suspect Boston. You know how she is."

"A card-carrying snoop," he chuckled with a touch of Truman Capote in his voice and maybe a bit of Curly from the Three Stooges, too. His nervous laughter signaled fading resolve.

"Everybody knows she's a snoop." Repeating key words was a proven sales technique. By emphasizing "snoop," I was selling hard, employing all those time-tested skills of a top producer.

"What about all our New York friends?" Charlie asked without conviction. His objections were dropping like Custer's men at Little Bighorn.

"Charlie, you could fill the Aquarium with your friends from Boston. But we'll all come from New York. Tell everybody a road trip is the only way to keep Sam's party a surprise."

"You're right," he agreed, his surrender complete. "I like it."

That was how it all started. That was how I helped my short, squat friend with the humongous head plan his wife's ill-fated birthday party.

* * * * *

The Giant Ocean Tank at the New England Aquarium soars four stories high, contains 200,000 gallons of salt water, and hosts about 150 different kinds of creatures from the sea. The names of its marine inhabitants attest to the fertile imaginations of oceanographers. The "Horse-eye Jack" and the "Scrawled Cowfish" suggest rustic Montana ranches rather than gilled beasts from the murky abyss. The "Sergeant Major" and "Blackbar Soldierfish" hint at distant military campaigns during the height of British imperialism. Some monikers refer to guns, like the "Permit" and the "Sargassum Triggerfish," a nasty little creature prone to biting the staff during feedings. Taken together, these names paint an exotic world thriving under the sea's endless cover.

Or perhaps, they foreshadow dangers from the deep. There are three "Sand Tigers," two males and one female. These sharks, each with three thousand spiny teeth arranged in eight jagged rows, undoubtedly reign as the tank's scariest residents. Their fierce eyes betray the absence of souls, black pupils floating in yellow-gray irises. To them, every vision is a potential meal. No matter how often biologists feed Carcharias taurus, they cannot suppress the sharks' natural instinct to hunt. Smaller fish sometimes disappear, victims of endless appetites.

I can spend hours gazing into the saltwater prism from every angle and depth. The wide, ever-rising footpath corkscrews round and round the Giant Ocean Tank all the way to the surface. Fish of every shape and color slowly circle the monstrous Caribbean coral, sometimes breaking ranks from their languid order to flip here or paddle there. They are my Svengalis from the sea. They whisk me from the day-to-day chaos of my world, away from the hoot and holler, break-ins, and other communication tools with names that hint of Wall Street's violent discourse. Ordinarily, I can lose myself in the tranquility of the tank's infinite views as finned creatures keep time to a silent beat only they can hear.

But not on Sam's birthday that Friday night in mid-July. By 8:45 P.M. the cavernous Aquarium rocked from laughter and jazz and the randy vibes that accompany endless tides of cocktails. Men in black ties scoped out the cleavage, their keen eyes probing one chest after another. Women in evening gowns knocked back cosmopolitans, their libidos rousing from alcohol and the dance floor's musky scents. I doubted anyone else in the crowd had been celibate for the last eighteen months. The jostle and the noise, however, made it impossible to dwell on this dark thought. The five hundred voices inside the atrium roared like coastal thunder on a stormy night.

There was one constant among the conversations. At Charlie's parties, always a bacchanalian mix of liquor and music, guests inevitably dropped their guards. Squeezing through the crowd, I overheard it all that night. In no particular order, with no particular focus, the conversations played like sound-bite medleys from reality television.

"Don't look now, but the duct tape on her boobs is showing. . . ."

Ó ÒThree more drinks, and weÕre out of here. . . .Ó

"Did you hear about Burkie? He wore a baseball hat right after getting Botoxed, and now he has permanent ridges on his forehead. Looks like a fucking Klingon. . . ."

"I bet that redhead is going commando. . . ."

"Her dress is so last year. . . ."

"Another Botero butt . . ."

"Blonde at twelve o'clock. I need my wingman. . . ."

When I finally reached the bar, a tall brunette with great bangs ordered a frozen margarita and told her friend, "Jill, you look fabulous. How did you ever fit into that dress?"

"Colonic irrigation," Jill whispered into the din. "Speaking of which, I really need to find the ladies' room."

Too much information. Jill scuttled past me with purpose, her singular focus betraying the gotta-go shuffle known to all ages. She had been oblivious to my eavesdropping.

Great Bangs, however, caught me red-handed. She smirked once and then let me off the hook. "Hey, Red," she said, referring to my strawberry-blonde hair, "I'm free Monday of next week. If that doesn't work for you, we can make it Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday." She wore a strapless royal blue evening gown with a plunging neckline. The cut made me wonder what was holding everything up.

I struggled to say something witty, but my brain failed to deliver. No brilliant repartee. No charming chow mein. Instead, I flashed my most winsome smile.

Great Bangs, undeterred, sipped greenish froth through a straw. Her large brown eyes held mine with the promise of an excellent evening. Maybe more. The look said, Step up to the plate and swing for the fences. Really tempting. But even after eighteen months, I wasn't ready.

Frankly, the penguins made better conversationalists than me. In the vast reservoir surrounding the Giant Ocean Tank, they all joined the chatter. The little blues squawked that their smelt was too fishy or their sardines too salty. The African penguins cajoled passing humans to exercise civil disobedience. "Throw us snacks," they demanded in penguin-speak. "Throw us snacks." The rockhoppers gossiped about their neighbors and griped about getting fat. All three breeds pummeled the staff with incessant orders. "We could use a few lounge chairs down here. And bring some rum cocktails while you're at it. Maybe a Frisbee or two." Like the party on the landing above, there was no symmetry on penguin beach, just kinetic revelry for the joy of life.

* * * * *

At 9:15 P.M. the band's lead singer tapped his microphone and called us to attention. His black hair looked like it had been styled with a garden tool, possibly a rake but more likely a weed whacker. "We're turning things over to our host," he said, slurring his words with hazy musician cool.

From every nook and cranny of the New England Aquarium, five hundred people searched for Charlie Kelemen. At five-six and 230 pounds, Charlie waddled more than he walked. No matter. Friends and fans overlooked the layers. His star persona would have done justice to the lankiest matinee idols from the 1950s. We became silent as he approached the microphone.

The penguins, conversely, saluted his arrival with raucous cheers. Charlie's rocking gait, black trousers, and white dinner jacket made him look like their reigning alpha male. The penguins whooped. They hooted. They hailed Charlie and hollered, "More snacks, Master. More snacks."

Charlie blushed, either from the exertion of walking or the realization he was on center stage. Cherubic and pink, he radiated charm and glowed with good-natured warmth. "Thank you," he said. "Thank you for celebrating Sam's birthday tonight. I know it was a total surprise."

He panned a Yeah, right expression for the crowd, and laughter reverberated through the cavernous room. No doubt she had found out. Everyone agreed Sam was a snoop.

The ! sh, circling methodically in the tank, distracted me. A large sting-ray wove through the water with an undulating motion. A portly grouper followed. Its fat, permanently pursed lips looked like a collagen experiment gone awry.

"Sam, where are you?" Charlie squeaked. "Come over here, sweetie." The crowds parted. We found Sam. Jet-black hair, cobalt blue eyes, and creamy white skin, she had the coloring of a Siberian husky. Tonight Sam wore a light green gown that ballooned into a bulb over her toned, tight legs. The silky fabric, petals stitched from the Garden of Eden, offered a refreshing alternative to the funereal black shades of most formal garb.

Earlier, Sam had laughed about her out! t. "Grove, I feel like a cabbage. But you know Charlie."

"He loves to decorate you."

With that, Sam fussed my bow tie into shape. "Mr. O'Rourke," she started coquettishly, "you're thirty-two. You're handsome. You've got sweet little hips."

"Thanks, I think, Mrs. Kelemen."

"All the girls are talking about you," she continued. "I won't be happy unless you ask somebody out on a date. Here. Tonight. You have your orders."

Now with the overheads dimmed, a lone spotlight celebrated Sam's approach. Girlfriends pecked her cheeks as she strode to the stage like Angelina Jolie collecting an Oscar. Men whistled. And from the Giant Ocean Tank, creature-like shadows splashed across our faces. No doubt Charlie had hired top-notch professionals to arrange the lighting. He had a flair for the dramatic.

"Tonight," Charlie continued, "a special guest has joined us from the teeming bazaars of Turkey. Her name is Neylan, which means "Fulfilled Wish." Charlie pronounced the words lasciviously.

All through the New England Aquarium, five hundred people chanted in unison, "Woo-hoo!"

"Before Neylan performs," Charlie said, "I need the men in the audience to help me set the right mood. Where are you, Crunch?"

The Kelemen family hairdresser, six-one and buff, emerged from the shadows just as Sam found her place next to Charlie. Crunch, scrutinized by five hundred partiers, pushed a hand truck loaded with two huge boxes piled on top of each other. He parked and winked flirtatiously at anyone, male or female, who dared to catch his eye. His red-sequined dinner jacket glittered brazenly under the spots.

With flair and an air of mystery, Charlie reached into the top box and pulled out a red fez made from the same sequined material as Crunch's dinner jacket. He inspected it at arm's length, gingerly treating the hat like a priceless relic from an ancient crusade. He donned the fez, positioned it with a rakish tilt, and warned the crowd, "No cracks about Casablanca please." He really did look like a short version of Sydney Greenstreet.

Crunch sneaked up on Charlie from behind, reached his red-sequined arms around the wide girth, and patted the fat man's titanic gut. Almost as though choreographed, Charlie pulled a burlap-colored burka from the second box and backhanded it to Crunch. The stylist quickly donned the burka and raked his fingers, open like sideways Vs, across the eye slits. First the left and then the right.

The crowd guffawed. The cultural reference made me queasy, but it was classic Charlie. He pushed to the edge and then some.

"Ladies," Charlie called, "these burkas aren't for you." He paused and waited for his words to take hold. "I want each of you to put one on your man. Let's see how they feel." With that statement Charlie won every woman's allegiance in the Aquarium. Crunch reached into the boxes and rapid-fired burkas into the crowd. I nabbed one for myself.

"Ladies," Charlie continued, "these are for you." The two men reached into the other box and pulled out more fezzes. Again, they tossed the gear to the guests. Sam donned a fez and watched in bemusement.

"Now, if everyone will step back," directed Charlie, "we'll invite Neylan to get started. I need a seat for Sam," he said to no one in particular. Alex Romanov, a hedge fund manager with lights-out investment returns, delivered a chair and gestured for Sam to sit.

The lead singer with the big hair returned to the spots. He shooed Charlie and Crunch away, while other band members semi-circled Sam from behind. With the sultry swagger of an accomplished musician, or practiced tequila drinker, the leader rumbled, "One, two, a one, two, three." Then the band took us to the Middle East and jolted our ears with staccato instrumentation, the kind found in Turkish nightclubs that serve curried goat.

Neylan absorbed the spotlight. She beamed from the center of its dazzling arc. The belly dancer became one with the light. Against the blackness that shrouded the rest of us, she soaked in every ray and emitted a few photons of her own. With her arms raised high in a cathedral point, or mosque turret, Neylan invited the crowd to savor the vision. She dared us to let our attentions drift. She glowed with the supreme confidence of a performer who had long ago perfected her ability to dazzle audiences and beguile men.

The pose certainly beguiled Jason Tropez, an aging sultan of the hedge fund industry. He ogled every inch of Neylan. He forgot his wife, the stately sexagenarian at his side. He forgot his mail-order mistress from the Eastern European escort agency. The worst-kept secret money can buy, Anastasia had been prancing near the bar earlier that evening. Right now, neither woman mattered. Tropez burned bright with desire for the belly dancer.

Put on your burka, and spare us the lust, I thought.

Neylan erupted. She shook her belly and hips hard. Little waves of fatty flesh rippled from side to side, like surf that crashes against a sandy beach before retreating to the sea for reinforcements. Neylan scooted straight for Sam, rotating her hips this way and that. It was the dance of the suffering stomach.

Thirty years ago when big-breasted women had hips, Playboy might have featured Neylan. She embodied the meaning of "voluptuous." Big butt, bulging belly, and bouncing boobs, all three jiggled just a few inches away from Sam's pert little nose. Neylan shook with the intensity of a jackhammer. Her skimpy bikini, fashioned from gold coins and allure, jingled like two pockets full of loose change.

Fun, but fucking weird, I decided. What had possessed Charlie to hire her for Sam's birthday? Belly dancers were more a guy thing.

At first, Sam laughed and played along. She toasted Neylan with a full glass of wine but did not drink. Instead, Sam's head bobbed to the rhythm of gold coins and floppy cleavage. No doubt she learned more about Neylan's anatomy than was necessary. As the crowd began to roar, Sam's face grew beet red. Her quixotic grimace asked, What do I do now?

"Have a drink," I answered under my breath. But Sam stared in embarrassment, unable to hear my advice.

Charlie's expression, by contrast, surprised me. He glowed with satisfaction, a man relishing his control over the crowd. He watched the audience and seldom bothered to look at Neylan. Not that she cared. She flopped backwards and forwards, shook her coins, and reached around to caress the back of Sam's neck. Some members of the audience gasped, but most cheered as Neylan tried to seduce Sam with her dance. Crunch, of course, joined in.

I wondered what the fish saw as they peered through their walls. With our burkas, black ties, red fezzes, and be-coined boobs quivering out of control, we must have been a curious sight. I half expected the little monsters to stop swimming and press their fish faces up against the glass for a better view. They seemed agitated. The parade of controlled circles had given way to perturbed bursts of motion. They zigzagged around the aquarium in quick flashes, as though trying to catch the light flickering from Neylan's blinding bikini.

Eventually, Neylan and Crunch chased Sam's self-restraint. She rose from her chair, snatched a pink chiffon scarf from a nearby friend, and sashayed into the human ring like a gypsy. Sam reached the scarf around the outside of Crunch's leg and pulled it through the inside of his crotch. With a coquettish expression and a roll of her shoulder, she mouthed words no one heard but we all understood: Oh my.

From somewhere in the crowd a voice bellowed, "Take it off."

The guests, captains of finance and bedrocks of philanthropy, cast their inhibitions aside. Charlie's parade of stiff drinks, from martinis to fruity rum concoctions, had taken control. "Take it off" became the universal, audience-wide chant, though it was unclear who was to disrobe—Neylan in her coins, Crunch in his sequins, or Sam in her cabbage outfit.

Charlie had disappeared from the spotlight and was nowhere to be seen. Odd. It was not like him to step aside. But he had created another masterpiece, and I suspected he was about to unveil his coup de grâce. It would be just like Charlie to emerge from the shadows wearing the robes of an oil sheikh. The image made me smile.

For no particular reason I noticed Great Bangs, my flirt from earlier that evening. Her eyes shone wide with anguish, her face a mix of horror and bewilderment. I looked over at the dancers, thinking their performance had generated the distress. The three wiggled their butts and bellies, hardly the cause of such anxiety. I returned to Great Bangs, and it became clear. She was not staring at the dancers. She was staring at the Giant Ocean Tank.

And she screamed bloody murder.

What are you thinking? ®

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Hope for Humanity - of ...

2012-03-30T12:39:59-04:00

My Hope

A summary prepared by Alan Rayner, March 2012

I hope to help develop a way of understanding life that makes natural sense by considering all its aspects, not just those that are specially favoured by one point of view or another. To do this, I think it is vital to liberate our imagination from present confinements that arise from thinking and perceiving in age-old ways that do not make natural sense and result in needless conflict, cruelty and environmental destruction. I think this liberation will make it possible for us to live, love and be loved more caringly, enjoyably, tolerantly and creatively.

At the heart of this understanding will need to be a change in the way many of us have been led to perceive space and boundaries respectively as empty distance and definitive limits between one thing and another thing. That perception cannot make sense of evolutionary change and so leads to paradoxical and alienating conclusions about life. It makes more natural sense to perceive space as a continuous receptive presence or ‘intangible pool’ and boundaries as energetic interfacings between distinguishable but not isolated localities within this pool. In this way we come to appreciate all forms, including our selves, as fluidly bounded flow-forms – dynamic inhabitants of our natural neighbourhood, like whirlpools in a water flow, not exceptions from it. We release our natural empathy and creativity and open the way respectively to explore beyond and resolve the abstract definitions and paradoxes that have blighted our scientific, theological, educational and governmental theory and practice for so long.

Obviously I cannot expect to be able to do this on my own. The most I can do personally is try to ease the process through living as caringly as I can, engaging with others, learning, and making my learning publicly available through my writings, artwork and oral presentations. As I do so, I bear in mind the need to see and value others’ points of view as well as for them to see and value mine. But this does not oblige me or others to accept, without reservation, the truth of views or expressions of views that do not make natural sense, no matter how well intended they may be.

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The Parable of the Good...

2012-02-02T10:27:57-05:00

"A certain man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he fell among robbers, who both stripped him and beat him, and departed, leaving him half dead. By chance a Christian priest was going down that way. When he saw him, he passed by on the other side. In the same way a Jew also, when he came to the place, and saw him, passed by on the other side. But a certain Muslim, as he traveled, came where he was. When he saw him, he was moved with compassion, came to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. He set him on his own animal, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. On the next day, when he departed, he took out two gold coins, and gave them to the host, and said to him, 'Take care of him. Whatever you spend beyond that, I will repay you when I return.'

Now which of these three do you think seemed to be a neighbour to him who fell among the robbers?"

Attribution

Public Domain

In the original version Jesus of Nazareth provocatively cast a Samaritan as the good guy. At that time Samaritans were hated by Jesus' target audience, the Jews. And the Samaritans in turn hated the Jews.

When the Parable of the Good Samaritan was written, tensions between the two groups were especially high following the desecration of a Jewish temple. Portraying a Samaritan in a positive light would have come as a shock to Jesus' audience.

Today the story is often recast in a more modern setting where the people are ones in social groups that are perhaps rather wary of each other. Groups such as Christians and Muslims perhaps.

By recasting the Samaritan as a Muslim, the parable regains its message to modern listeners and becomes the Parable of the Good Muslim. The message is that an individual of a group about which another might be wary can exhibit moral behavior that is better than that of individuals belonging to groups of which they approve.

This is a powerful message. The message that it might be better to judge a man (or woman) by their deeds and not by their religious or other beliefs seems relevant even today.

Another modern recasting of the story has the three travellers as a Christian, a Muslim and an Atheist. As such it becomes the Parable of the Good Atheist.

There is something powerful and enduring about the Parable of the Good Samaritan. Even a card carrying atheist like myself can appreciate this tale. It travels well (see the links below) and speaks to us across the centuries.

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How Crowd Funding Solve...

2012-03-28T15:43:15-04:00

Solving The Biggest Capital Market Gap In America: Crowd Funding For Established Technology Firms

How Crowd Funding Solves One of The Biggest Capital Market Gaps In America:

Unleashing A Torrent of Growth Capital For Small Private Established Technology Firms

Thomas E. Vass, President, The Private Capital Market, Inc.

The Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act As The Solution For AWOL Venture Capital

Both the U. S. House and the Senate have passed versions of the JOBS Act, and both versions contain new provisions that allow private companies to raise capital from “crowds” of investors. The crowds are the alternative to the monopsony that currently exists in the venture capital and angel marketplace.

Most of the public commentary and media attention has focused on how the JOBS Act will impact the capital market gaps for new ventures and entrepreneurial firms.

The New York Times cites Alon Hillel-Tuch, founder of the crowd funding platform, RocketHub, who states, “The initial stage, the seed stage, where people who are just looking to launch their product, they’re the best candidates for crowd funding. When investors discuss seed-stage companies, they’re usually referring to companies with prospects for tremendous growth — the sort of companies that ultimately rely on venture capital funds.” (Which Crowd Funding Bill Will It Be? Robb Mandelbaum, NYT, March 27, 2012).

The New York Times story correctly points out that the venture capital industry is not likely to be attracted to companies that raise capital through the crowd funding process.

But, do not shed crocodile tears for the VCs.

Industry statistics on VC funding indicate that only about 2 out of 10 companies that seek venture capital obtain funding, and that about 60% of all firms that actually obtain venture capital are terminated by the venture capitalists within 3 years of funding. This VC approach to investing would be called the Dr. Kervorkian model of capital funding.

In contrast to the capital market gaps for startups, most established firms, with real top line sales revenues, are generally not viable candidates for venture capital because the established firms do not have a clear path to an exit that results in a rapid capital gain for the venture capitalists or angels.

In addition, for many established technology companies, the amount of capital needed to fund growth, generally less than $1 million, is too small to interest venture capital, and the type of capital needed by the company does not fit the type of securities that the venture capitalists most prefer as an investment vehicle.

The venture capital community has a lot better public relations image than perhaps is warranted. The venture capital part of the capital markets was never going to solve the capital gaps that exist for small established technology companies.

The Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act Solves The Biggest Economic Problem In America

Jobs. Jobs. Jobs.

The biggest economic problem in America is the lack of jobs. The rate of job destruction for the past 15 years, mostly in large multi-national corporations, is much greater than the rate of job creation, mostly coming from established technology companies that are over three years old.

Brand new entrepreneurial startup companies do not create many new jobs, but established companies, with real life top line revenues from product sales, create most of the new jobs.

The statistics and evidence on job creation indicate that by the end of their third year, most 3-year old technology companies employ about 3 workers, including the owner/founder. At age 3, these young companies need a slug of growth capital, generally less than $1 million to get the next generation of new product out the front door and into the market.

If the companies obtain the second round of capital at age three, the evidence shows that the number of jobs increases from about 3 to about 7 workers. This spurt in jobs is one very important source of job creation in America.

But, it is not the most important source of new jobs.

If the company can stay alive to age 7, it will need another slug of capital, generally less than $1 million, to get the third generation product out the door. If the company can obtain this subsequent round of capital, the rate of job creation is exponential. The number of jobs increases from about 7 workers to about 20.

This third round of capital creates the Mother-Lode of new jobs in America. And, it is this third round of funding that will be solved by crowd funding allowed under the JOBS Act.

“Fend For Yourself” and Crowd Funding

In his careful legal review of early crowd funding efforts, C. Steven Bradford, the Earl Dunlap Distinguished Professor of Law, University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Law, noted that “…none of the current exemptions from registration fit the crowd funding model. Second, the web sites that facilitate crowd funding may be treated as brokers or investment advisers under the ambiguous standards applied by the SEC.” (SSRN, 2011).

The new JOBS Act provides some legal guidance to the ambiguity about internet crowd funding offerings cited by Professor Bradford.

Even before the passage of the JOBS Act, Bradford provided some data on the importance of the new method of raising capital. He noted that as of late July 2011, over 600,000 different Kiva lenders had loaned over $225 million dollars to almost 600,000 entrepreneurs. Peer-to-peer lending, just one form of crowd funding, has alone been responsible for over a billion dollars in funding, and some industry analysts believe peer-to-peer lending could exceed $5 billion annually by 2013.

Prior to the JOBS Act, Bradford reviewed how the U. S. Supreme Court held in the Ralston Purina case that the exemption from registration of securities “…turns on whether the offerees (i.e. investors) [need] the protection of the 1933 Securities Act or if they are able to “fend for themselves.” Subsequent cases have focused on the sophistication of the offerees and their access to information about the issuer.”

The Court’s emphasis on investors being able to “fend for themselves” will not be discarded under the provisions of the new JOBS Act.

Why Geographical Closeness Counts In Internet Crowd Funding of Established Technology Companies

As a result of crowd funding it is more likely that local investors will begin to make more investments in local companies that they discover on internet capital matching websites. Just because an investor finds a company on the internet does not mean that the investor takes leave of her common sense in investigating the merits of the opportunity.

Geographical closeness in crowd funding will continue to be an important component of investor due diligence and fending for oneself, just as it was prior to the JOBS Act.

In their research on the causes of success in biotech ventures, entitled “Towards an Evolutionary Model of the Entrepreneurial Financing Process: Insights from Biotechnology Startups,” Tom Vanacker, Sophie Manigart, and Miguel Meuleman (VMM), (Working Paper, University of Gent, July 2008), described two reasons why “closeness” counts for private capital market investments.

“Using multiple longitudinal case studies of young biotechnology firms,” they wrote, “we study differences in the financing process between high and low performing firms. Findings suggest that initial differences in the specialization of the investors with whom entrepreneurs affiliate early on, affect the ease with which firms attract (specialized) follow-on financing and firm performance. We demonstrate the role of the social context in shaping initial financing outcomes, as entrepreneurs limit their search for financing to one or a few investors with whom they have pre-existing ties.”

There are two components of closeness that combine to provide the ingredients to successful biotech companies. The first ingredient is the closeness of capital to fund the start-up. In both the VMM research, and confirmed by other research on sources of capital, it is widely understood that most investors in high tech start ups live in the same metro region as the new venture.

The evidence suggests that most technology firms raise all rounds of capital from investors who live within 50 miles of the company.

The second ingredient of success related to closeness is much more subtle, and carries an odd nuance of interpretation in the English language for a word that can have more than two meanings.

In most English translations, the word close carries the geographical connotation, as it is used above for the closeness of capital in proximity to the company. In this case, close counts because he investors want to be close to the company to observe the progress of the company and to “kick the tires” when the mood for kicking strikes.

The second interpretation of close involves a social and emotional connotation. Successful biotech firms are “close” to their sources of capital and close to the community business networks that support and sustain their success.

This second usage of the word close is more aligned with how Joel Mokyr, of the University of Chicago, uses the term when he writes that new ventures must be born into a “sympathetic” environment. The term close in this second context means close in terms of interindustry trading partners in the local supply chains.

In their research, VMM highlight both elements of closeness as it relates to biotech firms. As they note, “the search for financing is local. The notion of local search is a relative term and presumes a broader context (Stuart & Podolny, 1996). We define local search in the financing process as the search for financing from investors with whom the entrepreneur or firm has pre-existing ties as opposed to unrelated investors. Why do entrepreneurs limit their search for financing to one or a few investors with whom they have pre-existing ties despite the strategic nature of their decisions? The cases suggest that the social context is important as

it helps in locating potential investors,

it helps in assessing the quality and intentions of investors.

As VMM note, “Historical financing decisions have a substantial impact on the subsequent financing process and firm performance as a whole.”

Small Amounts of Capital Via Crowd Funding

In his research on small high tech firms in Canada, Stephan Rousseau examined how the internet could substitute for larger capital markets by providing information services more suited for the “small ticket” problem of most existing biotech firms.

In his article, “Internet-Based Securities Offerings By Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises: Attractions and Challenges,” (Canadian Business Law Journal, 2001), he documented how the large centralized capital markets routinely and systematically underpriced the small offerings of small firms.

As he noted, “The results showed clearly that the degree of underpricing varies negatively with the size of the issue. Thus, issues of $1-9.9 millions were underpriced by 23% on average. Issues of $10-49.9 millions experienced underpricing of 10%, on average, while those of $50-99.9 millions of 15.6%. The largest issues of the sample ($100-199.9 millions) were underpriced by as mere 4.2% on average.”

Underpricing means that the capital market services for small firms allowed investors to capture an immediate 23% unearned capital gain on the day of the offering. In other words, the 23% underpricing went into the pockets of the investors and investment bankers, and not into the pockets of the firms that needed the capital.

In the language of Wall Street, this underpricing is called a “haircut.”

Part of the solution for underpricing advocated by Rousseau was the use of the internet to provide more transparent information on the small ticket problem in the initial rounds of investments. The internet works well, but must be connected to the geographical location of the firms, because investors like to invest in local firms.

Crowd Funding And The Secondary Market of Private Securities

After investors make the first round investment, they like to make a profit by selling their securities in a secondary market, primarily to other investors located in the same geographical area.

Rousseau’s emphasis on linking the initial rounds of local capital markets to subsequent rounds addresses the main issue related to the Dr. Kervorkian method of capital. The secondary rounds provide liquidity for exit events in secondary equity markets so that the early investors could take their gains without killing the growth prospects of the firms.

Crowd funding allows for both raising the early rounds, and for sales of securities in the second rounds of capital.

In “The Role of Proximity In Secondary Equity Markets,” Dariusz Wojcik documents that close also counts in the secondary markets. He writes, “geographical proximity, has significant implications for: investors (in terms of performance and trade-off with liquidity); investment industry as a whole (in terms of size, structure, and strategy); issuers (in terms of access to capital and liquidity); communities (in terms of herd behavior and financial literacy).” (Managing Financial Risks: From Global to Local, Forthcoming with Oxford University Press in 2009).

Crowd funding under the JOBS Act is the very first step in providing the market exchange infrastructure of local capital markets. The new marketplace infrastructure will eventually include transactions for the early rounds and subsequent rounds of capital for a individual company, as well as subsequent exchanges of secondary capital.

In other words, the JOBS Act is the beginning of the creation for local capital markets that aim at serving very small local firms who need very small amounts of capital, who happen to create about 100% of the new jobs in America.

Internet based local crowd funding will tend to organize local social business networks into a coherent capital market that targets investments to the region’s most promising technological innovations. The local social business networks on the internet will eventually become the equivalent of institutional investors on Wall Street.

The most important function of crowd funding in regional capital markets, however, is not the initial investment in a single firm. The most important function is that crowd funding in the regional markets will provide a pathway for profits from the exit events to be re-invested in the regional innovation economy, in a type of Bayesian economic success model.

Crowd funding for secondary exchanges of capital means that cash flow from an earlier exchange is used to support subsequent local investments. Crowd funding, based upon internet technologies, provides the mechanism for this re-investment of capital from one generation of innovation to the next, unleashing a torrent of capital and an explosion of job creation.

About Thomas E. Vass: Vass is fee-based investment portfolio manager and regional economist located in Raleigh, N. C. He is the author of Predicting Technology: Identifying Future Market Opportunities and Disruptive Technologies, (2007) which explains his theory of technology evolution. His theory formed the basis of his 2007 patent that explains his method for selecting technology stocks for inclusion in an investment account. Please visit his economic research papers on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN) at http://ssrn.com/author=831853

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The College Admissions ...

2012-03-23T13:26:10-04:00

Status is the posturing we do in order to be a member of a desirable group. We posture because status has implications for how valued resources such as money, prestige, power, and honor are distributed. In an ideal world, the labor economists tell us that the more productive labor is, the more money, prestige, power, and honor will be acquired via the blind mechanisms of a marketplace that knows only productivity. But this ideology while important, belies what many of us intuitively know about the real world. Status is not only dependent on the mechanisms of a blind market, no matter how efficient it may be, but also is obtained through who you associate with. These associations may be through family connections, club memberships, school networks, fraternity membership, or what university you attend. None of these connections are blindly entered into, irrespective of their utility in the marketplace. And as study after study have shown advantage in the labor market also depends on legally pernicious status categories like race, gender, religion, and social class.

Universities are at the intersection of this status paradox, between a market which sees only productivity, and a social world tuned into status distinctions based on relationships. As labor economists (and university administrators) assure us, what is learned at the university makes labor more productive in the marketplace. But, this is not the whole story. Because, universities are not only about the acquisition of skills valued in the marketplace. Attendance at a particular university is also used as a status marker to determine how money, prestige, power, and honor are distributed irrespective of what skills an individual has. Were this not the case, no university administrator, parent, high school student, college counselor, or anyone else would pay any attention to the college status rankings published each fall by US News and World Report and other rankers of college and university prestige. And for this reason, it is interesting to think about what implications this annual ritual has on how we inside America’s colleges and universities view each other. And of course these views are not the same because, after all, status matters. Thus people teaching and learning at dominant universities like UC Berkeley have one way of viewing their privileges and advantages in what they presume to be a competitive life in which their true honor is recognized. Those of us who teach at lower-ranked universities (in my case Chico State) do too. But our views about the justice of Berkeley graduates’ privileges are different.

Why Chico State Does Better at Undergraduate Education than UC Berkeley: A Brief Rant

I will be blunt. When it comes to undergraduate education I think Chico State does a better job than UC Berkeley. The many large classes at Berkeley are too big for undergraduates. Berkeley’s classroom teachers or what they call “discussion leaders” are often inexperienced graduate students, and not the big name (and well-paid) research professors on the letterhead who may be widely published but often are poor undergraduate teachers. Berkeley also freely gives students credit for time the faculty do not teach. For example, Berkeley’s Introductory Sociology course in Spring 2011 had 279 students who were lectured to for two hours per week, and a smaller graduate student-led discussion section which was one hour per week. Students received four hours credit for these three hours. In contrast, Chico’s Introductory Sociology classes were three hours per week of lecture with about 40 students, and Chico students received only three hours credit for this. As for Berkeley’s undergraduate students, they themselves are among the smartest and hardest working high school students in California. And, at the end of four years at Berkeley, they may well still be smart and hard-working, although I have yet to see any evidence that this quality is acquired at Berkeley rather than one the students brought with them fro high school.

Chico State in contrast has smaller classes, few inexperienced graduate student teachers, and hire faculty because they want to teach undergraduates for their career. Big name or not, undergraduates routinely interact with experienced faculty hired for demonstrated teaching skills, even though they may also write books and academic articles just like the big names at UC Berkeley. It may well be true that Berkeley educates the very best high school students that California has. But Chico State takes California’s second best students, and makes them into really talented people. One day, I would like to see Chico challenge Berkeley on “value-added” in terms of student learning. I am confident that Chico grads would best Berkeley grads in terms of how much they learned from their classes between the day the walked in the door and the day they graduated. After all, it does not take much to take the straight A student from high school, and then turn them into a college graduate like Berkeley does. Chico though takes the B student, and turns them into a college graduate. And Chico State does it for less tax money than do the overpaid professors (and underpaid teaching assistants) at UC Berkeley. Chico State’s true honor is hidden, and US News and World Report got it wrong when they published their college rankings last September, and informed us that again, UC Berkeley was the number one national public university while Chico State didn’t even make the list.

A Little Sociology: The Relationship between Status and Achievement

But this paper is not only a rant about Chico and Berkeley. Rather it is about the nature of status and how alongside market forces status distinctions shape what colleges do and think. I think Chico would best Berkeley in a fair comparison of undergraduate quality of education, but then I teach at Chico, and naturally take some pride in what we do. And so more than self-righteous navel gazing, this paper is also an exploration of status systems work to allocate unequally both prestige and access to opportunity outside the blind mechanisms of the labor market. As such, this paper draws very heavily on sociologist Max Weber’s[1] description of status inequality in ethnicity, occupational categories, and caste. By extension this also applies to how college rankings reported by US News stratify America’s system of higher education.

So first a little sociology. High status means that one group (in this case Berkeley people) monopolize goods or opportunities through the maintenance of social distance from lower status people like me at Chico State. They do this through their power to award status markers for and assign prestigious goods. Thus, despite the fact Berkeleyites and Chicoites look alike, take the same classes, teach the same things about sociology and economics, Berkeleyites are routinely paid more, more likely to sit at the head of a table, be elected to honor societies, be selected to divide up federal grants, and become the arbiters of the institutions which award academic status. More to the point, US News asks Department Chairs working at places like Berkeley to determine their own rankings as well of that of everyone else. And not surprisingly the smarty-pants from places like Berkeley tautologically conclude that since they are paid more, they must do a better job at teaching, and therefore deserve another raise because their ranking in US News is so high.[2] (When I was a chair at Chico State, I never had a phone call or email from US News soliciting my opinion about the quality of undergraduate programs at Berkeley—so goes it in the game of status). Note that this has nothing to do with an objective measure of “quality” in undergraduate programs which I wrote about in my rant. Indeed, as I said before if this were the case, Chico would beat Berkeley hands down in US News rankings. But in fact ranking has nothing to do with the anonymous mechanisms of labor markets, which Weber as writes, status systems run by US News in fact abhor.

Weber writes that the inequality between groups like Berkeley and Chico are maintained through rituals which ensure that we will coexist in a system of mutual repulsion and disdain. My rant about Berkeley’s underserved status is typical of how a subordinated group emphasizes its own honor by disdainfully pointing out the pretensions of the dominant (In this respect, I guess I am a typically ingrateful and unappreciative subordinate). But the dominant group also has its own ways of justifying its status is deserved, typically by emphasizing the acclaim it received in the past and present. The result is a rhetorical dance engaged in by both parties. Thus both universities believe that there is something unique about their own institution, and each believes its own honor to be the highest one, a fiction which is cultivated in avoidance strategies which mean among other things that Chico’s students chances of getting into graduate school at UC Berkeley are virtually non-existent.

But at Chico we too protect our honor from the pretensions of Berkelyites. At Chico we routinely explain how our secret honor is hidden from the rest of the world, including US News, and particularly the stigmatizing rank Playboy once gave as the number one party school in the nation. We also need to explain why so few National Merit Scholars come to Chico, and why so many of our students routinely take so few classes while working at tedious minimum wage jobs while attending Chico State.

Still Berkeley too has an image problem. They need to explain why their honor is deserved, and how pretensions of people like me are the result of envy, jealousy, and sour grapes. In short there need to be rituals and stories to explain caste dominance (Berkeley), and caste subordination (Chico). According to Weber, because Berkeley is on top of an established pecking order, Berkeley’s story is about a glorious past which explains why logically Berkeley is the highest ranked public university in the United States. The past leaders who made the glory of Berkeley possible are heroes. There are regular remembrances of these heroes on special days, in the names of buildings, scholarships, and other tokens acknowledging their role in creating the deserved glories of the present. The message is clear to Berkeley grads: they are special and deserving of their exalted place in the world. And by implication the rest of us are losers.

At Chico, the stories and rituals are of course different. They are not be about a glorious past (we don’t have a plausible one), but about why our clandestine honor is routinely hidden and ignored. What is more, buried in the story we tell about ourselves will be an assertion that one day we will overcome the odds, and our secret glory will be revealed.

Chico’s Story of Hidden Honor

At Chico State, I routinely explain our position in higher education’s hierarchy to prospective students and new faculty. The story follows much along the lines I ranted about above. I describe the easy access to faculty Chico students have, the smaller classes, and point out that UC Berkeley has none of these. Because I am an alumnus of the University of California (Davis in my case), I typically tell visitors that I learned to teach undergraduates at the UC, but I became good at it only at Chico. The ideology I describe is one that explains away Chico’s stigma as a second rate public university in a manner which highlights our special, albeit unnoticed skills. Our mythology about our hidden honor goes something like this: If you would look closely at Chico State student, you will find that they work harder in the “real” world. After all Berkeley students tend to be richer and more spoiled. And because they have better high school grades they are more likely to have scholarships. This means that they rarely are exposed to the reality of a job in the dining commons, local restaurant, or camp counseling during the summer. Chico students also write better because real professors (not graduate students) grade their papers. And because all the hyper-competitive self-absorbed nerds from high school went to Berkeley, our students develop collaborative relationships in classes. This means that Chico State students are better prepared to be part of the teamwork found in the modern workforce. Chico’s applied hands-on approach encourages students to be involved in businesses, schools, and government as “real people” not theoretical drones ungrounded in the real world. Our students will never labor as a heartless drone holed up with a calculator screen and spreadsheets for fifty years as would a Berkeley student. Rather they will work in offices inhabited by real people.

All this of course avoids the fact that Chico students are perceived as being a bunch of drunks. But wait, there is secret honor even in this distinction. Chico’s Business School routinely brags about the “social skills” of their students. They point out that the party-school atmosphere is actually a strength; it means that employees have already learned how much alcohol they can hold and shall not—how shall I put this delicately?—throw upon the lap of a client during their first year on the job as would a socially unsophisticated nerd from Berkeley.[3] In short, we at Chico have a providential mission to save the culturally inept Berkeleyites from their own social cluelessness. Whole organizations would undoubtedly collapse if it were not for the strategically placed Chico State student who quietly and competently smooths large egos, and connects the human elements necessary in every organization. Or to borrow a Biblical saying, we believe that in the end days, the last will be first, and the first will be last; in the end, say in fifty years, the honor of Chico State will be recognized by even US News while presumably Berkeley will be noticed only by Playboy. Undoubtedly this will happen when one of my colleagues is plucked from obscurity and awarded a Nobel Prize in something, or an alum is elected president of the United States. After all if Eureka College’s Ronald Reagan, and Texas State Teachers College’s Lyndon Johnson can become president, why not someone from Chico State?

Steeped in History

Kingdoms of This World…

While typically Berkeley and Chico faculty do not run in the same circles, I can still walk on the Berkeley campus, and also browse their web-site. What you find is a presentation of self that is different from Chico’s. Berkeley doesn’t dream of Nobel Prizes, they already have them. Indeed, the list of current Nobel Prize winners (7) is only three clicks from Berkeley’s home page (along with the 13 deceased prize winners, and then one more click to the 24 alumni winners—who says that nerds aren’t the best?). Department rankings are only a click or two in another direction, where a page indicates “In the most recent National Research Council study, 35 of Berkeley's 36 graduate programs ranked in the top 10 in their fields in terms of faculty competence and achievement.” In case you don’t have a web-browser, go on the UC Berkeley campus, and you will see ostentatious privileged parking places reserved for Nobel Laureates. Buildings are named for outstanding scientists including those who developed the atom bomb in World War II, rich alumni like William Randolph Hearst, and other heroes who have graced Berkeley’s campus. In short, while Chico’s promise is still in the future, Berkeley’s Kingdom is in the here and now and they are going to let everyone know about it. The University’s web page preens with history, leading UC Berkeley to conclude with the self satisfied observation that “[Already] In 1966 Berkeley was recognized by the American Council on Education as ‘the best balanced distinguished university in the country.’” Nothing is shy, or hidden, or clandestine here. It is out in front for all to admire.

The implication of all this self-promotion for Berkeley’s undergraduates is that only the very best will be admitted; only the intellectual elite will be given admission to the hallowed grounds. Sometime in their first week on campus, it will be made clear to them that because Berkeley is the best, they too must be the best, a form of tautological reasoning that insecure 18 and 19 year olds embrace enthusiastically. And indeed they are the best, at least in terms of high school grades, SAT scores, extra-curricular activities and the other things that UC Berkeley and others at the top of the current status heap value highly. And this in turn justifies the self-satisfied assertion that only the best recognizes the best, and in this way the inequality of the American higher education system is perpetuated, seemingly ad infinitum. And as a result throughout their careers, they will give each other pay raises, jobs, honors, appoint each other to boards of directors, in the belief that being of high status is an end in and of itself.

But There are also Kingdoms of the Coming World…

None of the things that Berkeley brags about on its website addresses the undergraduate excellence like small classes, contact with faculty, etc., that we have at Chico. But even I will admit that Chico is weaker on one thing: presentation of our history. There is no “history of Chico State” link to our home page, nor as far as I can tell, any other place. There are no obvious lists of the accomplishments of our faculty (no Nobel Prizes) and our buildings are mostly named after obscure northern California counties. Despite over a hundred years of history, there are few illustrious faculty, donors, or alumni bragged about. On the President’s page, there is a brief mention that CSU Chico is one of the highest ranking public colleges in the West, but unlike Berkeley, the source is not cited.[4] More significantly though for an essay about the nature of status stratification, is the focus of two prominently displayed slogans on Chico State’s web page. “Today Decides Tomorrow” is mentioned in both the President’s welcome page, and is emblazoned above the door of the Kendall Hall, one of the few buildings to bear an illustrious name, former president Glenn Kendall. The second prominently displayed slogan is the campus’ latest goal which envisions Chico as becoming a center for sustainability education. So on the home page for months was a large green hot link reading “Our Sustainable Future” and led to a list of planned programs designed to position Chico in the future.

What both of these slogans of course represent is the belief that Chico’s unseen glory is the future—tomorrow as the slogan says. The future may be ours, and by extension not Berkeley’s. Someday, Chico’s mythology goes, an illustrious figure will emerge—in Weber’s terminology a messiah figure—who will demonstrate how quietly but excellently we have been delivering for California all along. In this respect I suppose it is fortunate to have so many buildings named after obscure counties. They are sitting there, waiting to be named for people who will give Chico great sums of money, our first Nobel Prize winner, or better yet invent an even bigger bomb! Best of all, those of us who have been around awhile will get to divide up the resources differently, meaning we will get a big pay raise, putting us ahead of even UC Berkeley: in this promised future, we will be of this world, and no longer have to worry so much about tomorrow!

The Persistence of Status Stratification

Of course the status inequality between Berkeley and Chico is hardly unique. Such inequality inherently permeates the relationships which order our hierarchically ordered modern society. I could have as easily written this essay about the relationship between Chico and the local Community College, Butte College. I am sure that the faculty there are acutely aware of the differences in pay and teaching load (i.e. they get less money and grade more papers). They will undoubtedly have the same uneasiness and chip on their shoulder relative to Chico State, and with equal faith await their first Nobel Prize winner and the arrival of a messiah figure in the form of a hundred million dollar endowment.[5] What this illustrates are not the implicit differences between Butte, Chico and Berkeley, but the nature of status and honor within society. Ultimately status, unlike market economics, is a zero sum game. For one institution or person to have more status, another institution must have less.

As Max Weber wrote, status systems are about sorting out who has advantages and who does not. Dominant ideology aside, it is not simply the provision of rewards on the basis of the blind labor market; indeed, status systems are about the privileged avoiding the mechanisms of the blind marketplace. The labor market may in theory be blind, but employment resumes still prominently indicate what college you attend. Highlighting such a status achievement is as important in the seeking of privilege as the skills learned, and tells to others where you belong in the pre-established pecking order.

So, from Weber’s perspective, the mystery of why neither UC Berkeley or Chico State use much of their web-site plugging the quality of undergraduate education is not so baffling. Berkeley spends its time asserting the importance of past Nobel Prize winners, and Chico dreams of tomorrow because they are, respectively, a dominant university seeking to preserve its status, and a subordinate institution dissatisfied with the status quo. The good news is that while such status distinctions persist and are evident in how each institution presents itself, they are also malleable. No currently dominant institution started out that way, which is why messiah figures (in Berkeley’s case the Nobel Prize winners) become so prominent in the mythologized histories they publish. Symbolically such heroes mean a lot, even though in delivering the core product of the institution—quality undergraduate classes to 19 year olds—they are irrelevant. This means that while Chico State may not be tomorrow’s dominant Berkeley, an institution like Chico, meaning anyone of the hundreds of undergraduate colleges, will find its rightful place in the sun, which in its own vicarious way gives us all hope.

[1] This essay draws very heavily on Max Weber’s classic essay “Class, Status, Party” which has been published in both From Max Weber, and Economy and Society. The essay was also recently retranslated by Dagmar Waters, Tony Waters, and others, as “The Distribution of Power within the Community: Classes, Staende, Parties," and published in the Journal of Classical Sociology (2010).

[2] Institutional reputation, which US News calls “peer assessment” comprises 25% of US News’ measure of university quality. Reputation is calculated by asking Department chairs at research universities like Berkeley what they think of themselves, and everyone else. The chairs indicate what their gut level feelings are which not surprisingly are that people like them are better than people at places like Chico State. The other 75% of the rankings are mostly made up of qualities students bring with them from high school like grades and SAT scores (15%), how much money alumni give (5%) and faculty pay (20%). Retention rates (20%) of all the numbers US News uses is the only one that has much to do with undergraduate education, although it too is not a direct measure of the quality of classes.

[3] This is what President George H. W. Bush (Yale Skull and Crossbones 1948) notoriously did in the lap of the Japanese Prime Minister in 1992.

[4] Number three in the MA granting public institution category for the west—source US News)

[5] Indeed, there wa a brief flurry of hype at Butte College in 2011 when rich alum Aaron Rogers quarterbacked the Green Bay Packers to Super Bowl glory. But Aaron has yet to return the love, or cut a check, and has instead has highlighted what he apparently believes is a stronger college connection—at UC Berkeley.

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Cancer, Diseases and Mo...

2012-03-21T16:10:17-04:00

In general, bio toxins are a hazard to human health. This article is, in essence, about serious new public health issues. There exist four ways in which our bodies can be exposed to bio toxins. Bio toxins are toxins produced by living organisms. Some of the bio toxins are neuro toxins (that is, they act in our brains) and all toxins gain entry into our bodies in four ways, these are breathing, food ingestion, bug bites and water. This article will, in principal, focus on the molds we ingest (via our lungs) by normal breathing. In the 1500's, in Europe, humans lived an average of 50 years. Contrast that life span of an average American in the US today. The average lifespan now is over 70 years, as this article is written. In general the goal of public health should be not only to have a better quality life as we live it, but also to have humans live on average longer that they do as of now.

Molds are ubiquitous, insidious ( see Bestthinking article " The Porous Nature Of Concrete As It Relates To Molds" , by this author ) and complex ( See Bestthinking article "The Polymorphic Nature Of Molds", also by Rod Danz ) for humans that come into contact with them. It is clear that molds that are ingested into our system come from breathing the air around us ( the air mentioned here is indoor air ). Molds we breathe in can lodge in the lungs.(J Occup Environ Hyg, 2006May;3(5):262-73) There they can grow into large groups called a fungal ball. This ball grows in our lungs and is very hazardous to our health. Some of the effects of this mold are hearing loss and general hearing problems. The mold here is named Aspergillus Niger (fungus and mold are essentially the same). The molds we breath are microscopic in size therefore they gain access to our bodies. These molds can infect us in another way. After we breathe air in, then it travels to our lungs where it passes into the blood stream. The reason the molds are passed into the blood stream is that the molds enter us through our lungs and that we do not have a filtration system that works at the microscopic level. Once in the blood humans either rid their bodies (via the liver, or are killed by our white blood cells ) of the toxic mold or they store it in the body. This condition is fully determined by our genes. A full 24% humans store up molds as opposed to their bodies eliminating them. (National Mold Resource Center) Our immune system normally detects the molds and the body proceeds to eliminate them, however in 24% of our population has no (or limited) HLA (human leukocyte antigen) geno-type. HLA genes code certain proteins on the cell wall. A complexity here is that some humans detect just some toxins but not others because HLA is NOT an all or none detector. Therefore, our immune system uses HLA to determine if the molds are foreign invaders or not. For neurotoxins in the brain HLA-DR is the agent. Some people are not able to detect (via recognition of molds contained in their bodies ) some disease causing molds such as Lyme's Disease (Richie C. Shoemaker). Note, Dr. Shoemaker has been a forerunner in bio toxin research and practices medicine today. He has been credited with many new discoveries with respect to his research on biotoxins in our bodies and in particular has done much research on molds. Thus, to continue, this population does not always recognize the toxic molds that reside in our bodies. There are about 311 million people in the United States today, thus 24% of this population is about 75 million people. This statistic clearly means this public health issue is VERY SERIOUS indeed. This fact calls for public health agencies to be called to action because a large percentage of our people are potentially adversely affected by molds. Note, due to monitoring by the Food and Drug Administration and our Department of Agriculture, food molds are well under control and we get few molds from ingestion via our stomach.

Molds are everywhere in our environment they grow in the soil feeding off the humus portion of the soil. Humus is material that once was alive and is contained in the dirt. These ubiqitious molds need water, a food source and warm temperatures to grow. If concrete is poured over the soil ( as in a concrete slab), this does NOT stop the molds from rising up into our structures. This is because like water, concrete is permiable to molds this is because they are microscopic in size. Thus, if one lives works or plays directly above a concrete slab, or has an attached garage and a door leading to a house then the molds gain entry into our structures. This discovery was made by the author. Molds can also "wick up", via the soil, ( from a concrete basement floor ) via air ducts or elevators in high rise buildings. ( see Bestthinking article, "The Porous Nature Of Mold As It Relates To Concrete", by Rod Danz ) The ducts can be either heating or cooling. The molds can also reside in ducts where over time breaks (or even sagging) develop in the joints of the metal pipe ducting. Molds also grow in structures (called sick buildings) as a direct result of these structures being water damaged. Some refer to these as water damaged buildings (WDB), estimates as high as 50% of our structures are water damaged.(source, NIOSH in 2011 ) This allows the molds to grow in us and infect us. Once infecting us, inflammation is then created in our body. The molds themselves are not the direct problem, more so it is the secondary toxins given off by the molds growths that are the real issue. These secondary toxins are called mycotoxins. They create aflotoxins that are carcinogenic, ie produce cancer. Molds are also found to be living in our motor vehicles, even if they are late model vehicles. Further, it is also clear that not all molds are harmful for example, penicillin which was discovered on bread mold and is used as an antibiotic. In particular, there exist about 147 molds that are harmful to humans. In general, there are over 20,000 species of mold. For this reason there are many different types of illness resulting from exposure, every different mold type can have a different toxic affect on the body. Having mold in our bodies causes disease, infection and inflammation. Molds are complex, as an example they can take many forms in their life cycle this is called a Polymorphism. In modern times structures have been made more air tight due to more stringent energy codes, this is not an optimal condition for mold reduction in that molds thrive in these closed structural systems.

There has been progress in understanding bio toxins and mold in the last 15 years for example, much progress has been made in understanding molds and the way in which they harm us. For example, one can determine the level of mold present in a structure by using a ERMI Test ( Environmental Relative Moldiness Index) This test was patented by the by Dr. Steve Vesper and the USEPA, in 2002, and is now being used to determine the mold level in a structure. Given the level is less than 2 (the scores range from -10 to 20) on this scale then the structure is determined to be safe for all people who inhabit the building. Also, as indicated above there exists a blood test to determine if one, via genetics, has the ability by the body to determine the immune response to differences between the various types of molds. Once the body is given the message that a foreign invader is in our body then we take steps to rid ourselves of the pathogen. The blood test results tell one if they have, in their body, a means to determine if a mold is interpreted as foreign to it, or not foreign. Remember, some 24% of our population does not have an immune response to molds contained in our bodies. Molds in general cause (via mycotoxins) inflammation and infections in our bodies, they can even invade our brains and cause mental problems such at personality disorders, or even worse mental conditions. These adverse conditions can be triggered by the stress associated with life or even by a bug bite. In particular, there exists a test called The Visual Contrast Sensitivity test, this test is used to determine if someone is affected neurologically ( in the brain ), the test is short and effective in the diagnosis of neurologic problems related to bio toxins. Some mental problems, related to the bacterial associated with a tick bite can be diagnosed by the VCS test. The tick releases a bacteria into one's body and it grows in the nerve, muscle, brain, lung and bile as opposed to the bloodstream. For these areas there exists no antibiotics to treat the problem. However, as good luck would have it, there does exist a treatment for the bacterial invaders and it is called Cholestyramine, which works by binding the bacteria to it. This problem is usually associated with Lyme's Disease. (Note, Dr. Richie Shoemaker has been very clear about exactly how these conditions occur within our bodies, a simple Google search will disclose many of his findings). As a final note, it is clear that molds are complex given their polymorphic nature.

The author of this article has discovered a new way that molds invade structures from the soil and that is, via concrete slabs or pads that form the base of many structures. The mechanism works as follows, molds grow in the soil and are bound up with water molecules in the soil. Given that a concrete pad forms the base for many generic structures the molds are "wicked up", via the water, into the buildings. The molds simply attach themselves to the water molecules contained in the ground. A study was done in June of 2011 and reported by the American Society for Microbiology. This study is copyrighted circa 2011 by the American Society for Microbiology. (see Applied and Environmental Biology, June 2011;77(12) : 4180-4188. doi: 10.1128/AEM.02513-10) or Google search (ncbi nim nih gov articles PMC3131638) The actual study was done in Denmark by 5 people working under the guidance of The Center for Microbial Biotechnology and The Danish Technological Institute. This study found 5 types of mold that grew on the concrete they were Aspergillus Niger, Aspergillus Ochraceus, Aspergillus Versicolor, Chaetomium spp. and Mucor Racemosus. Actually, some 18 different molds grew on concrete but in smaller numbers. Further, the mechanism of action works like this. People in the structure in normal breathing ingest the molds, the molds build up in a good number of people who ingest them. These people grow molds in the lungs , the growing molds give off myceotoxins in the form of bio toxins in particular ( www.mendeley.com/research/invasive-pulmonary-aspergillosis-caused-aspergillus-ochraceus/ )Aspergillus Ochraceus, Aspergillus Niger and Aspergillius Versicolor. These molds cause infections in humans according to the site given above. These molds also cause cancer via the mycotoxins they give off. Note, these species produce mycotoxins, which are aflatoxins that are highly carcinogenic (that is, cause cancer). Important here is that infections create inflammation in our bodies. It is clear that infections and inflammation in our bodies create an unhealthy state. Another dangerous mold found in abundance on concrete is Chaetomium Spp. This mold is directly implicated in inflammation of the tissues of the Peritoneum. This causes a condition called Peritonitis in humans, this condition is directly linked to inflammation of the thin tissues of of the inner wall of the abdomen. Still another toxic mold found on concrete is Stachybotrys Spp., this mold has been found to suppress our immune system affecting the lymphoid tissue and the bone marrow. Finally, I analyzed a list of some 18 molds and almost to a mold (17 of 18 with the 18th not clearly a soil based mold) they were found in the soil. The probability of this happening by chance is in the millions to one. In addition, the fact that on one table (three) in the study it sites linoleum as having the lowest mold level of all the surfaces tested. I firmly believe that the number of molds in the soil links directly to the high number of molds found on the concrete floor in the study and this establishes the mechanism of action of the concrete being the source of the mold entry into the structure in which the test was done. There is a "wicking effect" in that the very tiny molds attach to the water molecules and travel through the concrete to the floor above the slab. Note as related to the linoleum surface, linoleum normally lies as a covering over a concrete floor. Finally, the linoleum is NOT porous to water and the mold spores can not "wick up" past the linoleum, thereby invading the structure.

There exist ways to rid our bodies of mold some of these are (essential oil) diffusers placed in a moldy enviornment. These are effective in mold elimination from the air we breathe. Also, for molds in our bodies one can use a foot bath that has a positive and negative pole in the individual foot compartments, one can observe the water changing color indicating the molds are being cast from our bodies. This device uses a nine volt battery for its mold ridding action. It seems that the body will not respond to treatments if molds are in our bodies. One final thing that is worth mention is a chemical which is orally consumed that will directly remove the molds from our bodies ( Cholestepure ). Note, with out molds being taken from our bodies the disease they manifest will continue unabated.

The author hopes, in the future, that modern Physics can and will be used to help with all types of healing, not just for molds. The new method, I am now proposing is to use the idea of Quantum healing in the following way. There are frequencies that can be used to help people heal from Cancer and most other diseases in humans. The waves can come from a source directly to the person needing healing. For example, if one has a tumor they give an oral sample. The sample is made up of Hydrogen from one's body. Using a concept called entanglement (from Quantum Physics ) the person can receive the healing frequencies or waves from a distance. At this point in time, there is no limit to the distances the treatments can feasibly work over. The positive benefits of this concept have wide ranging positive implications. I am working with a person who has cancer and is undergoing this exact treatment and the scores for the cancer are dramatically reducing over short periods of time. The author is aware of a case of a person with brain cancer so severe that they were bed bound and not mobile. After this exact treatment method they are now leading a very close to normal life. The author will , in the future, write a complete article on this new way to be treated for disease remotely. Note, in 1927 Albert Einstein read at, a Physics convention, a paper that discussed the results of this exact experiment and could not, using the Physics he understood interpret the results and he termed this "spooky action at a distance ".

In conclusion, the author thinks that progress on mold and bio toxin research, in general, has been slow because molds are very small and in our live body difficult to observe as they interact at the cellular level with our cell structures. Through microscopes we can clearly see the microscopic form that is the essence of our body chemistry however, looking at dead cells and dead cultures does not clearly show the processes that are going on in our body at the live cellular level. This aspect makes mold chemistry and understanding very complex. The reason is that the cells are killed by the act of looking at them via cultures. In particular, the stains used are much larger that the studied particles, this has a negative effect on our ability to observe the virus live in the body. Finally, there is a need for a better method of looking at live cell interactions with molds and in general bio toxins.

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Fast-Fail: Fail Fast, F...

2011-08-30T13:51:04-04:00

The Quick-Kill™ model assumes drug discovery is a stochastic process⁽¹⁾. The simplest form assumes a binomial process with probability of discovery p such that the expected number of failures before the first success has a geometric distribution with a mean of 1/p.

The following discussion considers the simplest case where the development process is divided into two phases. However, the Quick-Kill™ model can be extended easily to include multiple decision points, multiple therapeutic targets, a range of time and development costs, and first-to-market considerations.

The Quick-Kill™ Model

If the costs of killing a drug candidate are $C_kill and the development cost for a successful product is $C_success then the expected costs for each successful market launch are

E(Cost) = (¹/_p) C_kill+C_success .

Similarly, if the time to kill a compound is t_kill and the development time for a successful drug is t_success and discovery is a binomial process then the expected time to first marketing authorisation approval (EMAA) or expected time to market (ETTM)

ETTM = (¹/_p) t_kill+t_success

This latter finding means that the ETTM is a function not just of the development time for successful compounds but the amount of time unsuccessful compounds spend in the development pipeline. Depending upon the discovery rate p the development time for unsuccessful compounds can have a significant impact on the ETTM. This gives rise to the development speed paradox in which strategies directed at increasing development speed and reducing the development time for successful compounds can actually increase the ETTM through their impact on the time taken to kill a compound t_kill.

Strategies directed at increasing development speed and reducing the development time for successful compounds can actually increase the expected time to market.

The Development Speed Paradox

More Haste, Less Speed

Getting products to market in the shortest possible time has become an obsession within the industry. And the arguments for accelerating development speed are compelling. Cutting one month from the development life-cycle translates to an extra month of patent protected sales. But while development speed is crucially important, an obsession with development speed to the exclusion of all else can run a company into the ground.

It is no good getting useless products to market quickly.

Mike Emmanual, Janssen Pharmaceuticals

One of the dangers of the current obsession is that maximizing development speed may actually increase the expected time to marketing authorization approval. This is known as the Development Speed Paradox. How does this arise?

It is a sad fact that only 10% of compounds make it from man to market. If you gear drug development to regulatory submission you optimize a process which will occur just 10% of the time. The remaining 90% of compounds will never get to new drug application submission. Instead of maximizing development speed we need to "fast fail" these compounds to clear the pipeline for new candidates. Any strategy which clears the pipeline of the 'no hopers' should be considered, even if it does so at the apparent expense of development speed. Let's look at an example.

A major pharmaceutical company debates the use of a service formulation to obtain early information on pharmacology in man together with preliminary safety data. A heated debate ensues. The “Right First Time” lobby argues that early studies in man with a service formulation will result in those early studies being re-worked, even repeated, for regulatory submission. Why waste time on preliminary studies using a formulation you know will never cut it?

However, the “Right First Time” lobby is missing the point. These early studies yield valuable information of direct interest. If in these early studies you find your candidate has no pharmacological effect or has serious safety problems then you are unlikely to submit to a regulatory agency. So why worry about whether those studies could be submitted? Why not build your development programme around early identification of the 90% that don’t make it rather than optimizing it around the 10% that will.

Let’s compare the Right First Time (RFT) Strategy with the Fast Fail (FF) Strategy. In the graphic below we have the two strategies.

Dennis Lendrem, 2011Attribution

Fast Fail Strategy

The RFT Strategy has a two year screening time followed by an eight year development time making 10 years to take a compound to market. The FF Strategy has a one year screening time with a service formulation followed by ten years of development making a total development time of 11 years.

Superficially it looks as though Right First Time Strategy with a total development time of just 10 years is the better bet since it has the shortest overall development time – 10 years compared to 11 years – a whole year shorter. A whole year of additional patent-protected sales?

However, using the Quick-Kill™ model above we see that the expected time to market for the RFT Strategy is given by:

ETTM_RFT = (¹/_0.1)*2+ 8

ETTM_RFT = 28 years

And the expected time to market for the Fast Fail Strategy is given by:

ETTM_FF = (¹/_0.1)*1+ 10

ETTM_FF = 20 years

The expected time to the first marketing success using the Fast Fail Strategy is 8 years less than for Right First Time Strategy even though it has the longer overall development time.

In fact, the Fast Fail Strategy outperforms the Right First Time Strategy for a range of probabilities - see Table 1.

Dennis Lendrem, 2011Attribution

Comparison of Fast Fail and Right First Time Strategies

Not until the probability of success exceeds 50% and the majority of projects are likely to be successful does the Right First Time Strategy beat the Fast Fail Strategy. But then, just how many companies can boast a 50% development success rate?

So why does the Fast Fail Strategy work so well?

Public Domain

Looking for a needle in a haystack? Torch the haystack.

Richard Peck, Eli Lilly

Well, the reason for this is that by clearing the pipeline and making way for new compounds to be evaluated there is a better chance of identifying a ‘good’ candidate that will make it all the way to market. Of course, as the proportion of such ‘good’ candidates increases the advantages accruing from sweeping the pipeline decrease and there comes a point where the Right First Time strategy pays off.

Pharmaceutical development is a business. And we perform research to guide business decisions. Clearing the pipeline for further compounds to be evaluated requires senior management discipline. The will to kill has to be there. The alternative is to clog the pipeline with with ineffective medicines of marginal value for which there is no place in today’s world. Strategies that clear those clogged pipelines are of greater value than those that speed marginal medicines to market.

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The Chronicles of Slick...

2012-03-26T14:15:00-04:00

Slick, now back in the UK from New York, has an even tougher paper round littered with hard-bitten compromises across a territory dominated by better wordsmiths. This morning he is making his way through gravelly sounding street musicians in the socially polarized rustbelt city where he now calls home. He is sodden in the spade bar of his local pub from where he watches the world go by through the bottoms of empty pint glasses. Outside: shouts and hollers; the sound of angle grinders and pile drivers; yellow hard hats; muslin; straw man gangsters; the depthless stare of yacht owners, not sure if this is land, or where the horizon ought to be and; pale scrubbed denizens like him just trying to get by. He grimaces at the scene. He is thinking of life in another city where he knows that he would be happier. His situation didn’t have to be this uneventful, this lack lustre.

One has to wonder how hard and for how long people kick themselves after they get caught red handed, or “snared a weaker” as is often said in Belfast. Do they see themselves as stereotypical portraits painted by the people who they’ve taken for a ride? Sincere people should not be accused of insincerity; they are the ones who deserve the golden opportunities for reinvention.

Slick’s insincerity wasn’t initially obvious. After the careening streams of his appeal ran dry, he sat alone in his spick council flat and thought about what really could have been. He had no victory, still has no victory, but he does feel more anger towards the person who revealed the true essence of his character. One can only wonder how many such characters exist, to say nothing of the stories that they could share. But to feel sorry for Slick is to deprive oneself of the pleasure of having the real truth fall on one’s lap. Slap! And why shouldn't it feel good?

Slick is now again free to lose himself in the same crannies as the feckless and the transient. The most evident kind of transience is the transience of insincerity – the shady car dealer, the inept con man, the pure bampot who dreams with tears in their eyes of one day being happy. Any of these characters are likely to flit on the day the bills are dropped through the letterbox. They will never be made to feel part of the honest city of permanence, but yet they have the audacity to think that they should be ploughing the same furrow alongside the most decent of spuds.

No doubt Slick will crop up somewhere else, his presence marked by a series of stories that will come to stain the lives of those who he manages to dupe. Until such time there is a more pressing question: whose tide of money and hospitality is he currently riding on? Surely that person, whoever they are, will come to regard Slick as a flotsam of their life, or maybe they are already hoping that he will be swept back out to sea on the next tide.

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The Spinach, Popeye, Ir...

2010-12-15T11:21:42-05:00

Postscript

In an earlier paper (Sutton 2010a) I explain how I was able to trace the origins of the Spinach, Popeye, Iron Decimal Error Story (SPIDES) as far back as I could to an article published in the British Medical Journal. That article was written by Professor Hamblin. I emailed Professor Hamblin and asked for the source of his story. His very prompt and courteous reply was that he had forgotten the original source of the story, after so many years, but thought he may have read it in an unknown copy of the Reader's Digest. Unable to find any earlier source for the story, in the Readers Digest or elsewhere, I concluded that Hamblin had probably conjured the story from thin air. As the paper below reveals, subsequent correspondence from the USA came in response to my 2010 paper and gave me a new lead. In light of this new information I was able to trace the story as far back as an inaugural lecture given by Professor Bender in 1972. In his inaugural lecture (at p. 11) Bender attributes the discovery of the decimal error explanation for the exaggerated iron content of spinach to the work of a professor Schupan. In a later letter published in the Spectator (Bender 1977), Bender claims that the correct iron figure for spinach was first discovered in 1937 by Professor Schupan. I can find no reference to any work published by a Professor Schupan on this subject. If any reader can find it then they will have solved another piece of this puzzle about how myths are created and spread (it is possible that Bender misspelt this professor’s name). A further clue to the origin of the decimal error story can be found in Bender's (1977 p. 11) acknowledgment and thanks to a "Professor den Hartog of Holland for tracing the possible origins of the belief." Unfortunately, Bender gave no reference to any published work or this professor's affiliation.

Without any other evidence to the contrary (since Hamblin never referenced his source), it seems fair to conclude that Bender's reference to a Professor Schupan is the source of Hamblin's mysterious German scientists - who he claimed discovered the decimal error myth in the 1930's. As the article below explains, both Bender and Hamblin were wrong about the true iron content of spinach being discovered in the 1930's. They were also wrong about there ever having been a decimal error. And they were wrong about Popeye eating spinach for iron. Because the truth about spinach and iron was known in 1892 and widely disseminated by US scientists as early as 1907. But it is fair to say that Hamblin most certainly never made the story up out of thin air as I earlier, and wrongly, suspected.

The world works in wondrous, though rationally explainable, ways. Had it not been for my original belief in the SPIDES – based on Hamblin’s BMJ article – and my efforts to track down those mysterious German scientists I would have never embarked on a self-taught course in myth busting and philosophy of science. Those newly acquired skills have enabled me to bust two further myths: first, that all beat patrol policing must be ineffective and second, both the Routine Activities Theory (RAT) and Crime Opportunity Theory explanation of opportunity as a cause of crime. As far as I can tell, the myth that Hamblin helped to spread led to no physically harmful impact upon anyone. But the criminological myths I have busted, since investigating his spinach story, are widely believed to be true and they have had a significant international impact upon policing and crime prevention policy making with all the attendant negative consequences that must flow from ineffective measures in these areas.

In a recent blog on this subject I hypothesize that trivial myths such as the SPIDES might actually work like a vaccination against serious ones. Could Hamblin's role in spreading the SPIDES, and its subsequent myth-busting, work as some kind of beneficial social immunomythology vaccination?

Professor Hamblin sadly passed away on January 8^th 2012. As a immunohematologist, Hamblin was a notable and highly respected and regarded researcher and teacher. He is particularly notable as an early pioneer of stem cell treatment for cancer. He made a difference by making the world a better place.

Dr Mike Sutton 26th January 2012.

The Spinach, Popeye, Iron, Decimal Error Myth is Finally Busted

For over thirty years a popular myth has been circulating in academic text books, peer-reviewed scholarly journals, popular discourse, university lectures and on the Internet that an accidentally misplaced decimal point in 19th century calculations of the iron content of spinach, exaggerated its iron content tenfold, which was then accepted as true and cited by a multitude of academic studies - all of which failed to check the validity of the figure. This most famous decimal error, it is claimed, led to spinach being erroneously promoted as a good nutritional source of iron and the reason the carton character Popeye's creator, E.C. Segar, chose spinach as the source of his – and the first American superhero’s - amazing powers. The famous Web site Cracked.com even has it as top of the list of the seven most disastrous typos of all time. A search on any search engine, such as Google, will reveal the extent to which this myth is believed and recycled. Earlier this year (Sutton 2010a) I published a primary research paper in the Internet Journal of Criminology that showed there was no published evidence to support the Spinach, Popeye, Iron Decimal Error story and that it appeared to be a myth. In my paper I proved beyond doubt that Segar chose spinach for its vitamin A content (although in fact we know today that spinach contains beta carotene - which the human body converts to Vitamin A).

In this article, I reveal for the first time the results of several months of historical research on iron and nutrition - much of which involved translating old German nutrition text books and academic papers. This article provides the first ever conclusive evidence for the source of the Spinach Popeye Iron Decimal Error Story (SPIDES) and how it occurred, and goes on to reveal that there most certainly was no decimal place error - but explains exactly why others thought there was.

In my earlier paper on this subject, I traced the source of the story as far aback as I was able to Professor Terence Hamblin’s (1981) article in the British Medical Journal. However, I can reveal here that the original published source of this story was in fact the famous nutritionist, and self-styled myth-buster - Arnold E. Bender. Bender first mentioned it in his inaugural lecture in 1972 (Bender 1972) and later in an article in the Spectator (Bender 1977). In the Spectator, Bender started the myth when he claimed that a German textbook on nutrition (Noorden and Salomon 1920; 476) replicated an earlier decimal point data mistake made by generations of textbooks that unquestioningly replicated erroneous data first published in 1870 by the German scientist E. von Wolff:

“For a hundred years or more spinach has been (and clearly still is) renowned for its high iron content compared with that of other vegetables, but to the joy of those who dislike the stuff this is quite untrue. In 1870 Dr E. von Wolff published the analyses of a number of foods, including spinach which was shown to be exceptionally rich in iron. The figures were repeated in succeeding generations of textbooks – after all one does not always verify the findings of others – including the ‘Handbook of Food Sciences’ (Handbuch der Ernahrungslehre) by von Noorden and Saloman [1] 1920.

In 1937 Professor Schupan eventually repeated the analyses of spinach and found that it contained no more iron than did any other leafy vegetable, only one-tenth of the amount previously reported. The fame of spinach appears to have been based on a misplaced decimal point.”

My primary research paper (Sutton 2010a) cites many scholarly publications whose esteemed academic expert authors - writing on the very subject of the importance of healthy scepticism - unwittingly believe the spinach decimal error myth to be true and so with unintentional irony they use it as an example to support their exhortations on the need for scientists to be healthily sceptical inquirers and always check published 'facts'.

Professor Bender, like Professor Hamblin, is an orthodox authority on nutrition. With further irony, Bender is famously a renowned sceptic of junk science. Perversely, these respected scientists failed to check the 'facts' behind the decimal error story before going into print.

Shortly after publishing the primary research paper I received an email from Bonnie Taylor-Blake in the USA . Bonnie had been researching, on-and-off, the decimal error story herself as a kind of hobby. She wrote to congratulate me on my findings and very kindly emailed some clues she had collected that suggested exactly where the origin of the SPIDES lies. The clue was to be found in an article in the Spectator Magazine (Marnham 1981) and an obscure reference to Professor Arnold E. Bender’s inaugural lecture. “Inaugurals,” as they are known in academia, are quite often lavish affairs, presented by way of an introductory speech by the University Vice Chancellor, or else by one of her or his deans, and supported by free food and wine for well over 100 guests. Bender gave his at Queen Elizabeth College, University of London on 24^th October 1972 (Bender 1972). What Bender said before his esteemed academic audience started the myth that he published in the Spectator (Bender 1977) five years later (Bender 1972:11):

“One common belief, that spinach is good for you, appears to be due to experimental error since the belief predates the Hollywood nutrition films based on the muscular development of the film star Popeye. I am indebted to Professor den Hartog of Holland for tracing the possible origin of this belief. It appears to date soon after 1870 when Dr E. von Wolff published food analysis showing spinach to be exceptionally rich in iron, a figure that was repeated in many generations of textbooks; it was in the Handbook of Food Sciences (Handbuch der Ernahrungslehre) by von Noorden and Saloman in 1920. In 1937 Professor Schupan analysed spinach for its iron content with µ-µ’-dipyridyl and found the figure to be one tenth of that reported by von Wolff – the fame of spinach may well have grown from a misplaced decimal point.”

After correcting for the fact that Bender had misspelt Salomon as Saloman in both his inaugural lecture and his Spectator article, which led me to suspect that he had never even read the original volume himself, I was able to purchase a copy of Noorden and Salomon via the Internet from an antiquarian book seller in Germany. As a non-German speaker I found Google’s online translator a most invaluable tool for making sense of the big old German text book that I had in my hands.

Noorden and Salomon (1920) present tables for the iron levels of various food stuffs taken from the published findings of Schall and Heisler (1917), von Berg (1913) and Haensel (1908). These are included in Table 1 (below). Noorden and Salomon’s (1920) figure for the amount of iron in dried spinach is 445 mg of iron per 100g. This figure is derived from Haensel (1908), who presented the iron content of spinach in percentage terms as 0.445 per cent. To convert this figure to mg per 100g it is simply multiplied by 1000 - which is 445.

Professor Bender was completely wrong about the source of Noorden and Salomon’s data on the iron content of spinach. Absolutely none of it came from von Wolff. Not one single figure. The figure Bender thinks came from the work of Wolff in the 1870’s in fact came from Haensel (1908). The origin of Bender’s myth probably lies in Germany. Had Bender read Noorden and Salomon (1920) he would have seen that they were citing several independent examples of German bad science as cutting edge knowledge 13 years after Sherman (1907) published the exact reasons why such data were flawed.

The source of Bender’s decimal error belief derives from the fact that accepted knowledge at the time when Bender was writing quite correctly held that dried spinach contained 44.8 mg of iron per 100g (e.g. Jackson 1938). Subsequent research has recorded a figure of 44.6 (Rewashdeh et al 2009). From this it is easy to see where the decimal error idea in Bender’s spinach story came from. Had Haensel (1908) moved his decimal point to give a figure of 0.0445 per cent iron he would have had an accurate figure for the amount of iron in dried spinach of 44.5 mg per 100g.

Most interestingly, when we study what Bender wrote, we cannot be certain whether he actually meant that the error in the iron content of spinach was due to von Wolff, or his assistant or a typesetter misplacing a decimal point. To be fair, at a stretch, he might even have meant that flawed analysis produced a figure that would only have been correct if someone came along and moved the decimal point. Later myth mongers would have it very clearly that this is what happened as they embellished the tale with various versions that add goofy assistants, sloppy typsetters and von Wolf blotting his copybook. But I’m not sure what a jury would make of Bender’s words. Personally, I do not find the professor guilty beyond reasonable doubt. Let me explain.

In his inaugural lecture Bender writes: “ – the fame of spinach may well have grown from a misplaced decimal point.” And later in the Spectator he writes more boldly: “The fame of spinach appears to have been based on a misplaced decimal point.”

Bender might have meant that Wolff’s analysis was bad science (although as we now know it was in fact Haensel’s figures Bender was referring to) that led to a figure ten times greater than that later found to be accurate. In other words it is unclear whether Bender means a decimal point was put in the wrong place or whether he meant instead that erroneous science produced a figure with a decimal point in the wrong place.

The strongest evidence of all that Bender did not start out with the intention of creating the misplaced decimal point part of the myth is that he begins talking about the subject in his inaugural lecture by saying: “One common belief, that spinach is good for you, appears to be due to experimental error…”

Clearly we can see here that it is early inaccurate scientific techniques that Bender appears to be blaming.

In support of this conclusion, we should note that Bender fails to provide a citation to any work by Professor den Hartog, whom he thanks for telling him the story. The fact that Bender says he is indebted to Hartog for “tracing the possible origin of the belief” suggests, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, that the two merely communicated informally - either verbally or in writing - about the story.

What Bender is guilty of, as evidenced firstly in his inaugural lecture, is a foggy style of writing that creates a greatly increased chance of potential misinterpretation upon the message he really wishes to convey about the history of nutritional research into spinach. Five years later in the Spectator Bender’s “Early inaccurate scientific techniques” sentence completely vanishes from his account. Perhaps Bender was seeking to use the Spectator to deliberately start an urban myth? We will never know. But what is most interesting is that eight years later he published a book somewhat ironically entitled: “Health or Hoax?” (Bender 1988).

In Health or Hoax? Bender mentions the fact that spinach is not a good source of iron. And once again gets his facts wrong about Popeye eating spinach for iron. But most tellingly – in a chapter entitled “Old Wives Tales True or False? – Bender makes no mention whatsoever of his earlier misplaced decimal point story.

Perhaps by 1988 Bender had actually undertaken some arduous research and found that in fact it was von Bunge in 1892 who discovered the problems with von Wolff’s (1871) research (see Table 1) and not Professor Schupan in 1937.

Lack of clarity in Bender’s writing may be the key to how the myth first started out on its journey to becoming a culturally embedded super myth. For example, Bender’s Health or Hoax? book is infuriatingly every bit as cryptically unhelpful as his inaugural lecture on the subject of iron in spinach. Even though the book is written for consumption by the general public - it is not until page 197 that one sentence alludes to the fact that what Bender writes on page 132 about spinach being “rich in iron” may not mean those who consume it will get much iron out of it: “Meat is a better source of iron, not only in quantity but because the iron in meat is better absorbed than that of plant food.” Bender writes, while never informing his readers why this is the case, and offering zero advice on whether or not “rich in iron” spinach is a good choice of food for those wishing to eat greens as well as, or instead of, meat to ensure they get enough iron in their diet.

Spinach whispers

As Bender’s SPIDES was re-told by others and re-printed it evolved at twists and turns so that there are so many different variations on the theme.

One version of the story suggests that these turn of the century scientists were not clear about whether they analysed fresh or dry spinach (Walter 2004). This is certainly true in relation to Noorden and Salomon’s (1920) tables because, while they do very clearly distinguish between fresh and dry spinach when presenting tables based on von Haensel’s research findings, they fail to do so for Schall and Heisler (1917) and for von Berg (1913). And their lower finding of 44 mg per 100g, for what we can only reasonably presume to be fresh spinach – given that it is labelled as leaves, stalks and juice - would be accurate were it dry spinach (e.g. Rewashdeh et al 2009).

The data in Table 1 reveal how easy it is to see how a popular variant of the myth that would have it that von Wolff recorded dry spinach as fresh (Coultate 2009) has become entangled with the notion of a misplaced decimal point and other accounts that von Wolff mixed up his figures for dried and fresh spinach. Because moving the decimal point for Wolff’s finding of the amount of iron in fresh spinach one place to the left would give a figure of 5.0 which as Table 2 reveals is close to the range of acceptable recent findings for the mg of iron in 100g of dried spinach (see: Olade and Obarisaide 2009). Moving his figure for dried spinach two places to the left would give a reasonable figure for fresh spinach. However, the idea that Wolff confused dried and fresh spinach and/or made decimal point errors in two observations seems fanciful in light of Sherman's (1907: 43; 53) explanation that poor science knowledge at the time was to blame. This is described in more detail below.

Table 1: Older data: Accurate and inaccurate knowledge regarding iron and iron oxide levels in spinach

Type	Units	Value per 100gs	Knowledge Source	Reasonably Accurate
Discredited Ash Method
Raw Fresh Dried	mg mg	50 3,350 (Fe203) 386 (Fe)	von Wolff (1871) ♣ von Wolff (1880)♣
.	mg	2170.6 (Fe203)	Von Haensel (1908)
Other Methods
Raw Fresh*	mg	3.8	Sherman (1907)	√
Raw Fresh	mg	3.0	Sherman (1907)**	√
Raw Fresh	mg	36.3	von Haensel (1908)
Raw Fresh***	mg	44-60 (Fe203) 31-42(Fe)	Berg (1913) ♣ Schall and Heisler (1917)♣
Raw Fresh*	mg	4.3	von Bunge (1892)****	√
Dried	mg	37.0	Atwater and Woods (1895)	√
Dried	mg	445.0 (Fe203)	von Haensel (1908)

♣ Revision Note: 29 March 2011: Jan Willem Nienhuys very kindly commented on this paper (see comments section) to point out that I made an error in using Wolff's tables for iron oxide here whist assuming them to be for FE (iron). I think my own mistake is interesting - although it may be a pure coincidence - in that the figure of 3,350 mg per 100g (FE203 iron oxide - not iron - FE) would correspond very closely to what we know today to be the real level of actual (FE) iron in spinach if the decimal place were moved two places. In effect, as Jan's comment (see end of this article) reveals, von Wolff (1871) quotes an 1848 result of 50 mg iron per 100 gram of spinach 'fresh substance', and in a later account (1880) he found 3.35 percent iron oxide (5.52 gram) in the ash of 100 gram dry material, corresponding to 386 mg iron. Here then we can see that if the decimal point were moved one place to the left of 386 we would have a pretty good figure for what we know today to be the mg of iron in 100g of spinach. But there is no evidence of a decimal error in von Wolff's work, just the inferior science of the day. As Jan reveals and neatly explains in his comments on this paper, it is important to note that von Wolff and others produce and present different findings for iron and iron oxide. von Wolff (1871) measured 50 mg iron per 100g of 'fresh substance'; and also calculated an average iron oxide content of the ash of 100 gram dry spinach (of two measurements) to be 3.35 percent, which works out to be 386 mg iron per 100g. Wherever I have given a value of Fe203 (iron oxide) - followed by a value for Fe (iron) - in Table 1, these values have very kindly been supplied by Jan Willem Nienhuys. His research results and reasoning, which appear sound to me, are set out in the comments section at the end of this paper.

*Reported by Sherman (1907) as spinach obtained from a grocer that contained some 3 to 4 times less water than a perfectly fresh sample which resulted in the average iron content being a third higher than in a perfectly fresh sample.

** Here Sherman (1907) calculated the mean average of the results of a series of earlier studies.

*** Noted by Noorden and Salomon (1920) as leaves, stalks and juice, presumably this is fresh and not dried material but we cannot be certain.

**** As cited by Sherman (1907: 53).

Today (see Table 2) we know that the real figure for fresh spinach is around 2.75 (US Department of Agriculture, 2010) andthe real figure for dried spinach is around 45mg per 100g (Jackson 1938; Rewashdeh et al 2009).

Table 2: More Recent Data: Accurate knowledge regarding iron levels in spinach

Type	Units	Value per 100gs	Knowledge Source
Raw Fresh	mg	2.71	USDA (2010)
Raw Fresh	mg	2.5	Council on Foods (1937)
Raw Fresh	mg	1.7 to 3	Stiebling (1932)
Raw Frozen	mg	1.89	USDA (2010)
Raw Canned	mg	2.30	USDA (2010)
Cooked	mg	3.57	USDA (2010)
Dried	mg	44.8	Jackson (1938)
Dried	mg	44.6	Rewashdeh et al (2009)
Dried	mg	34.0	Olade and Obarisaide (2009)

So is there any possible truth at all in the spinach, in decimal error story?

On the basis of the evidence presented so far, there is at least the possibility that von Wolff made two errors: (1) he recorded dry spinach as fresh, and that in addition he compounded this error when (2) somehow he or a typesetter, or some other person accidentally moved the decimal point in his findings two places to the right. An alternative possible explanation is that von Wolff worked on fresh spinach just like he said he did and that either he or a typesetter, or some other person, accidentally moved the decimal point a massive three places to the right.

Rather than simply accept these simple and compellingly feasible explanatory possibilities, as others have done, and present them as entertaining facts we should look for alternative possibilities. A good place to start is to examine whether perhaps the science of measuring iron levels in foodstuffs was not particularly good at the time and whether other scientists – working independently – came up with similarly high measures of the amount of iron in spinach.

Writing in the first decade of the 20^th century the German biochemist Haensel (1909: 9) notes that he is aware of only two studies that have analyzed the iron content of spinach. Paying tribute to but failing to cite: “recent studies on iron in food by G. von Bunge”, Haensel (1909:9) writes that all findings in his paper are based on his own analysis of the precise amount of iron in spinach.

Haensel analysed the iron content of spinach by various methods, and each time presenting in his paper two of each of his findings for the percentage of iron oxide. Haensel (1909: 14) writes that, contrary to (non-cited) earlier findings of others his own analysis, using the incinerated plant ash determination method, found that spinach was not in fact the richest plant source of iron and that lettuce, winter cabbage and endivien contained more iron.

If Emile von Wolff’s hugely exaggerated reported findings of iron in spinach were due to a decimal error alone then the decimal point was out by three decimal places. Moving his decimal point three places to the left gives a respectably accurate figure of 2.17 mg per 100g for fresh spinach. If by some amazing coincidence Haensel (1909) made a decimal place error as well – one that was reproduced by Noorden and Salomon (1920) without question – in his non-ash analysis of spinach then he made the same basic accounting error in recording the iron level for every plant he analysed; because using various methods of analysis Haensel consistently has winter cabbage, lettuce and endivien as containing slightly more iron than spinach.

Haensel’s findings for iron in fresh spinach are similar to the lowest levels found by Berg (1913) and Schall and Heisler (1917) (see Table 1). Given the similarity in their exaggerated findings, it seems more likely that the analysis method used by all three scientists, and some 45 years earlier by von Wolff, is to blame for these exaggerated figures, rather than a peculiarly coincidental series of separate decimal place accounting goofs. And, most clearly, the data presented in Table 2 exonerates von Bunge from the SPIDES because his 1892 figure is accurate. Bunge then is at least one early pioneer of nutrition who finally can stop turning in his grave as the truth is finally revealed for the first time in this article

Bad Science was to Blame for Exaggerations in the Iron Content of Spinach

More than 100 years ago Sherman (1907: 43; 53) in the US Department of Agriculture’s Office of Experiment Stations-Bulletin 185 explained in plain English the various ways that earlier biochemistry methods – such as those employed by Wolff and later by Haensel - exaggerated the iron content of foodstuffs:

“Little weight can be attached to the statements regarding iron which are to be found in the standard compilations of ash analysis, as these are based largely upon results obtained by methods which greatly overestimated the iron. Generally speaking, it is only since the discussion of iron in food materials was begun by Bunge in 1885 that analyses have been made with special reference to the determination of iron, and the amount of data which appears trustworthy is not yet very large.”

“Undoubtedly…many of the ash analysis of Wolff and Konig greatly overestimate the iron content of green vegetables, as was pointed out by Bunge in 1892.”

The various reasons Sherman’s Bulletin 185 gave for early bad science in the early high determination of iron levels of various foodstuffs, including plants and meat, can be summarised as follows:

Contamination of precipitates (the dissolved or suspended substances in solution)
Using less than completely fresh, and therefore somewhat dehydrated “fresh” plant material.
Volatilization of iron as ferric chloride during the ignition of the sample.
Contamination with iron from utensils.
Iron contamination from laboratory dust, including that from charcoal used in the heating process.
Iron in the reagents used.
Small amounts of platinum from dishes used in burning of the samples.

Sherman reveals then that at the turn of the 20th century American scientists were quoting von Bunge’s accurate findings of the iron levels of spinach and were well aware that von Wolff’s hugely exaggerated findings were due to unreliable methods, rather than any kind of simple decimal place transcription error.

Sherman shows us that by 1907, American scientists were more accurate, knowledgeable and ahead of the Germans on the iron in spinach issue. And because their clearly written knowledge was made available by way of the US Government’s Printing Office, it seems improbable that Noorden and Salomon’s (1920) tomb, which was never translated into English, would have influenced American scientists.

Braced Myths

Clearly then the popular myth that is being credulously recycled by journalists, nutritionists and scientists (e.g. Gates 2010) that: “The mega-iron myth first began in 1870 when Dr. E. von Wolf misplaced a decimal point in his publication which led to an iron content figure that was ten times too high. Although investigated in 1937 by the Germans, the rumor remained strong for decades (thanks to a pipe-smoking sailor man).” Is a myth about a myth.

The myth busting Jan Willem Nienhuys, who is secretary of the Dutch organization Skepsis, kindly points out in his comment in the comments section on this paper that:

“It is not quite correct to say that Wolff used bad methods: he reports various values for an enormous number of substances all or most of them derived from measurements found in the literature. He must have known about these wildly varying iron contents, but what can one do if one reports research of others?”

Conclusion

When respected academics and sceptics, with painful irony, erroneously believe a myth to be true and so use it as an example of the need to be healthily sceptical they create the unintended consequence of bracing the myth (Sutton 2010b). Braced myths are a kind of reinforced super myth; quite what this means in terms of how difficult it will be to kill such myths remains to be seen.

At least perhaps now at last, Segar and the much maligned von Wolff and von Bunge can stop turning in their graves as the SPIDES is laid to rest.

Timeline For Busting the Spinach Popeye Iron Decimal Error Myth

1871

Von Wolff’s 'bad science' is said to have exaggerated spinach iron content

1892 - Swiss

Von Bunge gets it right

1907 - USA

Sherman explains 19th Century bad science

1920 - Germany

Noorden & Salomon still citing old German bad science

1972 - UK

Bender publishes spinach Popeye iron decimal error myth

1981 - UK

Hamblin braces Bender’s myth

2010 - UK

Sutton proves Popeye ate spinach for vitamin A and never for iron

2010 - UK

Sutton busts spinach iron decimal error myth

References

Bender, A. (1972) The Wider Knowledge of Nutrition. Inaugural Lecture. October 24. Queen Elizabeth College., University of London. Somerset. Castle Cary Press Ltd.

Bender, A. (1977). Iron in spinach. Spectator. p.18. July 9.

Bender, A. (1988) Health or Hoax? London. Elvedon Press.

Berg, R. (1913). Die Nährungs- und Genußmittel (Aschenbestandteile). Dresden. Taken here from: Noorden, C. and Salomon, H. (1920) Handbuch Der Ernährungslehre Erster Band Allgemeine Diätetik. Berlin. Julious Springer.

Coultate, T. 2009. Food the Chemistry of its components. 5^th Edition. Cambridge. Royal Society of Chemistry Publishing.

Gates, D. (2010) The Body Ecology Guide to the Ten Healthiest Greens http://www.bodyecology.com/07/08/30/healthiest_greens_guide.php

Haensel, E. (1909) Über den Eisen- und Phosphorgehalt unserer Vegetabilien. Biochem. Zeitschr 16. 9.

Hamblin, T.J. 1981. Fake! British Medical Journal. Volume 283. 19-26^th December. pp. 1671-1674.

Jackson, S. H. 1938. Determination of Iron in Biological Material. Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Analytical Edition. 10 (6), 302-304

Marnham, P. (1981) Postscript Counteract. The Spectator. Jan 3. page 26.

Noorden, C. and Salomon, H. (1920) Handbuch Der Ernährungslehre Erster Band Allgemeine Diätetik. Berlin. Julious Springer.

Oladele, O.O. and Aborisade A.T. (2009) American Journal of Food Technology.Volume: 4. Issue: 2. pp.: 66-70

Rewashdeh et al 2009. Iron Bioavailabilty of Rats Fed Liver, Lentil, Spinach and other Mixtures. Pakistan Journal of Biological Sciences. 12 (4) 367-372.

Schall, H. and Heisler, A. (1917) Nahrungsmitteltabelle . 5. Aufl. Taken here from Noorden, C. and Salomon, H. (1920) Handbuch Der Ernährungslehre Erster Band Allgemeine Diätetik. Berlin. Julious Springer.

Sherman. H.C. (1907). Iron in Food and Its Functions in Nutrition. Office of Experimental Stations Bulletin 185. May 25. p56.

Sutton, M. (2010a). Spinach, Iron and Popeye:Ironic lessons from biochemistry and history on the importance of healthy eating, healthy scepticism and adequate citation. Internet Journal of Criminology (Primary Research Paper series). http://www.internetjournalofcriminology.com/Sutton_Spinach_Iron_and_Popeye_March_2010.pdf

Sutton (2010b) Discovery of Braced Myths. Supermyths blog. September 24^th. Available online: http://super-myths.blogspot.com/search/label/Discovery%20of%20braced%20myths

Wolff, E. (1871) Aschen-Analysen von Landwirthschaftlichen Producten Fabrik - Abflällen und Wildwachsenden Pflanzen. Berlin. Wiegandt & Hampel.

Walter (2004) Astronautics – that’s what you get out of it. Institute of Astronautics. http://www.lrt.mw.tum.de/en/interessierte/fs_nutzen_der_raumfahrt.phtml

[1] This is a misspelling by Bender of Salomon.

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The Problem of Zombie C...

2011-02-02T14:46:31-05:00

Picture commissioned by Sutton from the artist Marcus Jones. Marcus can be contacted via his online gallery website http://marcusjones.daportfolio.comUsed only with express written permission

Randomly Patrolling Zombie Cops

Braced Myth Definition

The 27 year old zombie cop myth was first bust in an encyclopedia entry I wrote on the UK Safer Cities programme. Following the presentation of a paper based on this BestThinking article at an academic conference, several papers are in preparation, or else undergoing peer review, that use swathes of text from it. Simply in order to comply with the rules of academic publishers that the books, chapters and scholarly papers they publish are not first reproduced elsewhere I have removed the text from this article.

As and when book chapters and papers are published, that are based in part on this article, I will publish a reference to them here. Furthermore, with permission of the publishers some of the text may then be reproduced.

I would like to thank the several thousand readers who have read this article and in particular those police officers who contacted me directly by email to let me know the negative impact of this policing myth on their work. This preliminary and revolutionary peer-to-peer publishing process on Best Thinking has been extremely beneficial and informative for policy oriented knowledge progression.

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Human Resource Informat...

2012-03-20T10:04:35-04:00

Human Resource Information Service (HRIS) Technology Helps Drive Organizational Strategic Advantage

The design and implementation of appropriate Human Resource Information Service (HRIS) technology heightens organizational strategic advantage in several ways (Mayhew, 2012): 1) Compliance with state and federal employment and labor laws; 2) A significant time and cost reduction in recruiting, candidate-list narrowing, and hiring practices; 3) A sharpening of productivity analyses; 4) Increased ease of access and dissemination of employee information as necessary; and 5) Facilitates the use of employee HR self-service options which free HR staff time for more transformational activities.

HRIS Technology Eases Access to Data for Documentation Purposes

Proper design, implementation, and use of HRIS can be used to track and document what sorts of federal and state employment and labor law training employees, supervisors, managers, and executives have received to date and what kinds of training need to be taken in the future to remain compliant with all relevant laws and regulations. The convenient storage and easy accessibility of such data is of critical importance so that the organization can document and demonstrate entity-wide compliance any time an audit is made whether it be announced in advanced, or done without prior notification.

Measurement of Improvement is Facilitated

Properly implemented HRIS also ensures that a substantial data base has been built to document what changes an organization has made in their HRM practices, and management practices, in general, to make the organization more compliant with state and federal employment and labor laws. In so doing, moreover, the organization can measure and substantiate the degree of improvement they have made vis-à-vis compliance and can reveal very quickly how far the entity has to go in terms of becoming fully compliant.

HRIS Speeds up and Facilitates the Recruitment and Hiring Processes

Relative to the second point, streamlining (Mayhew, 2012) recruitment, screening, and hiring processes, HRIS in many organizations nationwide and worldwide has been shown to speed up such functions very greatly. More and more HR departments have been freed from the numbing minutiae of recruitment record keeping and of building a data base of the narrowed list of candidates for a particular position, or positions, within the company.

Hundreds of Hours are Saved each Year in the Recruitment and Hiring Processes

Through HRIS innovation and streamlining, relative to the hiring process, hundreds of man hours (human hours), each year, are saved as are considerable amounts of money. Greater amounts of data concerning each candidate can be stored more quickly and easily than ever before which allows HR staff to develop a much holistic picture of each candidate than in the “old days” of “paper driven” HR record keeping procedures.

HRIS Sharpens Productivity Analyses

The third point, sharpening productivity analyses, has also come to the fore very clearly as a major benefit of HRIS technology. Because large amounts of “cross-skill” performance data can be stored about each employee in the wake of their evaluation sessions, their progress can be much more holistically tracked over a specific period of time than ever before. Their degree of progress, or lack thereof, in each job-task area can be quickly ascertained to determine if there are any particular areas of the employee’s performance that are consistently lagging.

Lagging Employee Performance is Sometimes Attributable to Flawed Job or Task Design

If such is the case, careful attention can be given to particular tasks that may be poorly designed and could be adversely impacting the person’s performance. This would be especially true if the person does not seem to be making any headway in overcoming a particular deficiency in the conduct of their (her/his) job tasks. If such is the case, then appropriate remedies such as task redesign, or even complete job redesign, can be implemented much more quickly than under old “paper driven” methods of performance evaluation.

Employee Data can Be Accessed Very Quickly

The fourth area, rapid access to, and dissemination of, employee information has been a boon to HR staffers in the realm of enabling them to provide highly relevant and immediate data concerning several employees being considered for an in-house promotion to one position.

The HR Department, virtually on demand, is able to very quickly access the data of those employees being considered for promotion and disseminates such information to the appropriate decision makers in the organization.

HRIS Technology has Driven the Development of “Self-Service” HR Services

The fifth area, self-service HR, has been empowered by HRIS, and has freed HR departments from many man hours (human hours) each year. The whole realm of “self-service” HR has had very salutary effects for both HR and non-HR employees

In a number of different organizations, employees can access their complete profile online 24/7 and increase, or decrease, the amount of money they put into their retirement-pension fund each month, for example. Or, they would, for instance, be able to pay more money into a graduate school education fund that they and their employer are jointly paying into each pay period.

Source: Mayhew, Ruth. (2012). Advantages and Disadvantages of Human Resources Information Systems. Small Business Demand Media, The Houston Chronicle. Retrieved March 5, 2012 from: http://smallbusiness.chron.com/advantages-disadvantages-human-resource-information-system-2107.html

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Old iPads for Kids or D...

2012-03-15T19:10:14-04:00

* Because little actual data are available for the safety and efficacy of interactive tablets, parents must not leave preschoolers unsupervised. In fact, the best use of iPads for these youngsters is to promote family interactivity, and the worst is alone-time with the device.

* Expectations: "Setting expectations and attitudes is an essential first step that may take some time, so start weeks before the handover. Get the kids used to the idea that you are in charge and use access to the new toy as an opportunity to make technology finally work for good parenting, not against it. Make it into a positive force for the child's development and family life. For example, childproof and get control of the Internet before agreeing to any other apps, whatever age the child," urges Dr. Schwarz.

* Childproofing the device features is necessary if a hand-me-down. According to Richard Buday, FAIA, President of Houston's Archimage and developer of ZillyDilly, this means removing all existing settings, apps and information from an iPad by tapping Settings > General > Reset > Erase All Content and Settings. You may also wish to inactivate the Safari browser and other features of the iPad via the Settings menu.

* Physical risks are rare but possible. While tablets are overwhelmingly helpful as educational, medical and assistive tools for special needs kids, parents should also be alert to potential physical risks, including head, neck, and shoulder injuries from postural strains, already reported in adults, and possible but seemingly quite rare problems including eye strain, injuries from glass breakage, and screen flicker triggering epileptic seizures.

* Learning and emotional hazards have received much more scientific attention. Excessive, unbalanced, and unsupervised screen time can be associated with obesity and deficits in social and intellectual growth an possibly be with more serious problems of media overuse in older kids. However, recent Guidance by the National Association for the Education of Young Children and the Fred Rogers Center also described potential benefits to very young children, moderating earlier warnings by the American Academy of Pediatrics and essentially sanctioning greater parental discretion.

* Maximize benefits and lessen conflicts: "I urge parents to take charge from the start and introduce the iPad as a family appliance, set rules, limit time, and provide a balance of experiences appropriate to the age and needs of each child," states Dr. Schwarz, also a researcher in technology use in play therapy and author of "Kids, parents & Technology: A Guide for Young Families".

* Use the device as much as possible for social, multi-person interactivity. Gently and firmly introduce new iPad rules and habits and media-free times and zones. Place and charge the device in a common area in your home and limit alone time. Include grandparents and siblings.

* Make sure "educational" apps are truly educational and fit your child's needs by consulting with a teacher. Carefully tailor content and times, especially allowed alone time, to age group and each child.

* Give preschoolers a child-proofed device and only when you are fully present and undistracted. Expand privileges for responsible mature kids to eventually allow media independence by mid-teens.

* Internet: expose to diverse free Internet content as well as apps to balance entertainment with enrichment of family relationships, socialization, values education, and extra-curricular learning to develop a well- rounded, informed, and competent children.

* Develop your kids' positive lifelong media consumption habits early and prevent later problems.

Refs:

http://www.naeyc.org/files/naeyc/file/positions/PS_technology_WEB2.pdf

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zillydilly-for-ipad/id492673037

http://www.mydigitalfamily.org

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Inclusional In-Sight

2012-03-11T12:16:29-04:00

Inclusional In-Sight

A statement of In-tent prepared by Alan Rayner

I want to contribute in whatever way I can to the development and spread of a way of understanding the natural world and our human place in it that makes good sense and is consistent with actual experience. I see this understanding as vital to our liberation, both as individuals and as groups, from unnecessary conflict, cruelty and environmental destruction, so that we can live, love and be loved more caringly, enjoyably, tolerantly and creatively.

At the heart of this understanding is a need to appreciate our selves and other life forms as dynamic inhabitants of our natural neighbourhood, like whirlpools in a water flow, not exceptions from it. Through being aware of our selves and all life forms in this way, we could release our inborn empathy and creativity. We could also resolve and explore beyond the excessively rigid definitions and paradoxes that have blighted our scientific, theological, educational and governmental theory and practice for so long. Here, I think it is helpful to transform our predominant, culturally reinforced, abstract view of space as empty distance and boundaries as the definitive limits of discrete objects. What difference could it make instead to view space as continuous, limitless, intangible and hence receptive presence – a source of deep love (agape) – and boundaries as dynamic interfacings that distinguish but don’t isolate natural forms?

In wanting to make this contribution I have to recognise my individual needs and circumstances as well as those of others. I cannot expect to bring about transformation in my own right. I can only hope to facilitate transformation through living as caringly as I can, engaging personally with others, learning, and making my learning publicly available through my writings, artwork, oral presentations and inspiration. Many of these can be found at www.bestthinking.com. They can also be found at www.inclusionality.org and www.inclusional-research.org, and via my ‘Twitter’ account, @InclusionAL.

When a centre of GRAVITY is understood to BE a centre of SPACE, EVERYTHING FALLS INTO PLACE. . http://www.bestthinking.com/article/permalink/1798?tab=article&title=place-time-the-flow-geometry-of-space

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Wettability of Contact ...

2012-03-07T14:37:35-05:00

A Recommended “Teflon Test” Control Technique

Used only with express written permission

Water does not wet silicone-coated root canal file.

Wettability by what? Why do we care? In the blinking or open eye, the competition between tear film components and the adjacent air for coverage of the lens surface is directly related to patient comfort and ocular health. ALL liquids DO wet ALL solids to some extent, and we use the contact angle formalism of the venerable Thomas Young (1805) to make quantitative statements about the degree of surface wetting in terms of the equilibrium contact angles of test liquids with the surfaces in question. In such test systems, with many “unknowns”, it is critical that the air/liquid surface tension values of the wetting liquids be accurately determined AND maintained throughout—and beyond-- the lens/liquid interface interaction. For contact lenses, it has been universally accepted that their surface wetting by water will be the standard by which the comparisons should be made. Our institutional problem, leading to often-cited variability of reported contact angle values, is that most investigations use “dirty water” –that is, water NOT of the required initial highest purity with a measured high liquid/vapor surface tension of 72.8 dynes/cm at 20 degrees {at the moment of first contact with the lens surface and generally much lower after that}. It is especially difficult to maintain water’s required high surface tension in large-volume test systems where multiple contact surfaces are simultaneously present from containers, needles, syringes, and is a serious further error to actually add surfactants to the system to obtain investigator-sought “more reasonable” data.

Used only with express written permission

Water-wettable root canal file.

Liquids of starting surface tensions lower than that of pure water WILL exhibit lower equilibrium contact angles than will pure water on all surfaces, giving misleading indications of apparent hydrophilicities for those test materials. Pure water put onto a lens surface that “exports” surface-active ingredients to the water, even in minute amounts, substantially lowers the surface tension of that water and again gives a falsely lower apparent water contact angle value for that surface. Lens surfaces that imbibe water, no matter how pure it may be, do not allow the EQUILIBRIUM requirement of the Young equation to be met and so do not characterize the water wettability of those lens surfaces but rather their bulk uptake properties. For better comparisons, the advanced formalism of Zisman (1968) to determine Critical Surface Tension values from contact angle measurements with multiple pure liquids gives reliable, reproducible correlations with materials’ actual outermost atomic constitutions—even for hydogels where the water contact angle is not a stable value.

Here is a way to establish trustworthy analytical results. Take a single droplet of the proposed “water” test liquid, and apply it to a clean, smooth Teflon (PTFE) surface. According to Zisman and numerous following experts, that water-on-PTFE contact angle value should be greater than 110 degrees (and higher if there is surface roughness). If it is lower, you are NOT doing a water wettability test. If the initial water contact angle is 110 degrees or higher, proceed with the measurement on the lens surface AND then take water AFTER the test for re-application to the Teflon surface. If the contact angle is not STILL above 110 degrees, there has been surface-active contamination of the water and your measured values do NOT characterize lens materials’ water wettabilities. Simply touching a contact lens to a free-standing 110 degree water droplet on Teflon will cause that water’s contact angle to immediately slump to lower values in proportion to the surface-active components spontaneously eluted. When extensive prior elution has been done, and the pure water contact angle on an eluted lens surface is still low, THAT is a reliable signature of a material surface with sustained hydrophilicity. Simply adsorbing elutable water-loving substances onto lens surfaces, or compounding them with elutable bulk additives, can give potential short-term clinical benefits but this is not related to intrinsic material wettability.

References

T. Young, Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc. London 95, 65 (1805)

R.E. Baier, E.G. Shafrin, W.A. Zisman, Science 162, 1360 (1968)

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Kerala Adventures - Why...

2012-03-07T14:19:15-05:00

India-Mel and Bonnie’s Excellent Adventure Feb 27, 2011

Kerala has a great climate, a long shoreline with serene beaches, tropical fresh water rivers and streams, lush hill stations and exotic wildlife, sprawling plantations and lime green rice paddy fields, historical monuments, cultural activities and most of all friendly smiling welcoming people. Guaranteed weather and cheap prices once you get there makes this a much better destination than Miami.

We heard very good things about Kerala Adventures, a travel company specializing in travel to Kerala and the owner John Thomas did not disappoint us. He organized an exciting tour filled with fascinating sights, a diversity of cultural experiences and much appreciated opportunities for rest and relaxation considering we were only staying for six nights.

Kerala is interesting because of the mix of Hindus, Moslems and Christians. There are churches, mosques and Hindu temples of every shape and size everywhere you look and the Portuguese influence is quite visible just like we observed years before in Goa.

What especially stood out for me was that wherever we went the Indian people smiled warmly and said hello or Namaste. But when we passed another Westener, whether at the hotel, on the street or at a tourist site they diverted their eyes, looked down and never offered a greeting just like back home in Toronto. The infectious friendliness of the Indian people did not seem to rub off on the foreign visitors.

CITY OF COCHIN

For our first two nights we stayed at the elegant Ramada Resort in Cochin. The resort has a huge meandering swimming pool and luxurious rooms with all the comforts of home. Our spacious room overlooked the Arabian Sea and the large breakfast was as good as anywhere in the world. It was a peaceful haven to retreat to at the end of a busy day of touring.

We boarded a large boat, the St. Sebastian, at the Fort Cochin Ferry dock for our private tour of the harbour. We saw the city landscape, the famous Chinese fishing nets, ship building and repair facilities and the gigantic loading docks with containers from all over the world. The best part of the boat ride was to see dolphins swimming and frolicking beside our boat.

We visited the impressive St. Francis Church which was originally built in 1503 and is the oldest European church in India. Vasco da Gama who discovered the sea route from Europe to India, was initially buried in this church. Nearby is the imposing Santa Cruz Basilica built in 1505, destroyed by the British in 1795 and later rebuilt in 1887. The Christians of Kerala which make up about 16% of the population belong to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. St. Thomas apparently came to Kerala in 52 AD and converted his followers at that time.

After a delicious sea food lunch at the renowned Malabar House Restaurant we visited Jew Town to see the oldest synagogue in the Commonwealth. The first Jewish traders apparently came to Kerala back in 992 BC during the time of King Solomon. After the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD some Jews fled to India and settled in Cranganore and other parts of India. Other Jews came to India in 490 AD from Persia and Babylon and in 1492 after their expulsion from Spain. The Maharajahs of Cochin welcomed the Jews and the Pardesi Synagogue was built in 1568. Kerala has been a place of tolerance and acceptance.

We walked down the narrow streets of the old city of Cochin to Jew Street. We took off our shoes at the entrance of the Synagogue which is the custom in India for visiting homes and other places of worship. The synagogue floor is made of individually painted tiles from China. There are large crystal chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and the Ark and holy bibles are hidden by a silk curtain. There is an informative pictorial description of the history of the Jews of Kerala in one of the outer rooms.

Perhaps the most impressive quality of Kerala is its openness to external influences. Diversity is part of everyday life. Arab, Roman, Chinese, Islamist, Christian, Marxist and British have all left their mark on Kerala. Kerala was the first place on earth to democratically elect a communist government, vote the communists out and re-elect them back again. Kerala has the highest literacy rate in all of India and primary school is compulsory for all children.

BACKWATERS

After 65kms or one and half hours south of Cochin we arrived in Alleppey, an area of many inland canals and waterways called the “Backwaters” famous for its floating houseboats. We checked into the Punnamada Spa Resort and then boarded our luxury houseboat docked directly in front of our waterfront room. We traveled all day on a converted rice barge that was used in the early days for the transport of goods from the isolated interior villages to the towns. These large house boats, about 67 feet long and 13 feet wide, have fully furnished single and double bedrooms with on-suite washrooms, sundeck, private balcony with comfortable chairs and full kitchen.

A cruise on a houseboat is a fabulous way to explore the picturesque beauty of the backwaters and a wonderful way to witness the simple life of Keralites who live on the river and canals. Many people choose to sleep on the elegant houseboats and have all meals prepared from local fresh provisions that is plucked, caught or bought in the back water.

We awoke to the tunes of lovely birds and watched an amazing sunrise through the coconut palms. The we drove to the Abad Whispering Palms resort, located at Kumarakom, a tiny settlement on lovely Vembanad lake one of the largest lakes in India. We took another riverboat cruise through Mangrove forests, emerald green paddy fields and coconut groves interspersed with enchanting waterways and canals adorned with white lilies and a plethora of birds. The staff at the resort went out of their way to make us feel at home.

The most impressive thing about India, unlike Florida, is the unexpected. While driving south to Kovalam and the beaches our driver had to stop because of religious Hindu procession. We jumped out to see many slender young men in trance with ten foot long steel rods piercing through their cheeks walking towards the temple. Teenage boys also in trance were dancing, eyes closed, to the rhythm of temple drums. Men with huge colourful four feet tall headdresses precariously balanced on their heads were followed by a procession of flutes. You’d never see that in Miami.

The 1.2 billion inhabitants of India face so many challenges. The greatness of a people is measured by how they cope with adversity. Although there is a wealthy minority and a growing middle class the great majority of Indians live without sanitation in very poor living conditions. We were inspired by the tenacity, good will and generousity of the Indian people in general. Perhaps the most profound reason to visit India is to remind us just how fortunate we are living in North America with our health and sanitation systems in place. India is all about acceptance and surrender. Once again we were reminded that joy and inner peace is not just about wealth and possessions.

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Finland to Host UN Conf...

2012-03-07T14:10:32-05:00

On 14 October 2011, it was announced at the United Nations that Finland will host the conference to be held next year on the establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East and that Jaakko Laajava, Under-Secretary of State in Finland’s for

On 14 October 2011, it was announced at the United Nations in New York that Finland will host the conference to be held this year on the establishment of a Weapons of Mass Destruction-Free Zone (WMDFZ) (a zone free of weapons of mass destruction, biological, chemical and nuclear) in the Middle East. Jaakko Laajava, Under-Secretary of State in Finland’s foreign ministry, has been appointed as the facilitator for the 2012 conference. The announcement was made in a joint press statement issued by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States.

Proposal for a WMDFZ

The establishment of a WMDFZ in the Middle East, which is very important for peace in the region, was first proposed by Egypt in 1990. The 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) states that the Treaty must be reviewed every five years. The NPT Review Conference that took place in 1995 adopted a Resolution on the Middle East calling on states to take practical steps to make progress in the establishment of WMDFZ in the region. The resolution called for the negotiation of a treaty committing the parties not to possess, acquire, test, manufacture or use any nuclear, chemical and biological weapons as well as their delivery systems. Such a treaty should provide for effective verification of compliance with the commitments made by the parties to the Treaty. The 2000 NPT Review Conference reaffirmed the goal of 1995 Middle East Resolution.

The 2010 NPT Review Conference called for a United Nations sponsored conference in 2012 to establish a WMDFZ in the Middle East to be attended by all States in the region. It is this UN Conference which is to be hosted by Finland. The United States, Russia and the United Kingdom, have committed themselves to work together with the UN Secretary General to convene the 2012 Conference. The Conference aims to bring together all Middle Eastern countries, some of which have a long history of disagreement about the issue, such as Iran and Israel.

Increasing interest in nuclear power in the region

There has recently been an increasing interest in Middle Eastern countries in acquiring nuclear-power reactors for the generation of electricity. Because the technology for civil nuclear power is identical to the technology for nuclear weapons any country operating with nuclear-power reactors must be regarded as a potential nuclear-weapon power. In the Middle East, nuclear power is under serious consideration in the Gulf States including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Yemen, Iran, Israel, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt.

The spread of civil nuclear power in the Middle East increases the risk of nuclear-weapon proliferation in the region. This underlines the importance of establishing a WMDFZ in the region.

A WMDFZ would commit those countries in the region which have stocks of chemical and/or biological weapons to destroy them. Israel is suspected of having biological weapons and Syria is suspected of having chemical weapons. Some other countries in the Middle East may have the capability of producing biological and/or chemical ones.

Iran’s nuclear activities

At the 2012 Conference in Finland, much attention will inevitably be focused on the attitude of Israel and Iran to making the Middle East a region free of WMDs. It is widely believed that Iran is developing the capability to fabricate nuclear weapons, in case its leaders take the political decision to do so. But Iran’s political leaders insist that its nuclear activities are for peaceful purposes only and that it has no current intention of acquiring nuclear weapons.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which regularly inspects Iran’s nuclear facilities, has found no evidence that Iran currently has an actual nuclear-weapon programme. Most experts believe that it would take Iran a few years to acquire nuclear weapons if it took the political decision to do so. Nevertheless, there are strident voices in Israel and the USA demanding a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Such an attack would be counterproductive. It would provoke a fierce Iranian retaliation; it would probably be unable to destroy those parts of Iran’s nuclear programme that are well protected and hidden; at most, it would achieve a short delay in Iran's development of nuclear weapons; and it would endure that Iran went all out to obtain a nuclear weapon-option as rapidly as possible.

In a stark warning, the London-based The Economist magazine states: “military action is not the solution to a nuclear Iran. It could retaliate, including with rocket attacks on Israel from its client groups in Lebanon and Gaza. Terror cells around the world might strike Jewish and American targets. It might threaten Arab oil infrastructure, in an attempt to use oil prices to wreck the world economy” (1).

It is, therefore, very important to avoid a war arising from the unresolved dispute about Iran’s nuclear programme. One way to do this is to seek a WMDFZ for the entire region that includes the participation of Israel. This may be the best way to avoid a war in the region because it may change minds in Tehran, Tel Aviv, and Washington. Whether it would overcome the hard-line thinking and militarism that determines policy in Iran, Israel and the United States is doubtful.

Israel’s nuclear weapons

Israel is widely believed to have developed and fabricated nuclear weapons and to have deployed them on bombers and missiles. It began working on nuclear technology almost immediately after the country was founded in 1948. Israel's first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion was convinced that Israel should obtain nuclear weapons for its security. He stated, "What Einstein, Oppenheimer, and Teller, the three of them are Jews, made for the United States, could also be done by scientists in Israel, for their own people".

In the late 1950s, with much support from France, Israel secretly constructed, at Dimona in the Negev desert, a nuclear reactor and a reprocessing plant to remove chemically the plutonium from spent reactor fuel elements. It probably first fabricated a nuclear weapon in the late 1960s. We know this because Mordechai Vanunu, a former Israeli nuclear technician who worked at Dimona, revealed, in 1986, details of the programme to the British newspaper, The Sunday Times.

Israel is one of four nuclear-armed countries not recognized as a Nuclear-Weapons-State by the NPT; the others are India, Pakistan and North Korea. Israel itself has, since 1965, adopted a policy called ‘nuclear ambiguity’, never officially confirming or denying that it has nuclear weapons. Instead, it has stated that it ‘would not be the first country to introduce nuclear weapons to the Middle East’, without defining what it means by this phrase. Israel has consistently refused to sign the NPT despite pressure from the international community to do so. It claims that joining the NPT would be against its security interests.

According to the authoritative Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI): “The size of the Israeli nuclear weapon stockpile is unknown but Israel is widely believed to have produced enough plutonium for 100-200 warheads. According to one estimate, Israel possessed m0.8 tonnes of weapon-grade plutonium as of 2010.” SIPRI estimated in 2011 that “Israel has approximately 80 intact nuclear weapons, of which 50 are warheads for delivery by ballistic missiles and the rest are bombs for delivery by aircraft” (2).

Israel operates F-16 Falcon bombers, some of which are certified for nuclear weapon delivery, with a range of approximately 1,600 kilometres (960 miles) and about 50 Jericho II ballistic missiles, with ranges of up to 1,800 kilometres (1,080 miles). The Jericho III ballistic missile, with a range of at least 4,000 kilometres (2,400 miles), was test-launched in January 2008 but its current status is unknown.

Shavit, a space launch vehicle produced by Israel to launch small satellites into orbit, was first launched on 19 September 1988, carrying an Ofeq satellite. If converted to a ballistic missile, it could deliver a nuclear weapon to a distance of 4,000 kilometres (2,400 miles).

All in all, Israel is a formidable nuclear power with a capability similar to that of the established nuclear powers, China, France and the UK.

Conclusions

The establishment of a WMDFZ in the Middle East will, to say the least, not be easy. As the US Arms Control Association explains: “Despite extensive international support and the catalogue of resolutions endorsed including by all regional states, practical progress has been stymied by sharp disagreements between countries in the region over the terms and the sequence of steps leading to the establishment of the zone. Reflecting differing perceptions of threat and security concerns existing in the region, Israel has closely linked discussions on the establishment of the WMDFZ with the existence of durable peace and compliance with international obligations by states in the region. Arab states have said that no such linkage should exist and that the establishment of WMDFZ would contribute to peaceful relations” (3).

All the countries in the Middle East pay lip service to the proposal for turning the region into a WMDFZ. But because of the deep distrust between them – particularly, between Israel, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria – they are not, to say the least, keen on its implementation. No country in the region seems prepared to agree to anything less than a total success of the proposal or to be seen to kill it off.

The proposal, many believe, is probably doomed to a slow death even though a WMDFZ would improve the security of all countries in the region. But Shibley Telhami and Steven Kull, writing in the New York Times, are somewhat more optimistic. They wrote: “The debate over how to handle Iran’s nuclear program is notable for its gloom and doom. Many people assume that Israel must choose between letting Iran develop nuclear weapons or attacking before it gets the bomb. But this is a false choice. There is a third option: working toward a nuclear weapons-free zone in the Middle East. And it is more feasible than most assume” (4).

Let’s hope they are right and ‘the third option’ is chosen. It would be a great pity if such an attractive idea does not succeed.

References

1. The Economist, Bombing Iran, February 25th – March 2nd 2012, page 9.

2. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), Armaments, Disarmament and International Security, SIPRI Yearbook 2011, p.349, Oxford University Press, 2010.

3. Arms Control Association, WMD-Free Middle East Proposal at a Glance http://www.armscontrol.org/factsheets/mewmdfz

4. Shibley Telhami and Steven Kull, Preventing a Nuclear Iran, Peacefully, New York Times, January 15, 2012.

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The Library Ticket, Pla...

2012-03-07T10:11:00-05:00

Social Scientists love to travel. They will always assert that travel is necessary to understand a culture. You need to travel, to feel the culture. And without such exposure, they believe that what is written is less valid because it cannot possibly have the critical perspective that local context provides. Or as the great anthropologist Bronislaw Malinwoski himself once wrote, field observation is necessary “to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realize his vision of his world.” On top of that, field work is the initiation ritual that gives academics like me “street cred” when preparing lectures about places exotic to your audience. There is nothing more effective for capturing the undergraduate mind than a casual reference to time spent in a third world hospital!

I like to travel too and truth be told, am a sucker for Malinowski’s point that you need to get off the metaphorical mission verandah, and into the village if you are to understand another social world. I put this into practice by encouraging my students to study abroad, join the Peace Corps, and seek out any and every opportunity overseas. For that matter, I even encourage them to become engaged in the soup kitchen down the street for much the same reason. So imagine my discomfort when I came across a comment in Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture by the historical economist Eric Jones. Jones points out that “straining for street cred can lead to the ‘eyewitness fallacy’ in which foreign travel substitutes for deeper inquiry.” And that “one can learn more about [China] in the British library than by visiting the country…the best ticket is a library ticket, because things may be found in books that are not apparent on the ground, and books offer more ideas than most of us can dream up for ourselves.” (Pg. 33-34). Huh, could he be serious? Whaddyamean that a library ticket is better for understanding culture than an airplane ticket to Beijing? What about thick description? Emic and etic perspectives? The deep understanding of culture that comes from being on the ground? And of course the awe that casual mentions about your last malaria attack brings in the antiseptic developed world? I bet Jones never had malaria, so what kind of street cred can he possibly have?

But then I read further, and I found out that Jones is not only uncomfortably correct, but he in fact has a really good point to make about the relationship between field experience and the type of deeper inquiry best done in the library. This is because the individual participant observer’s view is always limited to the contacts they personally make. Meaning that our personal contacts limit the ideas that we can dream up. How can a single observer write about a society as vast as China (population 1.3 billion) based only on what they themselves see? Indeed, even tiny Liechtenstein (population 35,000) is too big. Even the best participant observer can come in contact with only an extremely limited number of people. Jones went on to point out that libraries (and presumably the massive electronic data bases that are their descendants) are a also an effective way to get to know a country—you come not only in contact with the people you know, but many times that number as well. What is more, you are not limited to the views of your own friends and acquaintances, but can delve into those of people with whom you are not familiar, and even those who are dead.

The really embarrassing thing for those of us who romanticize the importance of travel is that much of the world’s great literature—and social science—is generated by library jockeys. Indeed, Jones made his point particularly well by pointing out that one of the leading translators of Chinese poetry, Arthur Waley, never went to China, because he wanted to protect his “personal image of the scene.” Better known is Jules Verne who wrote fantastic stories about the world without leaving France. Karl Marx did the bulk of his research in the British Library, and various archives. Max Weber wrote much about the Protestant Ethic of the United States before leaving for his first (and only) trip to the United States. Charles Darwin never went back to the Galapagos after his only visit while on The Beagle.

The problem is that I still like to travel, as does, for that matter, Eric Jones who himself has a well-used passport. And travel does continue to shape my thinking about the world; I still encourage students to leave the United States and experience the world—Travel is still the only corrective to world’s imagined up in the library. But does an airplane really ticket replace a library card? No, not yet. And neither does being an “eyewitness” or even surviving malaria automatically create a more valid viewpoint. Indeed, on the critical variables of wisdom and validity, I am afraid that the library ticket still trumps the plane ticket until proven otherwise.

Reference

Eric Jones (2007) Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture

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Favorable Terms and Con...

2012-03-06T13:58:36-05:00

FAVORABLE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR A SMALL BUSINESS PRIVATE OFFERING:

FAVORABLE TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR A SMALL BUSINESS PRIVATE OFFERING:

Taking Full Advantage of the Direct Corporate Private Offering

Introduction: The Direct Corporate Private Offering As A Better Model For Obtaining Financing

Since 1933, private companies have had an avenue of raising funds called a self-underwriting, or a direct corporate private offering, but it has not been widely used as a method for raising capital. In a self-underwriting, the company issues securities directly to investors, without the benefit of a securities broker or financial intermediary between buyers and sellers of capital.

Most young companies and startup firms have primarily relied on a broker or venture firm to assist it in conducting another business model to raise capital that features presentations to venture capital firms or angel groups. Each capital firm or group listens to the company presentation, and then may, or may not, make the company an offer to invest, generally under terms and conditions that are more favorable to the sources of capital than to the company.

In this older model, the broker or intermediary represents the financial interests of the investors, and not the company. The broker or intermediary will often form partnerships or syndicates with other brokers to sell the securities.

Industry statistics show that about 2 in 10 firms are successful in obtaining funds using this older model, and that after about 3 years, of all the firms that raised capital this way, about 60% are terminated by the sources of capital because the company did not meet the performance metrics of the capital firms.

In contrast to the startups, most established firms, with real top line sales revenues, are generally not viable candidates for the older model because the established firms do not have a clear path to an exit that results in a rapid capital gain for the venture capitalists or angels.

In addition, for many established companies, the amount of capital needed to fund growth is too small to interest the sources of capital, and the type of capital needed by the company does not fit the type of securities that the venture capitalists most prefer as an investment vehicle.

Obtaining Favorable Terms and Conditions for the Company In Raising Capital

One of the advantages of a direct corporate private offering over the conventional methods of raising capital is the company’s ability to control the terms and conditions of the offering. By creating the documents related to the offering in advance of the offering period, the company avoids the costs and time lost in frustrating negotiations with multiple sources of capital, all of who may want to impose their own terms and conditions.

The benefits of the company controlling the terms and conditions must be tempered by two key considerations. First, the terms and conditions must be attractive to a wide range of investors based upon the merits of the investment itself. In other words, the terms must be fair to the investors so that they may enjoy the benefits associated with making the investment.

The investors are not going to have an opportunity to negotiate over the terms and conditions of their private securities, so the terms must be fair for them from the start.

Second, the terms and conditions for an early round of capital must be compatible with future rounds. This means that a logical sequence of terms and conditions must flow through all of the eventual rounds of capital raising.

The priority for the company CEO in the creation of the documents must be that they are created right and fairly from the beginning and then continue to be fair for future investors, throughout the life of the company.

The company will need to work with legal counsel to get the exact form and text of the terms and conditions to fit the type of securities for the specific offering today and in the future.

Preferred stock – The Workhorse Security of Private Placements

The first consideration for the CEO in contemplating a private placement is the type of security for the business to issue to investors. Most companies that have some capital gain potential, as opposed to an investor’s interest in the dividend income potential from stable revenues, issue preferred stock.

Preferred stock has various "preferences" over common stock. These preferences can include liquidation preferences, dividend rights, redemption rights, conversion rights and voting rights, as described in more detail below. The “preferences” in preferred stock are also called terms and conditions.

The text for the conditions attach to both the security itself, and to other elements associated with the investment. The same terms, such as “participating,” may be used for different parts of the investment. For example, “participating” can apply to both participating in the flow dividends and to participating in the profits at liquidation.

When used in different elements of the investment, the preferences tend to compound the original, single use of the term “preference.” The preferences associated with preferred stock allows the investor to benefit from a capital gain event because the stock represents equity in the company, and as the value of the equity goes up, the investors can obtain the larger gain when the stock is sold.

Venture capitalists and other investors in the older model typically receive preferred stock for their investment. Most of the negotiations in raising capital in the conventional method, where the company goes searching for capital at individual venture capital sources, concern the priorities and rights for the “preferences” between the investors and the company.

All of the good features and rights associated with the self-underwriting of preferred stock can be used to provide investors with greater security and reduced risk of loss of capital, while the more onerous features regarding venture capital control over decision making authority, can be eliminated.

An additional benefit for investors and the company in a direct corporate private offering (DCPO), is that standardization across many different companies, all of whom issued stock with common terms and conditions, would eventually lead to easier transactions in the future via private securities exchanges.

Common terms and conditions would lead to greater liquidity in the private capital marketplace because less time and expense would be involved in determining how one security’s rights and features differed from another security.

One of the important features and rights associated with preferred stock is its ability to be issued with conversion rights into common stock at some point in the future. In the older method, the convertible preferred stock contained onerous anti-dilution protection for investors in the event that a second round of securities is issued to new investors at lower prices than the earlier rounds.

In the conventional model, the earlier investors had a built-in conflict of financial interest with the company associated with their capital costs of owning the stock. If the value of the company dropped, or the company did not meet the metrics of performance imposed by the capitalists, the conversion rights allowed the earlier investors to obtain a bigger profit when the stock was eventually sold, or the company itself was sold, for a gain.

As the name suggests, convertible preferred stock can also convert into common stock at either the holder's option or at the option of the company. Usually, there is some form of coerced or mandatory conversion feature for all investors if the company becomes involved in an Initial Public Offering (IPO), or company buy-out, where all the private stock is converted to publicly-traded stock.

Some of the onerous features in the older method of this form of equity, from the company’s and founder’s perspective, is that the earlier rights provide for a guaranteed return of capital through redemption provisions if the company's performance is mediocre. This explains one of the reasons why such a high percentage of companies in the earlier method were terminated by the capitalists if the company did not meet performance metrics.

In the earlier method, the investors were going to obtain a profit no matter what happened to the company.

These more onerous features of conversion upon redemption do not have to be inserted in company self-underwriting.

Convertible preferred stock often pays or agrees to pay some form of dividends, which can be paid in cash, or in the form of deferred additional shares. Usually the dividend rate is set by a vote of the Board of Directors. In the older model, one of the terms set by the investors was control over the Board of Directors, who could vote for dividends and also had the power to fire or terminate the original founders and entrepreneurs.

The payment of dividends is very beneficial to investors, as it gives them two ways to benefit from owning company stock. First, they may obtain a capital gain profit when they sell their stock, and second, they may also be paid income during the period of time they are waiting for the value of their stock to go up in price.

This type of outside investor control by the Board of Directors so prevalent in the earlier model can be avoided in the self-underwriting.

Conclusion: Making the Terms and Conditions of the Self Underwriting Fair From the Start

The burden of making the self underwritten private offering attractive to investors from the beginning means that the company and its legal counsel will need to carefully balance provisions that shareholders would find attractive with provisions that are fair to the company.

Since the direct corporate private self underwriting process does not involve negotiations like the older model, the initial set of provisions needs to be attractive to both the investors and the company right from the start.

Among the important considerations of additional protective provisions are:

A majority vote of the outstanding preferred stock holders to make any amendment or changes to the rights, preferences, privileges, or powers of, or the restrictions provided for the benefit of, the preferred stock;

A majority vote of the outstanding preferred stock holders to authorize any increases or decreases in the authorized number of shares of Common or Preferred stock;

A majority vote of the outstanding preferred stock holders any action that authorizes, creates, or issues shares of any class of stock having senior rights or preferences over existing shareholders;

The broadest possible information rights and inspection rights possible with greater rights attached to owners of at least 15% of the total outstanding preferred stock.

In conformity with the provisions of Sarbanes-Oxley on public companies, private companies should aim at transparency and truthful dealings with their shareholders. Documents such as audited annual and unaudited quarterly financial statements, annual budgets and monthly financial statements, minutes of the meetings of the Board should be made available to preferred shareholders in password protected areas of the company’s investor relations web page.

The major desired outcome of raising growth capital, from the perspective of the company, is to obtain capital that helps the company grow. With direct corporate private offering, companies gain more control over their destiny when the seek growth capital.

Part of the solution for small companies gaining control over their destiny is to offer the securities directly to investors in a private placement self underwriting, always mindful of the fact that the prosperity that results from the company’s successful growth must be distributed fairly to all those who took the risk to invest.

Upcoming Article: The Solution to Dilution

About Thomas E. Vass: Vass is a registered investment advisor and regional economist with an interest in the relationship between technological innovation and capital markets. He offers investment management advice to private investors, based on a 2007 investment management method patent issued to him. As a part of his capital market advisory services, he offers advanced web-based tools to help companies conduct a self-underwriting. He is based in Raleigh, N. C.

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The Rise of ‘The Pitmas...

2012-03-03T17:42:36-05:00

Dear foodies, to those who have experienced the food of iconic Pitmaster Ed Mitchell, you must wonder about the title. The eastern North Carolina style barbecue, side dishes, the heritage breed pigs, and the upscale restaurant concept are all distinguishing features of Ed Mitchell’s vision propelling him to international prominence. The Pitmaster brand will take center stage this March 2012 in Victoria’s City of Melbourne, Australia, a ‘global gastronomy food-obsessed city’!

For the last nine years the NYC Big Apple Block Party barbeque fundraiser for the famous ‘Madison Square’ Park, Ed Mitchell has pulled his ‘not so fancy’ flat black cookers out of his ‘classic’ eighteen wheeler rig, dressed in overalls sporting The Pitmaster hat! His team, included his brother (Aubrey) and son (Ryan), who helped to set up for slow cooking heritage breed pigs for eastern North Carolina style barbeque right there on the street. Smoke scents rising through the night being photographed and inhaled by late evening walkers or bike riders. This past June in 2011 he broke all the records selling the most food, had the longest line, giving him the highest profile with his beloved foodies. This major annual event going into its 10^th year, in the historic heart of mid town Manhattan, is a winner for thousands of New Yorkers who come out to enjoy the very best BBQ Pitmasters’ from across the United States. This is just how ‘The Pitmaster Ed Mitchell’ likes it, bringing his best with the best!

On March 5, 2012 he travels to the milestone 20^th Annual International Food and Wine Festival in Melbourne, Australia. ‘Melbourne’s Food and Wine Festival is an international food event that attracts chefs, winemakers, authors and presenters from around the world to share knowledge and skills on food, wine and culture.’ To appreciate this event you need to know that 350,000 people attend. It is held over 20 days. Chefs come from all over the world: United Kingdom, France, Viet-Nam, New Zealand, NYC, Israel, Hong Kong, Belgium, Italy, Denmark, and San Francisco. Unlike the prime corner location he claims in Manhattan for two days, he will be at a well known iconic event named the ‘Langham Melbourne MasterClass’ to demonstrate North Carolina eastern style barbeque at the ‘Friday Fire Masterclass’ featuring grilled meats! This new featured event, one of 300, was sold out right away! The scheduled lunch and dinner fares are also booked. Over the last six months he has been communicating and planning to bring his Pitmaster brand of barbecue to the international stage. The Aussie’s are excited because they asked for ‘the best’.

Question: How did this invitation come about?

Ed Mitchell: My understanding is that Shane Mitchell of Travel and Leisure Magazine recommended me to the Melbourne Festival Committee who contacted my PR person with an invitation. I, of course, accepted and preparation began for this event.

Question: What do you make of all this?

Ed Mitchell: “It was a very humbling experience in that someone appreciated my craft. It’s very refreshing to know I represent the lifestyle of North Carolinians: how we lived and what we ate.”

Question: What is your most important goal in meeting and sharing your barbecue brand with the Aussie’s?

Ed Mitchell: ”Let them experience the true authentic taste of barbecue by using the whole animal to produce eastern North Carolina style chopped barbecue. That’s the key. I will be demonstrating the art of cooking the whole hog and then blending it into a succulent moist flavor of barbecue that is unimaginable, using the whole animal taste.”

Question: What have you observed so far about the Aussie’s language in discussing barbecue?

Ed Mitchell: Like most references across our country, many use the term ‘barbecuing’ as putting a piece of meat on the grill. In the Aussie’s case, they say putting a piece of steak on the ‘bob’ (outside grilling). What they will experience is a slow roasting technique that really makes ‘barbecue’ and the fact that you are using the whole animal (hog) is the original and authentic way of preparing the dish.

Question: They eat wild animals: Kangaroo, gater, wild boar, etc. and want you to explore tasting them. Which do you prefer?

Ed Mitchell: First I must taste all the meats they recommended for me to try in order to determine which I prefer best to barbecue. I plan to engage through short joint demonstrations using the various types of native game/meat they are most familiar with in a barbecue setting.

Question: I understand you have an invitation to be seen on TV in Sidney, Australia by a million viewers?

Ed Mitchell: Yes

Question: What is the buzz about in Sidney?

Ed Mitchell: It is a version of the food network channel as we have in the states. They want me to participate in their Aussie version of the ‘Food Channel’ to barbecue some dish maybe ribs or something. I won’t know until I get there.

Question: What do you hope to get out of this unique opportunity?

Ed Mitchell: To spread around the world the great experience of the quintessential dish of North Carolina which is eastern North Carolina style vinegar based barbecue. Which places allot of focus now internationally as well as nationally on NC again as it relates to some parts of our heritage.

Question: What makes you uniquely suited as the spokesperson for this?

Ed Mitchell: Because of the recognition of my peers or the accolades they have bestowed upon me. It is great to have your peers recognize you for a certain kind of talent within the trade, and coming from them, other pitmasters is an honor, the foodies, writers, critics and by the people in the business.

Question: This event invites well known chefs from around the world so it is not just chefs who grill but are well known for their specialty. When you say recognized by your peers, how do you mean it?

Ed Mitchell: ”I got there because of people who cook barbecue are interested in the history of barbecue and how it’s done, who did what and when. That is all tied into the authenticity of what I represent. Also, I am doing it in a way that reflects so much of our heritage originally. So whoever these people are, like the John T. Edges’ of the world, Michael Pollan, and Calvin Trillin, people like that, who write about this stuff, Peter Kaminsky, these people are professionals in the world of food and food writing/critics. When you are able to be at that level, to be recognized by these talented people, it says allot.”

Question: What excites you about this trip?

Ed Mitchell: ”I answered earlier. Obviously I am very humbled to be recognized by the people in the industry who can appreciate my craft, that is an excitement in and of itself and of course you are very excited and humbled because you are recognized by people who really knows the business whether they are chefs, writers, food critics, foodies, or whomever) needless to say I am very pleased that someone thinks of me at that high level. What else can I say? I don’t want to pat myself on the back. But if someone else says so I will certainly I appreciate it and will accept it. It is very rewarding and humbling experience at the same time.”

Question: You are moving from a national iconic image to an international stage?

Ed Mitchell: “That says it all. Now you are there. Now my hard work has reached the utopia of all my dreams and hopes. When you get on an international stage, that’s it, you can’t get higher than that!”

Question: From this experience where do you hope to take ‘The Pitmaster, Ed Mitchell’ brand next?

Ed Mitchell: Well I certainly hope to expand it now to all markets local, national and international.

I guess you have to say ‘The Pitmaster, Ed Mitchell’ which was bestowed upon me by my peers, so therefore, I graciously accepted it and obviously what I became known by. When you go to the Big Apple Block Party and are among legendary Pitmasters: Mike Mills, Ken Callahan, or Chris Lilly and when I show up they say ‘here comes THE PITMASTER’, referencing my historical contribution of cooking the whole hog as the authentic basis of the craft. Honor is recognition by your peers as being the best amongst them. Everything I have said, as I talk about this is referenced based on what others have said.

Question: What is your travel schedule?

Ed Mitchell: I leave on the March 5^th and return around March 20^th

Comment: The Pitmaster, Ed Mitchell has at least one more visit to Melbourne to participate in their ‘theatre of ideas’ described as ‘Meet the game-changers. The world’s most forward-thinking chefs reveal big ideas and small inspirations.’ Certainly ‘The Pitmaster Ed Mitchell’ could easily fit in sharing his vision for delivering historically good food, engaging many in the ‘healthy food movement’, also having an effect on the profitability of the small farmer. This fits well within global concepts! Stepping onto the world stage would be a natural place for The Pitmaster, Ed Mitchell. Visit the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival 2012 website to learn more. Hey, get ready it is considered a bucket list item!

Written by Lillian Thompson for Trends Navigator Newsletter © 2012 Trends Management Consulting, Inc.

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Class Warfare

2012-02-29T10:36:18-05:00

The title’s a stopper. We once prided ourselves on being a classless society. So, if we admit the possibility of class warfare, have we become a “classed society?” Or have we always been one?

In truth, it’s the latter. “Indians,” said Article I of the Constitution as originally written, don’t count in the enumeration of citizens. “All other persons,” these being slaves of African origin, counted as three-fifths of “free Persons.” As to enfranchisement, there was a time when only landowning white males had the vote. No bound servants, no women, no persons of color.

What we generally meant by classless was, we had no peerage. Two (white, male) persons—one born in a mansion, the other in a shanty—might one day compete for elective office or a seat on the board of directors, or become an officer in the Armed Services. Birth conferred no intrinsic privileges, as it did In Europe.

This is a fine concept, and as a concept it still exists. In reality, we have—and speak of without apology—three classes in the United States: upper, middle and lower, the latter politely divided in our language between “the poor” and the “working class,” although one may be “blue collar” and ascribe to “middle class” values, live in the suburbs and send one’s children to college.

Yet contemporary examples abound of persons treated differently by reason of birth. Who fought the Vietnam War and who was exempted? Who gets busted for drugs out of all proportion to the number of users? Who’s the target of recent voter fraud legislation?

Recent events have caused politicians opposed to Obama’s presidency to accuse him of inciting class warfare—inciting the Have-nots to mau-mau the Haves to garner votes among the oppressed classes. His version of what he’s doing—the beef being mainly with his asking the upper class to pay the same taxes they paid before George W. Bush—is “leveling the playing field.”

But a level playing field isn’t a universal aspiration. When one year Mike Ditka put three hundred, eighty pound Refrigerator Perry into the Chicago Bears’ backfield for a plunge into the end zone, he was looking for The Advantage. Inside trading, a purported habit of Haves, including Haves in Congress, also seeks The Advantage. Lobbyists are persons seeking The Advantage for their clients, “interest groups” and industries.

When Bob Hope sang, “The rich get rich and the poor get children” he echoed a truism come down from Biblical days: simply put, whose child you are in many ways determines the path of your life. I went to college because my father and mother did, three siblings did, so what else do you do after high school? A college classmate of mine was the ninth child of a migrant farm worker and the first in his family to graduate from college. For him, going to college was a huge deal. He expressed more than once his belief there was class warfare waged against persons doing stoop labor to feed their families. He’d survived the warfare’s emotional wounds and risen above it.

Take the Occupy Wall Street movement. Google “occupy” today, the first ten suggested destinations are “occupy” followed by a place name (i.e., Occupy New Orleans) or the word “movement.” It’s about that level playing field. It’s about the Have-nots tiring of the Haves always getting The Advantage. The Haymarket Riot was an example of this happening in the past: a protest in support of striking workers. There were anti-establishment riots in America before there was a United States and plenty in the early days of the country. Farmers in New England were not about to trade taxes levied by King George for taxes levied by a bunch of Blue Bloods in Philadelphia.

You hear pundits and talking heads explaining Occupy Wall Street, the demonstrations in Wisconsin’s capitol and the efforts to recall reactionary officials in the upper Midwest. They say it’s the pendulum swinging behind the Bush Recession. Or they say it’s President Obama’s failure to counteract the Bush Recession with vigorous government spending cuts.

Here’s an alternative take on the reason why.

Our prevailing economic models assume a population pyramid with a broad base and narrow top—low death rate and high birth rate; an ever-expanding population. This picture pertained from Colonial times until recently. Now we’re worried that entitlement programs, which worked with an ever-expanding population, are sinking us. We can’t pay to fix highways and bridges. Our economy isn’t continually growing, and won’t ever again the way it did in the Fifties and Sixties.

Meanwhile, global competition for markets, rapidly changing means of communication, similar changes in automation, plus the deregulation of financial institutions worldwide, have made the flow of material, from a natural resource to a manufacturing plant to retailer to consumer, a hopscotch journey. More than half the items on my cluttered desk were made, in whole or in part, in Asia, mainly China.

We need a new model of how the world works. The consequences of letting things drift, putting Band-Aids on Band-Aids to make it to the next election, will see more discontent, more demonstrations, more Have-nots giving vent not to dissatisfaction, but to anxiety and at last fear.

The left has countered the right’s accusations of fomenting class warfare with a charge that the right incites fear of Obama and the “ninety-nine percent” to garner votes.

Folks, we do have class warfare, we do have reason to fear the future. Both sides are correct in pointing out symptoms of the problem; neither side is addressing realistic solutions. If, as seems likely, numerous incumbents of both stripes are swept from office in November, the electorate will be telling the politicians they need to start thinking. Not genius-type thinking, just thinking about what the geniuses need to cook up to stop the drift, to calm the fears, to create a new model of how the world must work.

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The Gathering Storm

2012-02-28T12:38:32-05:00

A recent editorial I read in the Journal of Healthcare Management described healthcare as being in a state of hyperturbulence that began in the early 90's. They go on to describe the present state as hyperdysfunction. As I read both those statements I found myself agreeing. I also drew the conclusion that that description applies not only to health care, but to a number of different dimensions of our society at present.

If we look at the "occupation" of Wall street as well as other major commerce centers not only domestically, but internationally we have some issues- and some opportunities.

In addition to the issues we face surrounding the management of health and the delivery of health care; which I see as overlapping and related, but not synonymous, I see them in a lot of ways as symptoms of larger underlying issues. The same editorial characterized the root causes of many of the issues as resulting from personal, political, and economic self interests. Again my reaction was we aren't just talking about health care.

A large part of our foundation as a country were based on twin principles of personal property and prosperity and personal competence. It seems to be that somewhere we lost our ability to explore models where these principle coexist.

Public Domain

If we take a look at the relationship between employer and employed and the level of alignment, which I believe is represented by the metric we currently refer to as employee engagement, we find that it is at the lowest levels since we began recording it. The root causes for much of the lack of engagement isn't very complex, people don't trust their leaders. They don't trust their their leaders in government, business, or most other institutions. For the last 100 years since the begining of the Industrial Revolution we have tried to replace personal competency with technology which simplifies processes and codependency in return for compliance. I talk to many business leaders who are frustrated that their investments in technology and systems aren't yielding long term sustainable economic results. They are equally frustrated by all the peopley stuff and government interventions and feel people should just be grateful to have a job.

I have commented in my blog posts that when highly educated people don't understand the frustration of their employees when C level compensation increased better than 20 percent per annum the last two years while average employees "benefited" from something approaching two percent I have to tell you that part of my reaction is really?

In fact just today I entered into an online discussion with other thought leaders as to why most MBA curriculums offer minimal exposure to human resources management concepts and why so few human resource leaders are graduates of these programs. Several advanced the idea that the best human resources leaders come out of other disciplines. I would agree in part. I don't see the issue as the discipline they came out of as being key, but rather the way they think. The best leaders in any discipline think integratively and systemically not linearly in my opinion.

Used only with express written permission

Human resource practioners who do not adopt to this line of thinking will find their career progression limited and their influence continue to diminish.

When I look at numbers reported by the Department of Labor estimating that poor hiring costs the U.S. economy trillions annually, that we spend billions on training annually with about a ten percent transfer rate (retention of the skills beyond 18 months), and the billions we lose to presenteeism; the phenomemon where people perform at about sixty percent of capacity, and the fact that sixty percent of health care costs are related to lifestyle and thereby changable by behavior modification, but the solutions are focused on delivering health care not managing health again my reaction is really?

I assure you I am not making these numbers up. I have been working in the field of human resources, organizational development, and change management for over three decades and occasionally I want to scream, it is the people stupid! The way to address these issues is through relationships. Technology has a role to play as a tactic, but not as a singular sustainable strategy. Outsourcing, down sizing, and offshoring move the problem around, They don't address root causes. They don't create capacity and they certainly don't build trust.

Political rhetoric is equally unhelpful. I know it is an election year, but am I the only one that finds much of the dialogue being thrown around boring and not very helpful?

I tend to agree with Dr.Leroy Hood, the scientist and philanthropist, who states that effective solutions are: strategic, societal, systemic, and sustainable. The embedded concept there in my mind is to create solutions that meet those parameters we are talking about solutions that are approached from a stakeholder rather than a shareholder viewpoint. A framework of plenty rather than scarcity.

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I am by no means the first or the smartest to advance this viewpoint. Writings from Thomas A. Stewart of the Harvard Business Review, Michael Porter, Nilofer Merchant and others are all discussing the same models from different perspectives. I especially like Porter's idea that profit should be redefined in societal value rather than just financial value terms.

Going back to my using the context of healthcare as a backdrop when I read the literature and from my own experiences in working with clients in that field I see two huge issues that are rarely addressed when we discuss health care and health management. Those issues are social literacy and codependency.

The delivery of health care has a vernacular associated with it that is opaque and byzantine, some would argue by design. The average American doesn't begin to understand how to navigate the "system". Additive is the issue of codependency. Many if not a plurality or majority of Americans have always had their health care delivered by their employer or a social safety net like Medicaid. Their role in managing their health has been as a passenger, not a driver. A systems based on delivery of health care services does not lend itself to individuals being accountable for proactively managing their own health.

The solutions of expanding coverage through Health Care cooperatives and modifying provider behavior through accountable care organizations or ACO's doesn't address either of these issues.

Simply giving individuals "choice" and making them accountable for their own decisions doesn't fix the literacy or codependency issue. In fact in the short term as individuals who have not had access to basic care and who I will go out on a limb and say are even less positioned to make informed to decisions around their health and health care will exacerbate the issue by putting more demand in the system.

Public Domain

I remember as an HR practioner dealing with a similar issue explaining to employers that compensation and reward programs suffered from similar issues. In many cases employees concerns and frustrations were based not only on what they were paid, but how decisions around their compensation were being made. They didn't understand and trust the process and in very few occasions were we providing the tools to their managers and supervisors to explain it to them.

I still get frustrated when I see HR practioners today respond that the most important role they provide in their client organizations is compliance with various State and Federal regulations. That should be a hygiene factor. Human resources like other professions is also becoming obsessed with certification. I see colleagues and others with a string of initials after their name in a way to me that resembles the caricatures of South American generals with chests full of "medals" that we used to see in old comedies. I don't mean to demean certification and study in fact I applaud continuing education. I just don't assume certification is a demonstration in and of itself of competence and mastery.

I have a brilliant colleague who talks about the difference between explicit or storage memory and implicit or applied memory. I fear much of certification is storage rather than application.

I get equally frustrated when I see leaders and executives who still embrace the model of simply applying best practices (for whom) and expecting to see monumentally different results. Indeed the consulting industry is largely based on applying these "templates".

As American employers the other thing we should take note of is that several of the emerging economies like India and Brazil are recognizing the importance of building employee engagement into their foundational infrastructures; much like post war Germany and Japan with concepts like total quality. American manufacturing is catching up, but it has taken over fifty years. Their average engagement scores are significantly better than those reported in North America and Europe.

The good news is that as I previously noted there are great thinkers and great models available out there for employers and organizations who are willing to explore them.

Organizations that have been willing to explore and implement new models like engagement and creating shared value are seeing their performance in more traditional metric areas improve substantially and enjoy significant competitive advantages over their colleagues, often as much as 100 perecent!

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The solutions to our issues are not going to come exclusively from one sector of our economy, but rather a willingness to explore new models collaboratively. The interesting thing is that most if not all of these changes can be done within the existing framework of what our Founding Fathers intended with the concepts of personal property and prosperity and personal competency. They never intended that one be sacrificed to support the other.

To paraphrase Rosabeth Moss Kantor "..change is a threat when done to me, but an opportunity when done with me.'

Which will we choose....

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What to do in the absen...

2012-02-28T09:27:14-05:00

What to do in the absence of a Fiction Dictionary

I would like to suggest that not long ago there were no personal computers to use as databases. I am sure there existed compendiums of universal knowledge better known as encyclopedias and dictionaries to guide us to the existence and use of words to express our sensual perceptions of ourselves and our surroundings. Following the topic at hand, it seems to me that we may be trying to put the cart before the horse if we start with the premise that all research for writing a book has to be done beforehand. Although I do agree that we may need some sort of preparatory age (period) specific information to start our creative process, I believe that excessive preparation of the kind that may be represented in a personalized compendium of period information on social mores might prove to be more of a hindrance than a help in the process of creative writing. When I wrote my e-novel, Borghese, I put the horse in front of the cart and started on my way. As I travelled along the road, I stopped along the way as warranted to put in my cart whatever I felt was necessary to add credibility to my story. I did not have to worry about my lexicon. The only thing that concerned me was being true to the period. Let me give you an example. My main character gets hired by the police and is assigned a squad car. Since my story takes place in part in the early 1930's, I had to make sure the car's model was not later and that the use of two-way radios was already existent. This is where the research came in. In other words, I would not have said that while Albert was travelling in the squad car he picked up his cellular phone and called headquarters. Javier

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Being Rich, Famous or S...

2012-02-27T14:58:01-05:00

I can usually anticipate where the conversation is going when a family member accompanying a loved one living with dementia to my clinic starts the conversations with the words, “Surely, in this world of modern medicine, there is something more we can do to halt the decline in my (fill in whichever family member is effected)." Sometimes this phrase is said with a degree of anger, sometimes with anguish and sometimes with a degree of aggressiveness as if somehow I, a geriatrician, and not a neurologist or psychiatrist might be inept in my knowledge or “holding back” on some new discovery that I do not know about. Sometimes the question is accompanied by a package of internet-based articles on “new or novel” treatments for dementia ranging from megavitamins of the already known and touted category (and generally proven ineffective in the evidence-based medical literature) or a concoction with a mysterious ingredient that “doctors won’t talk about” as they work in cahoots with the pharmaceutical industry.

Usually, even though often quite time consuming, a careful explanation of the state of the knowledge of treatment of dementia of the various kinds (the most commonly defined being Alzheimer’s disease), the person can be brought back to the reality of the current state of affairs. Most times they can be brought to focus on the real challenges that will be faced as the course of their loved one’s condition declines and they must face the very difficult decisions that will ultimately occur including planning for challenging behaviours well beyond the cognitive decline and the inevitable need to plan for end of life care that almost always occurs at some point in those who reach the later stages of dementia.

I recently saw the movie, The Iron Lady, which looks at the developmental and political life of former Prime Mister of the United Kingdom, Margaret Thatcher, from the vantage point of her experiencing the earlier and then later stages of dementia. It vividly portrays the impact the disease has not only on her behaviour, memory that includes a very poignant and vivid melange of past recollections and current experiences. This is something all of us working the field recognize in our patients and which we must often explain to their family members. One often hears the lament, “She can remember in great detail her sea voyage as she escaped the ravages of the war in Europe or her childhood run-in with her brother in the village in the Ukraine, but cannot remember what she had for breakfast today”.

Sometimes the intrusion of experiences from the past can cause great agitation and behavioural outbursts and sometimes can lead to warm and sometimes tearful recollections about loved ones that they think are still alive and are distraught to find that they have died. This is something illustrated in The Iron Lady when Thatcher’s daughter has to remind her mother of her late husband’s death as she struggles with emptying his clothes from the closet and donating his previous belongings that she can associate with in her memories of him that enter and leave her consciousness as she struggles to recall the events of the present.

The movie with the stunning role of Thatcher played by the incomparable Meryl Streep stirred a sense I have had previously as I observed some of the greatest or best known minds or public figures in the world afflicted by the usually devastating effects of one form of dementia or another, most often of the apparently Alzheimer type. This has helped me explain to the family members of my own patients that “surely me” with their scepticism that either medical science can be so limited or I can be possibly “out of date” in my knowledge of contemporary advances in the disease. It becomes evident to them that some of the most famous and wealthiest people in the world when afflicted with this condition, suffered in the same way as their loved one, despite presumably having access to the greatest medical experts available in the field.

In my own lifetime I remember the gradual decline of the late President Ronald Reagan who those of us in the field suspected he was beginning to develop symptoms of the disease as in his public appearances he seemed to rely more and more on the side whispers of his wife Nancy, the first lady, in a way reminiscent of what occurs in our office visits of many of our patients who when asked a relatively straight-forward question quizzically turn to their loved one, often unconsciously for the answer or to support the answer that they bring forth. We often use that common manoeuvre by our patient as a pretty sound clinical indicator of problems with cognition even though it can be quite subtle and the spouse (most often or sometimes it can be a child) may not even be aware of their response to support the ability of their loved one to function cognitively, although when asked directly they usually acknowledge that occurrence as part of their communication interaction.

Of interest is the family conflict over when the late President demonstrated some impairment of his previously sharp mind and wit and facility with words. The difference of opinion expressed and documented by his two sons has led to differences of opinion among them and has become an historical talking point- the question being– when did the 40th president begin to become mentally impaired by the disease? He was formally diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 1994, five years after he left office. Reagan died 10 years later at 93. His two sons differ in their opinions on when the symptoms first began but the controversy is not unlike that which all of us that practice geriatric medicine and deal with dementia see in our own practices as family members differ as to when a loved one first manifested some evidence of loss of cognitive function. With the variability in the course of the disease which for some starts with what is often called mild cognitive impairment which in many but not all gradually evolves into obvious dementia which itself can have a variable course depending on its own trajectory or one modified by the use of so-called cognitive enhancing medications, it is not surprising that in retrospect it might be hard to define definitely when the symptoms of Alzheimer’s dementia were clear in someone with such a public profile as the late President.

The film The Iron Lady reminded me a bit of a previous film in which the main character was a famous author, Iris Murdoch. In the film, Iris, the progressive decline of this gifted writer into the depths of deepening dementia is witnessed by her husband, played as it were by the same actor that played Margaret Thatcher’s husband, Jim Broadbent—a gifted and talented man who may have learned a great deal about the condition now that he has played a role in essence similar stories, both replete with movement from the present to the past. Both films capture important aspects of dementia and the powerful impact of such a disease on the person of such intellect and talent.

In my own personal associations with dementia two of the great mentors of my medical career developed dementia in the latter years of their life—despite lives and careers of great accomplishment and intellectual challenge and productivity. One physician was instrumental in my choosing geriatrics as a career, almost inadvertently and the other in arranging for my early association with Baycrest Centre which became the focus of my clinical and academic career.

Lastly, my own father who had a profound influence on every aspect of my personality, emotional, and intellectual development and character traits suffered from dementia in the last part of his life providing me with the opportunity to experience as a loving son and sibling of my most devoted sister who was the “it” in his care as he lived out his last years in a Chicago vicinity retirement home under her watchful eye aided by a most devoted personal care worker. It is through his life’s last experience that I get much of my fervor about the importance of “having the conversation” about the wishes and life’s values with those we love who are living with dementia so that when the time comes for difficult decisions at the end of life to be made, we, the loving family members who are the substitute-decision makers will have the strength and courage and devotion to their expressed wishes or value systems to act to promote compassion, comfort and caring at the end of the struggle with dementia.

For those of us who must respond to those family members who interject the “surely, there must be more that can be done for my (father, mother, aunt etc.) in this world of modern medicine, we who carry the responsibility of providing the best of available medical care, can draw on our collective personal and professional experience to provide an acceptable response to the questioner. To be able to recount the lives of the rich and famous and talented to confirm the limits of modern medicine allows us to demonstrate that even they have had to live with dementia in the same way in essence as the loved one in question. We doctors, along with their family member will care for to the best of our abilities and within the confines of contemporary medical practice, those that are living with dementia throughout the course of the disease as they enter the last stages of their life.

About the Author

Reprinted with permission from HealthPlexus.Net, February 16, 2012.

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Oxymoron: Having a Shor...

2012-02-24T17:08:56-05:00

Words are my life! I adore words such as serendipity, plethora, and dearth. I use them in conversations and I go giddy when I see them in print. As a retired literacy specialist, I recall the days when I made a respectable living by teaching children and adults to use our language correctly and creatively. I especially encouraged the use of colorful words. Why say that something or someone is “nice” when magnificent, gorgeous, heavenly, etc., could elevate your piece of writing to a more literate level, not to mention produce a higher grade from your teacher. A good vocabulary is a sign of achieving more than just a minimal education. In my present status as a peppy senior seeking a prince for a LTR (long term relationship) implying exclusive dating, my past training has paid off in many ways.

After a lot of time spent in the dating world as a result of visiting my two favorite internet dating sites, I encountered more potential dates in addition to some authentic duds. The word “frugal” comes to mind very often because I find that many of my potential squires are very economical. They never met a coupon they didn’t like. One of my dates took me to Sweet Tomatoes on the very first date and was not shy about using his coupons. For those unfamiliar with the establishment, it is a salad buffet beyond compare and there are free refills on the soups and desserts. Basically, this establishment is glutton heaven. My date proceeded to have five cups of soup, all of them of different after consuming two plates overflowing with salad. Obviously, his pot belly needed stoking. Adding to his appeal, while he drove a late model luxury gas guzzler and intimated that he was financially secure, he made no apologies and even suggested a walk on the beach in lieu of lunch, even though the rain was pouring down. Lunch was to be a substitute for a game of tennis and then we planned on going to a movie afterwards. Of course, after he spent so much time eating, we missed the start of the movie. We then drove back to our respective homes. End of a “perfect” gluttonous and frugal date. Foolishly, I consented to other dates with Mr. Tomatoes and they were also dictated by his budgetary restrictions. I am not a gold digger, but puh-leeze, be a sport! A free movie at your clubhouse? Mr. Tomatoes talked a great deal about his lack of success with the dating scene. Small wonder! And talk about not following your own advice.

Then there are the guys who recently broke up with their significant others. Red flag! They date you, but their hearts are longing for a reconciliation with their exes. They even go so far as to participate in “couples counseling.” This is not marriage counseling but a new phenomenon. Usually, I am told, three or four breakups occur, but they continuously go back to a failing, unfulfilling relationship for security and some claptrap about “the devil you know, etc.” So, they date you several times, and lead you to believe that you could be the one, and suddenly with no warning.... no more calls. You are left wondering what you did wrong and in addition, you are consumed by a feeling of low self-esteem. Suddenly, Mr. Wonderful is no longer on the internet dating sites and doesn’t show up at Singles groups. Somehow, the word gets out that Mr. Wonderful is indeed back with his ex and extremely happy once again, until the next big blowup, which is destined to occur. My first question these days therefore is something like, “When did you break up with your girlfriend?” No point in wasting time. Put faith in your natural instincts and intuition.

Be sure, moreover, you place full faith and credit in your innate ability to assess character. Stick to your guns and take no prisoners. If a guy sends up signals in the form of red flags, don’t plow through hoping they will go away because they just don’t. I know what I’m talking about because I made my mistakes due to my extreme neediness and a desire for a meaningful relationship. Hal is a case in point. I first met him on JDate and after e-mailing back and forth, we finally spoke on the phone. We discovered we had a lot in common: backgrounds, age, and a passion for football. Hal still worked but despite his business deadlines, we arranged a coffee date. He was far from my ideal but I agreed to a dinner date with him for the following week.

After thinking about it, I realized that while there was some basis for a relationship, our differences were too great and I felt that we would both be wasting our time and so I cancelled the date. I am a very active person and Hal is a couch potato minus. I felt very guilty about it and often thought of the wonderful conversations and the laughs we shared on the telephone. So I called him to invite him to share my free movie passes one Sunday about six weeks later. He agreed to go only if we could have some dinner afterwards. He arrived thirty minutes late, which is a no-no in the dating world and the entire experience was a big disappointment mainly because Hal was grumpy and preoccupied with a family matter.

Actually, he was depressed and negative about everything in his life and was more than willing to share these disappointments with me. He was overbearing, moody and just plain obnoxious. He was critical of my outfit and my hair which I thought was totally appropriate and attractive. I drove home after dinner, and while in my car on the way back I was thinking, “What is this all about?” “What do I need this for?” I’m the one who should feel depressed after such a date!!! He later called to try to do “damage control,” his favorite expression, and I then realized that my initial instincts were correct and I should have followed them. Hal said words to the effect that the next move was mine.

Did I take my own advice? Of course not! The red flags often looked green to me. After some months had passed and I was more into the dating scene, I foolishly contacted Hal again because I thought about him as a person of quality and intelligence after all, capable of deep feelings. And he was very lonely. I remembered our overly long and intense conversations, and wanted to re-connect and try again now that I had more experience. And so I called him and we began to date more intensively and we spent about two months in a more or less monogamous dating situation. During that time, I noticed or rather chose to ignore the red flags that were again flapping in front of my eyes.

His relationship with his grown professional children was practically nonexistent and even hostile on their parts. He whined incessantly about their lack of concern for him and the fact that they rarely called. When they came to visit, they spent the minimum amount of time with him and did so at best, just as a courtesy. His insistence that he was satisfied with the way he was and unwilling to learn new things was another disappointment. He constantly repeated stories about his previous two marriages and other relationships that were boring me to distraction, to say the least. He was past-oriented while I was present and future-oriented. He lived in a place that was marginal, (really a dump) and was planning on moving some day. But frankly, I didn’t think he ever would. It was mortgage-free and cleaning out the mess in order to sell and pack up, would take the services of an arsonist. But using words, my forte, in an abrasive tone to me when I only wanted to help him, was the proverbial last straw.

During one of our recent telephone conversations, actually our last, Hal raised his voice to me in temper over a matter about his health, that he knew he had to address, and somehow was unable or unwilling to deal with effectively. It was frustration on his part, but he dumped the problem in my lap and I didn’t want to contend with verbal outbursts or potentially self-induced serious health issues. I decided to end the relationship and I knew that this time, I would absolutely not return because he was not right for me. Above all, he derided me constantly for using multi-syllabic words. I needed someone who was more secure, not depressing, and certainly had enough self-esteem to care about his living accommodations, appearance, and health.

In other words, Hals of this world, use the gym at your condo and stop whining. You know that French fries have more calories than yoghurt. So, [this was the end of a short long-term relationship. It was my turn to do the damage control thing by ending it again instead of prolonging the inevitable. This time, I really, really meant it!! There will be no couples counseling, for sure. So, words which are so important to me, used in a verbally abusive way, was the cause of the breakup.

Thanks to JDate, Match, and serendipity, I met a wonderful, handsome, exciting man who meets most, if not all, of my ideals. He is upbeat, adventurous, intelligent, health-conscious, athletic, and a mensch. As a bonus, he is a professional writer and appreciates words of more than one syllable. Bob is my man for now and maybe for that LTR that I am seeking.

Ladies, there is a plethora of worthy gentlemen out there. Make yourself available, take a risk, look out for the red flags, and don’t be the moron part of the oxymoron. Go for it!!

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New Feelings: Thoughts ...

2012-02-24T17:08:31-05:00

I am in the process of reinventing myself. No easy task but I believe that being a retired Reading Specialist has given me an edge in learning so much about others, in addition to learning about myself and my emotional strengths and needs. Reading between the lines, or making inferences, is a skill I have taught my students. Today, that ability is standing me in good stead. In the process, I have become a human radar screen because I have found out more about a person from what is omitted than from what is said.

I recently lost the love of my life to lung cancer after a rather brief illness. The trauma of those nightmarish months spent taking care of him left me devastated and emotionally fragile. With the help of family and friends, bereavement groups, therapy, and my innate ability to bounce back, I am secure in the knowledge that there are things I cannot change and I need to move forward. I need to “let it go,” as my therapist told me and I learned that I definitely want another person in my life. I feel that I have so much to give and I want to fall in love again and bask in the glow of that wonderful sensation. I am earnestly searching for the next love of my life.

But, how to proceed to find that Mr. Right?

The obvious sources are attending singles groups, bereavement groups, waiting for an introduction from a friend, or trying the internet dating services. Since the first three choices left me wanting, I plunged into cyberspace. After writing a catchy profile and posting my photos, I have met some men this way but only one or two that I really wanted to see again.

One magical day, you might call it Serendipity, I ran into a man at Publix who recently lost his wife. I knew this person as an acquaintance through mutual friends, and I also knew his wife on a superficial basis. They had had a special relationship, a perpetual love affair. His loss was equally devastating for him as mine was for me. We chatted briefly and we went out for dinner two days later. We found that there was chemistry between us that was vibrant and alive. Was it the need for commiseration or the real thing? Who can say, and only time would tell. It was reassuring to think that such feelings were able to be resurrected.

We decided to keep our meetings confidential and met for several dinner dates. I found him to be utterly charming and attractive. His background was interesting and his radio announcer voice had me mesmerized. But, and here is the big but, he was still so in love with his deceased wife and, therefore, I was insecure about my future with him. I am ready to admit that I cannot change the past and am eager to move on. I don’t think, however, he was in the same place as I was emotionally. The dilemma was that I wanted to be with him so very much but I needed to give him the space he required. I insisted that he must want me for me, and not as a transitional person to help him over the rough spots only to advance into someone else’s arms. I enjoyed the time we spent together, but what was missing was the sense of permanence I sought, and which he was not ready to offer. He didn’t want to hurt me and I didn’t want to hurt him, yet I feared that is what was going to happen. And so with reluctance but with my goal in mind, I once again pursued my cyberspace quests and continued to read between the lines.

Often in the internet profiles, people list as their interests those things they would like to do and not what they actually do. The age and weight things are a given misrepresentation.This has become almost comical and a source of laughs when I meet someone for the first time. The thing is that I don’t play that game and can prove my age and weight. However, I will admit that I recently changed my age on one dating site in order to level the playing field and to see if my respondents would be younger than they had been. It has made little difference in the type or number of responses I received.Another misrepresentation is in the part of the essay that asks the responder to list an ideal date or what they are seeking. They always state that they are seeking a long term relationship because no woman wants to hear “one night stand,” which is another way of saying, a date, a friend. They don’t explicitly say “sex,” but use terms such as romance, public displays of affection, hugging and holding hands. The men usually write about how good they are sexually and infer that they know just how to please a woman. Pleasuring a woman is an individual thing. What pleased their wives or former girlfriends in the past may be a turn off to someone else. After a fifty year marriage to a very sexy man, I’ve learned a few tricks myself. Most men should realize that a really good lover does not need to advertise

Divorced men are better choices than widowers, in my opinion, because they are less hung up on their former wives and not quite as needy or lonely. A divorced man is generally more into the dating scene and knows how to treat a woman as far as manners and savoir-faire are concerned.They have a storehouse of interesting places to eat and where to meet.They accept the fact that they may have to drive a distance in order to date a variety of women, and don’t seem to mind. Many of the senior swains I am attracting enjoy going to romantic places anddoing fun things. Their interests are varied and most of the men have good relationships with their children and remain close to them.

I’ve had my share of long, getting-to-know you telephone conversations with men from the internet and most seem charming and have potential. Some, I’ve actually met for coffee or lunch. There was only one that I found interesting and worthy of a second date. We had a pleasant lunch and the second date was a casual dinner. So, was that three dates if you included the initial interview/coffee date? My daughter tells me that the third date is when it is expected that the couple would go to bed together. Indeed! Again, more enlightenment! Kisses and hugs are expected these days on a first date among seniors. I am told that many men use chemical enhancements and in addition are also proficient at oral sex, both giving and receiving, especially among the elderly. Seniors recognize their physical limitations and avoid the sexual acrobatics of their youth. This is good stuff to know.

Compassion and passion go hand in hand. With both in your arsenal, senior sex can be beautiful and a lifelong pleasure. This is the start of true intimacy between a man and woman. Sex is the bread and butter item and the rest of the meal follows, which hopefully will be delicious. I’ve been told that sex among us older folks is very much alive and well because the true aphrodisiac is between the ears........ the mind. Bodies change over time: the breasts sag, the butts are not that tight and curvy any more, the male organs shrink a bit, ladies grow their kimono arms despite exercising, hair on men appears in unwanted places. So what! The smiles, the laughs, the caresses, the hugs, the hand holding, the meaningful glances, the compliments, the desire to be with each other are what really count in a relationship.

Did I also mention availability? Are you phoneable, approachable, open to new ideas? If yes, then not to worry. The next great love of your life is out there and waiting to meet you. Remember your critical reading skills and if you encounter that special someone that can make your heart sing, maybe he has a friend or two? I’m ready for the adventure and I don’t mind reinventing myself.

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Changing the Conversati...

2012-02-23T14:24:37-05:00

The statistics are foreboding: since 1980, growth in healthcare spending has outpaced all other consumer spending by a factor of nearly three, while increasing from 5% to 18% of GDP. Looking just 3 years ahead, this figure is projected to reach at least 22%. Despite so much of the national conversation focused on managing “healthcare”, employers remain confronted with:

Healthcare renewal costs that are unsustainable
Plan design changes that have reduced benefits
Employee dissatisfaction with reduced benefits and increased costs

To understand why a shift in the national conversation from healthcare to health is necessary, one needs only to consider the implications of the data provided by our medical professionals:

Nearly 75% of Americans are overweight, and 33% qualify as obese
Cardiovascular disease and stroke are now the leading cause of death
17.5 million Americans will be afflicted with diabetes, and 25.1 million with cardiovascular disease
1 in 3 children born after 2000 will develop diabetes by age 50
29% of adults with high blood pressure are undiagnosed
70% of all claim costs are the direct results of behavior
74% of all claims are confined to four chronic conditions: cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and obesity

For those business owners seeking real solutions to rising healthcare costs, we propose the need to change the conversation on how to improve the health of those who are employed.

Understanding that the cost of improving health is far lower than the healthcare costs associated with combating increased disease, companies must learn how to build a culture of health improvement and engage employees and families in order to achieve sustainability in healthcare costs. To do so, employers can take a “measures-based approach” to identify risk within the employee population, develop strategies to facilitate positive change among high-risk individuals, and strategies to keep the healthy population healthy.

By learning and adopting new strategies that emphasize and reward employees and their families to embrace healthy lifestyle choices, employers can help employees and their families become far more efficient healthcare consumers, and move towards a flattening of healthcare trend.

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Seeking Redemption: Fun...

2012-02-21T11:25:37-05:00

The Politics of Religion As It Applies to Small Business

Ever since President Obama interjected his religious beliefs into the current political campaign with his diktat on contraception for Catholics, the main stream media (MSM) has been in a tizzy about Rick Santorum’s religious convictions.

Santorum has obliged by talking about the moral values that under gird a free democratic society.

This talk about the moral values in America by Santorum has sent the MSM into an even bigger tizzy. The media suspects that as a Catholic,just like their earlier suspicion of John F. Kennedy, there may be some Catholic cult or dark wicca practice, like Skyclad, that Santorum may implement for all Americans.

As a way of diffusing this volatile political issue, there is a path for the MSM to take to on examining how religious beliefs apply to owning and managing a small business.

Not that there is anything wrong with Skyclad.

Seeking Redemption

In a quaint play on words, the language of business buy sell insurance adopted the term “redemption” to describe one possible method for implementing and funding the insurance for a small business buy sell agreement.

In its application of Santorum’s Catholicism, redemption has a slightly different meaning, with an ancient controversy over how exactly one who believes gains redemption.

In the business case, redemption comes when the insurance policy pays out the death benefit to the business.

In this special case of redemption, the business itself, was the lost soul who got redeemed. The business did three things, (good deeds alone) to gain redemption.

The business applied for a life insurance policy whose total death benefit value was large enough to buy out a deceased owner’s shares from the estate of the departed.
The business named itself as the legal owner of the life insurance policy.
The business named itself as the legal beneficiary of the death benefits.

And, Voila, at the moment of death of an owner, the redemption occurs.

The Calvinists hate this whole idea of good business deeds leading to redemption, preferring instead to believe that a business is pre-ordained for redemption from birth. But, in the case of business, nothing is pre-ordained, so it is best to seek redemption from an early age.

The Act of Redemption

The corporation will not recognize income for tax purposes when it receives the insurance death benefit proceeds. (Hint to Republicans: Do not mention this business tax treatment to Obama).

The tax treatment for the business looks like a two-step tango. First, when the corporation first obtains the death benefit, it must reflect that part of the transaction on the earnings and profits of the corporation. The earnings and profits will increase with the life insurance proceeds received.

Second, and as a major act of faith, the earnings and profits decrease as a result of the stock redemption from the estate of the departed.

It takes a major act of faith, best codified by a legal agreement, for the business to buy the shares away from the estate. The legal agreement is between the company, and each owner and it legally obligates the estate to sell, and for the company to buy the shares.

The surviving owners and remaining shareholders do not get the benefit of a step-up in basis on their own shares when the corporation purchases (redeems) the deceased shareholder’s interest from the estate. The ownership interests of the remaining shareholders retain their original tax bases in the company.

The Estate of the Dearly Departed

Under a redemption approach, the estate tax consequences can become more pronounced when the deceased shareholder has a controlling interest.Under IRC section 267A, shareholder who owns more than a 50% interest either directly or indirectly is deemed to control a corporation.

In this situation, the shareholder may be deemed to have an ownership interest in the life insurance policy due to the shareholder’s ability to designate a beneficiary other than the company itself.

This is one big important reason why both legal help in drafting the agreement, and tax help in accounting for the insurance proceeds are essential. A distribution from a corporation to a shareholder or a shareholder's estate could possibly be taxed as a dividend, the preferred outcome in Obama’s philosophy.

The fact that the departed had a majority ownership could possibly result in the proceeds being includable in the deceased’s estate. Thus, the after-tax returns on life insurance policies can be substantially reduced if estate taxes are incurred as a result of the life insurance proceeds being included in the estate.

This outcome would not lead to Heaven for the estate, but to spending years in that other place, halfway between Heaven and Hell, commonly called the IRS.

The business attorney and the tax professional may qualify the transaction as a Section 303 redemption.

If the 303 requirements are met, a distribution from the business in exchange for stock will be treated as a capital transaction, and the shareholder's basis may be subtracted from the sale price. And since the basis steps up to fair market value at a stockholder's death, there is usually no difference between the basis and the sale price, so there is no gain.

Funding The Insurance Premiums for the Business Buy-Sell Agreement

The company applies for, owns, and is also the beneficiary of the insurance policy that funds the buy-sell redemption agreement.

Redemption is just one possible method of implementing the buy sell agreement, which is a legally binding agreement between owners.Sometimes, the legal agreement, which precedes the insurance policy, and the insurance policy itself, are confused and commingled.

The insurance policy requires a periodic payment of premiums. In many cases, a very beneficial outcome for the company can be obtained when the company uses business revenues to pay the insurance premium.

This payment of the insurance premium by the company requires careful deliberation from the attorneys and tax professionals who are providing guidance on implementing the redemption agreement. In many cases, it may be useful for the family to have its own legal and tax representation that is independent of the business professionals.

But, given the right set of precursor conditions, funding the insurance with business dollars sometimes leads to the seventh level of Nirvana, an incredibly blissful state, or so I am informed.

And, as is the case with Santorum’s religion, this blissful state inures to the happiness of the individual, and not the engorgement of the State.

Thomas Vass is an independent licensed insurance agent, located in Raleigh, N. C., with a special focus on helping small companies implement buy-sell agreements.

Please note: Vass is not an attorney and does not provide legal advice, and Vass is not a tax professional and does not provide tax advice. Vass is a business insurance professional and provides business insurance advice. Nothing in this article is intended to provide legal or tax advice, and any relationship to political advice is merely coincidental.

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Univanity

2012-02-20T14:49:30-05:00

Univanity

A song of definitive abstraction and its remedy

By Alan Rayner

I know where I stand

At the top of this heap

My pyramid of numbers

With me alone

At the top

A wholesome wholeness

Complete in every way

Superior to all my parts

That make me up

As a divine construction

Knowing it All

By Being Above It All

Yet, not having a clue

About what it means

To become

In the thick of it all

Doh!

I seem to have forgotten

What love means

Perhaps I’d better

Take a look around myself

Then feel my way inside my self

To find out why it really hurts

To be this way

Then, let my self breathe again

Sigh!

The ‘univanity’ alluded to by the above poem is an intransigent belief in the supremacy and completeness of individual or group as an ‘absolute independent singleness’ or ‘wholeness’. It thoroughly permeates modern thought and culture and is characteristic of both ‘individualism/reductionism’ and ‘collectivism/holism’. It is embedded in all forms of definitive abstraction – philosophical, mathematical, scientific, theological – that envisage the numerical figure of ‘One’ to be a discrete entity, ‘on its own’. It is neither consistent with our sensory experience of natural energy flow, nor can it make consistent sense. But it does lead to the exclusion or suffocation of human creativity, love and variety, as well as profound social, psychological and environmental conflict and harm through the pursuit of definitive knowledge as a source of power.

As I have put it elsewhere:-

Knowledge without Love is Power without Wisdom - Fearful Vanity that commits crimes against humanity and Nature. http://www.bestthinking.com/article/permalink/1807?tab=article&title=power-love-vanity-and-humility

Yet the pursuit of knowledge alone has, since the so-called ‘Enlightenment’, increasingly led to ‘Institutionalized Univanity’.

Correspondingly, it seems that most modern universities have become Institutions of Univanity, licensed to impoverish creative thought through having discarded their poetic licence in favour of money and kudos

But they’re not alone! For thousands of years we have been ramming univanity down our own throats, reinforcing it in our educational, political and religious institutions and ideologies, without recognizing how and why we do this, in spite of our selves. We have needlessly been hardening or removing what is needed to distinguish and nurture ‘ego’ as unique local self-identity in order to brutalize this into the abusive ‘egotism’ of individual or collective entireties.

Univanity is virtually impossible to remedy without profound mental breakdown or breakthrough, because it is by definition singularly unaware of its actual situation IN Nature, and hence unaware of the needless conflict and suffering that it induces. It is convinced of its own virtue and beneficence, thereby attributing all blame for harm elsewhere, by means of psychological projection. It views all questioning of its foundational premises as an unwarranted violation of its integrity, from which it defends itself by means of an exclusive and paradoxical wall of self-definition. Anyone who does question its premises is disregarded as ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’ (except in so far as they may agree with its premises, in which case they may be disregarded as ‘having nothing new to add’). No doubt, my calling it ‘Univanity’ will be regarded as an ‘insult’. Such is the difficulty of politely alerting Univanity to its own intransigence and harmfulness: one way or another it will find an excuse to take offence and/or ignore the point that is being made.

The 'hole point' of the fluid boundary logic of natural inclusionality is to move on from the 'univanities' of 'whole ways of thinking' that base themselves on the definitive completeness of individual or group, to a dynamic 'hole new way' way of thinking, where space is acknowledged to be a continuous intangible presence and boundaries are appreciated as energetic interfacings of inner and outer 'holeyness' or 'hollowness'. This corresponds in turn with the move from an idealist (abstract) vision of a 'hole' as an 'absence of presence' or 'gap/discontinuity IN the fabric(ation) of everything' and an authentic (natural) vision of a dynamically bounded locality OF space as intangible presence everywhere, without limit.

This natural inclusional move is commensurate with the vision of Robert Frost in his statement:

“Nature does not complete things... Man must finish, and he does so by making a garden and building a wall"

It is also a fundamentally different transformational move from the simple recurrent exchange of one kind of 'univanity' or 'partial truth' (e.g. reductionism – which fragments natural energy flow) for another (e.g. holism – which suffocates natural energy flow) depending on what is 'in vogue'

"Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favor." - Robert Frost, The Black Cottage

Here it is vital to appreciate that natural inclusionality (NI) seeks to TRANSFORM the ‘Pride and Prejudice’ of Univanity into a more sensitive and sensible understanding of our human place in Nature. It does not seek to eradicate and replace what has preceded it, but to learn and evolve from this in a creative and sustainable way.

Hence:

NI doesn't preclude conventional arithmetic or reasoning but transforms the meaning of its answers

Most fundamentally, NI recognizes that One is never all one alone; one dynamically includes and is included in the infinite space of Agape (deep Love).

Now, what could actually be so mad, bad and dangerous to know about that?

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How Sleep Disorders Imp...

2011-03-21T14:45:25-04:00

Sleep disturbances are common in trauma survivors, and they can exacerbate depression and PTSD, increase symptomatology, and have a negative effect on health (Krakow et al., 2000; Roberts et al., 2000). In a sample of female rape survivors with post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma-related sleep disorders had an independent impact on health, even after controlling for both depression and PTSD (Clum, Nishith, Pallavi, & Resick, 2001). In this article, I describe what we know about trauma-related sleep disorders, why they are relevant to health, and how treatment addresses these difficulties.

What is a Sleep Disorder?

The term “sleep disorders” cover a wide range of problems. Some disorders are measured via patient questionnaire. Others need to be measured via polysomnographic studies, which record vital signs and other physiological measures during the night. A polysomnographic study includes an EEG (electroencephalogram) to measure brain wave activity, an EMG (electromyogram) to measure of muscle activity, and an EOG (electro-oculogram) to measure How Sleep Disorders Impact Health in Trauma Survivors eye movements. Other measures include respiratory airflow, blood oxygen saturation, pulse, heart rate, body position and respiratory effort. Polysomnographic studies are necessary to detect problems such as sleep-disordered breathing (e.g., sleep apneas), and sleep-movement disorders (e.g., restless-leg syndrome). Patients are often unaware of these and so could not report them via patient questionnaire. Sleep disorders can be grouped into three broad categories: Insomnia. Insomnia refers to an inability to either fall asleep or stay asleep. It is often precipitated by life stress, worrying, or depression.

Insomnia can also be caused by lifestyle factors, such as daytime napping, or excessive caffeine consumption.

Hypersomnia. Hypersomnia refers to excessive daytime sleepiness and is a symptom associated with conditions such as sleep apnea.

Parasomnias. Parasomnias are unusual behaviors that occur during sleep. These include sleep walking, bruxism (teeth grinding) and nightmares, which occur during REM sleep.

Sleep Quality of Trauma Survivors

Several recent studies have documented sleep disturbances in trauma survivors. In one community sample, 68% sexual abuse survivors reported having sleep difficulties, with 45% having repetitive nightmares (Teegan, 1999). Hulme (2000) found that sleep problems among sexual abuse survivors were common in a primary-care sample. Fifty-two percent of sexual abuse survivors reported that they could not sleep at night and 36% reported nightmares. Intrusive symptoms were also common with 53% of sexual abuse survivors reporting sudden thoughts or images of past events.

In a sample of battered women living in shelters (N = 50), 70% reported poor sleep quality, 28% went to bed very fatigued, and 40% woke up feeling very fatigued (Humphreys, Lee, Neylan, & Marmar, 1999). Moreover, 82% described one or more of the following characteristics of disturbed sleep: many wakings over the course of the night, restless sleep, and early-morning waking. Six described vivid nightmares that included recent incidents of abuse.

In a study of sleep disorders in sexual assault survivors, 80% had either sleep-breathing or sleep-movement disorders. Both of these disorders were linked to higher levels of depression and suicidality. Women who had both types of sleep disorders had the most severe symptoms. The authors speculated that fragmented sleep potentiated the symptoms for women after a sexual assault and made it more difficult for them to cope (Krakow et al., 2000). These same authors noted that since sleep medicine is not well-integrated into trauma treatment, practitioners are often less effective than they could be if they also treated underlying sleep disorders. They indicated that psychotropic medications may mask the presentation of a sleep disorder, and further stated that clinicians may unknowingly exacerbate the psychiatric illness they are striving to treat by prescribing the medication in the first place.

How Sleep Impacts Health

Poor sleep quality has a number of negative effects on health. It compromises immune, metabolic, and neuroendocrine function, chronically activates the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, and increases mortality risk (Carmichael & Reis, 2005). McEwen (2003) noted that even short periods of disrupted sleep can wreck havoc on physical health. Disrupted sleep elevates evening cortisol levels, increases glucose and insulin levels, and increases insulin resistance. People with chronically poor sleep have more car accidents, and among people with chronic conditions, lack of sleep predicts greater functional disability and decreased quality of life. Not surprisingly, people with poor sleep use more medical services than their non-sleep-deprived counterparts (Stepanski, Rybarczyk, Lopez, & Stevens, 2003).

Smith and colleagues (2000) described the overlap between sleep and pain, with the relationship most likely being bi-directional: pain interferes with sleep and sleep disturbances increase the experience of pain. Sleep problems may also reduce a patient’s ability to cope with chronic pain. In their study of 51 people with chronic pain, 88% reported some dissatisfaction with their sleep. Pre-sleep cognitive hyperarousal was the best predictor of sleep quality, regardless of pain severity. This included racing thoughts, intrusive thoughts, depressive cognitions, and worry.

Sleep disturbances also impact immune function by increasing levels of proinflammatory cytokines. High levels of inflammation increase daytime fatigue, and the body experiences disturbed sleep as a physiological stressor, further increasing inflammation (Konsman, Parnt, & Dantzer, 2002). In a sleep study of patients with major depressive disorder (MDD), inflammation was associated with sleep disturbances. Prolonged sleep latency and REM density (two markers of disturbed sleep) were better predictors of inflammation levels than were depressive symptoms. The authors concluded that sleep disturbances were at least the partial cause of elevated inflammation in depressed people (Motivala, Safati, Olmos, & Irwin, 2005). And inflammation increases the risk of both heart disease and diabetes (Kendall-Tackett, 2007).

Treatment of Sleep Disorders

Morin and Ware (1996) recommend that a systematic assessment of sleep be incorporated into all psychological evaluations. They suggest that practitioners ask about the onset of the sleep disorder, and the temporal sequence of when the sleep disorder and the psychiatric disorder manifested. Did the symptoms of the psychiatric disorder predate the onset of sleep problems or vice versa? Polysomnographic studies can also reveal whether there are any sleep-breathing or sleep-movement disorders that might also be treated. These conditions often improve with medications and/or assistive devices. However, cognitive-behavioral interventions are appropriate for treating most sleep problems. In one recent review, it was effective for 70% to 80% of patients, and was comparable to sleep medications (Morin, 2004; Stepanski & Perlis, 2000). Cognitive-behavioral interventions help with sleep because they produce changes in REM sleep. Cognitive approaches can also address worrying and rumination that may be at the base of primary or secondary insomnia (Morin & Ware, 1996).

Cognitive therapy for insomnia includes three components: behavioral, cognitive, and educational. Behavioral aspects include establishing regular bedtimes, not using the bed for anything but sleeping and sex, getting out of bed when unable to sleep, and eliminating naps during the day. Sleep-hygiene education helps people minimize behaviors that might interfere with sleep. This might include eliminating caffeine, exercise, alcohol and smoking too close to bedtime (Morin, 2004; Stepanski & Perlis, 2000). Stress reduction includes a relaxation component that focuses on both autonomic relaxation techniques (e.g., progressive muscle relaxation) and cognitive techniques that address the worrying that keeps people from sleeping. A combination of cognitive, behavioral, and stress-reduction approaches is effective for most patients with sleep disorders.

Conclusion

Sleep disorders are another common effect of trauma that can increase health problems in trauma survivors. By recognizing possible sleep disorders, practitioners can help patients minimize or even eliminate them. Addressing sleep disorders will likely result in lower levels of symptoms and improved health overall.

References

Carmichael, C. L., & Reis, H. T. (2005). Attachment, sleep quality, and depressed affect. Health Psychology, 24, 526–531.

Clum, G. A., Nishith, P., & Resick, P. A. (2001). Trauma-related sleep disturbance and self-reported physical health symptoms in treatment-seeking female rape victims. Journal of Nervous & Mental Disease, 189, 618–622.

Hulme, P. A. (2000). Symptomatology and health care utilization of women primary care patients who experienced childhood sexual abuse. Child Abuse and Neglect, 24, 1471–1484.

Humphreys, J. C., Lee, K. A., Neylan, T. C., & Marmar, C. R. (1999). Sleep patterns of sheltered battered women. Journal of Nursing Scholarship, 31, 139–143.

Kendall-Tackett, K. A. (in press). Cardiovascular disease and metabolic syndrome as sequelae of violence against women: A psychoneuroimmunology approach. Trauma, Violence and Abuse.

Konsman, J. P., Parnet, P., & Dantzer, R. (2002). Cytokine-induced sickness behaviour: Mechanisms and implications. Trends in Neuroscience, 25, 154–158.

Krakow, B., Artar, A., Warner, T. D., Melendez, D., Johnston, L., Hollifield, M., et al. (2000). Sleep disorder, depression, and suicidality in female sexual assault survivors. Crisis, 21, 163–170.

McEwen, B. S. (2003). Mood disorders and allostatic load. Biological Psychiatry, 54, 200–207. Morin, C. M. (2004). Cognitive–behavioral approaches to the treatment of insomnia. Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, 65 [Suppl.], 33–40.

Morin, C. M., & Ware, J. C. (1996). Sleep and psychopathology. Applied and Preventive Psychology, 5, 211–224.

Motivala, S. J., Safati, A., Olmos, L., & Irwin, M. R. (2005). Inflammatory markers and sleep disturbance in major depression. Psychosomatic Medicine, 67, 187–194.

Roberts, R. E., Shema, S. J., Kaplan, G. A., & Strawbridge, W. J. (2000). Sleep complaints and depression in an aging cohort: A prospective perspective. American Journal of Psychiatry, 157, 81–88.

Smith, M. T., Perlis, M. L., Smith, M. S., Giles, D. E., & Carmody, T. P. (2000). Sleep quality and presleep arousal in chronic pain. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 23, 1–13.

Stepanski, E. J., & Perlis, M. L. (2000). Behavioral sleep medicine: An emerging subspecialty in health psychology and sleep medicine. Journal of Psychosomatic Research, 49, 343–347.

Stepanski, E. J., Rybarczyk, B., Lopez, M., & Stevens, S. (2003). Assessment and treatment of sleep disorders in older adults: A review for rehabilitation psychologists. Rehabilitation Psychology, 48, 23–36.

Teegen, F. (1999). Childhood sexual abuse and long-term sequelae. In A. Maercker, M. Schutzwohl, & Z. Solomon (Eds.), Posttraumatic stress disorder: A lifespan developmental perspective (pp. 97–112). Seattle, WA: Hogrefe & Huber.

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Best Practices for Disc...

2011-10-11T09:58:54-04:00

Employee Discipline Should be Restorative at Its Core

According to the University of Vermont School of Business Administration, constructive discipline in the workplace should be comprised of three elements: 1) The disciplinary action must always be fair, evenhanded, non-punitive, and non-discriminatory; 2) All employees who perform similar jobs must be held to the same standards that the employee being disciplined is; and 3) Discipline should always be constructive and focused on training the employee to perform at their (her/his) optimal level with a view toward retaining them in the organization over the long-term (UVM.edu, 2011).

Enhancing Employee Value Should be the Byword of all Disciplinary Action

The goal of disciplining employees in the organization should always be restorative and focused on enhancing their value to themselves, to the organization, the key stakeholders, and to the community. When training and constructive evaluations are done a consistent basis, much of the potential “venom” of disciplinary sessions can be circumvented. Moreover, discipline should never be done precipitously unless an egregious safety, ethical, or moral violation has occurred.

Personal Likes and Dislikes Have no Place in the Disciplinary Process

Employee discipline must always be administered even-handedly, or fairly, to all employees who perform similar jobs to the person being disciplined (UVM.edu, 2011). Personal likes or dislikes should have no bearing in the disciplinary process and the manager or supervisor carrying out the discipline must be careful to “leave their (his/her) ego at the door” when they are doing so.

Job-Design Flaws Should be Considered in Disciplinary Discussions

Strong restorative goals in disciplinary measures are much more positive than punitive ones are and they strive to edify and boost the confidence and competencies of the person being disciplined to a level where they can surmount their difficulties and become a more high performing and effective employee. It is very important in the disciplinary process to ascertain whether there may be job-design flaws which may be adversely affecting the person’s ability to perform the job effectively. With good rapport, the employee can be drawn out and asked to recommend job-design improvements that could benefit everyone on staff who has to perform the same, or similar, work.

Discipline Can Serve as a Catapult for Organizational-Performance Improvement

In sum, discipline rather than being negative can serve as a catapult not only for improvement of the employee’s performance but for improvements in job design and how the job is performed in all of its elements. In so doing, the skill sets of the employee can be improved, the performance of the section improved, and the performance of the entity enhanced which would lend greater momentum to their long-term profitability and value to themselves, their customers, and their community.

Source: University of Vermont School of Business Administration. (2011). Constructive Discipline. Retrieved October 10, 2011 from:

http://lenny.uvm.edu/Research/inProgress/Resources/HRMGuide/Employee/Relations/Laws/ConstDiscipline.htm/

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Time for a New Model

2011-06-10T15:34:52-04:00

Building Bigger Cupcakes

I have to admit I found that particular metaphor very catchy when I encountered in Nilofer Merchant’s June 2 blog post on the Harvard Business Review site. Her blog post titled People Aren’t Cogs discussed some of the same issues that have perplexed me for decades- why don’t more organizations get the fact that investing in the talents and abilities is not only a critical strategy, but it is good for business?

I think the following two quotes sum up the conventional wisdom that continues to be proliferated in most organizations-

Used only with express written permission

Companies have a hard time distinguishing between the cost of paying people and the value of investing in them" Thomas A Stewart 1948

Michael Porter- HBR "How else could companies overlook the well-being of their customers, the depletion of natural resources vital to their businesses, the viability of key suppliers, or the economic distress of the communities in which they produce and sell? How else could companies think that simply shifting activities to locations with ever lower wages was a sustainable ’solution’ to competitive challenges? Government and civil society have often exacerbated the problem by attempting to address social weaknesses at the expense of business. The presumed trade-offs between economic efficiency and social progress have been institutionalized in decades of policy choices.” December 2010

You will note I hope that these sentiments were expressing essentially the same idea over 50 years apart!

I have used a similar metaphor to Nilofer in expressing my opinion that most of us have been trained to believe that if I want more- more market share, more profit, more productivity, the strategy is to extract it from someone else.

I described in terms of pie- if I want more pie the conventional thought is I take yours. My model is more akin to build a bigger pie.

I was discussing with someone as recently as this morning the concept of personal competency, the idea embedded in our Constitution that each individual has the right and responsibility to plan and implement their own destiny. As you might suspect that concept is essentially contrary to the philosophy that fueled the Industrial Revolution.

Personally competent people could negotiate with you as a peer. They possess skills and attributes that you do not and they can bargain with you over the value of those services. That kind of a model doesn’t fit well when you are looking for armies of people who can perform the same tasks over and over again without really knowing the why or how.

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Largely because of the intervention of government through labor laws including the National Labor Relations Act, Taft Hartley, and others employees gained back some level of leverage through the legalization of collective bargaining- the right to form and join unions. They didn’t realize it then, but the “founding fathers” of the collective bargaining movement left some of what I believe to be the most important rights on the table.

Employees were granted the right to collectively bargain over wages, hours, and working conditions; but the means of production remain exclusively with management. Management is required to negotiate the effects of changing a method or location of production, but not the method itself. We gave up an important seat at the table.

In return for security in the form of health, retirement, and related benefits we agreed to truly become human capital. For generations that was the model. In return for compliance with company norms, rules, policies, and procedures you got security. Our sense of personal competency diminished especially about things like how the products were produced, how our wages and benefits were determined and bluntly blissful ignorance about what they cost.

To a large extent I would submit we remain in that place today. The average employee is remarkably uninformed about the thinking and methodology about how decisions are made around compensation in their organization and probably find the information about their health and retirement benefits downright byzantine. I still hear more mature workers complain bitterly about employers taking away their pensions and replacing them with defined contribution plans like 401ks. Many propose we follow suit with the same model in government sponsored programs like Social Security and there is a push towards consumer directed health care programs as well.

Part of the issue in my mind is that while we were providing security we robbed them of their personal competency around these issues. We still don’t see employees as partner/stakeholders, we see them as cogs.

Ms. Merchant mentions that in conversations with her colleagues she has been chided and warned against discussing too much peopley stuff. The amusing part is that she has a substantial track record for delivering results in business. She isn’t an academic or a social scientist; she is a businessperson as am I.

So let’s examine where we are in 2011. I hear and unfortunately I believe that the outcome of the next Congressional and Presidential election will largely hinge on the economy, that the current administration has had two and a half years to “fix” it and they have failed so they must be punished.

I believe differently. I believe that we have fundamental flaws in some of our essential societal infrastructure that have occurred over a period of years and we still are quite prepared to acknowledge them and execute a definitive change strategy.

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The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that employee turnover is costing the U.S alone $5 trillion annually in lost opportunity and productivity.

The American Mental Health Association indicates we lose another $200 billion annually to presenteeism, the phenomenon where people “show up”, but perform at less than capacity, lose productive time based on personal or family health issues, and accidents and injuries.

In the U.S. alone we spend $100 billion annually on “training” that has little or no sustained effect on productivity and performance.

Is it just me or is this peopley stuff starting to resemble real money and real opportunity.

For the last twenty years or so we have attempted to counter these issues with processes like lean, Six Sigma, and others. We are applying the wrong solutions.

The industrial model of the 19th and 20th century is no longer relevant or effective.

I heard a couple of brilliant quotes the other day in a webcast featuring social entrepreneur Simon Mainwaring.

The quotes were-

Government and philanthropy cannot by themselves successfully the issues in our society

and

Companies cannot succeed in societies that fail!

Perhaps one of the most interesting dimensions of these quotes is their author- it wasn’t a social scientist, philanthropist, or religious leader who made them- it was Bill Gates….

A New Economic/Social Model

Over the last few months I encountered descriptions of a couple of models that I found appealing and relevant that incorporate Merchant’s “bigger cupcake” thinking.

Michael Porter and Mark Kramer wrote a piece they called Creating Shared Value for the Harvard Business Review in the first quarter of this year. They explored many of the issues I have discussed here and went on to provide examples of where organizations actually invested in social infrastructure they found it to be to their significant business benefit.

I am not talking about corporate social responsibility here or cause marketing I am talking about investment in societal infrastructure that yielded a significant return to stakeholders.

Wal-Mart and Nestle both found that by investing in local “clusters” they significantly reduced transportation costs of transporting goods to their facilities and improved the economic position of the communities. Wal-Mart enjoyed another $200 million in annual savings by reexamining packaging and routing of shipments to sores to meet sustainability goals.

General Electric’s Eco-Imagination product lines represented an $18 billion revenue source in 2009

Vodafone’s investment in an electronic banking solution in Kenya in order to assist farmers in marketing their crops resulted in 10 million new customers over three years and the funds under management represent 11% of Kenya’s GDP, similarly an online service providing weather updates and other services to Indian farmers by ThompsonReuters resulted in significant increases in revenues for over 60% of the 2 million farmers using the service; significantly increasing the prosperity of the region.

As Porter and Kramer point out-

Not all profit is equal. Profits involving a social purpose represent a high higher form of capitalism, one that creates a positive cycle of company and community prosperity.

This peaks directly to Gates argument that companies can’t ultimately succeed in societies that fail.

A similar argument exists for cultivating engaged workforces.

Merchant’s blog post reported findings from a consolidated “mega-survey” conducted by Gallup incorporating data from 199 studies including 152 separate organizations, 44 industries, and 26 countries. The results show higher engagement results in-

An 18% increase in productivity

A 12% increase in customer retention, and

An increase in quality of 60%!

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Other “ancillary” benefits demonstrate that increased engagement can reduce turnover by 40%, the fact that 70% of organizations with high engagement exited the downturn with higher morale than entering it, and that 90% of Fortune Magazine’s Most Admired companies list have explicit employee engagement/branding strategies.

Category leaders like Apple and Google who have embraced these models for years can show a direct correlation to their bottom line.

Apple’s per capita contribution to revenues is over $420k per year, Google’s is at $335K. These are contributions per employee. They also don’t have issues recruiting and retaining the best talent- those candidates seek them out!

As Merchant points out having a model like this doesn’t just allow companies to win, it allows them win repeatedly!

Mainwaring calls this we thinking. The goal is increasing shared value, not just shareholder value. We are building a bigger cupcake.

Businesses and organizations of all sizes are going to have to deal with a couple of “new” realities-

The supply of “experienced” talent relative to the supply is going to diminish over the next few years. You will be competing for this next generation not only as employees, but as shareholders and customers.

I also agree with Gate’s that this is a societal issue. There is a role for government, philanthropy, social services, and the business community.

The 60% of health care costs that are attributable to individual behavior are going to require collaboration between payer, provider, and patient. We will need to create infrastructure to bring personal competency into their decision making process.

Social literacy, the ability to understand and comprehend the information people receive is a huge issue. So is motivation. If solutions do not include both incentives and accountability for personal decision making around not only health, but economic security in retirement they will fail.

The industrial codependency we cultivated to create generations of compliant workers isn’t going to be overcome by fiat. Business is just as accountable for the failures of our societal infrastructure as government. We need to participate in crafting the solution as do individuals.

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I see this as an opportunity represented by the new millennium. Let’s build a bigger cupcake not squabble over crumbs……..

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How Secure Are Pakistan...

2012-02-15T12:45:22-05:00

Pakistan has rejected a secret US military report that alleges that Pakistan’s intelligence services exercise tight control over the Taliban

Many are concerned about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and nuclear materials. American and Pakistani leaders insist that they want to prevent nuclear war and nuclear terrorism. If they are serious about this, they would actively collaborate on nuclear security, by for example, technical exchanges on how it can best be achieved. But currently, the two countries are locked into a hostile relationship. It is hard to be optimistic that will soon improve their relations.

The State of the Taliban

Pakistan has rejected a recent secret US military report that alleges that Pakistan’s intelligence services exercise tight control over the Taliban. The report, entitled The State of the Taliban 2012, is the latest of a series of reports drawn up by a US special operations taskforce using the findings from 27,000 interrogations with more than 4,000 captured Taliban, al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters and civilians.

Julian Borger, the diplomatic editor of the London-based Guardian newspaper, explains in an article published on 2 February 2012, that the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) “played down the report’s conclusions about the Taliban’s confidence of victory in the struggle for Afghanistan, saying that it simply reflected the mindset of insurgent detainees, which was not supported by the military situation” (1).

Both the Pakistani foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, and the Afghan foreign ministers, Zalmai Rassoul, also dismissed the report. Nevertheless, the report of extensive secret collaboration “between the Taliban and Pakistani and Afghan security forces behind the backs of NATO forces” is extremely damaging. Hina Rabbani Khar dismissively described the report as “old wine in an even older bottle”.

According to Borger, the report’s conclusions that the “Taliban’s strength and morale are largely intact despite the NATO military surge, and that large numbers of Afghan government soldiers are defecting, are in stark contrast to NATO’s line, that the insurgent movement has been severely damaged”. In spite of the denials, which are after all hardly surprising, the US military report rings true. And it helps justify the French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s decision to pull out France’s contingent from Afghanistan within a year, after an Afghan soldier killed four French soldiers.

NATO combat forces are scheduled to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014. The report’s finding that the Taliban’s levels of confidence and morale are high is not surprising. All the Taliban has to do is sit tight for two years. No wonder that, in the words of the report, “Taliban commanders, along with rank and file members, increasingly believe that their control of Afghanistan is inevitable”.

Stability in Afghanistan depends on a good security relationship between America and Pakistan. The US-Pakistan alliance, already in trouble, was severely damaged by a number of incidents that occurred in the past year or so, the latest being the assault by American helicopters on two Pakistani army posts along the Afghan border, which killed 24 Pakistani soldiers. US officials expressed regret for the deaths but they did not apologize for the attack, as demanded by many Pakistanis.

A Pentagon investigation into the air strike blamed a lack of coordination by American and Pakistani officers for the incident. But in a letter to the American Congress, Pakistan said the episode has raised suspicions in the rank and file of the Pakistan army that it was a premeditated attack (2). Be this as it may, many Pakistanis now look on America as an enemy rather than an ally.

Pakistan’s instability

As an article in the London-based Economist magazine explains the Pakistani army, which is in effect a state within a state, wants “to be rid of Mr. Zardari (Pakistan’s president) but they do not want to stage another coup. Nor do they want to see the opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, come to power since they do not trust him. The army’s tactic appears to be to apply pressure until Mr. Zardari snaps, or at least to weaken his government so that it can merely limp along until a more agreeable administration is somehow installed” (3).

The bad relations between the President and the army, Pakistan’s worsening relations with the USA and its dire economy, add up to a very unstable country. Instability in Pakistan threatens the security of the region. It also raises very serious questions about the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

Such questions were also raised by the relative ease with which a team of American Special Forces were able to fly from Afghanistan some distance into Pakistan and kill Osama bin Laden in his hiding place in Abbottabad, a suburb of Islamabad, Pakistan. In the raid, 120 miles (192km) inside Pakistan, the Americans swooped down in helicopters, swept through the buildings within the high walled enclosure and shot dead a total of five people including bin Laden. The operation took only 40 minutes.

There is a Pakistani military academy and other military facilities in Abbottabad but there was no effective military reaction to the US raid. This doesn’t bode well for the military’s ability to safeguard Pakistan’s nuclear facilities.

Pakistan’s stockpiles of fissile materials

Pakistan’s current nuclear weapons use highly-enriched uranium (HEU) as the fissile material. Pakistan also produces plutonium which could be used as an alternative fissile material in its nuclear weapons.

Pakistan produces plutonium in two nuclear reactors (Khushab-1 and Khushab-2) in operation near Joharabad. Each is capable of producing an estimated 6 to 12 kilograms of weapon-grade plutonium a year, giving a combined total of 12 to 24 kilograms a year – sufficient for between 3 and six nuclear weapons a year. Pakistan is constructing two new plutonium-production reactors at Joharabad - Khushab-3 and Khushab-4. When they are operational, these reactors will double Pakistan’s rate of production of plutonium. Pakistan is also building a new reprocessing facility to remove the plutonium from the reactor fuel elements.

According to Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, Pakistan currently has between 90 and 110 nuclear weapons, up from between 70 and 90 warheads in 2009. They estimate that within ten years it could have a total of between 150 and 200 nuclear warheads (4). They point out that, even though it is politically unstable, Pakistan continues to steadily expand its nuclear capabilities; “in fact, it has the world’s fastest-growing nuclear stockpile”.

According to the International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM), as of 2010 Pakistan had a stockpile of about 2,600 kilograms of HEU and roughly 100 kilograms of weapon-grade plutonium (International Panel on Fissile Materials, 2010). This is enough to produce between 160 and 240 nuclear warheads, assuming that each warhead uses either between 12 and 18 kilograms of HEU or between 4 and 6 kilograms of plutonium.

Pakistan’s nuclear-delivery systems

Pakistan’s nuclear weapons can be delivered by combat aircraft or ballistic missiles. New nuclear-capable ballistic missiles and new nuclear-capable cruise missiles are being developed. Kristensen and Norris say: “The Pakistani government has not defined the number and type of nuclear weapons that its minimum deterrent requires. But Pakistan’s pace of nuclear modernization — and its development of several short-range delivery systems —indicate that its nuclear posture has entered an important new phase and that a public explanation is overdue” (4).

Are Pakistan’s nuclear weapons secure?

Given the large amount of nuclear materials Pakistan possesses and the significant size of its nuclear arsenal, it is hardly surprising that there is much concern about the security of them. There are good reasons for concern. Its nuclear weapons are stored in facilities and on bases scattered throughout the country. And Pakistan has been the major supplier of nuclear know-how and technology to countries such as Iran and North Korea.

As Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder write in article entitled The Ally from Hell published in the National Journal on 5 November 2011 (6): “there are at least 15 sites across Pakistan at which jihadists could find warheads or other nuclear materials”. They argue that “Pakistan would be an obvious place for a jihadist organization to seek a nuclear weapon or fissile material: it is the only Muslim-majority state, out of the 50 or so in the world, to have successfully developed nuclear weapons; its central government is of limited competence and has serious trouble projecting its authority into many corners of its territory (on occasion it has difficulty maintaining order even in the country’s largest city, Karachi); Pakistan’s military and security services are infiltrated by an unknown number of jihadist sympathizers; and many jihadist organizations are headquartered there already”.

Goldberg and Ambinder quote Graham Allison, an expert on nuclear weapons who directs the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University: “There are three threats; the first is ‘a terrorist theft of a nuclear weapon, which they take to Mumbai or New York for a nuclear 9/11. The second is a transfer of a nuclear weapon to a state like Iran. The third is a takeover of nuclear weapons by a militant group during a period of instability or splintering of the state’”.

Conclusions

Although many in the west are worried about the Pakistan’s nuclear security, Pakistani leaders argue strongly that the country’s nuclear materials and nuclear weapons are secure. Both the USA and Pakistan say they want to prevent nuclear war and nuclear terrorism and should, therefore, collaborate on nuclear security, by for example, technical exchanges on how it can best be achieved.

The USA needs Pakistan’s help in dealing with its problems with Afghanistan and Pakistan needs direct financial support from America. Both countries suffer if they become open enemies. Moreover, Pakistan’s military can ill afford to lose its access to American weapons systems.

Nevertheless, Pakistan and America are locked into a hostile relationship. And there is no sign that it will soon improve. Let’s hope that common sense soon prevails, that the two countries can overcome their differences and work towards their common goal of preventing nuclear war in South Asia and preventing terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons.

References

1. Julian Borger, Pakistan brushes aside State of Taliban report, The Guardian, 2 February 2012, page 30.

2. The world this week, The Economist, December 31st. 2011, page 6.

3. Pakistan’s febrile politics; open spats, The Economist, December 31st. 2011, page 39.

4. Hans M. Kristensen and Robert S. Norris, Pakistan’s nuclear forces, 2011, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2011, vol.67, no.4, pp 91-99.

5. International Panel on Fissile Materials, Global Fissile Material Report 2010: Balancing the Books: Production and Stocks. Princeton: IPFM. http://fissilematerials.org/library/gfmr10.pdf.

6. Jeffrey Goldberg and Marc Ambinder, The Ally from Hell, Atlantic Magazine. December 2011 http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/12/the-ally-from-hell/8730/.

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Reporting On the Annual...

2012-02-10T22:33:09-05:00

The NC Department of Transportation conference was held on February 9, 2012 form 8:30 am to 4 pm at the McKimmon Center, Raleigh, NC titled “Building Momentum: Creating Jobs and OpportunityThrough Infrastructure Development”. After introductions by Director Shelton A. Russell of the NCDOT-BOWD or NC Department of Transportation Business Opportunity and Workforce Development, and welcome from Anthony Roper, PE, Deputy Secretary, NCDOT with remarks from Gene Conti, Secretary of transportation, for NCDOT the program got underway.

There are 5 years of projects listed on their website for the NCDOT which emphasized global competitive areas:

Federal Aviation

Bridge and Replacement Projects

My invitation to this event came about through a business relationship with American Safety Products whose owner/president is Warren Arrington, Jr. a 27 year distribution business his specialty for construction can be found on the website at www.amsafpro.com. Warren, a dedicated businessman, carefully selects where he spends time. It became evident very early that the urging for him to attend would be fruitful.

The first panel focused on ‘Job Creation Through Infrastructure Development’ highlighting important facts that were worth noting. When we invest in our infrastructure at $1 Billion it actually equals 28,000 jobs with other percentages going to professionals and retailers, according to Diane Cherry from the Institute for Emerging Issues. She noted that at $5.4 Billion dollar investment translates into 51,000 Construction jobs, 23,000 in professional businesses like planning/engineering/architectural firms and 75,600 goes to retail related businesses. The first panel participants comprised of small businesses and NC State engineering staff discussing experiences in the NCDOT environment responding to questions from the narrator.

Key tips from this panel were as follows:

Application of the Davis Bacon Act related to salaries

What outreach efforts including site surveys offered by NCDOT staff as tools to better convey relevant information to appropriate demographics in a timely manner,

Dealing with ‘low bids’ by understanding the project and work force readiness

Having a business model at start up that can secure funding

Building relationships/Teaming/Networking

Understanding your customers

Have an internal effective operating business culture

Exploration of the ‘PPP’ [Public/Private Partnership] movement for more creative financing, tap into other vehicles other than bonds, and a good delivery system. It was noted by a panelist that on the professional side awarding contracts and shopping them around for lesser bids was problematic and needed to be revised if to be implemented in NC.

The Conference Keynote speaker was Michael V. Roberts author of ‘Action Has No Season, Strategies and Secrets to Gaining Wealth and Authority’. His claim to fame from the ‘show me state’ was exactly that. After 37 years his business wealth is worth $500 million. [I heard in the video presentation $1 billion] One could appreciate his success through development of hotels, retail centers, broadcasting, apartments, office buildings, and the Roberts Isle and Resort in the Bahamas (for you travelers). He is a man of many accolades of which one is being a member of President Obama’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. An innovator himself, he has coined the word ‘Actionaire’ “one who takes action to achieve your highest goals in life.”

His talk covered:

He declared himself a ‘cold blooded’ capitalist, humor in the spirit of “Rick James” (music icon),

Use capitalism for the greater good,

Innovation also means building on existing technology, enhancing and changing directions with it i.e, using the IBM computer to Gates software for accessible laptops, to Google pass AOL on to Facebook,

The Henry Ford model T was invented in Europe but translated in the states as an auto for the average person thus building infrastructure for speed combining entrepreneurship with capitalism thereby creating high growth jobs and opportunity,

Pointed to recent NY Times story about President Obama’s visit to Silicon Valley posing the question of why the iPhone is not manufactured in the states, leading to the story of aggressive Chinese suppliers who build campuses for workers so they can be ready to work at midnight if necessary, only emphasizing the challenges of global competitiveness when applying Apple business decisions. (In this case it was a request for no scratch glass late in the assembly process, which Corning responded to except the assemblage leading to extraordinary means of incorporating into the assembly line allowing for the same delivery date. Competitiveness includes being able to hire thousands of people in a day cannot be matched by United States businesses.

How do we compete in the US?

Efficiency, Efficiency, Efficiency

Eliminate ‘fear and failure’ from your vocabulary as well as ‘being in a box’ (experience teaches as part of living)!

Keep communicating your vision even as it unfolds..

An ‘Actionaire’ takes dreams, aspirations with bravado expanding from experience!

Rich people scream and the wealthy whisper..

Live every moment to the fullest,

Create generational wealth,

Promote science, technology, engineering and math,

He covered key areas of economic growth: Alternative energy, Healthcare, and Transportation. ‘It is now time to plant seeds.’ Be competitive globally, create jobs and not run away from capitalism. Finally he states to ‘do it right’, have inclusion, diversity, and accountability to create sustainable wealth’. Mr. Roberts’ ultimate entrepreneur act was to do a book signing of his new book at $20.00/copy., for which I negotiated the cover picture with him! What an inspiration!

The second panel focused on ‘Economic Impact of 2010 Infrastructure Projects in North Carolina’. Earlier in the welcome and remarks there was a comment that NCDOT usually does 100 bridges & replacements per year and are now partnering with private sector businesses to deliver 1200 over the next several years! This panel discussion composed of well spoken NCDOT engineers along with the Director of Construction for the NC Turnpike Authority. [The North Carolina Turnpike Authority was created in 2002 by the General Assembly in response to concerns about rapid growth, heavy congestion and dwindling resources.]

They covered bridge projects across the state commenting on the variety of projects for replacement, rehabilitation, and renovation. Asphalt resurfacing projects is totaling $400 million. Triangle Parkway is $135 million; Western Wake Freeway at $460 million; the Monroe Connector By-Pass near Charlotte at $360 million and the 23 mile Garden Parkway at $800 million advertized to a short listed team (which you can be found on NCDOT’s website). The numbers offered at the conference for this segment of infrastructure construction comes to $2.5 billion. These eye popping numbers only requires on average low percentage goals framed in mid teen percentages, race neutral, good faith efforts, and contractors who exceeded the mid teen percentages. Say the percentage goal is 14 per cent based on $2.5 billion the DBE participation requirement results in $350 million (?), no small change. However, the competition will be fierce at both ends to get a high performing general contractor or construction managers at risk as well as a ‘low bid’ high performing small sub-contractors that now include women, minority, disabled, etc. (More on move from HUB -Women and Minority Businesses to the DBE [Disadvantage Business Enterprise mix another time).

Infrastructure development is effectively an economic engine and as the high speed rail comes on line from Georgia to DC all the interim states including North Carolina will benefit from the ½ billion dollars funding. The engineer involved with this one likened the nature of this project as ‘going over to add an addition on your neighbor’s house working with their in-laws to get it done’. His comment only speaks to the complexity of working not only within the borders of NC, with the private sector Norfolk Southern rail company, as well as Virginia and South Carolina and since one affects the other in the planning stages, include Georgia and the District of Columbia! While all have good intentions they must be translated into workable solutions for each unique situation. He spoke about the example of grading and railroad tracking (Norfolk Southern?) versus road over rail (DOT) suggesting the separation of responsibilities to the appropriate jurisdiction and expertise. In a later discussion with Eric Swanson, he spoke about further complexities when you move to a high rail system which requires a straight run and moving existing curved rails into this format will have great impact on nearby communities. This project has a 20 to 30 year duration. No rail system was built overnight; nor will this one, however, if you are considering a career, a business, or the likes you will want to keep this economic engine in mind as you plan for future opportunities. It has the potential to position you for wealth.

Key positioning points from this panel discussion include:

Financial capacity for sustainability

Drive

Educational piece (industry)

Apply best practices

Be aware to attend job fairs for employment opportunities when construction has begun in area to help contractors meet staffing needs like the Monroe Connector/Bypass.

Connect to major contractors: Raleigh Durham Road Builders and S.T. Wooten.

Reach out to small businesses (if you are big contractor)

Seek increase involvement of local community stakeholders

Offer fresh ideas for how to make things work better

Build relationships on the vertical side (buildings) of construction ensuring connecting to smaller projects; check state construction website

Big opportunities in private sector for transportation logistics: transit/aviation/rail

Look for small projects for HVAC contractors and maintenance

Check for informal bids under $500.000

Small projects: follow up on in-house designed projects that need building like storage sheds

This was followed with an awards luncheon speaker, newly appointed (November 14, 2011) Director of the RDU Airport Authority, Mr. Mike Landgouth, out of Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport Authority. Awards to various businesses were for their performance and commitment to the success of NCDOT missions and goals. Mistress of Ceremonies was Ms. Shelby Scales the newly appointed Executive Director of the Airport Minority Advisory Council (AMAC).

This was a worthy conference for the very discerning businessperson like Warren, who made valuable contacts, but also for those who could see a way to get into the business with a bright future ahead of them and their next generation family. The time is now to understand the ‘how of wealth’. It was there all wrapped up in a beautiful bow at the NCDOT-BOWD conference in Raleigh and being handed over as a gift. All you had to be was present.

This article is for the Trends Navigator News © of Trends Management Consulting, Inc. a unique approach to outreach for underserved populations' sustainability.

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Power, Love, Vanity and...

2012-02-10T09:41:32-05:00

Power, Love, Vanity and Humility

Some Observations

By Alan Rayner

Vanity arises from the false premise – enshrined in definitive rationality – that Power as energetic form can be abstracted from or confine Love as receptive spatial influence

Humility arises from the recognition – in the heart of natural inclusionality – that Power and Love, Energy and Space, are distinct but mutually inclusive presences, and SPACE CANNOT BE CUT INTO PIECES.

Vanity is the mainspring of all needless human suffering, prejudice and estrangement, sourced ultimately in infinite dread.

Humility compassionately (not patronizingly!) recognizes the ultimate needfulness of all living creatures as energetic INHABITANTS of space as infinite depth, within, without and throughout form.

If 'Knowledge is Power' and 'Wisdom is Love', then to pursue Wisdom through definitive rationality is in Vain. There has to be another way – a Natural Inclusional Way.

Natural Inclusionality is not Welcomed by Vanity.

Vanity could be transformed into humility by natural inclusionality, if Vanity relaxed its insistence on alienating 'self' from 'other' and seeking/assuming superiority/authority by definition.

Wisdom may be found through understanding self-identity as a natural dynamic inclusion of neighborhood, where each lives inescapably within the other's influence.

Unwelcome

I can only conclude

So far as I can tell

That whatever I bring

By way of resolving human estrangement

Strangely enough

Is not welcome

In this Club of Corporate Disregard

For what yearns agape within

With welcome

For the warm heart

Frozen into mere stone

By the pallid grasp of icy Enlightenment

Whose sole object

Is to distance itself

From soulful presence

In order to keep itself forever intact

In infinite dread

Robust in defence

Ruthless in attack

Dedicated to its heroes’ stances

Fortified by dispute

Between those castle walls of Pride and Prejudice

Which make it feel at home

Securely guarded

Against all questioning of lofty values

Set in its imperious ways

For, what hope is there for admission

Within those walls of vanity that welcome

Only those prepared to reinforce them?

None, I guess, without compromising what’s really needed

To breach them

So that we can really come to life and love afresh

Unwelcome as what’s needed may seem to be

From a great height

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Show Them Your Assets

2012-02-10T09:27:24-05:00

Show Your Investment Bankers and Finance Companies Your Buy-Sell Agreement Assets

Show Them Your Assets

The Private Capital Market Business Insurance Buy-Sell Series: February 7, 2012

The Cash Values In Your Company Buy-Sell Agreement Insurance Policies Are Going to Become A Lot More Valuable, For Many Different Reasons

Getting Ready For The Next Fed-Induced Asset Bubble

No matter how much the Federal Reserve has lowered the interest rates or how much cash the Treasury has injected into the economy, the FDIC commercial banks and commercial lenders, have not extended the necessary business credit to worthy small business that are desperate for growth capital. Now, the Fed has announced that it is going to hold interest rates at zero, for the foreseeable future. The ostensible reason is to provide more economic certainty for private sector decision-making.

The outcome of this policy, given the open global flows of money and capital, and the fixed and non-movable capital equipment and real estate in the domestic U. S. economy, is yet another Fed-induced asset bubble. The Fed’s interest rate policy lever does not work in a globally-integrated financial market because the other players can anticipate the Fed and take profitable contra positions in the international currency market.

Just like the asset bubble in tech stocks in 1998. Just like the asset bubble in real estate in 2005. Just like the asset bubble in commodities in 2007.

All of which led up to the financial melt down in October of 2008. All caused by a 20-year devil’s brew of government intervention and political manipulation of economic forces that should have been left to the free markets.

Witness now the elites in Europe trying to make decisions about the Greek debt, and decide for yourself if you have confidence in the ability of a tiny handful of U. S. political elites to manage the national economy.

The next Fed-induced asset bubble will make it even worse for small private U. S. technology companies to obtain growth capital from U. S. financial firms.

A Perverse Economic Benefit of Global Corporate Socialism

Oddly, one outcome of the Fed’s policy manipulations is that the main sources of capital for funding U. S. small business growth in America will likely be foreign lenders, who are seeking deals in the U. S. small high technology business sectors.

One effect of global financial integration is that the socialistic, collectivist policies in European countries have effectively killed technology innovation in their home economies. Both corporations and banks in the U. S. and the rest of the world are dependent on new ideas that are commercialized and the best place to find ideas for technology commercialization is in the U.S.

To paraphrase one of President Obama’s favorite lines, there are millions and billions of dollars sitting in foreign bank accounts waiting for a good investment idea in America.

Which makes the Obama philosophy of turning the U.S. into a benevolent totalitarian European state all the more stupid, from an American exceptionalist point of view. Technology commercialization is the unique initial factor endowment that gives the U. S. economy a global comparative advantage, and having the President of the United States destroy that cultural advantage by turning the U.S. into a socialist state is not exactly the hope and change citizens were hoping for.

The main technique of foreign corporations gaining U. S. technology will be from buying the small companies outright, or loaning them money.

Loaning small companies capital is not such a bad thing if the baby of American technology innovation does not get thrown out with the nasty bathwater of European international socialism. In order for very small private companies to get on the global deal screening radar screen, the small business community is going to need to promote themselves on a global PR platform.

One good way to get on the global radar screen of foreign lenders is to show them an asset that they understand. In other words, show them the cash.

In this case, the cash value assets of your corporate owned life insurance that funds your buy-sell agreements.

Generally Accepted Accounting For Corporate Owned Life Insurance Assets

In the United States, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) released a policy statement on the appropriate financial reporting treatment for life insurance owned by a company. (Technical Bulletin 85-4). The section states that an asset should be recorded on the financial statements at the amount that could be realized under the insurance contract at the financial statement date.

The balance sheet entry for the corporate owned insurance is described as an asset, at a specific date. In determining the expense or income to be recognized for the period, the premiums paid would be adjusted for the change in the cash surrender value.

If the life insurance contract were to be surrendered, the insurance company would issue the cash surrender value to the corporate policyholder on that date. The cash surrender value is the total balance of the accumulated value in the policy reduced by the charges that apply if the policy is cancelled in the early years of coverage. In order to be recognized as an asset on a company’s financial balance sheet statement, the policy must be owned and controlled by the company and must have the potential for providing a future economic benefit to the company.

A company obtains control of a life insurance policy when it purchases the policy as the owner and deposits premiums into the contract. The death benefit proceeds on the life of the company official who is insured could be considered a future economic benefit, although receipt is contingent on the contract remaining in force and the death of the life insured.

It is the cash surrender value of the life insurance contract that is recorded as an asset on the balance sheet of the company, however, and not the future value of the death benefit. Each year the change in the cash surrender value either goes up or down, and this changes the value of the asset on the balance sheet.

The GAAP treatment of corporate owned insurance as a balance sheet asset originated in a November 1970, AICPA Accounting Interpretation entitled “Accounting for Key-Man LifeInsurance.” That Accounting Interpretation identified the cash surrender value method as generally accepted accounting for purchases of life insurance.

In October 1984, the AICPA’s Accounting Standards Executive Committee (AcSEC) approved an Issues Paper entitled ”Accounting for Key-Person Life Insurance.” In the Issues Paper, AcSEC reaffirmed support of the cash surrender value method as the only generally accepted method for the treatment of corporate owned life insurance.

Corporate Insurance Cash Value Assets In The Event of Your Untimely Demise

In their article “Business-Owned Life Insurance: Opportunities and Pitfalls, David M. Cordell and Ted Kurlowicz explain what happens to the cash value of corporate owned insurance if you or the insured employee dies. (FPA Journal, Sept 2006).

In order to insure an employee or key executive, a company must demonstrate that it has an “insurable interest.” Without this documentation and evidence of insurable interest, a new tax law provision would cause the death benefit policy proceeds for employer-owned coverage to be treated as taxable as ordinary income.

In other words, in order to show the assets of cash value, the company must first demonstrate the logic of buying the insurance policy on the life of the employee or key executive. As Cordell and Kurlowicz explain, a corporate insurable interest is often described as the need to fund certain key employee benefits since the business will have an obligation to provide the benefits under the company compensation plan.

Another beneficial use of the corporate owned insurance, in the first instance, is the funding of a buy-sell agreement covering the lives of the participating owners. As they note, a critical qualification in the buy-sell agreement is that for the business to be the policy owner and beneficiary of the death benefit.

This means that the company must have the obligation to be the purchaser of the ownership interest at the time of the untimely demise that triggers the buyout. For example, a stock redemption agreement with insurance on the lives of participating owners would be an appropriate use of life insurance for funding the buy out.

Finding A New Purpose For Your Cash Value Assets

The importance of using corporate owned cash value as a multi-functional asset is big and getting bigger. In his testimony before Congress, David M. D'Agostino, Director, Financial Markets and Community Investment for the GAO, describe why the asset was so important (Testimony Before the Committee on Finance, United States Senate, October 23, 2003, Business-Owned Life Insurance: Preliminary Observations on Uses, Prevalence, and Regulatory Oversight).

As D’Agostino noted in his testimony, “Generally, business-owned life insurance is permanent, lasting for the life of the employee and accumulating cash value as it provides coverage. Attractive features of business owned life insurance, which are common to all permanent life insurance, generally include both tax-free accumulation of earnings on the policies’ cash value and tax free receipt of the death benefit.”

He described how banks use the cash value of corporate owned insurance to meet Federal Reserve capital asset requirements. He testified that, “As of December 31, 2002, 467 banks and thrifts reported business-owned life insurance holdings in excess of 25 percent of their tier 1 capital. The GAO asked the bank regulators to explain their oversight of 58 institutions with the largest concentrations, all in excess of 40 percent of tier 1 capital. Bank regulatory officials said that their agencies were monitoring these institutions’ levels of holdings, had conducted preliminary reviews or detailed examinations, and concluded that major supervisory concerns do not exist.”

Non-financial corporations also use corporate cash values for a variety of purposes. D’ Agostino described research from 2002, and stated that. “In the 2002 results from its survey of Fortune 1000 corporations, Clarke/Bardes reported that 65 percent of those companies that fund nonqualified deferred compensation plans and 68 percent of those that fund nonqualified supplemental executive retirement plans do so using business-owned life insurance.”

The audit and accounting guidelines for the larger, SEC reporting companies in showing the value of the assets in their financial statements was also described by D’ Agostino. “The SEC,” he noted, “requires public companies to prepare their financial statements in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP), which would require them to disclose information about business-owned life insurance policies when such information is material.

According to SEC officials, however, following GAAP would rarely require purchases of and earnings from business ownedlife insurance to be shown as separate line items because they typically are not financially material to the company.”

The main idea is that cash value assets of life insurance are currently used by very large, public, global companies in a wide variety of business purposes and strategies, and their model can easily be adopted by very small private companies, and turned to their advantage in the global market.

Making Your Cash Value Life Insurance Perform A Dual Business Purpose

The cash value of corporate owned life insurance is an asset that foreign lenders can easily see and easily value. It is, after all, cash value held on the balance sheet of the company, according to GAAP.

Unlike the fluctuating or imprecise values of some other corporate assets that an asset bubble will obscure, that type of cash is going to become even more valuable. With the coming of the next Fed-induced asset bubble, the value of that cash sitting on your company balance sheet will be one asset that very few lenders will question when they go about their task of figuring up how much money you can borrow.

What the foreign corporations really want is your American technology, but show them your assets, and you may get the benefit of their capital without giving away the intellectual property of your company.

Thomas Vass is an independent licensed insurance agent, located in Raleigh, N. C., with a special focus on helping small companies implement buy-sell agreements. .

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North Carolina Redistri...

2012-02-06T10:44:43-05:00

The 2010 10-year census results lead to a troubling redistricting in North Carolina for Democrats and impacts the value of your vote in the 2012 elections. (From President, Congressional, Governor, State Legislator and Superior Court Judges to the School Board.)

First, the voters who ignore the census or stay home and figure nothing significant will change received a warning during midterm elections. When we refuse to exercise our constitutional rights, which we have the right to do, others could dictate our future. Speaking of a perfect storm, let us consider the 2010 census report. It triggers a legal requirement for redistricting by state legislatures which effect representation from the US Congress to school board districts. If NC Democrats were still a majority of legislators, this would not be an issue. The Republicans, on the other hand, have now taken advantage of a weakened economy to gain control of seats at the state level benefiting from typically disinterested students, stay-at-home African-American voters as well as disgruntled voters during mid-term elections. For the party that comes to power every 10 years, 'redistricting' is mapped based on demographic information (statistics characterizing human populations or segments of human populations data by age, sex, income, race, etc.) are used to make changes in district lines that benefit Republicans where possible.

Raleigh's population grew by 46.3% and Wake County by 43.5%. Ideal district populations of 733,499 of which (after census report), five deviated from a negative 13.3% in district 1 (G.K. Butterfield shrunk); David Price District 4 grew by 12.7% to 16.2 % in district 9 (Sue Myrick {R} Charlotte). Redistricting laws call for rebalancing population, thus leading to a domino affect that makes it advantageous to the political group in power (the Republicans).

The strategy involves getting some more of the 13 NC congressional seats (more electoral votes for the favored party). Chipping around the edges of existing districts increases the voting block of potential Republican voters in a district and places two legislators in the same district, thus whittling down power and influence of Democrats. For example, you may recall the defeat of Bob Etheridge (1997-2011 congressman who may run again) by a nurse named Renee Ellmers, District 2 (tea party supported). Redrawing the district maps would increase the number of Republicans in her district, giving her a much better chance of keeping the seat. Make sense?

The strong Democratic districts where the Republicans realize they cannot make real impact are left intact or by creating so-called minority-majority districts, thereby diminishing influence with fewer African-American representation and reducing your voice with other representatives. 'Political segregation if you will'.

The intent is to have a substantial Republican voting population (who as a political party are in the minority statewide) by increasing the number of districts (up to three new seats in the US Congress) and tip the balance in this 2012 election, making it hard for incumbents to win easily.

By chipping around the edges (taking away Democratic voters and adding Republican voters in affected districts of Heath Shuler (District 11 6% more Republicans and taking 3/4 of Asheville voters out of his district), Larry Kissell (District 8 increase of Republican voters), and Mike McIntyre (District 7), now lives inside Kissell's district. McIntyre will run again for District 7 facing a more favorable Republican majority which 58% voted for John McCain in 2008. Brad Miller of the 13th district 'ranked number 2 on the list as a most likely victim of redistricting', (now lives in David Price's District 4, who intends to run for re-election). As stated in the the Washington Post Blog "all four now represent significantly more conservative districts, and 2012 will be a test on a whole new scale for each of them." The North Carolina Republican party is being touted as the 'new king' of gerrymandering and a lesson for others.

This is a legally mandated gerrymandering cycle ('the dividing of a state, county, etc. into election districts so as to give one political party a majority in many districts while concentrating the voting strength of the other party into as few districts as possible.') Those in politics on the Democratic side understand the challenge well since Obama won this state during the 2008 election. This may be why a lawsuit was filed complaining about how this approach limits the voting impact of minorities, particularly African Americans, who historically are protected under the Voting Rights Act. "The final plan has got to satisfy the U.S. Supreme Court on one person, one vote and not deviating more than about 5 percent"; to satisfy the Justice Department on not discriminating against minority voters according to the ballotpedia.org website. This may be the only recourse available to keep some congressional seats in place. If too many disenfranchised folks come under this scenario it tends to lead to a lawsuit challenging the redistricting map changes which creates all white districts (bleaching); or fewer minority representation. Court resolution may not occur until next spring around April, creating an environment of political upheavel during the 2012 presidential race season. "...the new map further increases the likelihood that Republicans will control a 10-3 delegation after 2012", stated by rollcall.com.

Another strategy deployed by the Republicans using a 'breakdown of results from the 2008 presidential race by North Carolina Free Enterprise Fund' moves a voting block of Brad Millers' from 40 percent GOP to 56 percent simply by cutting off Democratic territory in Greensboro, increasing his need to appeal to a majority Republican constituent clearing way for the possible success of a GOP competitor. Is he going to run within the new district lines (4) where his house is located and challenging David Price? Or run in his old district 13 where he has to establish a residence? Maybe Governor?

No doubt the Republican effort hedged its bets by sacrificing one of their own in Rep. Patrick McHenry who will receive 6% more Democrats in order to add 6% more to Shuler's 11th district, making it the most Republican. Those safe are Sue Myrick [R] Charlotte area, Reps G.K. Butterfield, Mel Watt and David Price who are in 'exceptionally' Democratic districts. "Though many of the districts in the new maps have more restored Democrats than Republicans, 78 of the state House districts and 33 of the state Senate districts would have been won by Republican presidential candidate John McCain in 2008 - both of which would give Republicans veto-proof majority in Raleigh. Ten of the state's 13 new congressional districts would have been won by McCain in 2008," according to the dailytarheel.com.

Wake County research as of July 28th 2011 enacted as Session Law 2011-404 District Plans shows the loss/changes of at least three Democratic districts (33,34,35,38) held by women in Wake County, who effectively will be pitted against each other in a reduced environment for female participation that continues to ensure women's rights. It will also be a challenge for black folks who are put in large voting blocks diluting their voting strength. Democracy North Carolina, a member of the Alliance for Fair Redistricting and Minority Voting Rights (AFRAM), at a public hearing on May 9th to the NC General Assembly Redistricting Committee encouraged the process to be fair and responsive to public input, be open and transparent, encouraged meaningful participation, protect minority voting rights, and satisfy legal requirements.'

The process requires that the redistricting maps come under scrutiny of "the Voting Rights Act mandates that Department of Justice or the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia must pre-clear before being enacted," according to rollcall.com.

These new redistricting lines will not be changed or redrawn until ten years or 2022 if approved by the Justice Department, which in general is not resisting!

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Place-Time: The Flow-Ge...

2012-01-30T13:08:10-05:00

Place-Time: The Flow-Geometry of Space

By Alan Rayner, Ben Sidebottom, David Peleshok and Philip Tattersall

No where is an Island, entire of it self

Summary

Here we show how a radical involution in conventional mathematical and physical perceptions of reality can be brought about by regarding natural form as comprising energetically surfaced cavities of space, instead of local points of mass surrounded by space. This involution provides a new way of understanding gravitational influence ‘at a distance’ and reconciling particle and field theories of matter. It enables evolutionary processes of all kinds to be understood in terms of ‘natural inclusion’ – the co-creative, fluid-dynamic transformation of all through all in receptive spatial context. All form is understood as ‘flow-form’, an energetic inclusion of omnipresent intangible space within, throughout and beyond dynamic figural boundaries.

Energy is mobile, superficial, formative presence while space is still, permissive presence, ultimately beyond energetic reach in its infinite inward and outward depth. Each presence in the other, distinct but mutually inclusive, is essential to natural energy flow as ‘place-time’, which comprises 100% intangible space, plus tangible energy in circulation and animated suspension respectively around and within inward and outward depth. Space, in this view, is a limitless pool of implicit induction; an intangible hollowness of local centres and axes, around which energetic form flows rather than residing within a fixed tangible ‘frame’ or ‘shape’ of explicit force. All energetic form circulates and reconfigures around and within an infinite scale of inductive influence, as an evolutionary dynamic of continual, cumulative transformation.

This understanding only becomes possible when the infinite depth of space as an intangible presence ultimately beyond energetic reach is acknowledged. The frictionless quality of this inaccessible intangible presence inside, outside, throughout and beyond distinctive energetic localities needs especially to be appreciated. Space can neither be abstracted from nor confined by structure. The apparent hardness of solid structure actually arises from the inaccessible hollowness within the depth of close-packed energetic configurations of space. In other words, space cannot be cut, not even with a diamond knife.

With this acknowledgment comes a paradigmatic transformation from perceptions based upon the definitive boundary logic of ‘abstract rationality’ to the fluid boundary logic of ‘natural inclusionality’. The fundamental natural geometrical ‘shape’ that manifests this fluid boundary logic is what we describe here as a ‘zero fractal’.

Introduction

Throughout history, atomistic theories have regarded physical form as being composed of local points of mass surrounded and distanced by empty space. This perception has been brought into being by closed-systems of abstract logic, employed solely to approximate ‘observation points’ or ‘evolutionary points’ within an otherwise infinite continuum of cumulative energetic transformations. The resulting reductions of reality are embedded as absolute truths in the foundations of both classical and modern mathematics (Rayner, 2011a).

These abstract systems impose discontinuity between one object and another by treating boundaries as discrete limits and space as an isolating absence of tangible presence (cf. Tattersall, 2011). By treating a zero-dimensional point as a point of mass in space instead of a point of space enveloped by mass, they begin with a physical impossibility – the notion of a mass that has no shape or size. The resulting paradoxical inconsistencies render the agency of change - energy - into an extrinsic force instead of an intrinsic inductive influence.

Here we intend to show how the inconsistencies of abstract perception can be obviated by perceiving physical form as local cavities of receptive space enveloped by energetic surfaces. Space, in our view, consists naturally of an intangible, frictionless and thereby receptive presence that co-creatively induces tangible energetic presence into shape. It corresponds with what the ancients thought of as ‘aether’ and modern quantum field theorists speak of as ‘Higgs Field’. It is, in effect, the zero viscosity universal ‘medium’ that enables the non-zero viscosity informational ‘message’ of tangible energetic form to configure and reconfigure into myriad shapes and sizes – local ‘figures’ that cannot be isolated or cut away from their spatial ‘ground’ as independent singular entities (Rayner, 2011a). All figural shapes are hence inclusions of a cumulative energetic flux whereby any distinct locality can only be perceived as ‘one discrete object’ when abstracted or ‘singled out’ from larger and smaller scales within an infinite depth.

The following view of infinity was held by Blaise Pascal and many of his contemporaries, in the 17th Century:

“The actual infinity in material things as much as in the increasingly large as in the vanishingly small, that is, the actual division of each part of matter to infinity and at the same time the infinite vastness of matter, has been supported by Mr Pascal.” Leibniz (1695)

This, literally particular, ‘dual-infinity’ view suggests that it is not possible to observe either a largest scale or a smallest scale of material organization in the infinite depth of reality; that all material things are infinitely divisible, with infinite surface area; whilst also being additive to an infinitely larger, greater scale.

“...all matter is organic everywhere, and that however small a portion one takes, it contains representatively, by virtue of the actual decreasing to infinity that it encloses, the actual increasing to infinity which is outside it in the universe.” (Leibniz 1695)

In modern day ‘holism’, the universe is regarded paradoxically as a seamless, infinite whole, and infinity itself as an indefinable numerical quantity of matter. There is no perception of inaccessible vastness beyond material form, or of inaccessible non-material presence within and throughout material form. Space, in other words, is rendered ultimately co-extensive with material form or structure; rather than a distinctive, intangible and hence energetically inaccessible and indivisible presence that in its truly infinite and indefinable depth, exceeds the limitations of local tangible presence both inwardly and outwardly. Infinity is rendered a property of matter, both in terms of attribute and ownership, not an inextricable quality of space within, throughout and beyond material boundaries. Division is conflated with diminution and multiplication with enlargement.

By contrast, atomistic reductionism does envisage an inner limit to the divisibility and diminution of material form, by way of a ‘fundamental particle’ or unitary figure as a definitive ‘absolute, independent singleness’ that can be summed with others to limitless amount. This ‘single-infinity’ view is ultimately accomplished through the imaginary exclusion of space (and hence infinity) from figural form rather than conflation of space with form. The resultant figure is a paradoxical ‘point-mass’ or ‘infinitesimal’ that in being dimensionless lacks shape and size and can hence only be ‘nowhere’ – a ‘something’ that arises from and can only in itself be ‘nothing’. This is the abstract ‘point’ from which both classical Euclidean and conventional non-Euclidean geometries as well as all conventional arithmetic are derived. It cannot, in actuality exist – it can only exist as an imaginary abstract conception. It is a ‘zero point’ represented as a ‘unity’.

The abstract conflation of division with diminution, and multiplication with enlargement, which is evident in both reductive (single infinity) and holistic (dual infinity) views of material form, hence leads to a dual diminution of resolution in interpretation of actual perceptions gained far from and close to a fixed locality. The effect is either to merge or to divide the mutual relation between distinct but not discrete formative tangible (= finite) and spatial intangible (= infinite) presences into ‘one’ or ‘many’ complete ‘wholes’ and ‘parts’, which in themselves can only be rigidly inert because movement necessitates the distinctive, permissive presence of space. Holistic abstraction leads to the perception of an infinitely divisible whole that is more than the sum of its individual parts as infinitely divisible wholes, whereas atomistic reductionism leads to the perception of a ‘finite whole that is equal to the sum of its finite parts, that are ultimately divisible into dimensionless point masses’.

This dual diminution of resolution leads to paradoxical contradiction and ambiguity, which afflict both dialectic (holistic ‘both-and in mutual contradiction’) and propositional (reductionistic ‘either-or’) logics and their incorporation into mathematical physics (Rayner, 2011a). A fixed ‘observation point’ or ‘'evolutionary point’ is created by an observer in the process of taking a finite measurement – a snapshot of the infinite depth and dynamic fluidity of Nature. This point defines the scale of infinity (i.e. ‘proximity’ in space/time) at which a material form, for example an apple, is perceived as a singular object and hence is ascribed the number one; one apple. This is in contrast to other observation points at which for example, the apple and its internal organization is seen as a collection of cells; a multitude of molecular, atomic or quantum interactions; or just one small appendage of a tree in an orchard in a world in a universe. Each of these would herald vastly different mathematical interpretations, ratios and relationships, based on the same locality of ‘somewhere in everywhere’. At some proximity the apple and its constituents could be perceived as an inert ‘particle’ in space/time, at others as a dynamic ripple or wave of space/time. But neither of these definitively partial views could, in themselves, yield the imaginatively combined (Rayner, 2011b) view of all form as flow-form – infinite, intangible, immoveable space throughout and beyond local dynamic tangible figure, as a vital inclusion of each in the other in the natural energy flow of the cosmos that we describe below as ‘place-time’.

All energetic matter therefore appears to comprise local particles when viewed at some scale of this dual-infinite depth, but as being in flux when viewed at another scale. Even the most apparently inert objects are intrinsically in dynamic relationship with their neighbourhood. In quantum field theory this flux is essential to maintaining the shape of particles interpreted as ripples of a quantum field.

Natural Inclusionality – an involution of abstract perceptions of space and boundaries

As natural dynamic inclusions of space, all forms are variably fluid flow-forms. Their boundaries are energetic configurations of space, not exclusions from space. When they move, space remains still yet infinitely permeating and inducing flow. Space, in this view, is the frictionless, zero viscosity ‘context’ that co-creatively induces the resistive, non-zero viscosity ‘content’ into form.

The first serious attempt by a physicist to introduce an involution in the usual perception of space and matter was that of Osborne Reynolds (1903). Reynolds described space as an hexagonal array of minute hard but weightless granules of aether, similar in diameter to that currently proposed for ‘quarks’, with matter flowing in and through its interstices, similar in width to the ‘Planck length’ proposed for boson ‘strings’ or ‘branes’.

Reynolds’ reasons for doing this are as relevant today as they were in his time: he wanted to account for ten manifest physical qualities of nature as follows:

(1) The non-resistance of space to movement of tangible material form, such that the orbital velocity of planets and moons in the solar system, for example, remains virtually constant for thousands of years.

(2) The ability of space to allow the transmission of light from source to receiver.

(3) The gravitational attraction of material bodies for each other as an inverse function of distance.

(4) The cohesiveness of matter after breaking and fusing.

(5) The elasticity of matter as in a coiled spring.

(6) The variable frictional resistance of matter to the sliding movement of other matter, which can be overcome by sufficient pulling or pushing influence.

(7) The viscosity of matter, which allows a constant rate of flow down a gradient.

(8) The electromagnetic properties of matter, as revealed by the effects of static electricity.

(9) The capacity for a volume of fluid to equilibrate to uniform pressure.

(10) The chemical reactivity and decomposability of matter, as revealed in combustion and electrolysis.

This combination of qualities, Reynolds recognized, could not adequately be explained in terms of the conventional representation of the universe as passive empty space populated by mobile material objects driven by extrinsic force. But he thought they could be explained if the universe could be likened to a mixture of perfectly spherical sand grains and water – with the grains arranged as an hexagonal lattice of ‘space’ and ‘matter’ flowing freely in the interstices between the grains. Such a biphasic system would, he contended, account purely mechanically for all the known properties of light, electricity and gravitation. In particular, he attributed light waves to the ability of such a system to lock into a rigidly close-packed configuration under pressure due to its volumetric dilatancy (Reynolds, 1885). A similar phenomenon, where interstitial spacing is critical, is nowadays recognized to play a role in the spread of a ‘shock wave’ through a high speed traffic flow that piles up in response to local impedance (Sugiyama et al., 2008) . Years before de Broglie (1924), Reynolds (1903) declared the motion of matter to ‘have all the character of a wave in the medium; and that is what the singular surfaces, which we call matter, are – waves. We are all waves.’

Such a complete inversion of standard perceptions of the relationship between matter and space, in which space as an intangible, zero viscosity presence is vitally involved in, whilst not resisting the flow of form, anticipates in some ways, the evolutionary concepts of natural inclusionality developed by Rayner (2011a). It may go too far, however, in its use of definitive logic and choice of metaphor to render space and matter respectively as mutually excluding ‘particles’ and ‘waves’.

The notion of ‘space’ as having a limitless pre-existing structure as a crystalline array of hard aether ‘grains’ and ‘matter’ as flowing ‘space’ amongst but not included in the grains is difficult to reconcile with human sensory experience (i.e. ‘evidence’) or consistent reason. But it does help to draw attention to the nature of the problem of understanding the dynamic reciprocity of figural ‘message’ and contextual ‘medium’ as distinct but mutually inclusive and co-creative presences, and the radical involution in common perceptions that is needed to clarify this. To exclude one or other of these presences from consideration or to conflate them together within a seamless ‘whole’ or ‘unity’ cannot make sense of the manifest physical qualities of nature identified by Reynolds. In this paper we explore how these qualities could arise not through space alone or even as ‘space-time’ having an explicit, pre-existing structure, but through having an implicit, receptive presence and influence, that enables variably rigid and fluid tangible form to emerge co-creatively through its mutually inclusive relationship with energy in what we call ‘place-time’ (see also Rayner, 2008, 2011c, d). We suggest that space therefore has a far more important role as a co-creative, zero-viscosity contextual medium in evolutionary processes than has so far been recognized in current theories of relativity and quantum mechanics (see below)

‘Natural inclusionality’ is a new philosophy and fluid boundary logic of self-identity and ecological and evolutionary diversity and sustainability (Rayner, 2011a). It is intended to supersede the abstract rationality that has dominated human thought for millennia, based on definitive logic that can only apply to inert material systems that are unknown to exist anywhere in Nature. Whereas abstract rationality treats space as empty distance between, occupied by or outside completely definable tangible material structures or objects with discrete boundary limits, natural inclusionality recognizes space as a limitless, indivisible, receptive (non-resistive) ‘intangible presence’ vital for movement and communication. This recognition of space as a natural presence, instead of an abstract geometrical construction, allows all form to be understood as flow-form, distinctive but dynamically continuous, not singularly discrete. It enables the simple move from regarding intangible space and tangible boundaries as mutually exclusive sources of discontinuity and discrete definition to mutually inclusive sources of continuity and dynamic distinction. Natural, intangible space is included throughout and beyond all tangible figural forms as configurations of energy, whether as massy bodies or mass-less electromagnetic radiation.

From Abstract Artifact to Natural Inclusion: Bringing ‘Schrödinger’s Dead Cat’ Back to Entropic Life

In limitless space, as the proximity of an observation point to a definitively measured locality expands or contracts, so the measurement begins to show ‘dual-diminishing resolution’. At lengthening range, the locality progressively recedes ‘out of sight’ to a fixed ‘vanishing point’ at which its boundary is irresolvable and indistinguishable from its surroundings. At shortening range, the locality progressively looms large enough to become perceived as boundless and to surround the observation point. Moreover, what appears motionless at long range, over short duration or from within its depth may be revealed to be dynamic at short range, over long duration and from outside. This corresponds with our common experience of visual perspective, whether through our naked eye or through the magnifying lenses of our telescopes and microscopes and depending on whether we are situated within or outside a moving container. Although the locality does not actually increase or decrease in size, mobility or occurrence, our perception of its size, mobility and occurrence does change. Moreover, it changes in a way that is only explicable if space is neither a tangible presence (some kind of pre-existing ‘fabric’) nor an absence of presence (some kind of void nothingness or blankness that nonetheless comes between things), but an intangible presence (frictionless, omnipresent ‘no-thingness’ as 100 % of everywhere, without limit).

In conventional Quantum Physics, the ‘Copenhagen Interpretation’ of the ‘Schrödinger’s Cat’ thought experiment (in which a cat is placed in a sealed container with a vial of cyanide that may or may not get broken by a random event) considers that the quantum constituents of matter do not assume a quantifiable value, unless measured by a conscious observer. Here, the cat is confined in ‘suspended animation’ between life (wave function) and death (inert particle) but cannot be defined as alive or dead without opening the container. The constituents exist in a transient energetic flow-form, and not as a ‘unit’, discrete from the surrounding space and its neighbours – its context; unless perceived to be so. This fluidity of form, and the acknowledgement of the importance of the observer, already sits at the core of quantum field and particle physics theories (Wimmel, 1992).

The ‘animated suspension’ of natural, co-creative flow-forms is readily observable in nature, from subatomic to galactic scales and not least in embryonic, adult and decomposing cats (Rayner 2009, 2011b). Flow-forms are implicit in notions of Dual Infinity (Leibniz, 1695), relativity (Einstein, 1954) and Quantum Field Theory (Wimmel, 1992), but unlike these acknowledged abstract, reduced representations, find their actual ‘place-time’ in the continuity of space and energetic distinctions of dynamic boundaries/interfacings. They are dynamically distinct but not definitively discrete.

The fact that from a suitable observation point, flow-form(s) can, for short or long durations, appear discrete and stable, has led them to be ascribed definitive boundaries, relationships using the system of exact numbers and rigid geometrical form adhered to by conventional mathematics. But the fact that they can also be viewed in another way, in which they lose local definition has led to the notion of Wave Particle Duality, which suggests that all particles also have the characteristics of waves, including atoms and molecules, as well as photons and elementary particles (Eisberg & Resnick, 1985). Hence, if a particle or a wave is recorded, the necessarily hidden reality of the infinite depth is tacitly ‘cut’ as baseline assumptions are made, boundaries are imposed, and an approximated ‘closed’ system is created. The same tacit cutting of space by abstract definition is evident in Einstein’s formulation of relativity theory, as evident in the following statement:

“When a smaller box s is situated, relatively at rest, inside the hollow space of a

larger box S, then the hollow space of s is a part of the hollow space of S, and the

same “space”, which contains both of them, belongs to each of the boxes. When s is

in motion with respect to S, however, the concept is less simple. One is then inclined

to think that s encloses always the same space, but a variable part of the space S. It

then becomes necessary to apportion to each box its particular space, not thought of

as bounded, and to assume that these two spaces are in motion with respect to each

other.” (Einstein, 1954)

How, one might ask, can you move (‘cut and paste’) a box of space without dynamically bounding it? How can you dynamically bound a box (or, more aptly, sphere – see below) of space, without a gravitational centre? How can you distinguish the space inside a box from the space outside and still transmit light from an external source through the interior of the box at a constant ‘speed’, regardless of the movement of the box relative to its surroundings? How can you sub-divide a continuous, frictionless, intangible presence? The reality is that you can’t. This is because a presence that has no resistance can neither be cut nor resisted by a tangible frame. It is inescapably present throughout and beyond the boundaries of tangible figures. A tangible frame is an inclusion of and is included in

space but the frame is not the space. The tangible frame can move (or be moved) and be cut, but not the space. When the frame moves the space stays where it is: in relative terms by remaining still space permeates freely through the frame, the frame does not cut through the space. Moreover, if the frame is to move without being forced to do so by a force situated somewhere outside of it, it must have the capacity for movement within itself, i.e. the frame is itself a manifestation of energy, not inert structure—it is a variably fluid ‘framing’, not a permanent, absolutely rigid ‘framework’. This tangible ‘framing’, or ‘dynamic interfacing’, has to be present for form to be distinguishable in a feature-full cosmos, but it can neither ‘occupy’ nor ‘exclude’ the space that it includes and is included in (Rayner, 2011a).

Tacit ‘space-cutting’ is also implicit in the inclusion of ‘entropy’ in calculations by a variety of disciplines. In Thermodynamics, for example, entropy is essential to predicting the occurrence of dynamic equilibrium, a balance created as a result of energetic exchange. Rudolf Clausius originally described entropy as an increase in disordered energy, tending to a maximum and never depleting within an isolated system (Clausius, 1865).

Since, in space as a continuous, intangible presence, a system can never truly be isolated (cut free from the space it includes and is included by, see Rayner 2011a), what is abstractly perceived as ‘the external environment’, the universe, must be regarded as a dissipative sink. Correspondingly, entropy has more recently defined as the energy that is no longer available for work in a system, a reservoir of ‘useless’ energy accumulating as the ‘useful’ energetic work is exhausted and equilibrium is reached (Moore, Stanistski, Jurs, 2005). William Thompson in 1851 hence proposed that eventually, in a finite universe, with a smallest and a largest scale, the ever-increasing entropy (energy that is ‘no longer available for work’) will herald a descent into total amorphous disorder, the ‘heat death’ of the universe. This, and variations thereof are still commonly held views in modern science (Adams, Laughlin, 1997).

Nonetheless, in Thermodynamics, a reversible process is acknowledged never truly to reach equilibrium and therefore become completely inert. A point of ‘no net change’ is attained, but this remains dynamic. The ‘useful’ energy can hence never be fully depleted; it is more that the potential for change is reduced locally, as the energy flow becomes more stable, maintaining localized shape. This local stability of shape is however always vulnerable to external stimuli, that may create new potential for change, thereby introducing more ‘useful energy’.

In an infinite system, entropy could more simply be acknowledged as energy transferred to the infinite depth beyond the perceptually imposed boundaries of the observed system. While it is no longer perceived as useable by the observed system, it is still an inclusion of infinite flow; rather than a descent into either chaos or uselessness. Molecular, atomic and sub-atomic relationships remain dynamic, as demonstrated by their detectable bond resonance, and as implied by Quantum Field Theory; so do planetary and galactic orbits. This could also imply that the inevitable production of entropy, as a result of continual change is not finite either – constrained to the locality described by the mathematics, but even when dynamic equilibrium has been established.

Entropy, when viewed in this infinite context, would seem to be more in accordance with the flow-forms that can be observed in nature (Rayner 2009, 2011b), as theoretically required by Quantum Field Theory (Wimmell, 1992), and even the bond-resonances that we can readily observe in a dynamic equilibrium. It takes on a role in the continual reconfiguration of energetic flow, rather than contributor to the ultimate ‘heat death’ of the universe. ‘Schrodinger’s Cat’ ultimately reconfigures into life, not ultimate corpse.

Fractal Geometry – A ‘stepping stone’ to natural inclusional flow geometry, or a ‘stumbling block’ stuck in abstract definition?

‘Fractal geometry’ has widely been heralded and taken up by varied fields of research in recent decades as the ‘geometry of nature’ and ‘path to infinity’ (Mandelbrot, 1982; Stewart et al., 2004). In some respects this may be true, and there is no doubt that the study of fractals – as figures created by the extrapolation of recursive equations, which exhibit infinite self-replication – has shown both the limitations of integral Euclidean geometry and importance of iterative processes in understanding the generation of natural flow-form. There is at least a superficial similarity to natural branching and nested structures. Some examples are shown below.

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Fig. 1. Pythagoras Tree. (Wikipedia, 2005)

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Fig. 2. Menger Sponge. (Baserinia, 2006).

Although claimed to transcend Euclidean geometry (Mandelbrot, 1982) fractals are actually constrained by their conventional arithmetical formulation, to the surface (Fig. 1), or within rectilinear sets (Fig. 2) of Euclidean planes. They explore the effect of infinite subdivision into mutually exclusive spatial and material localities within a Euclidean container as a whole – and so effectively cut space by boundary definition. But they do not and cannot take into account the continuous space throughout, beyond and inaccessible to figural boundaries. They do not and cannot explore curvature, except, as in calculus, through approximation to infinitesimal scales. They are, quite literally, fractionations of, not expansions from Euclidean dimensions. As implied by the above ‘Menger Sponge’ example, to become truly natural inclusional flow form, they need to include somewhere vital, and this somewhere is everywhere - space.

Natural Inclusional Flow-geometry: the dynamic spatial relationship between curved and linear form in the origins of variably resistive and mobile boundary configurations: crystals, channels, pulses and circulations

With the recognition of natural, energetically inaccessible intangible space as a vital inductive influence, which tangible energetic form both has an affinity for and cannot be isolated from, emerges the possibility of a natural flow-geometry that both transcends and transforms the abstractions of conventional mathematics. ‘Zero’, as a local point of space is brought from outside to inside tangible form as a receptive centre for energy to circulate around, but not reach. This bringing from outside to inside is what constitutes the involution in perception of natural form as ‘place-time’, which is implicit in natural inclusionality. It offers a simple new way of understanding observable geometric configurations in Nature that arise from the dynamic spatial relationship – not irreconcilable disjunction – between curved and linear form, which allows a non-paradoxical synthesis of the findings underlying relativity and quantum mechanics to be made.

All things being equal, the natural form of fluid droplets and bubbles is spherical. The sphere is that configuration of energy/matter in dynamic relationship with space in which the ratio between surface area and internal volume is minimal. Any departure from the infinite radial symmetry of spherical form increases the surface area to volume ratio, and hence the capacity to absorb or dissipate energy from or to outside. Also, as the internal volume of a sphere decreases, the ratio increases towards infinity at ‘zero’ volume. The energy/matter invested in the surfaces of a set of small diameter spheres is correspondingly much larger than that in the surface of a larger sphere of the same volume as that of the small diameter spheres combined.

The sphere can correspondingly be regarded as the primary fluid form from which all other configurations of energy in natural flow geometry can be derived by elongation and/or close-packing. These include linear configurations in curve-faced cylindrical form and plane-faced, close-packed hexagonal and tetrahedral form of the kind familiar in rigid, crystalline and frozen structures. The latter structures correspond with the ‘locked’ configurations of dilatant fluids under pressure recognized by Reynolds (1885), and their resistive quality sets up the potential for oscillations between stalled and flowing movement of the kind illustrated by the spread of a ‘Mexican wave’ around a sports stadium produced by people alternately standing up and sitting down.

Loss of spherical symmetry, associated with uptake of free energy, allows elongated forms – ellipses, tubes, channels, branches and spirals to emerge and grow, as in the roots and shoots of plants and the shells of snails. Uptake of heat allows expansion of surfaces in less condensed, more energetically relaxed form that are less liable to break symmetry. The spores of some fungi illustrate this point well. At high temperatures they germinate by swelling isotropically to form ‘giant cells (Hanlin 1994). At moderate or low temperatures they germinate to produce a protoplasm-filled tube, called a hypha, which elongates and produces branches and anastomoses from parabolic apical growing points to form a collective organization known as a mycelium. As shown in Figs 3 and 4, both in the way that it explores unpredictable, heterogeneous environments and in the way it can fuse with or interfere with others, this collective organization graphically illustrates the interdependent relationship between polarized (linear) and circular flow-form in a living organism.

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Fig. 3. ‘Fungal Foraging’. A fungus finds an ‘oasis in a desert’, by fluid-dynamically spreading and narrowing its energetic focus. The wood-decaying fungus, Hypholoma fasciculare, has been inoculated into a tray full of soil on a block of wood (‘starter’food source), with an uncolonized wood block (‘bait’ food source) placed some distance away from it. Distinct stages are shown in the radial spreading of the fungal mycelium from the inoculated wood block, followed by the redistribution and focusing of its energy in one direction following upon contact with the bait. Similar fluid dynamic patterns of gathering in, conservation of, exploration for and redistribution of energy supplies are found throughout the living world, from subcellular to ecosystem scales of organization (From Dowson et al., 1986; see also Rayner, 1997).

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Fig. 4. Early (left) and late (right) stages in compatible (upper) and incompatible (lower) pairings between mycelia of the wood-decaying fungus, Phanerochaete velutina grown from wood blocks inoculated into soil, showing the formation of persistent and degenerating channels across the zone of overlap. (From Dowson et al., 1988).

Continuously curved spherical surfaces cannot, on the other hand, be derived from discrete linear components – not even contiguous spheres of equal diameter - without reducing these to infinitesimal sizes – and even then, only as a convenient approximation, useful in calculus. This is clear from the fact that the surface area of a sphere is 4πr², where π is a well-known, so-called ‘irrational’ number. A truly continuous curved surface is possible only if it is itself an inert amorphous fudge – begging the question of how and why this could come into being – or its ingredients are fluid, capable of flowing into and out from others. In either case space too must be continuous (incapable of being cut or defined). Here, it can be recognized that the boundary of a fluid sphere is not a discrete limit that isolates inner space from outer space, but a dynamic interfacing between inner and outer realms across which space, as intangible presence, is continuous.

The spheres of flow-geometry are therefore not self-contained, locally discrete entities, as in conventional Euclidian and non-Euclidian geometries, but energetic configurations of local space within ‘somewhere’ distinct as an inclusion of non-local space everywhere (Shakunle & Rayner, 2008, 2009). Here it may be recalled that Euclidean geometry is the abstract geometry of zero-dimensional (size-less) points, one-dimensional (breadth-less) lines, two-dimensional (depthless) planes and three-dimensional solids (self-contained volumes). Its figures are used to represent definitive tangible structure and yet can only actually represent the intangible presence in the core of tangible form because it is impossible to reach zero size, breadth or depth without removing the tangible presence. The same applies to the so-called ‘non-Euclidean’, Riemannian and Lobachevskian parabolic and hyperbolic geometries of curved surfaces.

The reality is correspondingly that abstract Euclidian and non-Euclidean points, lines and planes/curved surfaces can consist only of intangible presence, not tangible presence! By the same token, it is impossible to drive or rotate a solid body from or around a solid fixed centre. The central ‘still’ point, axis or plane of symmetry of any bodily form can only consist of intangible presence, with correspondingly zero viscosity. In effect, conventional mathematics and its discontinuous underpinning logic thereby treat ‘1’, as a ‘unit of tangible presence’, as if it is ‘0’, a vanishing point of intangible presence. They literally attempt to construct ‘one thing from nothing’ and then to sum an infinite number of these one things up into an infinite ‘whole’ as a ‘one’ that is also ‘many’, whilst discounting the very presence that truly is infinite and indivisible, at all scales (space).

This difficulty can only be resolved realistically by accepting that in Nature, tangible and intangible presences are distinct but mutually inclusive. This is the point recognized by the flow geometry of natural inclusionality. Here, space and boundaries are regarded as mutually inclusive sources of continuity and dynamic distinction with variable connectivity, not mutually exclusive sources of discontinuity and discrete definition, as in standard Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries. So far, the only mathematical formulation explicitly to accept and incorporate this natural inclusion of omnipresent space in and throughout local figural form is the ‘transfigural mathematics’ introduced in 1985 by Lere Shakunle (see, e.g. Shakunle, 1994; Shakunle & Rayner, 2007, 2008, 2009).

Natural inclusionality effectively transforms the fixed structural frameworks and boundaries of standard Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries into fluid framings of omnipresent, non-local intangible space everywhere, within (intra-), throughout (trans-), between (inter-) and beyond (extra-) local tangible energetic form (cf. Shakunle & Rayner, 2009). This opens the possibility of a dynamic, co-creative, mutually inclusive relationship between internally and externally situated non-resistive (and hence receptive) intangible spatial presence and locally situated, tangible energetic presence. Of central significance to this interplay is the fact that tangible energetic presence can only circulate around, it cannot occupy the intangible core of spherical flow-form. Moreover, the more closely it circulates around this core, the greater will be the intensity of energy invested in its surface area relative to diameter and the stronger its internal coherence needed to restrain its expansion. As in a vortex, such increased coherence can be provided by enhancing the rate of circulation in response to a steepening pressure gradient from outside to inside. Alternatively, it may be possible by reducing the heat content of the system.

What emerges from these considerations is a picture of a fluidly bounded sphere as a ‘balancing point’ of inaccessible, intangible, non-resistive space configured by a tangible, resistive rotational flow (‘spin’ or ‘swirl’) of energy – in other words, an energetically surfaced cavity or ‘local sphere of spatial influence’. This spherical swirl around a local centre of zero pressure, is potentially both an acquisitive ‘sink’ and a generous ‘source’ of energy flow from and to others in its dynamic neighbourhood.

Of special interest are the possibilities that arise when the ‘local spheres of non-local influence’ of natural inclusional flow-geometry overlap with and dissociate from one another to yield potentially complex and varied patterns of flow, counter-flow and generative and degenerative interference. These possibilities can be visualized through a consideration of the figure, known as a ‘mandorla’ or ‘Vesica Piscis’ produced by two spheres each overlapping to the centre of the other, as depicted in the sonic interference pattern shown in Fig. 3, which shows a striking resemblance to the formation of bridging channels between fungal mycelia shown in Fig. 4.

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Figure 5. Sonic interference pattern in the vesica piscis between two sets of annular ridges and troughs (from http://www.fromthesoilup.com.au/news/vesica-pisces)

This figure provides the foundation for deriving the configurations known as ‘breathing points’ in Lere Shakunle’s ‘transfigural mathematics’. Fully overlapping, the spheres coincide as ‘one’, but as each is drawn out to one side from the other a convex lens-shape forms, which balances the ‘tension’ set up as each reciprocally gains and loses energy from the other. This is illustrated in one plane using two hemi-circles in Figure 6.

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Figure 6. Coil and recoil – how a sphere of spatial influence reaches to and draws in from receptive centres of zero potential (zeroids) in its neighbourhood. (From Shakunle & Rayner, 2009)

In this case, as the ‘upper’ hemi-circle moves ‘horizontally’ to encompass the ‘positive’ to its ‘right’ (using conventional mathematical representation), a ‘deficit tension’ (‘minus’) is set up to its left, resulting in a ‘clockwise’ spiral inflowing countercurrent towards the central focal point-influence, which has meanwhile been stretched into a ‘line’. Simultaneously, a ‘surplus tension’ (‘plus’) is set up to its right, which results in an ‘anti-clockwise’ spiral inflow. In Shakunle’s ‘transfigural mathematics’, the ‘horizontal S-shaped, or sigmoid, figure that results from this ‘left-to right flow’ and its countercurrents is called an ‘alpha fold’. By the same token, the reciprocal sigmoid figure produced as the ‘upper’ hemi-circle is drawn into the ‘negative’ to its ‘left’ is called an ‘omega fold’. The superimposition of alpha folds and omega folds as seen along a ‘horizontal line’ in one plane yields a two-fold figure, known as a ‘zeropline’, which is one of several kinds of zero spirals (Fig.7).

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Figure 7. Dynamic configuration of a ‘breathing point’ along a horizontal axis to yield a ‘zeropline’ (shown here, for simplicity, omitting details of folding through the core, but depicting its intangible balance point-centre as a dark spot) (From Shakunle & Rayner, 2009).

If the same geometrical process is repeated along a ‘vertical line’, a four-fold, ‘breathing point’ is revealed, corresponding with a tetrahedral arrangement, of the kind familiar around a 4-valent carbon atom (Figure 8).

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Figure 8. Dynamic configuration of a ‘breathing point’ along both horizontal and vertical axes (shown here with more elaborate folding through the core identity included).

(From Shakunle & Rayner, 2009)

Using the zeropline to represent the basic dynamic configuration of the breathing point (as both what can be thought of as a ‘point-channel’ – a point that expands into a channel – and a ‘line-channel’ – a channel that condenses into a point), the way a ‘flow-channel’ can form as a linear series and become organized into gravitational bodies is illustrated below by coupling one breathing point into another (Figure 9).

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Figure 9. Coupling of neighbouring zeroplines to yield a linear series. (From Shakunle & Rayner, 2009)

Such a series can vary enormously in length, and this length, along with its central axis of internally located space, could either be stretched out into elongate form or coiled upon itself into a compact form, like a snake, caterpillar, worm or millipede. But ultimately, every ‘segment’ along this length will retain its local identity in dynamic relationship with its neighbours and only be capable of communication with members of other, non-connected flow-lines through the intervening space between them. Moreover, every distinct, though not spatially isolated, flow-channel will have a local-in-nonlocal centre of inductive spatial influence and hence manifest as ‘massy body’. In conventional physics such bodies may be alluded to as consisting either of ‘matter’ or ‘antimatter’, depending on which way around the flows and counter-flows are arranged.

A radically different arrangement of flow and counter-flow situation occurs in flow-circuits where the axis of internal space is de-localised into the configuration of a toroidal annulus or ‘ring’ through the formation of what has been called an annular ‘superchannel’ (Shakunle & Rayner, 2007, 2008, 2009). The way in which this possibility arises can be seen from Figure 10.

Used only with express written permission

Figure 10. ‘Flow and Counterflow’ (From a painting by Alan Rayner, Oil on canvas, 2008). The continuous ‘superchannel’ of transfigural geometry spatially expands the discrete, one-dimensional, purely material line comprising contiguous but spatially discontinuous and dimensionless numerical point-masses upon which classical and modern mathematics are founded. Each discrete point is transfigured from a static, lifeless entity into a dynamic, breathing identity as a local informational (electromagnetic) sphere of non-local spatial influence, a ‘breathing point’. The breathing points reciprocally inspire from and expire to their immediate neighbours, creating a double helical energy flow through coupled numerical neighbourhoods of three.

The formation of such circuits enables ‘current’ to flow freely and reciprocally through a double helical arrangement of alpha and omega folds such that their inductive influences mutually balance one another, rather than being ‘weighted’ one way or the other (as in linear flow-channels). All kinds of natural and human-made flow-circuits may be based on this principle. Biological examples include the flow-networks of fungal mycelia, central nervous systems of animals and vascular systems of plants and animals. In organic chemistry, the stability of aromatic rings compared with aliphatic chains is attributed to the hybridization and delocalization and of s and p and p electron orbitals respectively into sigma bonds and pi clouds. Superchannels may also be the fundamental flow-form in which electromagnetic radiation, which has no detectable ‘mass’, occurs and emanates from or gives rise to ‘equal quantities’ of what are spoken of as ‘matter’ and ‘antimatter’ (Shakunle & Rayner, 2009).

From Hierarchy to ‘Lowerarchy’: a natural inclusional interpretation of gravitationally inductive geometric and numerical organization and evolution

Based on the above considerations, natural inclusionality enables new interpretations to be made of cosmological organization and evolution. These interpretations bring together some insights from Reynolds’ granular aether, relativity, quantum field theory and fractal geometry, whilst crucially NOT imposing definitive boundary limits between, or attempting to unify formative energy and permissive gravitational space, but treating these tangible and intangible presences as distinct yet mutually inclusive.

An involution becomes possible from paradoxical and inconsistent perceptions of rigidly hierarchical organization, based on definitive exclusivity and extrinsic force, to an appreciation of the inductive coherence around central zero points and axes of infinite intangible presence. This coherence arises from the intrinsic depth of space and intrinsic dynamic of fluid boundaries as mutually inclusive presences. The need for physical ‘law enforcement’ within rigidly three-dimensional confines is removed. The inductive influence of spherical and cylindrical ‘holes’ subsumes the hierarchical power structure of cubical ‘wholes’. Receptive hollowness and formative fluidity subsume solidity and rigidity.

With hierarchical perception the question arises of why gravity has such a relatively weak influence, when compared to and when acting upon fundamental forces that act at smaller scales (as evident from the fact that you can use electromagnetism to lift an object, against gravitational influence). The issue has had many mathematical explanations applied to it, mainly involving the need for one, or a series of dimensions in time and space, extra to the four predicted by General Relativity. These extra dimensions have not yet been observed experimentally (Randall & Sundrum, 1999). It is one of the core questions for the Standard Model of Quantum Mechanics, as the model does not conclusively include for gravity or explain the origins of gravitational influences (Novaes, 2000).

We cannot assume uniform characteristics to the greater scale inductive influences that comprise ‘Gravity’, amongst the evidence of other, unexplained phenomena in Space; such as dark matter and black holes. These signify that there is as much variety and complexity to the greater scales of infinity, as we observe in the smaller scales.

The need to account for this infinite complexity / surface area in both spatial depth and energetic scale, may provide an ever-receding horizon for any reduced solution to the search for a mathematical ‘theory of everything’ or Unification Theory. Natural Inclusionality implies the organically co-creative, inclusive nature of each inductive influence within and between the other; infinitely varied influences, within the larger overall sphere of influence of a larger object and beyond to infinity; each distinct, but not discrete from an infinite flow / counter-flow context, permeated and induced by the receptive depth of space. As these influences would not be evenly spread or fixed across the heterogeneous Earth, this would imply an irregularly shaped, flow-form cumulative gravitational field, as has been experimentally observed by the GOCE Satellite (Fig. 11).

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Figure 11. GOCE Satellite Mapping of Earth’s Gravitational Field. ESA/HPF/DLR, 2011.

A very simple metaphor can be used to describe how this co-creative accumulation or inclusion can occur. As a yacht travels through a sea-channel, there are a number of perceptual observation points, for example:

The Propeller: As the hull displaces the local water and the propeller rotates, the molecules of steel and water interact in a perceptually ‘chaotic’ way. The local effects of the local inductive influences upon the molecular level are, at a relative scale, much greater than the local effect of the larger scale waves that the smaller influences none-the-less embody.

On Deck: On deck, foam can be observed at the point of contact, between the boat and the water, but the perceptual ‘chaos’ at observation point 1 is much less relevant. The effect of this local chaos is not additive but ‘inclusionally cumulative’ observed as a steady wake, leading from the back of the boat.

The Dolphin: A dolphin employs the wake of the boat to provide propulsion in the water. The perceptual chaos at observation point 1, has become an inductive influence, ‘force’ or even ‘orbit’ at a larger scale.

In this way, a dual-infinite, naturally inclusional reality allows the properties of gravity to be understood and interpreted more comfortably, in the limitless dimensionality of receptive space, unconfined conceptually by Euclidean three-dimensionality or the need for additional dimensions of time and space.

The relative ‘weakness’ of gravity when acting upon the smaller scale also provides a further insight into the property of ‘dual-diminishing resolution’ described earlier. This property is dependent upon both scale and proximity in space, as well as perception. Resolution is diminished in a relative sense, but the inductive influences are still mutually constituent. It may be that the differences in reconciling the relative strengths of the fundamental forces is purely an artifact of attempting to account for many different magnitudes of inclusive, space-permeated energetic flow within unacknowledged infinite scale/depth, using a scale/depth limited, finite system of definitive mathematics.

Beyond the horizon to zero fractals, and the 1/0 diminution

The transformation of the Menger Sponge into intricately nested natural inclusional spheres of influence is, in effect, simply accomplished by fluidizing the rigid 3-dimensional boundary-definition via the incorporation of receptive space within, throughout and beyond the figure. The resulting figural flow-form may be called a Zero Fractal; Figs 12 - 14 show examples from nature, which demonstrate the Zero Fractal in context. In all of the below images, the zero points / particles in resolution can be acknowledged to comprise, and co-create within, further ‘unseen’ detail / divisibility at both close and far depth – they exhibit dual diminution of resolution.

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Fig. 12. Simulation of molecular dynamics of DNA Molecule. Singh et al. 2010

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Fig. 13. The Triangulum Galaxy (NASA/Swift Science Team/Stefan Immler, 2011)

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Fig. 14. These two images of a three-light-year-high pillar of star birth demonstrate how observations taken in visible and infrared light by the Hubble Space Telescope reveal different perceptions of an object. (NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team, STScI, 2010)

Dependent upon both the observation point and the duration of observation, dual diminution of resolution allows us to perceive the energetic configurations as being divided into infinite zeroidal patterns – particles, or perceived as continual flow – waves, membranes. This applies to all the energetic particles / waves, whether perceived as matter, electromagnetism, light and/or other force transmitting particles described by quantum mechanics.

“When you detect a photon, you can say where, when, and with what frequency it arrived, but before the measurement, these parameters are undefined. The photon's existence is embodied in a wave function, which gives the probability of measuring the photon at any time, place, and frequency. The wave function for a single photon is usually a "wave packet"--nearly zero everywhere except in a narrow range of space and time. But as long as you don't detect the photon directly, you can manipulate its wave function into any complicated shape, in theory.” (Kolchin et al, 2008)

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Fig. 15. Light shaping. Shown here are the measured oscillations in a multi-photon light pulse (Kolchin et al, 2008)

The Zero Fractal consists of non-linear, indefinitely divisible, inclusive, transfigural zeroids configured as energetic spheres of influence, but always fully and freely permeated by continuous space. They are not necessarily interconnected in a rigid matrix or a linear wave, though they may appear to be so at the Observation Point, yet still assume co-creative, dynamic flow-form through interplay with other, proximal zeroids. The infinitely deep, receptive nature of space plays a key role in inducing this flow of energy, as described previously.

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Fig. 16: Scanning Tunneling Microscope image showing the individual atoms making up this gold (100) surface. Reconstruction causes the surface atoms to arrange in columns several atoms wide with pits between them (Image originally created by IBM Corporation)

Figure 16 shows a ‘snapshot’ of this flow-form at atomic level in Gold (100) under STM. At once, both the zero fractal shape can be observed, as can how a perceptually rigid structure can be perceived from the interrelation of proximal zeroids, closely packed, but always permeated by continuous space. It is apt to investigate and to engineer this instantaneously observed digital, rigid-lattice structure, but the presence of further space-permeated flow-form, inclusively, between the Cosmological and Quantum Observation Points and beyond, must also be acknowledged. This suggests that linear and digital relationships are perceptual and emergent at scale, rather than intrinsic properties throughout infinite space and energetic flow-form.

All flow-form begets inductive influence, all inductive influence begets flow-form; and each requires the permeation and receptivity of limitless space. Natural Inclusionality would suggest an infinitely deep, indefinitely surfaced, energetic reality, comprising simultaneously interrelating, diminishing spheres of influence – emergent particle / wave flow-forms, permeated throughout by the infinite depth of space. This depth and detail extends not only across the surface area of perceptual mass, but across energetic and inductive surface area, and beyond, ad-infinitum. No element within this infinite flow-depth need be or can be extracted from the infinite context.

At a particular Observation Point, a perceptual numerical scale can be ascribed, a smallest and largest scale selected, and therefore a ‘Horizon of Diminution’ created – the ‘edge’ of a perception or a mathematical / theoretical system. It is not fixed, being dependent upon both the Observation Point and the resolution available to the perceiver, but it is ever present within perception of infinite depth. Hence, the ‘Horizon of Diminution’ is a characteristic of perception, not of space, energy or matter. Each zero ‘point’ within the images above can be described as a ‘Horizon of Diminution’, as the depth of flow and space within is not perceptually obvious – they are perceived as ‘whole’ units, singularities, that can be described by the number 1.

As it is a ‘mobile’ characteristic of perception and understanding, rather than of energy, space or matter, a new horizon – ‘whole’ unit or number 1, and hence entire derivative, abstract numerical scale, can ‘appear’ at any scale of infinity ‘in theory’. We can approximately transcend these linear, Euclidean scales and relationships via our use of ‘irrational’ constants e.g. Pi, although this always entails losing resolution due to ‘rounding’ up or down and thereby ‘cutting’ the infinite depth of space.

The dual diminution of resolution provides the basis for the Euclidean perception of a ‘whole’ unit, discrete from the surrounding space. The number 1 could be described as the smallest perceivable ‘whole unit’ of energy/mass; and 0 as the absence of presence – space. In contrast, a naturally inclusional flow-form necessarily includes both 1 and 0, consisting of infinitely-deep, continual, receptive space, bounded by indefinitely-diminishing, energetic spheres of influence. And so, the smallest flow-form, or flow-length, perceivable as a ‘whole unit’ always incorporates both energy and space, both 1 and 0.

This is the ‘1/0 Diminution’ – the abstract exclusion of 0, and hence infinity, from 1 in perception only; a clear paradox, and yet the fundamental basis of our mathematical and scientific paradigm. The ‘smallest perceivable flow-length’ – 1 must in actuality include infinite ‘limitless space’ – 0, with infinite ‘potential of dissolution’. To define a number as ‘whole’ – 1, the non-number – 0, and hence infinity, must be ‘abstracted’ from the dynamic boundaries of the number, thus yielding only linear and linear-recurrent relationships. These linear numerical relationships and systems are therefore ultimately scale-limited by perceptual abstraction.

The number 1 as a singularity cannot be divided into further ‘whole’ parts, and therefore can have no depth or structure, no dynamic flow-form, and hence no mass. It is a paradox, a perceptual ‘horizon of diminution’ in the infinite depth and permeability of energetic flow and space, which can be given life and form by acknowledging the infinite flow-depth within.

Within Reach

Here, I am

Calling from within you

To all

Who call

From my heart’s desire

To be

Full filled

With nothing less

Than nothing more

Reaching everywhere

Beyond each lingering moment

Of transient life

Spinning around

Turning inside my dear

Embrace

With nowhere further to go

Than somewhere deep inside

Without walls

Within walls

Beyond eye shot

Beneath ear shot

I cannot be pierced

Not even by the fiercest

Assault

Mounted from a place

Without my consent

By those Hell-bent

On reaching my infinite depth

Such a vain, hopeless venture

Not the spirit of adventure

That brings you close

Within my reach

Beyond your grip

Alan Rayner

2nd January 2011

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Bruce L. Rosenberg for alerting us to the work of Osborne Reynolds, Peter Jackson for his comments about ‘Einstein’s Boxes’ and Paul Stiles for sharing his insights regarding the difference between depth and distance.

References

Clausius, R. (1865), "Über die Wärmeleitung gasförmiger Körper", Annalen der Physik 125: 353–400).

Dowson, C.G., A.D.M. Rayner & L.Boddy, (1986) Outgrowth patterns of mycelial cord-forming basidiomycetes from and between woody resource units in soil. Journal of General Microbiology, 132, 203-211.

Dowson, C.G., Springham, P., Rayner, A.D.M. & Boddy, L. (1989) Resource relationships of foraging mycelial systems of Phanerochaete velutina and Hypholoma fasciculare in soil. New Phytologist 111, 501-509.

Einstein, A. (1954). Relativity. University Paper Back, London: Methuen & Co

Eisberg, R. & Resnick, R.(1985). Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei, and Particles (2nd ed.). John Wiley & Sons. P59-60.

Hanlin, R.T. (1994). Microcycle conidiation – a review. Mycoscience, 35, 113-123.

Leibniz, G.W. (1695) Textes inédits tome 2, Gaston Grua (ed) Paris; Presses Universitaires de France, 1948. pp 553-555.

Mandelbrot, B. (1982). The Fractal Geometry of Nature W H Freeman & Co.

Moore, J. W., Stanistski C. L &, Jurs, P. C. (2005). Chemistry, The Molecular Science. Brooks Cole. ISBN 0-534-42201-2.

Novaes, S.F. (2000). Standard Model: An Introduction. Online: arXiv:hep-ph/0001283 [Accessed 06.01.12]

Randall, L. & Sundrum, R. (1999). A Large Mass Hierarchy From A Small Extra Dimension. Online: arXiv:hep-ph/9905221v1 [Accessed 06.01.2012]

Rayner A.D.M. (2008). Natural Communion: Poems and Paintings About Our Human Inclusion in the Evolutionary Flow of Place-time. Available from http://www.inclusional-research.org/furtherreading/naturalcommunion.pdf

Rayner, A.D. (2011a). Space cannot be cut: why self-identity naturally includes neighbourhood. Integrative Psychological and Behavioural Science, 45, 161-184.

Rayner, A.D.M. (2011b). Envisioning. www.bestthinking.com

Rayner, A.D.M. (2011c). NaturesScope: unlocking our natural empathy and creativity – an inspiring new way of relating to our natural origins and one another through natural inclusion. O Books.

Rayner, A. (2011d). Space in form – fungi show the inclusional path of natural sustainability. Common Knowledge (in press).

Reynolds, O. (1885). On the dilatancy of media composed of rigid particles in contact. Philosophical Magazine, 20 (S5), 469-481.

Reynolds, 0. (1903). On an inversion of ideas as to the structure of the universe (The Rede Lecture, June 10, 1902). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shakunle, L.O. (1994). Spiral Geometry. The Principles (with Discourse). Hitit Verlag, Berlin, Germany.

Shakunle, L.O. & Rayner, A.D.M. (2007). Superchannel of zero spirals. Journal of Transfigural Mathematics, 1, 63-64, 104-105.

Shakunle, L.O. & Rayner, A.D.M. (2008). Superchannel – Inside and beyond superstring: the natural inclusion of one in all - III. Transfigural Mathematics 1 (3), 9-55, 59-69

Shakunle, L.O. & Rayner, A.D.M. (2009). Transfigural foundations for a new physics of natural diversity – the variable inclusion of gravitational space in electromagnetic flow-form. Journal of Transfigural Mathematics 1 (2), 109-122.

Stewart, I, Clarke, A.C.C. & Lesmoir-Gordon, N (2004). The colours of infinity: the beauty and power of fractals, vol. 1. Clear Press.

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Tattersall, P.J. (2011). Throwing Some Light on Quantum ‘Weirdness’:A New Way of Looking at an Old Problem? (An Essay). http://www.bestthinking.com/article/permalink/1657?tab=article&title=throwing-some-light-on-quantum-weirdness-a-new-way-of-looking-at-an-old-problem-an-essay-

Wimmel, H. (1992). Quantum physics & observed reality: a critical interpretation of quantum mechanics. World Scientific. p. 2. ISBN 9789810210106

Image Sources

Fig. 1. English Wikipedia, 2005. Pythagoras Tree. Online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PythagorasTree.png [Accessed 15.01.2012]

Fig. 2. Baserinia, Amir R. 2006. Menger Sponge. Online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Menger.png [Accessed 15.01.2012]

Fig. 11. ESA/HPF/DLR. 2011. New GOCE Geoid. Online: http://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/GOCE/SEM1AK6UPLG_1.html#subhead2 [Accessed 15.01.2012]

Fig. 12. A. Singh, S. Snyder, L. Lee, A. P. R. Johnston, F. Caruso, Y. G. Yingling, Effect of Oligonucleotide Length on the Assembly of DNA Materials: Molecular Dynamics Simulations of Layer-by-Layer DNA Films, 2010. Langmuir 26 (2010) 17339-17347.

Fig. 13. NASA/Swift Science Team/Stefan Immler, 2011. The Triangulum Galaxy. Online: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1841.html. Dated 12.01.2011 [Accessed 15.01.2011]

Fig. 14. NASA, ESA, and M. Livio and the Hubble 20th Anniversary Team, STScI, 2010. ‘Starry-Eyed Hubble Celebrates 20 Years of Awe and Discovery’. Online: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/hubble20th-img.html. Dated 22.04.2010 [Accessed 15.01.2012]

Fig. 15. Pavel Kolchin, Chinmay Belthangady, Shengwang Du, G. Y. Yin, and S. E. Harris, 2008. Electro-Optic Modulation of Single Photons - Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 103601 (issue of 5 September 2008)

Fig. 16. Gold (100) surface under STM Microscopy. Image originally created by IBM Corporation.

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Including Retirement In...

2012-02-02T11:13:28-05:00

What to Do If They Just Won’t Take a Hint

Having the earlier generation of owners stick around in the business sometimes is like the punch line in the joke about the couple in their 90s who divorced after 60 years of marriage.

“But, why now, after 60 years of marriage?" asked a concerned friend.

“Because, we had to wait until the children died,” the husband replied.

In many cases, it may be a better idea to provide the older owners and partners a viable financial alternative to leaving the business, but that idea requires early planning to implement. In order to help the older owners ease out the door, the younger owners need to show them the cash.

The cash to fund the older owner’s retirement is held in the company-owned life insurance contract whose death benefit would have been used to buy the older owner’s shares, if the owner had died before reaching retirement age.

Unlike the joke about the divorce, the owners did not die first, so the cash values in the company-owned insurance policy can be used for another purpose. In this case, the cash is used as a monthly stream of income that buys away the owner’s shares during the first years of the owner’s retirement.

The Top 3 Issues That a Buy-Sell Agreement Can Solve for Retirement Income for Older Owners

The buy-sell agreement is drafted by a business attorney, and contains the legally binding obligations of the owners to sell their ownership shares for an agreed-upon price.

The legal terms and conditions of the agreement cover 3 important issues related to the ongoing viability of the company:

The agreement restricts the older owners from selling their shares to outside parties at the time of retirement.
The agreement sets the fair value of the shares to be transferred at retirement.
The values contained in the agreement act as evidence for tax issues related to the treatment of capital gains for the older owners.

The agreement would provide guidance on the retirement age and the length of installment payments to the older owner. Generally, the duration of installment payments would be 5 to 10 years.

Even though the words used in the agreement may be described as retirement income payments, the stream of income paid to the older owner are classified as installment payments on buying away the shares of the owner.

Selecting the Type of Insurance Policy That Can Be Used as a Vehicle to Fund the Retirement Payments

The type of insurance to be purchased is a different question than who owns the insurance policy. Sometimes, it is more advantageous for the company itself to buy and own the insurance policy, and in other cases, when the company has less than 3 owners, the policies can be owned by each individual owner.

The insurance policy that is bought must create internal cash value buildup. The cash values inside the policy are usually borrowed by the owners to pay out the retirement income to the older owner.

In other words, the type of life insurance policy used to fund the buy-sell agreements would not be term insurance. Rather, the policies would be whole life, universal life, variable universal life or indexed universal life that build cash values.

In these types of policies, premium payments are directed into two types of internal accounts inside the insurance policy. Part of the premium pays the cost for the death benefit and part of the premium is placed in the cash value account. The cash inside the cash value account generally earns some form of interest, and over time, the cash value accounts grow in value.

At some point in the future, the cash values of the insurance policy can be used to fund the retirement income payments to the older owners.

The logical sequence of events in implementing the buy-sell agreement means that the attorney who drafts the agreement works on the project first, then the CPA who provides accounting and tax services blesses the contents of the agreement, and later argues with the tax authorities over the meaning of the agreements, followed by the insurance advisor, who helps the owners select the right types of policies to buy.

The insurance advisor tries to match the titles and ownership interests in the buy-sell agreement with the title and ownership interests of the insurance policy. Otherwise, events will get messy at the time of retirement.

This coordination between the legal agreements and the insurance policies means that the attorney, the CPA, and the insurance advisor will need to communicate with each other. Generally, the advice provided by the most senior female in the group will hold the greatest influence on what happens next.

Using the Same Insurance Policy Over Again to Fund the Future Retirements of the Younger Owners

Sometimes, the insurance policies used to fund the buy-sell agreement are surrendered, or sold back to the insurance company. In this case, the insurance company would pay out the internal cash values to the owner of the policy. The legal buy-sell agreement would require that the cash values of the surrendered policy be used as a down payment on buying the retiring partner's share.

A better alternative than surrendering the policy may be for the owners of the insurance policy to borrow the cash value but keep the policy in effect by continuing to pay the premiums. The loans against the cash value are used to fund the retirement income to the older owner.

Then, if it had been a really smart attorney who drafted the agreement, and a really smart CPA who blessed the agreement, the existing life insurance policy can be used to insure the life of a new owner. The terms and conditions in the legal agreement must describe this treatment of the life insurance policy.

The new owner who is insured by the policy may often be substituted on the same policy when the older owner leaves the company. The premium and policy values may have to be adjusted in light of differences in ages and health between the previous and new insured, which means that the insurance advisor will need to do more work to make the transition on the insured happen at the insurance company.

The great financial advantage to keeping the insurance policy in effect for the remaining owners is that the internal cash value build up continues in the existing policy. At some time in the future, after the installment payments to the older owner are completed, that cash value build up may be used again to fund another retirement payout.

This time the retirement payments are to the former young whipper-snapper who helped the previous older owner out the door.

About the Author

Thomas Vass is an independent licensed insurance agent, located in Raleigh, N. C., with a special focus on helping small companies implement buy-sell agreements.

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Will North Korea Give U...

2012-02-01T10:50:17-05:00

Posted at 10:56 AM ET, 12/19/2011

The death on 17 December 2011 of Kim Jong Il, for 17 years the dictator of North Korea – officially, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) - and the succession of his son Kim Yong Un (dubbed the “Great Successor” by the North Korean media) has again focused attention on North Korea’s nuclear arsenal.

Kim Jong Il obsessively pursued a nuclear-weapon program and was prepared to devote a large fraction of North Korea’s resources to acquiring nuclear weapons. We don’t know much about Kim Yong Un but it is most likely that he will retain the country’s nuclear weapons and improve them, at least in the short term. It is not known whether or not these weapons are small and light enough to fit on to ballistic missiles but, if they are not, many North Koreans will want them to be made so.

The North Korea is a highly militarized country, supporting some 1.19 million people in its military forces, giving it one of the world’s largest standing armies. As well as a large conventional arsenal, North Korea is generally believed to possess chemical weapons and to maintain an offensive biological weapons program. And it has deployed a number of types of ballistic missiles.

North Korea allegedly possesses the biological-warfare agents anthrax, cholera, and smallpox and has a capability to produce up to 5,000 metric tons of chemical weapons per year Probable agents include mustard gas, phosgene, sarin, and V-type nerve agents. But its most formidable weaponry is its nuclear arsenal.

North Korea’s nuclear-weapon program

North Korean work on nuclear weapons dates back at least to the early 1950s, to the years just after the 1950-1953 Korean War. According to the New York Times, “Kim Il-sung, North Korea’s founder, was acutely aware that General Douglas MacArthur had requested nuclear weapons to use against his country during the conflict, and declassified documents show that he pressed his cold war allies — first Russia, then China — for nuclear technology. But it took decades to put together the equipment, and it appears that only relatively recently did the North make a political decision to speed forward” (1).

North Korea demonstrated its capability to fabricate nuclear weapons by testing one on 9 October 2006 and another on 25 May 2009. It is estimated that North Korea has so far produced about 35 kilograms of plutonium, in a small reactor at Yongbyon, North Pyongan, enough to produce about 7 nuclear weapons (2).

North Korea is enriching uranium and producing plutonium. Both highly-enriched uranium and plutonium can be used to fabricate nuclear weapons. North Korea secretly constructed a uranium-enrichment plant at Yongbyon. We know about this because Professor Siegfried S. Hecker, together with some colleagues, was shown the facility (3). Given that North Korea is an extraordinarily closed and secretive country, getting information about its activities is notoriously difficult. For this reason, the access given to Hecker, a nuclear-weapons expert at Stanford University, is hard to explain.

Hecker has visited North Korea seven times, including four visits to the Yongbyon nuclear facility, the most recent one in November 2010 when he was shown the new gas-centrifuge facility for the enrichment of uranium. This plant could produce highly-enriched uranium usable to fabricate nuclear weapons, giving North Korea a second route (in addition to plutonium) to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons.

North Korea has admitted that it has a program to enrich uranium but claims that it does so for civil rather than military purposes, to produce fuel for future nuclear-power reactors. Hecker speculates that he was shown the enrichment facility because North Korea wants the world to know that it has modern and sophisticated uranium centrifuges. Hecker and his colleagues were told that there are 2,000 centrifuges at the facility, which could produce enough highly-enriched uranium to fabricate one nuclear weapon a year.

North Korea and nuclear proliferation

North Korea's willingness to supply nuclear technology and know-how to other countries, including Iran and Syria, causes much concern to the international community. It secretly built a nuclear reactor in Syria, of a similar design as the one it built at Yongbyon. It was eventually discovered by Israeli intelligence and destroyed by Israeli bombers in 2007.

And it is believed that North Korea was the main source of the nuclear technology and material sold by the black-market network of A.Q.Khan (the ‘father’ of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons) to Iran, Libya and Syria.

North Korea is believed to be still assisting Iran. Several North Korean engineers which reportedly killed in a huge explosion which ripped through an Iranian military base at the end of 2011. All in all, North Korea is a much greater nuclear-proliferation threat than any other country.

North Korea’s nuclear program is significantly more advanced than Iran’s. Nevertheless, the USA, Israel and other western countries are making great efforts to stop Iran’s nuclear program but they are virtually ignoring the proliferation threat posed by North Korea. This is presumably because Israel perceives that its existence will be directly threatened if Iran acquires nuclear weapons whereas North Korea is not a threat to Israel. Moreover, Israel can considerably influence American policy.

North Korea’s ballistic missiles

North Korea has an active ballistic-missile program. It began developing ballistic missiles in the 1970s. It tested a Scud-B ballistic in April 1984. It has produced the 800-mile (500-kilometre) range Scud-C, the 1,200-mile (700-kilometre) range Scud-D, and the solid-fueled KN-02 short-range ballistic (an upgraded version of the Russian SS-21 Scarab missile) with a range of about 120 miles (70 kilometre).

It has also deployed the 780-mile (1,300-kilometre) range ballistic missile called the Nodong, which it initially tested in 1993. North Korea's Taepodong-1, a 1,100-mile (1800-kilometre) range missile/space launch vehicle, has also been flight-tested. North Korea's three-stage Taepodong-2 is potentially an intercontinental range missile; however it has yet to be tested successfully.

North Korea has tested anti-ship cruise missiles a number of times since 1994. It has a long history of exporting ballistic missiles to other countries, including Iran, Pakistan and Syria. Its willingness to provide other countries with ballistic missiles is of significant concern to the international community.

According to a South Korean news agency, North Korea test-fired a new short-range missile, with a 72-mile (43-kilometre) range, soon after the announcement of Kim Jong Il's death last December.

North Korea and arms control treaties

North Korea became a party to the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1985 as a non-nuclear-weapon state but unilaterally withdrew from the Treaty on 10 January 2003, leaving it free from the binding force of its Safeguards Agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). North Korea is not a Party to the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT); it is not a member of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR); it is not a party to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC); but, since 1987, it is a party to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC).

The urgent need for negotiations without preconditions

North Korea is extremely proud of its nuclear arsenal which it sees as a deterrent to threats from more powerful countries, including the United States. It is hardly likely that Kim Yong Un will be prepared to bargain away such an asset, acquired with a huge sacrifice, which is its only significant strategic bargaining chip with the United States and its regional neighbors.

A major concern is that North Korea will continue to sell nuclear materials and technology to other countries or even give them to terrorists. A crucial question is: Could North Korea be persuaded to negotiate away its nuclear-weapon program?

When Kim Jong Il met with Chinese officials in May 2011 he said his government would attempt to restart the six-party negotiations (involving North Korea, the United States, China, South Korea, Japan and Russia) to end North Korea’s nuclear-weapon program. He angrily abandoned them at the end of 2008; he understandably objected to preconditions being imposed on the negotiations. Washington and South Korea demanded that the North Koreans announce a moratorium on their nuclear activities before, rather than after, negotiations begin.

In August 2011, Kim Jong Il, at a meeting with Russian President Dmitri A. Medvedev, stated that he would consider a moratorium on the testing and production of nuclear weapons, saying that he wanted to resume the stalled negotiations. The North Korean demand for negotiations without preconditions seems reasonable. The other five parties should accept it.

And they should do so soon. According to the New York Times: “In January 2011, former U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates warned that North Korea was within five years of being able to strike the continental United States with an intercontinental ballistic missile, and said that, combined with its expanding nuclear program, the country ‘is becoming a direct threat to the United States’”(1).

Hopefully, Kim Yong Un will, like his father Kim Jong Il, want to return to the six-party negotiating table. But he will probably want to consolidate his regime first. The best guess is that North Korea will remain a nuclear-weapon power for some while longer.

References

1. North Korea's Nuclear Program, The New York Times, 22 December, 2011.

2. Wade L. Huntley, Bucks for the bang, North Korea’s nuclear program and northeast Asian military spending, www.asianperspective.org/articles/v33n4-g.pdf

3. Siegfried S. Hecker, Redefining denuclearization in North Korea, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 20 December 2010.

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Dementia and the Holoca...

2012-02-01T10:07:25-05:00

Dementia poses many difficult challenges and choices to those living with the condition, and to those who are close to the person who has the disease. No one is spared the collective experience that dementia often causes when individuals and their families and friends and those in the role of professional caregivers are faced with as a result of the many cognitive and behavioural challenges that are often poignant and terrifying. During a recent media interview on the subject of behavioural symptoms associated with dementia and the array of potential interventions including medication therapy, I described to the media interviewer the special challenge that I have encountered when trying to address the complex and often terrifying events that affected holocaust survivors as their distant horrific experiences come to the forefront of their consciousness. This is usually much to the dismay of those caring or living with them who often seek some respite from health care professionals to help their loved one find relief from the horrors of their memories.

The interviewer, presumably as a way of categorizing the anecdote I was describing to her of a recent patient I saw in the clinic said, "Oh, I guess it is a post-traumatic stress disorder experience" which I agreed to without really having the chance to dissect and realize that the analogy was at best superficial. I realized that the comment an analogy did not fully capture the profound impact that the holocaust experience had for many of the older patients I care for and the effect that those life events of the holocaust itself added to what was for many a previous life as an outsider in a world in which they were never really welcome and for which the holocaust was a final devastating chapter on top of a life of fear and insecurity. I concluded to myself after the discussion that there was a different element to surviving the holocaust, especially in those from Eastern Europe that multiplied the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder as a way of understanding their experience of the holocaust and how it effects their life as they develop symptoms with dementia with its cognitive disruption and ultimately behavioural manifestations.

Most people who suffer the various iterations of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) had prior to the event that was traumatic a reasonably "normal" life experience. That does not mean that everyone had a quiet, safe and sedate life but most did not have an experience of a comparable magnitude that was deemed to be the type of stress that can be categorized and sufficient to cause PTSD. Among the common events to which this syndrome has been ascribed is war and how it impacts soldiers who have survived,, people who have lived through natural disasters that resulted especially with the loss of life, either of close family and friends or of entire neighbourhoods or communities. For some it may have been a violent and close encounter as may occur in a capital crime such as a witnessed murder or the tragic loss of a loved one in other tragic events such as a motor vehicle accident. Whatever the cause, usually the preceding life experience was nowhere near the magnitude of the tragic occurrence as the event itself.

The difference that I have seen with many of the holocaust survivors that I have treated for dementia and related conditions is that prior to the holocaust they had witnessed or been subjected to a vast array of life-threatening, life-demeaning or harrowing experiences related to virulent anti-Semitism that was often rife in the communities that eventually succumbed to the holocaust period. However, there were some stark contrasts between different European communities and how the holocaust manifested itself. Those Jews that lived for example in most of Eastern Europe experienced severe and often individually murderous and harmful anti-Semitism long before the holocaust period as part of ambient culture and strong negative bias towards the Jews. For others such as the Jewish population of Germany that had endeavoured to be absorbed and accepted into the general community, the "shock" of rabid anti-Semitism and harmful actions was for many difficult to fathom or accept.

For many of the holocaust survivors that I have seen in my clinical practice, the memories of the past are often something that plagues them as the present and the ability to recall new items is lost and all they have to dwell on is the past. I remember one patient, a Polish holocaust survivor whose family was endeavouring to find a live-in support person to look after their mother as part of their commitment to try to keep her at home rather than have her admitted to a long-term care facility for which she qualified. They were looking for someone who could speak to her in her early spoken languages as with the dementia taking its toll, her English which in any event had not been well developed gradually slipped away and she reverted to her mother tongue which was Yiddish with Polish being remembered, but not used often.

According to the daughter in the distant past they had a Polish speaking housekeeper for her mother with whom she got along with quite well and there were never any problems between the two. The daughter found a Polish speaking person to be a support worker/caregiver to live in the home with her mother as a Yiddish speaking caregiver could not be found and those from other backgrounds that they spoke to were not able to communicate adequately with the mother for a relationship to develop. The daughter was very pleased to interview someone who had the qualifications she was looking for as a care provider who also spoke Polish. To the shock and horror of the daughter within a few hours of the person beginning her first day on the job she called the daughter and said she was being screamed at and cursed by the mother and wanted to leave which she did as soon as the daughter arrived.

The mother was in tears and shaking as she explained to her daughter that she was exposed to an anti-Semite and was fearful whenever the caregiver opened her mouth and spoke to her in Polish. She kept reiterating the threat she felt from being in the presence of someone speaking Polish and was sure the person had the intent of hurting her. No amount of explanation by the daughter was sufficient to calm her mother and get her to understand that they were no longer in Poland and that this woman was not a threat-needless to say the Polish caregiver did not return and an English-speaking Filipino woman with lots of experience and a gentle disposition was found with whom the mother managed to communicate adequately for her needs to be met.

To summarise my point, in order to provide an appropriate and sensitive level of care, when dealing with those patients who suffer from dementia and who are holocaust survivors, treating physicians and caregivers must understand that although there are some similarities between Holocaust survivors and those suffering from PTSD, there are many differences that need to be recognized as well. A more robust understanding of and attention paid to the pre-holocaust experience must be included in the evaluation of behaviour so that appropriate steps can be taken to minimize negative and frightening associations with past experiences.

About the Author

Dr. Michael Gordon is currently medical program director of Palliative Care at Baycrest, co-director of their ethics program and a professor of Medicine at the University of Toronto. He is a prolific writer with his latest book Late-Stage Dementia: Promoting Comfort, Compassion, and Care and previous two books being Moments that Matter: Cases in Ethical Eldercare followed shortly on his memoir: Brooklyn Beginnings-A Geriatrician's Odyssey. For more information log on to www.drmichaelgordon.com

Reprinted with permission from HealthPlexus.Net, January 26, 2012.

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North Carolina Technolo...

2012-01-23T14:52:28-05:00

The Technology Stock Advisor, a weekly online newsletter for technology stock investors, published by Thomas Vass, a portfolio manager based in Raleigh, N. C., released the stock picks for 2012 of what he considers to be the best five stock pickers in America.

Vass released his own Top 10 Tech Stocks for 2012 on January 9, 2012.

“When we begin our search for stocks, we define 9 high tech value chains, where we believe most of America’s innovation occurs in sustaining product innovations and radical disruptive technology commercialization,” said Vass. “Our patent is based upon an economic theory of technology innovation that we developed called Structural Evolutionary Regional Economic Theory (SERET).”

“We suspect that our theory of stock selection leads to superior investment performance over the long term compared to any of our top five competitors,” said Vass. “We think the general investing public would benefit from our comparison over the course of 2012 in order to judge for themselves,” he added.

“I consider these five competitors to be the best in the world at what they do in selecting stocks for their clients, and I have a great deal of respect for their history and tradition of representing their clients,” said Vass.

The competitor stock lists are based on published reports and press releases and all stocks are priced s of close on January 3, 2012. Stock price monitoring and graphs are provided by Google Finance, an online data service.

Barclays Top 2012 Technology Picks, Report compiled by Meena Krishnamsetty, WSJ Money Watch, December 20, 2011. Barclays stocks selected by Stuart Linde.

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James Glassman, Contributing Editor, Kiplinger's Personal Finance: James Glassman's 10 Picks for 2012, January edition. “These ten investing suggestions should do well for your portfolio in the New Year and beyond.”

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Goldman Sachs' 9 Best Stocks for 2012 By Frank Byrt. The Street, November 2011. “BOSTON (TheStreet) -- Goldman Sachs(GS_) analysts have nine technology stocks on their short list for now, with six-month price targets that are as high as 61%.”

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JP Morgan's Top Tech Stocks for 2012. By Rebecca Lipman, Kapitall, The Motley Fool Posted 10:58AM 12/27/11 Investing. “J.P Morgan's Noelle V. Grainger published a report on December 9th that took a look at top stocks in several technology sectors, such as software, computer services & IT consulting, semiconductor capital equipment, and alternative energy.”

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Top Technology Stocks Recommended By UBS. By Insider Monkey in Seeking Alpha. January 11, 2012. “UBS Investment Research recently published a report entitled “U.S. Research” on December 30, 2011. It isn’t publicly available but we will summarize its main points. The report lists their top stock ideas for 2012. In this article, we will discuss their most-preferred stock ideas for the Technology sector.”

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Vass noted that one stock in particular, Qualcomm, had been selected by three of his competitors. “I have followed Qualcomm in one of my stock watch portfolios for many years, he said, but it does not meet all of my selection criteria.”

Investors who want detailed daily investment advice and news on what to do today to manage their TSA stock investments may subscribe to the TSA Detailed Newsletter for $15 per quarter.

Investment Disclosure: The past performance of an investment is no guarantee of future performance. All investments bear risk of loss of principal invested. There are no guarantees related to investing. Please visit technologystockadvisor.com to read the IM&I ADV Part II Disclosure Document. Stocks mentioned in this release may be owned in the personal and business accounts of the investment advisor.

About Thomas Vass: Vass is fee-based investment portfolio manager located in Raleigh, N. C., and the author of Predicting Technology: Identifying Future Market Opportunities and Disruptive Technologies, (2007) which explains his theory of technology evolution. His theory formed the basis of his 2007 patent that explains his method for selecting technology stocks for inclusion in an investment account.

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Are abatements a win-wi...

2012-01-30T13:08:58-05:00

Tax abatements and incentives for business investment are often portrayed as “win-win” tools for local government. The anecdotal support for this view is that they are “targeted investments” without which communities would be unable to attract new jobs or expand its existing job base, but used properly are a boon for the economy and more or less costless to taxpayers. The problem is that economic research does not support this view.

“Although tax incentives have long been endorsed as the highway to prosperity, with promises of attracting businesses, providing jobs and enriching the state, most public finance experts consider them bad policy,” write College of Charleston economics professors Peter Calcagno and Frank Hefner in a 2009 report for the South Carolina Policy Council. “[T]ax incentives that target specific companies create inequities, complications and inefficiencies. Further, they shrink the tax base, thus shifting the burden of taxes and reducing tax revenue available for the basic functions of…government. Finally, there’s little evidence that targeted incentives bring growth in the form of good paying jobs.”[i]

The Oklahoma Policy Institute reports even businesses agree. Just last spring “17 of the top business executives from the Kansas City area made an unexpected request to the governors of Kansas and Missouri – they asked to end tax incentives for their businesses.” As the business leaders explained, “the only real winner is the business who is ‘incentive shopping’ to reduce costs. The losers are the taxpayers who must provide services to those who are not paying for them.”[ii]

The situation is no different at the local level. “Many economists have been prompted to question why municipalities continue to offer abatements indiscriminately when they have been shown to be largely ineffective and resource-wasting,” notes University of Kansas Policy Research Institute economist Luke Middleton.[iii]

Middleton considers several possible theories as to why this might be the case and concludes that the problem is not that public officials are unaware of the research, but simply that their incentive is to ignore it. “Often faced with tremendous pressure to do something, especially in cities undergoing economic decline, Burnier says that using abatements ‘give the practitioners the opportunity to appear active and engaged, and they give elected officials the chance to claim credit and reassure the community members that jobs are being created.’” He goes on to suggest that another problem is the lack of viable alternatives. Politicians “feel trapped in a sub-optimal situation but are compelled by their circumstances to stay the course.”[iv]

Are local officials truly trapped, though? It’s an important question that merits significant consideration and public input. As Joseph Coletti of the John Locke Foundation suggests, “Before making a decision on incentives, governments should provide citizens a summary sheet that shows what effects the government expects and what assumptions it uses for jobs, expenditures, revenues, discount rate, and the incentive’s contribution to the firm’s decision. The summary would provide a starting point for public comment.”[v]

A bolder step would be to explore the costs and benefits of phasing out abatements and incentives altogether. This would hardly eliminate the role of local officials in fostering a healthy environment for economic growth. On the contrary, city and county officials could partner with their local Chamber of Commerce to solicit feedback from existing businesses and citizens about what current taxes and regulations stand in the way of their success.

Accepting this task should give them plenty of opportunity to appear active and engaged without resorting to corporate handouts. Now that’s a real win-win situation.

[i] Calcagno, Peter C., ed. Unleashing Capitalism: A Prescription for Prosperity in South Carolina (Columbia, South Carolina: The South Carolina Policy Education Foundation, 2009), 137. Available at: http://www.unleashingcapitalismsc.org/book.aspx.

[ii] Perry, Gene. “How the tax incentives war puts states in a terrible bargaining position,” OK Policy Blog (Tulsa, Oklahoma: The Oklahoma Policy Institute, 25 April 2011). Available at: http://okpolicy.org/blog/taxes/how-the-tax-incentives-war-put-states-in-a-terrible-bargaining-position/.

[iii] Middleton, Luke. “Literature Review: Tax Abatements and Economic Development Incentives,” Report No. 49 (Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Center for Economic and Business Analysis Policy Research Institute, January 2001), 9. Available at: http://www.ipsr.ku.edu/resrep/pdf/r49.pdf.

[iv] Ibid., 10.

[v] Coletti, Joseph. “Lotteries and Economic Incentives: Governments need better tools to evaluate tax breaks,” Spotlight No. 398 (Raleigh, North Carolina: The John Locke Foundation, 7 September 2010), 5. Available at: http://www.johnlocke.org/acrobat/spotlights/Spotlight398EconIncentives.pdf.

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Euler and Divergent Mat...

2011-11-23T17:59:07-05:00

11. Numerical Study

The theory for regularising divergent series, especially those known as terminants, has been presented in previous parts of this article. Specifically, Part 2 was concerned with the derivation of Borel-summed regularised values for both types of terminants, while the corresponding MB-regularised values were derived in Part 3. Although the theory is based on sound mathematics, we really do not really know if any of these results is valid because of the "fallacies and paradoxes" as Abel referred to them that abound in divergent series. This means that one cannot rely on intuition to make inferences about such series, especially in regard to their limits. What we need to do in order to convince ourselves that the various results in Parts 2 and 3 are indeed valid is to carry out extremely precise and accurate numerical studies. Hence, Part 4 aims to describe the results from various numerical investigations involving these forms for the regularised value. By carrying out such numerical investigations, we shall not only be able to verify the various expressions for the regularised values of both Type I and II series, but we shall be in a position to observe whether Euler's views on divergent series are indeed correct or not. Moreover, in the process of evaluating the Borel-summed regularised values we will be confirming the existence of the Stokes phenomenon.

Underlying such numerical investigations is the fact that numbers do not lie. This fact seems to be generally ignored by practitioners in standard asymptotics, who instead rely on proving theorems by invoking such vague symbols as ~, and As a consequence, no one really knows just how accurate their asymptotic results are or even the specific ranges over which they can be applied. As indicated earlier, these deficiencies follow from the truncation of frequently incomplete asymptotic expansions as a result of applying the Poincaré prescription or definition on p. 151 of Ref. 8 and are responsible for the discipline of asymptotics being the butt of jokes. A typical example is the Princeton graffito "2+2=5, for sufficiently large values of 2" quoted by Berry in Ref. 6.

In this part of the article we shall present a numerical demonstration involving a particular Type I terminant since spectacular demonstrations involving Type II generalised terminants have already been presented in Chs. 9 and 10 of Ref. 9. There, the Borel-summed and MB-regularised forms for the regularised value were found to agree to astonishing accuracy, but no such analysis was ever presented for Type I series. We shall rectify the situation here, whilst at the same time providing the reader with a clearer idea of exactly the type of numerics we have in mind in order to carry such a demonstration.

The first point to be made is that will be replaced by in the general forms for the regularised value of a Type I series discussed in Parts 2 and 3. This is necessary so that we can observe the effect of other Stokes sectors and domains of convergence within the principal branch of the complex plane. Next, we shall let rather than a simple value like 1 or 1/2, so that the terminant can no longer be identified with a known special function. That is, the terminant represents an asymptotic solution to an unknown function. It also means that we are opening up a new frontier in mathematics, whereby we do not know the solution, but can give its value anyway. That is, for each value of "Solution X" will have a specific value.

Since the forms for both types of terminant as given by Eqs. (57) and (58) represent small asymptotic series, we shall consider values of where truncation is unable to provide an accurate estimate. Therefore, in the first instance will be set equal to a value lying in the intermediate region of and in the second instance to a “large” value, where 2." src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black{\left|{{z}}^{{3}}\right|}>{2}.$" /> Both of these regions or domains would never considered by the practitioners in standard asymptotics because their basic tools or the vague symbols mentioned earlier do not apply there.

The numerical study will also cover a wide range of values for the truncation parameter As we shall see, altering the truncation parameter is effectively employing a different method for evaluating the regularised value. The regularised value of the particular terminant mentioned above can be obtained by substituting the appropriate values into the Borel-summed forms given by Equivalences (76) and (79). Then we find that

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where the upper sign is valid for arg and the lower sign is valid for arg In both cases is a non-negative integer. In the above equivalence the offset is given by Max[ ] Re On the other hand, for the Stokes lines, where arg the regularised value derived from Equivalences (77) and (80) is given by

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The MB-regularised value of the series can be obtained by introducing the relevant values into Equivalence (90). This yields

Used only with express written permission

where arg Therefore, we observe that there are three different forms covering the principal branch of the complex plane for The form is valid over arg while the and forms are valid over arg and arg respectively. Therefore, the and forms share a common region of arg which is where we expect both forms to yield identical results for the regularised value. If this does not occur, then we know that the results of the previous section are invalid. On the other hand, the common region for the and forms is arg Hence, these forms are expected to yield identical values for the regularised value when is situated within this sector of the complex plane.

Table 1 presents a small sample of the results obtained by programming Equivalence (112) as a module in Mathematica [28]. Specifically, the table is composed of the various terms on the rhs of Equivalence (112) plus the truncated series up to since

Used only with express written permission

That is, the regularised value of the entire series on the lhs of the above equation or is equivalent to the truncated series plus the regularised value on the rhs of Equivalence (112). Hence, Eq. (113) represents a means of checking the concept of regularisation since by varying the value of the truncation parameter we are evaluating completely different values for both the truncated series and the MB integral in the course of evaluating the regularised value of

The first column of Table 1 displays the value of Because arg has been set equal to the regularised value of this particular terminant can be evaluated by setting and in the rhs of Equivalence (112). As a consequence, the second column displays the value of used to obtain regularised value for the entire series via Eq. (113). The next column presents the value of the truncated series or the first term on the rhs of Eq. (113) with equal to The fourth column lists the value of the MB integral on the rhs of Equivalence (112), while the fifth column labelled Discontinuity displays the values for the second term on the rhs of the equivalence statement. This term vanishes for but remains fixed for The final column displays the regularised value of the entire series, which is determined by summing the quantities in the third, fourth and fifth columns of the table.

The results in Table 1 have been obtained by running Mathematica 4.1 on a Pentium computer. The numerical integration routine in this software package, which is called NIntegrate, was used to evaluate the MB integral in Equivalence (112). This was achieved by expressing each MB integral as the sum of two separate integrals ranging from zero to infinity. Because the NIntegrate routine can miss sudden peaks occurring in the integrand, it is advisable to divide the range of integration into several smaller intervals. In addition, the routine can be fine-tuned by setting the options of AccuracyGoal, PrecisionGoal and WorkingPrecision to high values. Because Mathematica 4.1 is limited by the machine precision of the computer, which in this case was 16 decimal places, WorkingPrecision was set equal to 16, while the other options were set equal to 14. This limitation in the precision of the results due to machine precision does not apply to more recent versions of the software package such as Versions 6.0 to 8.0. Provided the input variables are not expressed as decimal numbers in these versions, the results can be obtained to unlimited precision, but it will come at a cost in the time taken to carry out the computation of the integrals. Finally, in obtaining the results for the MB integrals, the options of MinRecursion and MaxRecursion, which determine the minimum and maximum number of sample points used within the NIntegrate routine, were set equal to 3 and 10, respectively. Again, these can be adjusted, but at the expense of the CPU time.

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Because of the limitation on the working precision in the evaluation of the MB integral in Equivalence (112) and the fact that the accuracy and precision goals were set to 14, we can at best expect that the above results will only be accurate to about 14 significant figures. This situation applies to all the values in the table for The and values in the third column represent the values one obtains by adopting standard asymptotics. Thus, we see that the truncated values are quite inaccurate and can only be regarded as estimates despite the fact that we are effectively carrying out this numerical study for which is much smaller than or 4/5. This inaccuracy is expected because for this value of the optimal point of truncation or is equal to unity.

For values of greater than 5, we can see that the regularised value displayed in the final column is not as accurate as the results. This is because the truncated series begins to grow dramatically or rather diverges. To compensate for this divergence, the value of MB integral diverges in the opposite sense such that when it is combined with the truncated series, it yields a less accurate regularised value resulting from the cancellation of redundant decimal places. Hence, by the time the truncation parameter reaches a value of 20, we find that the truncated series is of the order of which means that the first 10 significant figures will be cancelled before the regularised value for the series on the lhs of Eq. (113) can be obtained. As a result, the regularised value in the final column for the form is only accurate to 5 decimal places, all brought on by the machine precision of the computing system.

It should also be pointed out that all the values in this table and subsequent tables have not been rounded off at any stage. That is, the final digits displayed in the table represent in all cases the output that is printed out by running the computer programs. In addition, the values of the MB integrals for in the table have been asterisked because problems occurred during their computation. In fact, for the regularised value in the final column is not even correct. This is an indication that numerical integration is largely a “black art” relying on the intuition of the programmer to gauge the limitations of the software being used.

In this example the integrand outside the Mathematica module has been set equal to

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Hence, the main module requires the value of and arg as input before proceeding to calculate the value of ( arg The problem with the above form for the integrand is that may become very large or very small before it is countered by the factor of and/or the other factors in the integrand. When this occurs, Mathematica alerts the user that it is experiencing convergence problems in the numerical integration. The asterisked results in Table 1 are examples of this type of occurrence. In fact, what is surprising about these results is that although convergence problems did arise in the evaluation of the MB integral, the software package was still able to give accurate values for the regularised value in all but the last calculation, i.e. for and

Let us now raise the ante by carrying out calculations using a more recent version of the software, namely Version 7.0.1, on a PowerMac G5 with 1.25 GB of RAM. We shall also carry out calculations with on the same system. Hence, we shall present two tables of results: the first will display the result obtained for and arg situated in the upper half of the principal branch, viz. arg while the second table will display the results for and arg It would simply inconceivable to consider such values of in standard asymptotics as truncation would lead to extremely inaccurate results. Moreover, as a result of the discussion in the previous paragraph, we shall re-write the integrand for the NIntegate routine as

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This provides us with the best opportunity of avoiding convergence problems. The Mathematica module used to generate the results in the tables appears in the appendix.

Before the code was used to generate the results for various values of arg , it was re-run for the same set of values in Table 1, thereby enabling a comparison to be made between both computing systems. Not only was the second computing system much quicker, it was also able to generate values for much larger values of the truncation parameter, i.e. for values where the Pentium plus Mathematica 4.1 system experienced convergence problems. For many of the results took less than 30 s of CPU time on the more powerful system, whereas with the previous system they took several minutes to compute despite the fact that the precision and accuracy goals were set to much lower values. Nevertheless, regardless of the value of it should be emphasised that problems with convergence as well as with precision and accuracy goals will also arise with the more powerful system, once the truncation parameter or becomes sufficiently large. This will be discussed later when we consider the case of and arg

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Table 2 presents another sample of the results obtained by running the Mathematica module in the appendix on a Power Mac G5 equipped with Mathematica 7.0.1. Not all the decimal places for the various results are displayed due to limitations in space. Because the truncation parameter was not very large, i.e. was generally taken to be less than 25, the regularised values in the final column are accurate to at least 30 decimal places. As a consequence, one is not able to observe any variation in any one of the regularised values.

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From the table we see that for those values of arg where both the and forms of Equivalence (112) are valid, we ultimately obtain the same regularised value. Therefore, we have two completely different forms for the regularised value yielding identical results, which is in accordance with Euler’s first view about divergent series. Moreover, we see that altering the truncation parameter for the same value of yields the same regularised value even though the truncated series and MB integrals are different for each value of This also accords with Euler’s second view that one should obtain the same value or limit for an infinite series irrespective of the approach or method used to obtain it.

Table 3 presents a sample of the results obtained by running the Mathematica module in the appendix again on the Power Mac G5 with Mathematica 7.0.1, but on this occasion, has been set equal to 2 and arg is less than zero. This means that the MB-regularised values can only be evaluated by using the and forms of Equivalence (112). As for the previous table not all the decimal places of the values in the columns are displayed here. The major difference between this table and the previous one is that the truncation parameter did not need to be reasonably large before both the truncated series and MB integral began to diverge rapidly. E.g., for the magnitude of both the truncated series and MB integral is of the order of However, as they diverge in opposite directions, there is a great cancellation of decimal places in arriving at the regularised value of the series.

The main characteristics or features of Table 2 are also evident in Table 3. Although the common region is different, viz. arg both the and forms of Equivalence (112) yield identical results for the regularised value of This is despite the fact that the jump discontinuity is different for both forms. In addition, altering the truncation parameter for a fixed value of arg yields the same value for the regularised value of even though the truncated series and MB integrals vary for each value of In fact, the difference between choosing a value of in the intermediate region and one in the large region is that the truncated series and MB integrals do not diverge as rapidly in the former case as they do in the latter case.

Table 4 presents a sample of the results for the regularised value of obtained from the Borel-summed forms given by Equivalence (110). These have been evaluated by running the second Mathematica program in the appendix with and arg 0" src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black{z}>{0}$" /> on the same Power Mac G5 computer equipped with Mathematica 7.0.1. As can be seen from the code, the options in the call to the NIntegrate routine were set to the same values as in the previous module. As was the case for the two preceding tables, not all the decimal places for the results could be displayed here. One interesting feature about these results is that they took considerably less time to compute than their MB-regularised counterparts. In general, they took only a few CPU seconds to compute compared with the MB-regularised values, which took between 20 and 90 seconds and even longer on the system with the Pentium computer and Mathematica 4.1. This is quite surprising because the opposite was found to be the case when evaluating the regularised values from the MB-regularised and Borel-summed forms for the complete asymptotic expansion of in Ref. 7.

The first column in Table 4 presents the value of the truncation parameter that was used to evaluate the various quantities on the rhs of Equivalence (110). The next column displays the values of used in evaluating the Stokes discontinuity term in the equivalence statement. As indicated previously, these integers are dependent on the value of arg which appear in the third column of the table. The next column displays the values of the truncated series, viz. the second term on the rhs of Eq. (113), while the fifth and sixth columns display the values corresponding to the other terms on the rhs of Equivalence (110). The integral on the rhs of Equivalence (110) is referred to here as the Borel integral. The final column presents the Borel-summed regularised values of These have been calculated by summing the corresponding quantities in the three adjoining columns.

Used only with express written permission

From Table 4 it can be seen that the regularised value of remains invariant for each value of arg That is, irrespective of the value selected for the truncation parameter, we end up with the same regularised value for the entire series. Each value of results in a completely different integrand to be computed by the NIntegrate routine, which means effectively that different methods are being employed to evaluate the regularised value. Nevertheless, the regularised value remains invariant as it did when the truncation parameter was altered in the MB-regularised forms of the regularised value. From the table it can be seen that for 10" src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black{N}>{10}$" /> the truncated series diverges rapidly, while the Borel integral obliges by diverging in the opposite direction. Even for the smaller values of the truncation parameter the truncated series represents a poor approximation to the regularised value, which highlights the fact that the truncated series is only a good approximation when is very small, namely less than 0.01.

Because the regularised values in Table 4 have been evaluated by using the same options in the NIntegrate routine as those in Table 2, we can make a direct comparison between the corresponding results. As a result, we observe for the same value of arg that the regularised values are identical to one another within the precision and accuracy goals set in the modules. This means that the regularised value of can be evaluated by combining Eq. (113) with either the Borel-summed form given by Equivalence (110) or the MB-regularised form given by Equivalence (112). In other words, we have two totally different methods yielding the same regularised value, which is in agreement with the second of Euler’s “unorthodox” views.

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Table 5 presents another sample of the results obtained by running the second module in the appendix on the Power Mac G5 with Mathematica 7.0.1, but on this occasion and arg lies in the lower half of the complex plane. This table is composed of the same quantities appearing in the previous table. As in the case of Table 4, they were computed far more quickly than their MB-regularised counterparts displayed in Table 3. Nevertheless, we see that when the value of arg is fixed, the regularised value of remains invariant as the truncation parameter is varied. Of course, this is provided that it is not sufficiently large to cause convergence problems.

As can also be seen from the table, the truncated series diverges rapidly once is greater than 3. As expected, the divergence is much greater and more rapid than the truncated series for again confirming that the truncated series will only be accurate for very small values of where there is an optimal point of truncation. Furthermore, we find that for the same value of arg the regularised value appearing in the final column of Table 5 is identical to the corresponding value in Table 3. Hence, both MB-regularised and Borel-summed forms yield identical values for the regularised value of

Now let us examine the evaluation of the regularised values of via the Borel-summed forms given in Equivalence (110). Although the Stokes discontinuity term or the second term on the rhs of Equivalence (110) is identical to the extra term on the rhs of the MB-regularised value given by Equivalence (112), it appears at different values of in the principal branch. We have already seen that the MB-regularised value for arg can be written in terms of an MB integral without the extra term, i.e. in Equivalence (112), or it can be expressed in terms of another MB integral with the value of the extra term on the rhs of Equivalence (112). However, the extra term or Stokes discontinuity term is zero for Borel-summed regularised values when |arg but yields a contribution when arg That is, in Equivalence (110) for |arg while for arg . we put in the upper-signed version and for arg we put in the lower-signed version. Nevertheless, we find that whichever form is used to evaluate the regularised value of the series, we still obtain the same value even when the truncation parameter is varied.

All that remains is to describe the evaluation of the Borel-summed forms for the regularised value of along the Stokes lines of arg To accomplish this, another Mathematica module needs to be created, which can evaluate all the terms on the rhs of Equivalence (111), in particular the Cauchy principal value. In Mathematica 7.0.1 this is achieved by specifying Method-> ‘PrincipalValue’ in the call to the NIntegrate routine. Unfortunately, because this can fail, as is explained in Sec.11.3 of Ref. 9, it is better to evaluate the Cauchy principal value by using the special add-on package in Mathematica 4.1 or by specifying the singularity in the range of integration. The latter approach is adopted here. Although separate modules will be required for the and cases, for brevity we shall only consider the latter case. The Mathematica module for this value of appears in the appendix. Since the singularity in the Cauchy integral occurs at in this instance, we see that appears in the division of the range of integration in the NIntegrate routine. Once again, the options of WorkingPrecision, AccuracyGoal, PrecisionGoal, MinRecursion and MaxRecursion were set to the same values used to obtain the results presented in Tables 2 to 5.

Table 6 presents a sample of the results obtained by setting arg in the third module in the appendix and then varying the truncation parameter All the values in the table were computed within a few CPU seconds. As we have observed in the previous tables where the truncated series begins to diverge rapidly for fairly small values of the truncation parameter, but is countered by the divergence in the opposite direction by the Cauchy principal value integral, whose values appear in the column denoted by PV Integral. As is typical for this Stokes line, the Stokes discontinuity term is purely imaginary. In Ch. 1 of Ref. 12, Dingle gives a rule based on this behaviour for continuing asymptotic expansions across a Stokes line. In particular, he states that an asymptotic series generates a discontinuity that is out of phase or imaginary with the series. Although this occurs in the fourth column of Table 6, it only occurs because for the Stokes discontinuity. For other values of this need not necessarily be the case.

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Even though a large range of values for the truncation parameter has been considered, we always obtain the same regularised value, which can also be checked with the corresponding MB-regularised value displayed in Table 3. However, whilst the correct value was obtained for Mathematica did indicate problems with internal precision in the calculation of the Cauchy principal value integral. This is presumably due to the fact that 56 decimal places had to be cancelled before the regularised value could be determined. Consequently, this value is asterisked in the table. Nevertheless, the results in the table again vindicate Euler’s view that the value assigned to an infinite series should be independent of the method used to determine it.

At the beginning of Part 4 it was mentioned that a numerical study of generalised Type II terminants has already been carried out in Ref. 9. Consequently, there is no need to present another numerical investigation into this type of terminant here, but only to summarise the results in Ref. 9. Again, it was found that both the MB-regularised and Borel-summed forms for the regularised value yielded identical results for all values of the variable taken over the entire principal branch of the complex plane as we have observed here with Type I terminants. Thus, we find that Euler's “unorthodox views” hold regardless of the type of terminant being studied.

It was also implied at the end of Part 2 that more general or sophisticated series than terminants would need to be studied in order to develop a complete theory of divergent series, an issue which will be discussed at length in Part 5. A typical example is the highly divergent series P(z), given by

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This particular series appears in Ref. 9 as an example of a general Type II series where f(k) and z^k in the a_k of Eq. (1) are equal to Γ(2k)Γ(k+ν/2)/Γ(ν/2-k+1) and z^7k/3, respectively. On the other hand, the Type I version of this asymptotic series possesses an extra alternating phase factor of (-1)^k in its coefficients.

The series given by Eq. (114) can be MB-regularised, but it is not Borel-summable in the manner described in Part 2. However, at the end of the part it was indicated that Borel summation can be extended to general Type I and Type II series provided f(k) can be expressed as a Mellin transform. To see how this applies to Eq. (114), we note that the quotient of the gamma functions appears in a more general form in the integral given by

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Hence, putting k=2k, p=2, q=0, and a=2 in the above result produces the precise form for the quotient of gamma functions appearing in Eq. (114). By introducing the resulting integral into Eq. (114) and interchanging the order of the summation and integration, we arrive at a series where the summation over k is only in powers of k. Since this alternative series is merely a variant of the geometric series, it can be regularised as described in Part I. E.g., for the Stokes sector of , the extended Borel-summed form of the regularised value of P(z) is found to be

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The above result, which is composed of a Cauchy integral and a jump discontinuity, is typical of the Borel-summed forms presented earlier in this part and also in Part 2. Hence, we have observed that Borel summation can be extended to far more complicated asymptotic series than those with gamma function growth in their coefficients as in the case of generalised terminants, but of course, this is provided that the coefficients can be expressed as a Mellin transform in the series. By using the extended Borel-summed forms such as Equivalence (116) and the corresponding MB-regularised forms for the regularised value of P(z), we can carry out another extensive numerical study as has already been done in Ref. 9. Yet again, it was found that the regularised values obtained from both sets of asymptotic forms agree with each other for numerous values of over the entire principal branch of the complex plane. That is, the two entirely different methods for regularising an asymptotic series yield the same regularised values. As a consequence, we can now be confident that the MB-regularised forms will yield the correct regularised value of the asymptotic expansion for the original function when the extended Borel-summed forms cannot be derived. Since on this occasion a far more complicated series than a terminant has been considered, we also see that Euler’s “unorthodox views” are going to apply to all divergent series even though a complete theory of divergent series is yet to be realised. As stated previously, the issue of developing a complete theory of divergent series is addressed in the next or concluding part of this article.

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Dating in My Seventies ...

2012-01-25T15:01:50-05:00

“Mirrors don’t lie,” my mother told me. Or do they? “A picture is worth a thousand words.” “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Another gem was “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” Keep these sayings in mind if you want to successfully survive the ordeal known as internet dating for seniors.

I remember dating as a teenager in the 50s in the Bronx, New York. The guy always called the girl. If the date was for a Saturday night, then the call must come no later than the previous Monday night. If the call came on a Tuesday, the response was “Sorry, I’m busy.” If she consented, it indicated that the girl was a loser. Typically the prospective datee would wait by the phone Monday evening, let it ring exactly two and one half times, and answer with a dreamy “Hello-o-o.” After a little bit of small talk, the guy would pop the question, “Are you free on Saturday night?” After a pause long enough to allow water to boil, the girl would indicate that she was available for a date on Saturday night. Arrangements and plans were made as to time of pick up and whether it was a party or a movie. And the guy always, always came to the girl’s house to call for his date. This gave the parents a chance to grill the boy, which in turn was good preparation for him for future job interviews. No driving to a predetermined destination to meet up, even if the guy lived in Brooklyn and the girl lived in the Bronx. Very few teenagers had cars so we traveled by subway, bus or, on very special occasions, by taxi.

The day of the date arrives and the girl starts preparing at 4 PM for an 8 PM pick up. She carefully selects her outfit and lays it on her bed alongside her freshly laundered linen handkerchief sprayed with perfume, probably Chanel Number 5. She takes a long, soaking bubble bath and has her hair in curlers. She carefully applies and reapplies her make-up, but not too much of it. It has to look natural. She checks to see that her hosiery seams are straight on her legs which were shaved and lotioned that afternoon. Not a hair is out of place and the entire family is giddy with excitement. Mom made sure that the house was sparkling clean with an aroma of freshly baked cookies coming from the kitchen.

The doorbell rings exactly at 8 PM. Even though the preparation for the date took four hours, the girl is not quite ready. The father, hopefully, in his jacket and holding his pipe, greets the lucky guy, and after much awkwardness, the inquisition begins. Where are you going? When will you bring my daughter home? What do you do? on and on. If the guy survives the ordeal, this man-in-training has promise. Then the vision appears. A perfectly groomed, ladylike young woman enters the living room with a smile that will melt your heart. She kisses her parents goodbye and the date begins. Of course, if the girl lives in an apartment house, even better, for now the neighbors have a chance to cluck and make judgments and maybe provide feedback the following week.

The date proceeds well enough and then it’s time to bring the princess home. It is dark, the apartment house lobby and the hallways are filled with silent night sounds. At the door to her apartment, the well-brought up young lady, who incidentally never opens her purse except to powder her nose, thanks the boy for a lovely evening, has her key handy and opens the door and sweetly whispers, “Good night.” Good night kiss? Are you kidding! No decent girl would offer more than a dry peck on the cheek, if that much. If the guy was dumb enough to ask, “May I kiss you good night?” the answer was an icy, “I don’t kiss on the first date.” A lot of you reading this would nod in agreement. If a second date occurred, then maybe a little holding hands and maybe, maybe one and only one dry kiss. Only sluts would “French Kiss,” and even then not until you were “going steady.” When you went “steady” the rules of sex play and dating changed somewhat after the obligatory ID bracelet. But remember, there were still a lot of virgins in the 1950s.

Fifty years later, I gingerly, but eagerly reentered the dating environment. I recently lost my husband of fifty years. I knew that my life had to go on and I felt a need to find a kind and loving man to complete my life. I took the advice of my friends and children and signed on with the more popular cybernet dating services. I opted to do this because waiting for an introduction from my married friends would probably take forever and, let’s face it, neither I nor my prospective squires were getting any younger. Plus, I had already made the rounds of singles, senior discussion and bereavement groups where the same faces, none of which were particularly appealing, seemed to magically appear over and over. Clearly, more aggressive measures were warranted.

Let me tell you that I am an educated, attractive, athletic, talented, fun lady and I consider myself a “prize catch.” So, with confidence and few trepidations, I prepared my “profile.” I clearly stated that honesty was my strong suit so don’t test my patience with fiction and lies about your age, weight, height, health, education, etc. Don’t imply, for example, that you are a widower when in fact your wife died thirty years ago and you have subsequently been remarried and divorced twice. In my mind, you are a divorcee. The biggest offense, I’ve found, is lying about one’s age. Universally, the men tended to admit to their real age right up front after you met them in person.

Remember, a woman in our society, is permitted to lie about her age while a man is not But both are unacceptable in my view. However, the difference is that with plastic surgery, good make-up, and a push-up bra, a woman can hide it better. Also, thanks to on-line information, which I will never reveal how easy it is to get, the lies will appear ridiculous and stupid and only project false vanity. Instead, you should walk tall and be proud of the years you have lived. All the more if you have lived them with integrity and kindness.

So now, after some talk on the telephone or E-mail beforehand, a date is made to see if the two candidates for a relationship will click. By the way, the guys were advised to state in their profiles that they are looking for a long-term relationship because that is what women want to hear. Another fabrication! Most likely, the meeting takes place in a neutral, busy place like a coffee shop in a bookstore, or over lunch at a popular but modest restaurant. The man usually picks up the tab.

Once I met a prospective liar/date at the indoor mausoleum where our respective spouses are entombed. In order to accommodate his schedule, I had to rush home from my exercise class to shower and change and so I had no time to eat lunch. The “meeting” lasted less than an hour inside a mausoleum with not even a cup of coffee afterward. He said he would call me, but couldn’t say when he would do so. One man told me that after an expensive lunch in a trendy restaurant where his “date” showed up weighing 400 pounds and in a dirty muumuu, he vowed that the next time he met a woman from the internet for a drink, it will be at a public drinking fountain.

This honesty thing really gets to me because the question is what else is he lying about? The response I usually got was, “Would you have come to meet me if you knew my real age?” My snappy answer was, “Maybe. But now that I know you lied, I probably wouldn’t want to date you because you indeed did lie to me.”

One of my male friends warned me to be careful because there are a lot of “sleazy predators” out there. So far, I’ve only run into lying, delusional men with some very disgusting personal habits like picking one’s teeth and examining the contents in full view of everyone in the restaurant, chewing with their mouths open, dressing inappropriately for a first encounter, talking incessantly about their last relationship, not even politely asking one question about my life, drinking hard liquor at four in the afternoon, taking off one’s shoes and asking me to look at an area on his foot that was causing some pain, (as if I were a podiatrist, maybe), not calling on the phone when promised, self-absorption, and just plain rudeness.

Today, having a man over to your house to pick you up for a date, is questionable and chancy. In all likelihood, your protective, would be ninety-year-old Dad is not around to ask those good questions.

I’ve been told by a male dating maven that the dating rules have changed as in the movie Boynton Beach Club which dealt with the issue of love and dating among the seniors in South Florida. The film raised some excellent questions and explored the emotional issues and concerns of seniors. One of the male characters implied that he was in real estate when in fact he was an exterminator.

Ladies, be careful, and remember your critical reading skills. While it is natural to pad one’s resume and use buzz words, beware of terms like “walking on the beach at sunset,” “romantic candlelight dinners,” “travel” which probably means taking a cruise to the Caribbean with the Hadassah group, seeing if there is “chemistry,” and other shibboleths.

I’ve become a profile junkie and can categorize them into two major types: promising and dismal. First I look at the photos. The pictures at best are unclear and probably taken ten years ago lending credibility to my exaggeration theory. Then the age listed is inaccurate but inadvertently revealed in the narrative portion of the profile. Some men write on and on in detail about who they are, what they like, who they want to meet. As a woman reads this profile opus, she mentally forms an idea like, “Yeah, this is a guy I can go for.” After a while, you realize that these writings could appeal to any woman out there because they are so generic.

Then there are the profiles that either purposely or inadvertently leave out a lot of information. Watch the typing, grammar, and spelling which can be very revealing. People are complicated and if you have lived this long, you have been exposed to life’s ups and downs. You hope for the ideal, but ladies, go to a good movie instead if you want handsome, charming, toned, and flat abs. If you are lucky, you will meet a “MENSCH” with a pot belly and not a “PLAYA” with a pot belly, at a coffee shop date, who you will want to see again and who will make you laugh. After all, we are in this human race together and I can understand the loneliness, fear of rejection and lack of confidence on the part of some men, which may partially explain the attempted deceptions.

On a positive note, I have found that all the men I have either met or spoken to on the telephone are indeed a lot of fun and made me laugh. Is the laughter enough, you may ask, to go through all this in order to maybe, someday, perhaps, possibly meet the one who will be your lover, friend, partner for the rest of your life? Who knows? “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” as Mom said.

I remember another of my mother’s sayings, “Treat your man like a king, and he will make you a queen.” I did and most of the time during my marriage, I felt like a queen. Is there a king out there seeking a lady-in-waiting? Let me give you my E-mail address and cell phone number. Maybe we can meet for a coffee. I don’t sit waiting by the phone on Monday nights any more.

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What to Do If One of th...

2012-01-25T13:34:27-05:00

What To Do If One of the Partners or Owners Is Not Insurable In Your Business Buy-Sell Agreement

How To Solve The Buy-Out Funding Dilemma When You Can’t Buy Insurance?

Most business advice columns on buy-sell agreements contain an underlying assumption that all of the owners and partners are healthy enough to obtain life insurance or disability income insurance.

The primary reason a business would fund the buy-sell agreement with a life insurance policy on each owner is that the insurance contract shifts the risk to the insurance company. If one or more shareholders dies before the other owners have saved enough money to buy the shares away from the deceased owner’s estate, then the insurance benefits will provide the needed cash.

The same type of risk shifting occurs with the purchase of a disability insurance policy on all the owners, in the event that an owner becomes disabled and the other owners have to buy out her shares. The disability buy-out insurance is a different policy than the disability income insurance that funds the monthly salary for the disabled owner.

But, what do the owners do in the case where insurance cannot be purchased because one of the owners is not insurable?

The dilemma arises because the legal terms and conditions of the buy-sell agreement obligate the other owners to buy the shares, and mandate that the deceased owner’s shares be sold, for an agreed upon price, no matter when the death or disability event occurs.

Coordinating the Legal Buy-Sell Agreement with the Cash Flow Needs of the Company

In the event that there is not insurance in place, then the legal agreement should contain provisions that allow for an installment sale process, where the other owners, in a cross-purchase arrangement, or the company, in the entity arrangement, buy the shares away from the estate over time.

Generally, the agreement would contain the business value, that is updated every year, according to an agreed upon formula.

The agreement would specify the agreed upon initial down payment on the purchase of the shares, and the correct rate of interest to be paid on the remaining balance, for the principal and interest payments, until all the shares have been purchased.

Both of the provisions about down payment and periodic monthly installments must be adjusted to fit the reality and needs of cash flow in the business, or salary needs of the other owners.

Combining an Installment Buy-Sell with Partial Insurance Coverage

Sometimes, the uninsurable owner may have an existing personal policy that can be legally re-titled or modified to suit the purposes of the buy-sell funding requirements. This is not a good solution, because the outside policy probably had some logic or rationale to serve another death benefit need when it was first purchased.

Re-designating the goals and purpose of the outside policy is suboptimal, but is sometimes necessary. Even when an outside existing policy can be found, the death benefit may not be high enough to serve the purposes of the buy-sell business valuation.

If the outside existing life insurance policy is going to be used, then the legal terms and conditions of the buy-sell agreement must contain provisions that allow for a combined installment sale in conjunction with partial insurance death benefit proceeds.

The attorney who prepares the business buy-sell agreement must coordinate the legal agreement with the legal contractual terms of the life insurance policy, including a possible re-titling of the ownership, premium payer and beneficiaries.

This is very complicated and fraught with tax consequences for both the surviving business owners, and the estate of the deceased owner. Both professional legal help, estate help and tax help will be required to assist handling this case. Plus, the types of insurance death benefits options available in the insurance contract will need to be coordinated with the legal agreements.

A slight variation on this idea of using an existing outside insurance policy to fund part of the buy-sell agreement involves the use of an existing term insurance policy, or even the purchase of a new term policy, for a death benefit and premium that covers the risk of a very early death, within the first several years of the buy-sell enactment.

The very early years of the buy-sell are the most risky for all the owners because the company and the owners do not have the financial resources then that they may accumulate in the later years. In other words the gap in funding for the buy-sell agreement from non life insurance coverage is greatest in the early periods.

The insurance underwriting of the term life insurance companies, especially for smaller amounts of death benefit are not quite as restrictive or onerous as for a universal life or whole life insurance policy.

If the term life insurance idea is going to be implemented on the non-insurable owner, then the legal terms of the buy-sell agreement must contain provisions describing how the term insurance death benefits are coordinated with the provisions of the buy-sell agreement.

Combining an Installment Buy-Sell with Internal Cash Values from the Other Owners Insurance Contracts

The buy-sell agreement contains an agreed upon future business value that will be used to assess the dollar value of each owner’s share of the company.

Imagine that the company business value is $300,000 and each of the 3 owners owns 33% of the company.

Assume that one of the three owners can not obtain life insurance.

The total amount of death benefit needed to fund the entire buy-out of the non-insurable owner is $100,000.

The two insurable owners can do two things to help cover the gap in funding on the other owner. First, they can buy and own a type of insurance policy that contains an automatic yearly increase in death benefit on themselves. The automatic increase rider costs a little bit more, but tends to avoid a problem down the road on the funding gap if the company becomes more profitable.

In the example, the current year value of the company is $100,000 for each owner. If one of the insured owners happens to die first, before the non-insured owner, then part of the future funding dilemma can be moderated as a result of the automatic death benefit increase.

Second, the insurable owners can buy a type of life insurance policy that has high rates of internal cash value build up, especially in the early years of the agreement. The internal cash value can be designated to be used to cover part of the funding gap caused by one partner not having an insurance policy.

Sometimes, this idea is called “split-dollar” where parts of the insurance policy are split between different parties.

The attorney who drafts the buy-sell agreement will need to coordinate with the lawyers for the insurance company how the life insurance policies will be titled and owned.

Establishing the Company Escrow Investment Account to Fund the Buy-Sell

One idea to help solve the funding gap on the non-insurable owner is to begin funding a company investment account where the funds are escrowed and held for the specific purpose of funding the buy-out.

Each month, or periodically, the company would fund the escrow investment account, just like funding insurance premiums. The goal for the company would be to fully fund, or self-insure, the amount required to buy out the non-insurable owner.

The attorney who prepares the buy-sell agreement would insert provisions into the legal agreement on the uses of the escrow funds, tied to the buy-sell agreement.

In an entity arrangement, where the company buys the shares from the estate, this idea is less complicated than when it is combined with a cross-purchase agreement, where the other owners are buying the shares from the estate.

The company would generally open an investment or savings account, titled and owned by the company, and managed by the company. Generally, the company would probably want to obtain outside independent investment advice on the management of the account, to avoid conflict-of-interest or other fiduciary issues.

Buying the Uninsurable Owner a Deferred Annuity to Fund the Buy-Out

Most deferred annuities contain payout provisions on the death of the annuity owner. The insurance underwriting requirements of an annuity are not as restrictive as the underwriting for a life insurance policy.

So, in the event that an owner is not insurable for life insurance, that owner may still be able to buy and own a deferred annuity.

The company, or the other owners, would make periodic premium payments to the annuity, just like the case of insurance premiums in a life insurance contract.

The future income benefits and future death benefits of the annuity would match the values of the company in the buy-sell agreement. The future income benefits would match the terms and conditions of the installment sale provisions, and the death benefit would designate the pay out to fund the buy out from the owner’s estate.

The attorney who drafts the buy-sell agreement would need to coordinate the provisions of the agreement with the title and beneficiary of the annuity.

In the case of retirement, instead of death of the uninsured owner, the annuity income payments can be used to fund a living buy-out of the owner’s interest.

Obtaining a Contingent Business Loan or Commercial Financing to Fund the Buy-Out

Sometimes, the revenues and cash flows of the company are so good that a bank or commercial finance company would consider offering credit or loans to fund the future buy out of the owner’s shares.

Often, the loan could be secured or collateralized with equipment or real estate owned by the company.

It may be a good idea to begin negotiations with asset-based lenders on financing invoices or receivables that could be implemented at the time of death or disability of the non-insured owner. The commercial finance companies require a lead-time to assess the risk associated with a contingent loan to be made in the future.

For commercial banks, the future contingent loan to fund the buy-out may look to the bank like a future line of untapped working capital. As in the case with a commercial finance asset-based lender, the commercial bank will need time to underwrite their risk in offering that future line of credit to fund the buy out.

The bank may be more interested in offering the buy out loan if it is attached to an active line of credit or working capital, so early negotiations would be a good idea.

The attorney preparing the legal buy sell agreement would incorporate provisions regarding the authority of the company to obtain a future loan to fund the buy out and also prepare the board’s resolution to authorize a future contingent loan linked to the buy-sell agreement.

The Private Capital Market® Business Insurance Buy/Sell Agreements Series

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Apple's iPad iBook 2: T...

2012-01-23T15:07:57-05:00

Apple's iBook 2 is the new elephant in the room for textbook publishing.

Many textbooks are already digitized at a basic level. There are general pluses to digital textbooks, including the saving of paper, interactive engageability, customizeabiliy to individual students and those with special gifts or needs, and the orthopedic relief to youngsters who now often schlepp 20 lb book bags.

But as a child-psychiatrist and technophile, I see vast potential benefits to a sensible coordinated system of digital textbooks. There are two overriding advantages to systematically and carefully integrating textbooks into the richness of the digital universe.

First, a broader collaboration of stakeholders: Textbooks, as do books in general, traditionally have created civilized communities of their readers across time and space. Now, on a day-to-day level, real time collaboration and sharing among librarians, teachers, students, parents, therapists, and primary sources could enlarge and enrich learning communities well-beyond the school walls, and do so not only through text, but also by audio and video. The modern classroom teacher, who personally knows the student and his or her learning and social experience, is the natural leader of such a student-centered community and must be given needed training, resources and support.

Secondly, the collaborative tradition could only be amplified by deep and broad well-managed accessibility to other resources through hyperlinking, also individualized, carefully edited, and filtered. Educational videogames can become integrated teaching tools, such as those of Houston's Archimage's Playnormous. Additionally, hyperlinked sources should include older texts, for example as digitized by Google 's visionary Book Library Project. Additionally, new worthwhile material related to the iBook 2 project must be well-annotated and organized and accessible to future generations, rather than disappear into the vast noise of cyberspace.

BTW, concerns about the distractions of other iPad content are not trivial. The device is engaging and magical. Teachers, parents, and software developers must bring technical solutions to maximize the benefits of media consumption while minimizing their power to distract (for example, Chicago's MyDigitalFamily's just introduced ZillyDilly for the iPad, which offers curated content while minimizing distraction.)

Finally, let's remember that the basic skills necessary to integrate and deliver great educational content do not need reinventing. These are already developed and well-practiced by the talented and expert folks who bring us our current wonderful textbooks. Working with these folks is the visionary power of Apple's iBook 2 project.

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Iran's Efforts to Devel...

2012-01-23T15:32:25-05:00

The war against Iran's nuclear program has already begun

In March 2012, Iran will hold an important election, perhaps the most crucial one it has ever had. The world’s attention is, however, mainly focused on Iran’s nuclear programme. Iran insists that this is for peaceful purposes only; western powers believe that Iran has ambitions to fabricate nuclear weapons.

Last November, the US, Canada and the UK announced new sanctions against Iran following the report from the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which said that the Agency has ‘credible’ evidence that Iran had experimented with nuclear-weapons design. (1). In addition, the US is freezing Iranian central bank assets and imposing an embargo on oil exports. But Iran was not referred to the UN Security Council because Russia and China were opposed to the move. Iran dismisses the threat of sanctions.

Covert attempts to disrupt Iran’s nuclear programme

Arguments are intensifying in both Israel and the USA about the need for a military attack to disrupt Iran’s nuclear programme. At the moment a covert programme of assassinations, cyberattacks, and bombings is underway in an attempt to slow down Iran’s nuclear activities. Many experts believe that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency is mainly responsible for carrying out these attacks, which include the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists.

Israel has a history of assassinations dating back to, for example, the killing in 1972 of the Palestinians involved in the Munich Olympic attack on Israeli athletes. The US CIA, however, is prevented, by Executive Order, from conducting assassinations, except for people suspected of being members of al-Qaida or the Taliban, on the argument that the USA is in combat with these groups.

On 11 January 2012, the fifth assassination in the past two years of an Iranian nuclear scientist took place, when 32-year old Mostafa Ahmadi-Roshan was killed in Tehran when assassins on a motor-bike stuck a magnetic mine (limpet bomb) to his car. This attack was similar to earlier attacks on Iranian scientists, allegedly associated with Iran’s nuclear programme; each time the assassins used motor cycles (2).

On 12 January 2010, a Tehran University physics professor was killed by a remote-controlled bomb; in November 2010, two bomb attacks in different parts of Tehran killed one nuclear scientist and injured another; and in July 2011, yet another scientist involved in Iran’s nuclear programme was assassinated by a motor cyclist.

According to a report in the New York Times, the latest assassination “drew an unusually strong condemnation from the White House and the State Department, which disavowed any American complicity. The statements by the United States appeared to reflect serious concern about the growing number of lethal attacks, which some experts believe could backfire by undercutting future negotiations and prompting Iran to redouble what the West suspects is a quest for a nuclear capacity” (3).

The report goes on: “Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared to expand the denial beyond Wednesday’s killing, “categorically” denying “any United States involvement in any kind of act of violence inside Iran.”

Western-imposed sanctions against Iran’s nuclear activities have not yet caused, and are unlikely to cause, Iran to falter in its nuclear activities. Quite the opposite – Iran has announced that it has begun enriching uranium at its new plant at Fordow. Built into 90 metres of mountain rock near the city of Qom, in the north of Iran, the facility, known as the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant (FFEP), would be extremely difficult, to say the least, to destroy by bombing.

The Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant

The existence of the FFEP, only came to light after it was identified by Western intelligence agencies in September 2009. Tehran said it began the project in 2007, but the IAEA believes design work started in 2006. According to the IAEA, “all nuclear material in the (Fordow) facility remains under the agency's containment and surveillance”.

As Yossi Melman, an influential feature writer and columnist for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, specializing in strategic issues and who reports on nuclear issues, wrote in a recent article, entitled The war against Iran's nuclear program has already begun (4), that a secret war against Iran's nuclear programme is underway. “It did not start this week or last month”, Melman wrote, “It has been under way for years, but only faint echoes have reached the public”.

For example, in June 2010, the computer system operating Iran’s main uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz was infected with a complex computer virus known as Stuxnet, which attacked the controller systems of the centrifuges, manufactured by Siemens, causing them to malfunction

At the end of 2011, a huge explosion occurred at a Revolutionary Guards military base some 40 kilometers (24 miles) west of Tehran. Among the many people killed was the Director of Iran's missile development programme, General Hassan Tehrani Moqaddam. Then, another powerful explosion occurred in Isfahan, which has a uranium conversion plant nearby. The extent of the damage done by the blast is unclear.

Each of these events involved key parts of Iran's nuclear programme – the conversion of uranium after it has been mined, the enrichment of uranium, and the means of delivering warheads by ballistic missiles. As Yossi Melman points out, these acts of sabotage require “sophistication, financial and technological resources, agents and precise intelligence. The prevailing assumption is that foreign intelligence agencies are initiating, managing and executing the secret operations”.

He goes on: “The Iranians, and international media outlets, believe these operations are the work of Israel's Mossad and possibly also a Western partner such as the CIA or Britain's MI6”. It has also been suggested that Mossad may have recruited Iranian dissidents to undertake operations in Iran.

Melman quotes Gary Samore, US President Barack Obama's special assistant and coordinator for arms control and weapons of mass destruction, proliferation and terrorism, who said in May 2011, "I'm glad to hear they are having troubles with their centrifuge machines, and the U.S. and its allies are doing everything we can to make it more complicated." This is close to an admission that America and its allies are behind the sabotage of Iran’s nuclear programme.

Iran may be years away from a nuclear weapon

The IAEA claims that Iran plans to produce uranium enriched to 19.7 per cent in the isotope uranium-235 at the FFEP. It may soon have 348 gas centrifuges operating at the FFEP, producing about 8.4 kilograms per month of uranium enriched to 19.7 per cent in the isotope uranium-235. About 20 kilograms of uranium enriched to 90 per cent, called weapon-grade uranium, would be needed to fabricate a nuclear weapon. The (19.7 per cent) enriched uranium produced at the FFEP could be further enriched at the plant to produce weapon-grade uranium for nuclear weapons.

According to Gregory S. Jones, in a paper produced for the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (5), as of 1 November 2011, Iran had stockpiles of 2,810 kilograms of uranium enriched to 3.5 per cent in uranium-235 and 517 kilograms of uranium enriched to 19.7 per cent in uranium-235.

Jones concludes that, although Iran could produce weapon-grade uranium relatively quickly - in months rather than years – “this does not mean that I think Iran will become an overt nuclear weapon state any time soon. It can continue to move ever closer to the highly-enriched uranium required for a nuclear weapon with the blessing of the IAEA. Iran would only need to divert nuclear material from (IAEA) safeguards when it would want to test or use a nuclear weapon”. This may be years away.

A military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is not a reasonable option

The US Navy routinely sends warships through the Strait of Hormuz. Recently, Iran has been conducting a series of naval exercises in the Persian Gulf and has successfully test-fired a number of missiles – including, a surface-to-sea Qader cruise missile, a shorter range Nasr missile, a surface-to-surface Nour missile, and a medium-range surface-to-air missile.

Iran also has conducted naval exercises, lasting 10 days, near the Strait of Hormuz. These, according to Iran, were "mock" exercises on shutting the strait but said that it had no intention of closing it. To do so would be very damaging to Tehran, economically, politically and militarily. In any case, the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain would move to prevent such a closure. The Strait of Hormuz is a narrow 30-mile-wide (48 kilometres) channel, through which 20% of the world's oil is moved.

The combination of the US election this year and the escalation of media and diplomatic pressure around Iran’s nuclear programme is increasing speculation about a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, by Israel or the USA or both. An all-out military attack is, however, not a reasonable option.

But threats to attack, and counter-threats to close the Straits of Hormuz, will probably go on for the foreseeable future. Iran will want to demonstrate that it is a powerful country and that it will not allow sanctions to intimidate it or to affect its military posture. The US and the west will want to show that they are standing up to Iran. It is an old-style display of military power.

Conclusion

Military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities would be absurd and counter-productive. A military attack from the air could not destroy all of Iran’s nuclear capability. After a military attack Iran would devote all its scientific and technical resources to fabricate nuclear weapons as quickly as possible, will the full support of the Iranian people. It would be much more sensible to move forward by negotiations without preconditions.

References

1. International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement and relevant provisions of Security Council resolutions in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Vienna, 8 November 2011.

2. Saeed Kamali Dehghan and Julian Borger, Nuclear chemist is fifth victim of daylight assassins on motorbikes, The Guardian, 12 January 2012, pp.4–5.

3. Scott Shane, Adversaries of Iran Said to Be Stepping Up Covert Actions, New York Times, 11 January 2012.

4. Yossi Melman, The war against Iran's nuclear program has already begun, Hareetz, 2 December 2011. www.haaretz.com/misc/writers/yossi

5. Gregory S. Jones, Iran’s Efforts to Develop Nuclear Weapons Explicated, paper prepared for the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, 6 December 2011. www.npolicy.org/

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Farmer Power: The Conti...

2012-01-23T15:32:19-05:00

Day by day, the peasants make the economists sigh, the politicians sweat, and the strategists swear, defeating their plans and prophecies all over the world—Moscow and Washington, Peking and Delhi, Cuba and Algeria, the Congo and Vietnam (Shanin 1966:5)

Economists, politicians, and strategists since at least the end of World War II dream of the world’s rural farmers becoming a wealthy, healthy, and modern middle class. Implicit to this dream is peasants moving off the farms of China, India, Africa, and Latin America to staff factories in an ever-wealthier world. When this doesn’t happen, the Ph.D.s do indeed sigh, sweat, and swear not at themselves, but at the peasants that frustrate the models on which their development plans are based. In the process though, they forget one thing: the very nature of the world’s subsistence peasants. Subsistence peasants farm, feed themselves, build their own houses, have children, grow old, while producing little for the world markets that the economists celebrate. In short, peasants resist the siren song of the economists’ models, no matter how effectively it might be packaged by cheerleaders for globalization and free markets including U2 frontman Bono, UN Secretary Generals, US Presidents, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, or economist Jeffrey Sachs.

The Two Great Transitions in Human History

Anthropologists and historians talk about the two great transformations in human organization. The first began 8,000-10,000 years ago when Neolithic farmers emerged from scattered groups of hunter-gatherers. During the following millennia they became clans who as a small unit together tilled the earth, raised animals, built permanent houses invented village life, and even at times created empires. The economists dream though of a second transition begun only about 400 years ago, and continuing today. In this transition, the same farmers—heirs to the Neolithic—are moving into a modern market economy in which tasks are highly specialized, and trade in the global marketplace is key. In this transition there are governments and banks gambling big money that millennia are not needed before a world-straddling market economy emerges. Indeed, economist William Easterly estimates that since World War II over $2.3 trillion was spent to entice these farmers into the new global marketplace by the World Bank, United States Agency for International Development, European Community Humanitarian Organization, and so forth.

So why didn’t such a big investment necessarily work during the five and ten year plans of the economists? Simply put it is because subsistence farmers of the Neolithic are outside the ethic of the economist’s modern marketplace, and relatively immune to its enticements. Subsistence farmers traditionally grow most of what they eat, build the houses they live in from local materials, and make the clothes they wear independently from the marketplace. Their small surpluses go to harvest celebrations, or as tribute to the chief, prince, king, or other leader who provides relief supplies in the event of famine. Indeed, what is produced by subsistence farmers never even has a market price put on it. But life was good for farmers with access to hoes, plows, unclaimed arable land, and rainfall; in good years there was enough food to support a rapidly expanding population. In better years there was something left over that could be traded for minor luxuries, or offered as tribute to a potentially rapacious warlord. And so, across the millennia, values, norms, and culture emerged to justify and accommodate the nature of subsistence farming. First was loyalty to kin, and tribute to a feudal leader who maintained the famine socks and organized defense. The abstract nation-states, citizenship, and market principles of the economists and politicians were yet to be invented as the organizing principle for larger societies.

In short, subsistence peasants, while vulnerable to catastrophe, were more independent of the marketplace than we moderns. If markets failed, life on the farm was more uncomfortable, but there was still food to eat, and a place to live. In the modern market though, market failure means that unpaid workers are evicted from their houses or unable to buy food. Subsistence farmers, when viewed from this perspective, had it quite good as long as land was plentiful and rains came. Indeed, this is why Karl Marx when dreaming of world revolution, compared France’s unrevolutionary nineteenth century subsistence peasants to an inert sackful of potatoes. Marx complained that like potatoes in a sack, no peasant household was much different from any other. The French peasants contributed little to the efficient globalized markets emerging in Europe’s cities: a potato was always just a potato, each pretty much like the other.

Nineteenth century European factories initiated this transition by hiring masses of former peasants to work in textile mills, meat packing plants, mono-crop agriculture, and the other specialized assembly lines of the Industrial Revolution in which skilled workers do a single simplified task, but do it efficiently. This transition is what development agencies like the World Bank call ‘development’. Given that this is such a massive project, it is perhaps surprising that it occurred in many countries in only a matter of decades or a century, rather than the millennia of the first transition from hunter-gatherers to settled agrarian populations. Nevertheless, this transition is not yet over. It is continuing in the third world today, as the subsistence peasants continue to defeat the plans and prophecies of hyper-educated economists, politicians, and planners.

The Long Successful Run of the World’s Peasants

The world’s subsistence peasants had a long and successful run. Emerging out of scattered hunter-gatherer communities 8,000-10,000 years ago, they settled down in fertile river valleys where they raised more human food per hectare than nature had ever produced for their forbearers. As hoe wielding farmers cleared the land, rapid population growth resulted from the increases in food production. Surpluses, though small by modern standards, still eventually supported great empires in places like Ancient Egypt, Rome, China, Europe, and the Americas. True, a “terrible compromise” in which freedom and liberty were traded for the protection of a tribute-seeking King often emerged. But life and culture were similar for the vast majority who remained on the farm, growing and consuming what they needed to eat, building housing, producing clothing, and having children. In this context, rarely did more than ten or twenty percent of all production enter the marketplace—the bulk of consumption remained on-farm where peasant families, each doing the same thing as the other, continued to resemble that unrevolutionary sack of potatoes which so frustrated Marx.

Take a potato out of the sack, and the bag is still a sack of potatoes, just a little lighter. Take a smaller specialized piece out of a specialized machine, and not only is the machine only a little lighter, but it also might not work. This is why peasantries are so resilient when compared to a system of differentiated economy organized by Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” and the principles of supply and demand. The problem is that from the retrospective and comfortable position of today’s economists, this change appears magical and painless in societies celebrating individual achievement, and the accumulation of capital. But it is not painless for the peasant whose old way of life is slowly destroyed, family loyalties dissipated, land appropriated, clans disrupted, and replaced too often with life in the urban slums of modern industrial cities.

Scotland’s subsistence peasantry is a good example. Scotland’s clans from time immemorial occupied the hills and glens where they farmed, raised livestock, built stone houses, and paid in-kind tribute to patron clan chiefs. However, following English military victories in 1748, a new way of looking at the land emerged. Clan chiefs siding with the British were granted personal title to the clan lands, while at the same time new factories demanded wool, flax, and labor. The Scottish highlands provided an excellent place to graze sheep and raise fields of inedible flax for the textile mills of the growing cities, and Scotland’s peasantry provided laborers who could work in the newly industrialized economy as wage laborers. In modern words it was a “win-win” for the “Clan Chiefs” who could now sell or rent “their” personal lands in the free land market, and the expanding industrialist class which needed cheap labor. But left out of course were the peasants who lost uncommodified traditional rights and privilege to use the land their ancestors had, the right to the famine stocks kept by the clan chief, who now preferred the global market’s measure of productivity, i.e. hard cold cash.

In this context, expropriation of Scottish peasant lands occurred by hook and by crook across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Threats of famine pushed former peasants into factory towns where they became the new urban working class. When the bright lights of the labor market were not alluring enough, sheriffs and military often played a prominent role. And as the survivors gained market skills needed in the rough urban environment, they lost subsistence skills and the old way of life: No longer could they grow their own food, or build their own stone houses even had they been so inclined. The lucky survivors after a few generations were though able to serve the needs of the world-straddling labor market, and become the middle class consumers which today’s economists celebrate. But this was not the only strategy of Europe’s eighteenth and nineteenth century peasants.

For a time Europe’s subsistence farmers had another strategy to deal with the disruptions coming with the transformation to market society: They could flee to places like North America where arable land was available after the native population died from European contact. And so when the European peasants arrived in North America in the eighteenth century, many left for the nearby forest where it appeared they might resume life as a subsistence peasantry. In fact in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, not only the Scottish peasantry fled to the North American forest, but also English, German, French, and others displaced European peasants. Hacking, clearing, hunting, and fighting their way across the North American continent, Europe’s subsistence peasantry peopled the land east of the Mississippi between about 1750 and 1850. The expansion was one rooted in the conservative subsistence peasantry’s greatest traditional strengths, especially the ability to have many children, organize social life around clan-based loyalties, and a penchant to clear land for new farms. This happened across decades (rather than millennia), as the United States and Quebec experienced one of the highest population growth rates ever-recorded: Populations of North America’s subsistence farmers doubled every 20-30 years.

A paradigmatic example of the consequences of such rapid demographic growth is the frontiersman Daniel Boone. In his long life (1734-1820), Boone hunted, and cleared farms across Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Missouri along with his 13 siblings, 10 children, and more than 60 grandchildren. For a time of course, subsistence farmers like Boone even made it in the rough land markets of Kentucky where he settled in the 1770s. But like millions of other rural peasants dabbling in the unfamiliar impersonal marketplace with its emphasis on cash rather than the handshakes, Boone was conned by land speculators from the city. Fortunately for him, there was still land left further west in Spanish Missouri, to where he moved his clan in 1799.

Neither Daniel Boone, his extraordinary clan, nor Europe’s peasants prospered for more than a few decades whilst hacking, clearing, and hunting—the modern industrial world was too close. And as in Scotland, the actual profits, and the land itself, slowly but surely made its way into the hands of the newly emerging investors who controlled the government, banks, law firms, and land offices. So in a slow but recurrent fashion, the United States’ Northwest, settled by prolific hunters and farmers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, passed into the modern global land market. Most dramatically, what was in 1830 a remote trading village for hunters—Chicago—by 1870 was a large modern industrial town, coordinating the production of maize, wheat, lumber, cattle, and hogs across several states. Just like in Scotland, in North America the peasants were slowly but surely moved onward—into factories, production for the market, or further west. As in Scotland, the movement was facilitated by urban market power in the form of land speculators and bankers—whose eviction notices were backed up by the sheriff. And so, North America’s subsistence peasantry faded into history as the land they cleared passed out of their hands whether violently, or through the maneuverings of mortgage bankers.

It will be no surprise to readers of Current Intelligence that markets are enormously successful in concentrating and increasing economic productivity. But I doubt that any of Current Intelligence’s readers, myself included, can raise what they eat, build their own house, and make their own clothing like Daniel Boone, a Scottish clan, or an African subsistence farmer today. We are very much part of the finely-tuned world in which labor is specialized, and worldwide trade is critical. But even Bono, Thomas Friedman, and Jeffrey Sachs likely have ancestors who in the recent past were such self-sufficient farmers.

In place of subsistence farms are the large corporate and government bureaucracies who use the invisible hand of the marketplace to produce for the world. But to say that this happened, is not to say the process was just, nor came without suffering. Nor was it necessarily welcomed by the world’s peasants whose passive resistance to market incentives still throw askew econometric forecasts. And if more evidence is needed of this conflict, one need look no further than Africa today, where vast numbers of subsistence peasants continue to live, farm, and resist government attempts to exclude them from lands reserved for cash-generating timber reserves, hunting blocks, plantations, or national parks even as promises of cash for wage labor entice them into the cities.

Africa’s Peasants Confront Markets and Its Bureaucrats

In pockets of Asia, Latin America and especially Africa peasant clans are still often like those Marx compared to a bag of potatoes: similar to each other, and not particularly suited to a fine division of labor. Perhaps all that is particularly new is that they have access to clothing purchased from the bales of the wealthy world’s cast-offs. But like the peasants in Scotland or even Daniel Boone, they resist with the tools of the subsistence peasant: high birth rates, clearing land, reliance on clan loyalty, and demands for relief commodities when crops fail.

The problem is that few development bureaucrats or businessmen see Africa in terms familiar to its subsistence peasantry, i.e. as a conservative, well-tested, and secure way of life. Rather they see it in terms of its incapacity to produce for a global marketplace in which land and labor are capital. Thus African development programs are typically about the tools and measures of the marketplace, like trade balances, currency stability, mineral production, agricultural extension, clothing manufacture, and oil. Unseen in such analyses are the subsistence peasants who are effectively invisible because they primarily produce outside the global market. In this context, they will always frustrate the highest ideals of the development agencies. The way they frustrate the modern marketplace is through the same messiness seen in eighteenth century Scotland, and nineteenth century North America. They have babies who as young men and women eventually push into forest reserves, national parks, and other cash-producing concessions only lightly policed by the central government. And when these traditional strategies no longer work, the survivors demand relief supplies from their patrons, just as surely as Scottish peasants asserted rights to famine relief from patron clan chiefs in the eighteenth century Highlands. And perhaps most threatening, when land does indeed run out, the peasantry creates vast numbers of youth who no longer have access to land for a subsistence life, and few market skills of interest in urban labor markets. And ominously, these displaced youth are the targets of extremists seeking to create the militias needed for the type of revolution Marx dreamed of. Or in a post Cold War world, they are susceptible to the ethnic ideologies found in places like Rwanda, Congo, Colombia, Afghanistan, The Middle East, and elsewhere.

The Limits of Modern Economics for Understanding Peasant Life

There are of course advantages to modern neo-classical economic models: They do predict how people embedded in the marketplace respond to incentives. Today though, the trick is knowing which farmer is embedded in the marketplace, and which in older persistent ways of thinking about economic life. The former will respond to incentives in manners development bureaucrats will understand. But for those still embedded in older subsistence ethics, the bureaucrats encounter people who do not remain at factory benches consistently, hire based on clan loyalties, appeal to personal relationships in the awarding (and repayment) of loans, lose their land to hucksters, and withdraw from confrontation when working conditions become onerous. Most frustrating for the bureaucrats are the emphases on the age-old method of resistance; especially having more children than the development bureaucrats think economically wise. And of course when food shortage looms, they look to the new patrons in the aid bureaucracies for relief supplies.

Such techniques, whether called peasant stubbornness, resistance, weapons of the weak, or simple laziness are in fact the old means used to resist the intrusion of the outside world into the older world of the subsistence peasant. But after $2.3 trillion spent in development assistance to change the peasantry into the finely tuned producer in a market economy directed by the guiding spirit of Adam Smith’s invisible hand, you would think something else might be tried. There are rational reasons the world’s subsistence peasants avoid capture by the world market—and unless these reasons are evaluated, not even another $2.3 trillion will provide the alchemy needed to transform Marx’s bag of potatoes into a finely tuned watch. And as long as this happens, the sighing of the economists, and sweating of the politicians will continue.

Tony Waters

Chico, California

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God in Two Minutes - A ...

2010-04-18T13:46:01-04:00

A 'Pseudo-Scientific' but Objective Re-look at God and Religion

Foreword

This article is an abstract of my e-book titled "God in Two Minutes" (Now published and downloadable at Amazon.com). Though the book describes the concepts in much greater details with very simple illustrations, examples and diagrams, this is an attempt to summarize a difficult subject. Difficult not because the concept is difficult to grasp, but because it addresses a topic which is close to our heart. This is a topic which one cannot help but read through the colored glasses of our deep rooted belief system.

With due respect to your beliefs, it is my humble request to read with an open mind, and get ready for a completely fresh look. Keep observing your thoughts as you read this - and whenever a thought based on your current belief surfaces, push yourself to be as open to a fresh look as possible.

What I have discussed in the book is not science, not religion, nor 'heavy' philosophy. It is plain and simple common sense.

The topic of religion is very relevant to this time when religious fanaticism has shaken the world. The book addresses the fundamental causes which have led to the great religious divide

The topic of religion is very relevant today when religious fanaticism has shaken the world. In a world divided by religion, this book is important to you and to every human being. You may say, “I am very open minded. I am not against other religions, so I do no harm to the world when I follow my faith”. Do you know that your very private beliefs too contribute to dividing the world? Do you know that YOU need to do something about this religious divide? If you love your children and want to gift them a better world, YOU NEED TO WAKE UP AND ACT NOW.

The book addresses the fundamental causes which have led to the great religious divide. It can help root out religious fanaticism from this world and make the world a much better place to live in.

An attempt is made to explore the mysteries of the Spiritual World, and to find an answer to the question “What is God and Religion?” This work is more an inquiry than an answer to this question. This piece does not purport to be a research paper on the subject of God and religion, and no claim is made of any proof for the arguments presented. The purpose of this piece is not to explain the concept of God and religion, but to indicate what it is NOT. The objective is an immediate damage control by opening our eyes to see clearly "WHAT GOD IS NOT" rather than searching for an answer to the question "WHAT IS GOD?".

What is God

We all learnt at school that the physical world consists of a three dimensional space (Fig. 1.1). The three dimensions of the physical space are represented by x, y, z axes (distances in x, y and z directions). An object occupies a unique position in this space, which is represented by point P in the figure and by values of a, b, and c on the x, y and z axes.

Used only with express written permission

.	Fig 1.1: Physical Space	. .	Fig 1.2: Mental /Spiritual Space
We are familiar with the Physical space and x,y,z coordinates. There is a similar mental space, the dimensions of which are our various feelings like love, fear, hope, faith, courage, etc. Just as we occupy a position in the physical space, we occupy a unique position in the mental space at any given time.

Similarly, I believe that there is a mental space and at any given time, we occupy a unique position in this space.

Just as an object in the physical space has a potential energy, we humans are endowed with immense mental energy, which depends on our position in the mental space.

The mental space is a multi-dimensional space where the axes are our various feelings like love, fear, hope, faith, courage, etc. (Fig. 1.2 shows only 3 dimensions for simplicity and for comparison with physical space). Our position in the mental space can be defined by how much we measure on the feelings axes.

Just as an object in the physical space has a potential energy, all of us humans are endowed with immense mental energy, which depends on our position in the mental space.

In Fig 1.1, an object at point P in Physical space (Fig 1.1) is associated with a unique potential energy which depends on its position, or how much it measures on the x, y and z axes. Similarly, our mental energy depends on how much we measure on our various feelings. In other words, a person at point S in Mental Space (Fig. 1.2) has a unique mental energy, or a unique mental state. The probability of success in whatever we do depends on our mental energy at that time. Since our feelings change from time to time, our position in the mental space keeps changing. And so does our mental energy – which explains the inconsistency in our performance.

Just as there are high potential energy points in the physical space, I believe that there are very high energy zones in the mental space too. Attaining God is nothing but reaching these high-energy zones in the mental space. These are zones where the measure of confidence, love, faith, hope, etc. is extremely high and you can be in an extremely powerful state of mind. This is where Buddha reached, and so did Christ, Mohammed and Mahavir. We will refer to these zones as "Godly Zones". (Fig. 2.2)

Used only with express written permission

Fig. 2.1: Physical Space	Fig. 2.2: Mental Space
Physical science and mathematics tell us clearly what force should be applied (and at what angle) to move from A to B in physical space. In the mental space, however, the laws of the space are not known. We are in the dark as to how to move from a low energy state in mental space to high energy state (Godly Zones)

In the physical space (Fig. 2.1), if we have to move a body from point A to point B, or from low energy to high energy, we know what force is required, and at what angle Ø we need to apply that force. What made it possible is Mathematics. After the discovery of Mathematics, man has mastered the laws of the physical space and has come a long way from the days of apeman. However, we are still apemen so long as the mental space is concerned. We know nothing about the laws of this space (Fig. 2.2). We do not know how to reach the Godly zones.

Attaining God is nothing but reaching these high-energy zones in the mental space. This is where Buddha reached, and so did Christ and Mohammed

While the language of mathematics describes the laws of physical space precisely, it fails miserably in the mental space. What is required is possibly a new language, which I call Mentomatics, which will explain the laws of mental space. Before mathematics was devised, laws of physical space were as much a mystery as the laws of mental space are today without Mentomatics.

To reach the moon you have to fire your rocket at a specific angle with a specific force. If you were to explain how to reach the moon without a mathematical language, some of your followers would reach Mars, some would crash-land on the moon, some would be lost in the space and some would not take off at all. Only one in a million million would reach the moon.

In the absence of a Mentomatical language, some people have tried to explain how to reach the high-energy zones of mental space, or to reach 'God'. It is no wonder that only one in several millions like Buddha, Mohammed, Christ, etc. could reach the destination and the rest of us were left groping.

Keep observing your thoughts as you read this. Whenever a thought based on your current belief surfaces, push yourself to be as open to a fresh look as possible

I believe that in the olden days there were extremely learned sages (saints) who reached dizzy heights in the mastery of spiritual learning. Unlike physical science for the study of which you use sophisticated instruments and gadgets, the study of spiritual science or spirituality required nothing but your mind and body. As a result, the ancient sages had acquired advanced knowledge of spiritual science and had mastered the art of reaching Godly zones. They could attain high mental energy levels, but they could not explain to the common man how they did so in the absence of Mentomatics. In order to explain to the man in a language that he could understand in those days, they created the concept of God. They said God gave them the energy. They gave 'God' a physical human shape because that is all that common man understood then.

The common man is far advanced today and understands the basics of physical science. He is in a position to understand abstract concepts like energy and force which the ancient common man could not have imagined in the wildest of his imagination. Hence, I have the liberty to explain to you the concept of God with an analogy of abstract concepts like forces and energy, a liberty which the ancient saints did not have. Nevertheless, let me caution you that I am not using physical science to explain the concept of God - I am only drawing an analogy as an illustration. I know that today's physical science may not be able to explain it. You may need a new ‘science’ and a new language like mentomatics to explain it.

The concept of God is a method - in fact a psychotherapy - which helps you to get to a higher state of mind and to a higher mental energy

The concept of God was created by the ancient sages to help you to move closer to the high-energy zone from wherever you are in the mental space.

So what is the concept of God? It is a method, in fact a psychotherapy which helps you to get to a higher state of mind and to a higher mental energy, and closer to the Godly zone in the mental space. And where is God? If at all there is something called God, it is right within you. The high energy level that you can experience by reaching the high-energy zone is latent within you.

Why did we call this a psycho-therapeutic method? Because it works by increasing your faith in God, your love for God and raising your confidence and hope. So you move up in the mental space closer to the high-energy zones (fig. 2.2). It is the faith in God, and not God, that works for you. And it is not God who does it for you, you do it yourself. When you wear a ring with special stones that are believed to bring good luck to you, it is your faith in the miracle stone that helps you and not the stone itself. The book describes in much greater details and with simple illustrations how the methods of God and the miracle ring work.

So the concept of God is the current best available method to reach the high-energy zones. It may be slow, not very easy to follow, but it is the best available method today. I believe that a time will come when you would have a mentomatical method to reach high-energy state within minutes or seconds. You may be able to attain so called God in two minutes. Sounds ridiculous? But so would TV, radio, pistol, aircraft and computers (which are miracles of mathematical science) be unbelievable to an apeman.

What is Religion?

Religion originated as a code of conduct – rules of social behavior and hygienic living. As time passed, the code of conduct got married to the concept of God.

While the language of mathematics describes the laws of physical space precisely, it fails miserably in the mental space. A new language, which I call Mentomatics, will explain the laws of mental space

In the olden days, there was a wide gap between the learned and the common man. The learned sages wished the welfare of the common man. They probably knew about disease, what caused it and how to prevent it. They wished to create the norms of good social and hygienic behavior and ensure compliance. The best way to ensure compliance was to tell the common man that such behavior pleases God, or in other words, God says so. The code of conduct got converted to the voice of God and Religion was born.

Religion is a result of a marriage of convenience between the code of conduct and the concept of God. Most of the religious beliefs and rituals have a very scientific base. But there are two problems.

First, most of the rituals and rules have been distorted by touts and the half learned so called saints.

Secondly, the norms and rules were important in those days, but may not be so relevant today with the advancement of science, particularly the science of hygiene and medicine. Conditions have changed, technology has changed, but we still believe in the age old rituals without having a fresh look.

Need for a Fresh Look

We re-engineer business processes today, where we re-assess the relevance of the age-old processes with respect to the current tools and technology available today. Similarly, there is a serious need to ‘re-engineer' religion.

As stated, the norms and rules were important in those days, but may not be so relevant today with the advancement of science, particularly the science of hygiene and medicine. In spite of remarkable advancement in science and technology, we still believe in the age old rituals without having a fresh look.

Religion originated as rules of social and hygienic living. The best way to ensure compliance was to tell the common man that such behavior pleases God. The code of conduct got converted to the voice of God and Religion was born

What stops us from having a fresh look at religious rules and rituals? We saw that 'faith' was a very important component for this psycho-therapeutic method to be effective. There lies the real catch. You must have faith in the concept of God and religion to benefit from it. The more you believe in the method, the more it will work for you. But faith can also blind you – the more faith you have, the less you will question the rules. And blind faith has led to a serious side effect.

The most disastrous side effect of this psycho-therapeutic method was that multiple religions sprang up and so did religious conflicts. It is possible that Buddha, Mohammed and Christ reached the same high-energy zones. They all tried to explain how they reached there. All of them may have followed the same path, but in the absence of a precise Mentomatical language, we understood them as different paths and created several religions.

The over-dependence of faith in this method is the double edged sword which has led to religious extremism. Faith can be blinding. That is the greatest flaw in the method and there also lies the catch. The method may have worked for individuals, but clearly it has not worked for the world as a whole. It is said that today there are more deaths due to religious conflicts than due to all natural calamities put together. Clearly, there is a need to look for a better method.

If man had closed his eyes and said that walking is the only way to move from one place to another, he would never have invented the cars. If he had said that moving along land is the only way, he would not have invented aeroplanes.

I can foresee a world united again, a world where man will not be divided by religion. Religion will be 'scientifically' explained. Man will see his folly

Similarly we can find a way to reach the Godly zones, a way that will be several times faster than today's methods of religion.

To me Mentomatics seems to be the key to our understanding of the spiritual world. The beginning of our study of the physical world was made when we devised a way to measure the different parameters of the physical world like distance, weight or mass and time. When we could represent them in numbers, there came the beginning of Mathematics. Physical laws could be explained by mathematics only when we devised ways to measure distances, mass and velocity.

Similarly for the spiritual laws to be explained with Mentomatics, we need to first devise methods to measure the various parameters of the Spiritual world, namely the various feelings like love, confidence, hatred, etc. That could open the doors to the realm of mentomatical rules and the formulas governing the spiritual law. That could open the doors to the Spiritual World!

Like mathematics led to the development of Classical physics and Quantum sciences, mentomatics will lead to the discovery of Spiritual Science. And as quantum physics explained not only the laws of classical physics of slow moving items but also explained the laws of fast moving particles of the physical world, spiritual science will not only explain the laws of spiritual world but will also encompass the laws of classical and quantum physics.

Spiritual science will develop advanced 'mentomatical’ explanations for the spiritual phenomenon and will provide easy tools for the common man to attain spirituality. There will be methods available to realize "God-in-two-minutes" or instant spirituality. Sounds stupid? So would thoughts of television and aircraft sound stupid to an apeman. And we are no more than apemen in the realm of spiritual world.

Several years from now, people will say, “Once upon a time, there lived barbarians on this earth who believed in different religions and they killed their fellow beings in the name of God."

I can foresee a world united again, a world where man will not be divided by religion. Religion will be 'scientifically' explained and we will see that there is only one so called 'God' present in the form of an energy within each one of us. Man will see his folly.

You have read about barbarians who lived on earth years ago who killed one another for food. Several years from now, people will say, “Once upon a time, there lived barbarians on this earth who believed in different religions and they killed their fellow beings in the name of God."

Used only with express written permission

The e-book "God in Two Minutes" discusses in greater details with simple illustrations and examples how the concept of God and religion may have originated, how exactly the method of religion works to benefit us, the biggest flaw in this method and the big mistake of mankind due to which this wonderful method, which was devised for our well-being, has actually led us to conflicts, divisions and miseries. The book can be downloaded at Amazon.com.

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Reluctantly Going into ...

2012-01-17T16:25:50-05:00

Reluctantly Going Into Business With Your Partner’s Widow, or Former Spouse

More Than a Difference of Opinion

The owners of a company sometimes have a difference of opinion over the direction or strategy of a business. Sometimes the difference involves mundane matters like installing a new piece of production equipment, or obtaining a business loan to finance growth.

In many cases, the differences of opinion about the company can be ironed out between the original owners because when they started the company they shared a common business philosophy, and that common understanding allowed for compromise and rational deliberation.

When one of the original owners dies, that common understanding evaporates, and the surviving owner begins to comprehend that overcoming a difference of opinion about the business with the widow, or the former spouse, involves a lot more complexity.

The widow or former spouse may have inherited the ownership interest when the shares passed through probate, or through the courts, if the owner did not have a valid will. Many times, the original owner prepared a will with the first wife as the primary estate beneficiary, but failed to modify the will after the divorce.

The original owner then finds herself reluctantly in business with the surviving widow, or inadvertently, with the former first wife.

When the widow becomes an owner, there is an unanticipated divergence in financial interests between the surviving owners and the surviving spouse of the deceased owner.

The surviving original stockholders are mainly concerned with increasing sales and using profits to grow the business, but the surviving spouse is interested in obtaining income from the business.

One method the surviving spouse can obtain income from the business is in the form of dividends taken from profits, or sometimes in the unhappy case of taking them from business capital accounts or retained earnings, if there are not any current profits to pay dividends.

If the widow or former spouse happens to be the majority owner, and votes for a dividend, then the dividend must be paid, no matter whether the company has profits or net revenues.

The profits usually had been used to finance business operations or fund future growth, and with mandatory dividends, those former uses of capital are foreclosed.

This conflict leads to more than a difference of opinion between the surviving owners and the surviving spouse. It can lead to the forced liquidation of the company.

Financial Issues for Minority Shareholders After a Death of the Original Owner

Because a corporation operates under the principle of majority rule, the holders of a majority of shares with voting power often can use their power to further their own interests and to deny minority shareholders three basic expectations:

a lucrative job
a meaningful role in management
a proportionate share of earnings

The issues are perfectly symmetrical for a former spouse or widow who winds up as a minority shareholder. The original majority shareholders can deny the former spouse a stream of income from dividends and preclude the sale of the company, or even the sale of the minority shares to an outside buyer.

This use of majority power is often called a “squeeze-out.” A “squeeze-out” is an action taken by majority or controlling shareholders in an attempt to reduce or eliminate a minority shareholder’s interest in a closely-held corporation. Common squeeze-out techniques include:

Refusal to declare dividends
Refusal to distribute earnings as bonuses or retirement benefits
Siphoning off earning through exorbitant salaries and bonuses
Termination of employment (the functional equivalent to a denial of dividends or any return on investment)
Removal as directors or officers (or effectively depriving minority shareholders of any active voice or meaningful role in the management and operation of the corporation)
Deliberate withholding of information or manipulation of company books and records
Usurpation of business opportunities and misappropriation of corporate assets

Squeeze-out techniques are used by majority or controlling shareholders to “lock-in” a minority shareholder for two reasons:

to force a sale of a minority interest at less than a fair price
to “freeze out” the minority of a fair return on investment

Legal Protection of the Minority Shareholder Interests

Many state have passed laws that offer a minimum set of rights for minority shareholders. Among the rights usually proscribed by general stature are:

The right of minority shareholders to inspect corporate books, papers and records at certain times and places.
The right to attend and vote at corporate meetings with notification of such meetings given to the minority shareholders.
The right to take part in the election of a board of directors
The right to bring derivative suits against corporate managers for breaching their fiduciary duties to shareholders.
The right to delay or block mergers, consolidations, or reorganizations if the minority shareholder rights are impaired and a court agrees with the minority shareholder.
The right of appraisal of the value of the business and the minority shares, and payment in the event of a fundamental corporate change, such as a merger.
Pre-emptive rights, which allow minority shareholders to maintain their relative equity in the company when new shares are issued.

In addition to the general statures, the state and Federal courts have generally moved in the direction of expanding minority shareholder rights. Sometimes, the courts even order the company or original owners to buy out the minority shareholders.

Obtaining a Well-Crafted Buy-Sell Agreement That is Coordinated with the Estate Settlement Plan

A much better financial outcome than reluctantly going into business with the former spouse and learning about her minority legal rights is to retain a business attorney to craft a buy-sell agreement, before the original owners die or become disabled.

The provisions in the business buy-sell agreement must be legally coordinated with the provisions of the owner’s estate settlement plans, especially the part about dealing with former spouses that may still be beneficiaries in prior wills.

Children from prior marriages must also be included in both the business buy-sell and the estate settlement plans, or the original owners may find themselves reluctantly in business with those children.

In the case of very small, closely-held companies, the same attorney who drafts the business buy-sell agreement may also draft the family estate settlement plan and will.

In the case of larger private companies, usually it is a good idea to obtain two different attorneys to handle the two distinct sets of issues involved in the business buy-sell and the estate settlement.

Funding the Business Buy-Sell and Estate Settlement Plans With Two Sets of Life Insurance Policies

In many court cases involving the fair treatment of minority shareholders, following a death of the original owner, the judge will attempt to find the fair value of the minority shares.

Rather than have a judge issue a ruling on business value, a better idea is for the original owners to agree upon the fair value of the business, and put that value, or the formula, in the buy-sell agreement. That agreed upon value becomes the starting point for determining the amount of life insurance to buy to cover the smooth transition of ownership after a death.

The insurance for funding the buy-sell agreement is completely different than the life insurance that is used in the family estate settlement plan. The life insurance for the estate settlement is usually designed to benefit the surviving spouse and all the children from all the prior marriages, so that everyone feels like they were treated fairly.

In many cases, the death benefit proceeds from the estate settlement plan are owned by a family trust. The trust usually has provisions spelling out when and how the children and surviving spouse are paid the death benefit, including provisions about not interfering with the future of the business.

The attorneys who draft the buy-sell agreement and the estate settlement plans must work together to make certain that the beneficiaries of all the different life insurance policies are correct.

After that legal work is complete, then both the business and the family can buy the right type of life insurance policies to fund all the agreements and plans.

Otherwise, the owners may reluctantly find themselves in business with former spouses, surviving spouses, and wayward children from different marriages.

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Standing In a Doorway

2012-01-13T13:39:40-05:00

I AM STANDING IN A DOORWAY ….

(Published 2010 Patchwork Path Wedding Bouquet)

in Oban, Scotland. A small coastal village, Oban is situated at the entrance to the Hebrides and is home to the distiller of a famous single malt scotch whiskey. Primarily a summer resort, on this day in November, this quaint town is quiet. Although I’ve not been to Oban before I have visited Scotland. This time however, is markedly different. Jack and I have just been married.

This doorway is a funny, almost petite entryway, the kind only found in Europe in old stone buildings. It is the entrance to the Registrar’s Office where the civil part of our marriage has just been performed. I wear an off-white suit and carry a handful of wild flowers. The day is a dull gray, although not raining. For this time of year, we consider ourselves lucky it’s not blustery. I look odd in my light color clothing because everyone else has on gray or black to match the weather. The people who see me (and there are several people on the sidewalk) know exactly what has just occurred. They are all smiles as they watch us. And, because in this small town where everyone knows everyone, we stand out for what we are --- Americans. The Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages, plus her two assistants, toss rice and confetti as we exit through the doorway and begin our walk up the street.

As we stroll for three or four blocks, people stick their heads out of house windows and stand in store entrances and smile. Many of them offer congratulations. I think I feel my face redden and I know that Jack blushes but we’re pleased with the attention. Although we are here on our own, no family or friends, suddenly the whole town of Oban is celebrating with us. It is remarkable to think that they wish us well without even knowing who we are. Both of us smile back. We keep walking, hand in hand as we continue towards St. John’s Cathedral and our meeting with The Very Reverend Alan Murray McLean. He will marry us again, this time in the chapel of St. John’s. The church crouches at the crest of a rocky cliff near the end of the main street. As we push open the huge wooden door a blast of cold air rushes out. A cleric, standing atop a tall ladder, puts flame to the many candles lining the walls. It is so cold inside this ancient church (even though we paid to have the heat turned on) you can see your breath.

During our meeting with Reverend McLean yesterday, we chose the passages he will read and the words we will say. Today, as we stand in the foyer, Reverend McLean materializes from the dark recesses of the church and graciously shakes our hands. He introduces us to the young cleric and ushers us into the chapel. Here there are twelve pews. Each seat has its own handmade pillow. “The needlepoint work of thoughtful church members,” he explains. He asks us to chose a pillow on which we will kneel. “Yours for the day,” he jokes. He is a somber man with a youthful face and thinning hair. His frame is thin and his skin pale. He told us he’d been ill but didn’t elaborate.

The chapel altar has been prepared and two large candelabras provide the light. With a small inclination of his head the ceremony begins. As we kneel on our chosen pillows Reverend McLean stands before us, an open bible in his hands. I can see up the sleeves of his ornate beaded robe and realize he has thought ahead. He wears several layers of clothing including what appears to be long underwear. I cannot stifle a giggle. I give Jack an elbow poke and move my eyes towards the draped sleeves. Then we both giggle softly.

The bible Reverend McLean holds, and later a chalice from which we drink, are both over a hundred years old. The three of us read bible passages under the flickering candlelight. The ceremony is short. After the words, “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” the cleric takes a photo of our smiling faces. It is a picture I later have enlarged to send to family and friends. We retreat to an office tucked beneath the choir loft where Reverend McLean signs the marriage certificate as do Jack and I. One side of the official paper is in Gaelic; the other side is in English. It is huge and he rolls it, tying a bow with a red ribbon. The ceremony complete, we exit the church and find ourselves once again on the avenues of Oban. A soft mist rolls in from the bay and the clouds hang heavy. We walk hand in hand nearly oblivious to the first few drops of rain. A rainy wedding day brings good luck is the saying. I think I’ve covered all eventualities. There is a six pence in my shoe, a new suit for me and a new tie for Jack, a borrowed string of pearls rests at my neck and a blue garter hides on the upper part of my left leg. Now Mother Nature’s impending rain is the clincher.

We enter our hotel to the applause of the dining room staff. They have prepared a private luncheon … Champagne, poached salmon, creamed potatoes, and a vegetable ragout. The meal is topped off with a small round white frosted cake adorned with one candle.

Today, as clear as if it were yesterday, I can taste the salmon and feel the Champagne bubbles on my tongue.

-END-

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A Hypothesis Regarding ...

2012-01-10T21:19:47-05:00

Introduction

About the Tasmanian Devil

Tasmania is the southernmost state of Australia, situated just south of mainland Australia on the forty-second parallel.

The state is home to several marsupial species and one in particular, the Tasmanian Devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) has been an icon for many years. The Devil is a carnivore about the size of a small dog and weighs between 4.5 and 13kg depending on age and sex. The Devil is endemic to Tasmania. Devils are nocturnal hunter-scavengers. They are non-territorial and are described as non-cooperative feeders. Groups of animals tend to feed on a single carcass. During feeding Devils tend to fight and can be quite aggressive (http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/sprat/public/publicspecies.pl?taxon_id=299).

The Tumour disease

From around 1996 the Devil population has suffered from a serious disease. The infectious cancerous disease, known as Devil Facial Tumour Disease (DFTD) is affecting large numbers within the population. Mortalities continue to be very high such that populations of the species are now in decline. Since 1996 the Devil population has declined by approximately 40% (note 1).

Affected Devils suffer from large cancerous cysts in and around the mouth and face. The disease is transferred as a result of biting. As mentioned earlier the animals are quite aggressive when feeding, often biting each other around the mouth and face. It is during such fights that cancerous cells are transferred between Devils. The cancerous cells take hold in the new host and the deadly cancer begins to grow. Once the infection takes hold the animals become progressively weaker and die. Affected Devils die within months (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022402). The Tasmanian Devil is now listed as ‘Endangered’.

While much effort has been put into understanding the nature of the disease, the cause continues to elude researchers. Extensive high quality research is ongoing and a widespread community effort has led to the quarantining (captive groups) of DFTD-free groups of animals in a bid to ensure the long term survival of the species.

Building on an earlier idea (Tattersall, 2006a&b) this paper puts forward a hypothesis regarding the initial cause of the Devil Facial Tumour Disease.

Background to the hypothesis

It has been suggested (Tattersall, 2006a&b) that Merkel cells in the neuroendocrine areas (note 2) in the skin around the mouth and face of the Devils (the site of many tumours) may have been rendered cancerous in susceptible animals by sunlight rich in UV. The affected cells are then transferred from animal to animal during fighting, leading to the spread of the disease via allograft cells as has been suggested by other researchers (note 2).

Recently other researchers have suggested that Schwann cells (found in the nerve tissues of the skin) are the likely origin of the deadly cancer (note 2). As already suggested (Tattersall, 2006 a&b) and also recently reported by other researchers (http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/174970.php) Tasmanian Devils are genetically very similar to each other. It follows, as has already been postulated by other researchers, that cancerous cells transferred during fighting are not be recognized as ‘foreign’ by the immune system of new host Devils (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022402). It is also suggested that the cancerous cells may have developed ways to remain viable within the tissues of a new host (http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0022402). This suggests a subtle yet complex immunology within the Devil population.

Hypothesis

A possible cause of DFTD

In proposing a possible cause it is hypothesised here that changes in UV intensity, due to disturbances in atmospheric ozone concentrations over recent decades, may have caused cellular modification in susceptible individuals. Although Tasmanian Devils are predominantly nocturnal there is evidence that they do like to sunbake during warm weather (note 3).

Some assumptions regarding genetic and environmental factors

The isolation of the species on the island of Tasmania over the past millennia has led to a genetic similarity (lack of genetic variation) within sub-populations and consequently an inability to resist certain diseases, particularly those associated with the immune system itself. Susceptibility to disease may be particularly significant where there have been relatively sudden environmental perturbations (note 4), such as the increase in UV intensity over the past 30 years due to changes in the ozone layer (note 5). While there are always variations in the genetic makeup within populations, in the case of the Tasmanian Devil it is suggested that the genetic uniformity of the population has set the scene for not only spontaneous development of diseases (due to environmental stressors), but also rapid infection rates.

The author has speculated on some of the possible interactions and pathways involved in the cause and transmission of the disease. The original ‘mind map’ of my desk top research on the DFTD is reproduced below.

Used only with express written permission

Original research ‘mind map’ for DFTD research. Philip J Tattersall, 2006.

Concluding Remarks and Predictions Regarding DFTD

While it is clear that the majority of the Devil population is susceptible to infection via transfer of cancerous cells it is not clear what proportion of the population may be resistant to infection. The genetic similarity within the population suggests that the immunity mechanism of such resistance will be subtle and perhaps difficult to detect. In any case it would appear that numbers of DFTD resistant Devils are small. Those Devils susceptible to spontaneous DFTD due to environmental exposures (such as UV) may be in even smaller numbers, thus making their detection perhaps impossible. It follows that spontaneous DFTD in isolated (captive quarantined) groups may not be observed.

This hypothesis predicts that there is a small number of individuals within the Devil population susceptible to developing DFTD resulting from environmental exposures such as UV, while others may be carriers (not necessarily resistant to DFTD) harbouring active DFTD cells capable of infecting other Devils. Furthermore there may be individuals in sub-populations that are resistant to both spontaneous DFTD (resulting from exposure to UV) and DFTD resulting from transfer of ‘infected cells’ during fighting.

In closing, the subtle yet complex genetic and environmental interactions that lead in turn to subtle immune phenomena no doubt go some way to explaining the difficulty of the research task as researchers attempt to elucidate the origin, mechanisms and causes of the DFTD. That said, all efforts to date by the international research teams are to be applauded.

References

Tattersall, P.J. (2006a), ‘Devils’ tumours’, The Launceston Examiner, November 28, 2006, p. 22.

Tattersall, P.J. (2006b), ‘Could ozone be killing or devils?’, The Hobart Mercury, December 2, 2006, p. 35.

Notes and Further Literature Sources

Note 1. The full extent of decline is not definite and populations continue to be monitored. (http://www.dpiw.tas.gov.au/internnsf/Attachments/LBUN-6996MH/$FILE/DFTD_DMS_Feb05a.pdf)

Note 2. The allograft theory of cell transfer has been proposed by other researchers for some time. (http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091231164736.htm). Reference has been made to the neuroendocrine cells as the origin of the DFTD (The Launceston Examiner, ‘New Hope in Tumour Fight’, November 21, 2006, p. 1).

Note 3. Although the Devil is largely nocturnal, the author has noted animals, in the wild, sunbaking during the warmer months of the year.

Note 4. The wide spread use of manmade chemicals in modern times may also be one such ‘perturbation’ or sudden stressor affecting susceptible elements within ecosystems in a non reversible way. Such chemicals either singly or in combination may be a causative agent in DFTD. This might be particularly relevant in the event that UV exposure has weakened the Devil’s immune systems over time. (see http://www.osti.gov/energycitations/product.biblio.jsp?osti_id=5571869

Note 5. UV increase and ozone depletion information can be located at:

(http://soer.justice.tas.gov.au/2009/air/1/issue/5/index.php).

About the Author

Philip J. Tattersall

Soil Tech Research

8 Lenborough St,

Beauty Point,

Tasmania,

Australia 7270

Email soiltechresearch@bigpond.com

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North Carolina Technolo...

2012-01-10T17:17:52-05:00

Raleigh, N. C. The Technology Stock Advisor, a weekly online newsletter for technology stock investors, published by Thomas Vass, an investment manager located in Raleigh, N. C., released its 2012 Top 10 Tech stock selections today.

All 10 of the TSA 2011 stocks were selected on January 2, 2012, based upon a 2007 stock selection and portfolio management patent issued to Vass. The method of the patent explains what stocks to buy, the target buy price, the target sell price and the best asset allocation for an investor’s risk profile.

The prices in the table below reflect closing prices as of January 2, 2012, as described by Google Finance, an online financial data service.

Closing Price January 2, 2012

Attribution

“Last year, our top ten TSA portfolio of stocks had an unrealized capital gain of over 10%,” said Vass. “I intend to compare my 2012 investment performance to what I consider to be the top 5 technology stock pickers in the nation, and will release their stock selections next week, so that interested investors can track and compare my performance throughout the year.”

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Dysology Challenge - fo...

2012-01-07T18:04:02-05:00

Do we really all have psychic powers? If so then how come I never knew?

In this article I challenge Dr Rupert Sheldrake - who is promoted as a Cambridge University scientist - to accept the Dysology Challenge to put his reputation where his brain is.

In September 2011 The very first Dysology Challenge was laid down here on BestThinking to two professors of physics. The prize offer and conditions were then and remain today as follows:

The Dysology Challenge – For Cold Fusion Energy

“If cold fusion produces commercially viable free energy in 2 years time you win and get to present me (Mike Sutton) with a prize for Dysology (bad scholarship) that I'll fund at a cost of £1000 in the form of a bronze trophy depicting the theme of veracity versus claptrap – with my name engraved on it.

And if that happens I will thank you in public for proving me wrong.

If it does not produce such energy then I get to present you with the same trophy that I paid for. In this event you fail, but you still get to keep the prize even though it happens that you are wrong. Only now it is your name that will be engraved on it .”

On September 15^th 2011 the Nobel Laureate and Cambridge professor of physics Brian D. Josephson refused to put his reputation where his brain is by boldly declining to accept the Dysology Challenge regarding our difference of opinion regarding whether or not George Washington University Professor Simon Berkovich was right regarding his belief in mysterious free energy existing in the universe. Birkovich, similarly failed to take up the Dysology Challenge. (click here to read the comments section on this article to see how the challenge was made, refused by Josephson and weirdly ignored by Berkovich).

Today I am extending the Dysology Prize to include proof of genuine psychic powers existing beyond delusion, confirmation bias, coincidence, fraud, methodological bias, or measurement error.

I am in good company. Because the Dysology Prize will be added to the current total of one million three hundred and 64 thousand pounds ($2,105,000 US) offered by a total of nine organisations and individuals, including the massive $1m Randi Prize for anyone who can prove that psychic powers exist. Despite being on offer for many years, and despite the extreme simplicity and fairness of the conditions required, no one has ever succeeded in winning any of these prizes.

Today (8th Jan. 2012) I hereby challenge University of Cambridge scientist Dr Rupert Sheldrake to accept the Dysology challenge for psychic powers. I argue that there is no veracious scientific evidence that proves humans have psychic powers. I publicly challenge Dr Rupert Sheldrake here on the Best Thinking website:

The Dysology Challenge – For Proof of Psychic Powers

I hereby challenge University of Cambridge scientist Dr Rupert Sheldrake to accept the Dysology challenge for psychic powers:

“If you can demonstrate in controlled conditions of the kind laid down by the James Randi Prize and can win the Randi Prize by proving that psychic powers exist then you get to present me (Mike Sutton) with the Veracity versus Claptrap trophy prize for Dysology (with my name engraved on it for bad scholarship) that I'll commission at a personal cost of over £1000. If the outcome is not obvious the British Royal Society will be invited to determine the winner.

And if you win then I will thank you in public for proving me wrong.

If, on the other hand, you fail, then I get to present you with the same prize that I paid for. Only you also get to keep the prize – with your name engraved on it - for your bad scholarship.”

I am prompted to publically challenge Dr Sheldrake following his article in the Daily Mail today (Sheldrake 2012) in which he claims that we all have psychic powers.

I strongly suspect that Dr Sheldrake wrote the article in order to sell his latest book: The Science of Delusion - which is released this week. If he is right then he will win the Dysology Challenge and there is no reason why he should not win a further whopping great pay out of £1,364,000 to add to whatever he makes flogging his book.

If Dr Sheldrake fails to apply for the Randi Prize, and all the other significant cash prizes and accept the Dysology Challenge then we must draw our own rational conclusions about his audacious claims. If he is right then surely winning the Randi prize would sell far more copies of his book than his article in the Daily Mail.

Finally, what kind of newspaper editor or journalist worth his or her salt would not ask Sheldrake why he has not applied for the Randi Prize?

Dr Mike Sutton (Dysology.org)

Reference

Sheldrake, R. (2012) Why we ALL have psychic powers. Daily Mail. pp.56-57. Jan 7^th.

Note on Sheldrake

According to his page on Wikipedia today: “In September 2005 until 2010, Sheldrake received the Perrott-Warrick Scholarship for psychical research and parapsychology, which is administered by TrinityCollege, Cambridge.Sheldrake then took his current position as Academic Director for the Learning and Thinking Program at The Graduate Institute in Bethany, Connecticut^.”

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Participatory Budgeting...

2012-01-07T18:49:39-05:00

In severe economic times, such as the one we are in, budgeting and the forging of public policy become even more difficult than usual. Huge gaps of perception exist between those charged with the duty of crafting and implementing budgets and those who are served by such budgets.

Large Gaps of Perception between Boards of Trustees/Chancellors and Communities

This is especially true of the students and voters who live in community college districts (CCDs) around the country. CCD Boards of Trustees and the Chancellors of CCDs work hard to implement evenhanded budget cuts which have been mandated for their constituent colleges but, rightly or wrongly, gaps of perception often exist between colleges that serve poor neighborhoods and boards of trustees/chancellors who are required to select and implement budget/programmatic cuts. In short, because of such perception gaps, colleges that serve low-income communities, and their constituents, often feel that they are bearing the disproportionate share of the cuts when compared with colleges that serve middle-class and affluent areas.

Bridging Gaps of Perception through Participatory Budgeting (PB)

To the end of bridging these gaps of perception between Boards of Trustees/Chancellors and community college student/voters in underserved areas, and to the end of searching for ways of blunting the effects of the budget/programs cuts, it would behoove Chancellors/Boards nationwide, to seriously consider the merits of participatory budgeting, or PB. Although PB requires much time, hard work, and compromise, its effects can be very salutary, as will be shown.

Basic Model of PB which Transcends Cultures

Hundreds of examples of effective PB, from around the world, exist and consist of several salient and overarching features which transcend socio-cultural and socio-economic differences and form its foundation. Every socio-cultural and socio-economic group in the world is unique, but a common overarching approach, relative to PB, is shared by all and consists of the following elements (Lerner, 2011): a) A needs assessment; b) Thorough deliberation; c) Decision making; and d) Implementation.

Needs Assessments and Deliberative Processes are needed

In terms point of point a, the needs assessment, members from the community should establish spending priorities and budget delegates chosen to represent their respective neighborhoods (Lerner, 2011). Concerning the deliberative process, point b, delegates should collaborate with budgeting professionals e.g. civil servants and design and create projects that are the most relevant for their respective communities. This type of collaborative partnership could also be forged between Boards of Trustees/Chancellors and constituent community delegates all over the country, with particular attention given to outreach in underserved communities of color.

A Vote Should be taken to determine the Spending Priorities

Subsequent to close collaboration between the budget delegates and the Trustees/Chancellor, a vote should be taken to determine what the spending priorities should be and what cuts should be made i.e. points c and d.

Board Members and Chancellors should not worry about Relinquishing Power

Such collaboration might cause Board members and the Chancellor to be concerned that they would be relinquishing too much decision-making power to the budget delegates. This should not be a cause for concern on the part of the Board, or the Chancellor, however.

The Discretionary Budget is usually 20%, or Less

Normally, 20%, or less, of the budget is put on “…the PB table for discussion” (Lerner, 2011). This comprises a fairly small percentage of the overall budget but a large portion of the discretionary budget which typically does not include fixed costs such as wages, salaries, and infrastructural maintenance (Lerner, 2011). The discretionary budget, then, can be used for capital or operating projects, depending on the needs of each of the district community colleges.

PB’s popularity worldwide has been driven by six major factors (Lerner, 2011):

1. Democracy—people everywhere liked to be actively engaged in budgetary/public policy decision making, most especially when those decisions impact their lives. The giving of such voice to people from the community empowers them and gives them a strong sense of ownership and responsibility for the decisions they make and challenges them to think outside the box in terms of searching for solutions to budgetary shortfalls. Active engagement of community residents forges bonds of trust between them and public-policy/education leaders, which is so vital for the tailoring of win-win outcomes for all the stakeholders involved.

2. Transparency—Public involvement in budget/public-policy decisions fosters greater accountability and clarity with regard to how such decisions are made and what outcomes they bring about. Community engagement encourages a creative tension between public-policy/education-budget creators and community delegates vis-à-vis what is fiscally doable and what is ideal for the community in terms of implementation and outcomes.

3. Education—Strong collaboration between members of the community and budgetary/public-policy leaders deepens every participant’s understanding of the democratic process and the complexity of the issues which shape budgetary and public-policy decisions, including budgetary decisions made in community-college districts statewide.

4. Efficiency—Inclusion of a broad spectrum of stakeholders from the community and public-policy/budgeting/college leaders lends itself to a broader, deeper, and richer sequence concerning the budgeting process and its outcomes. Contingency planning, most effective targeting of funding, and long-range fiscal/budgetary planning all demand the broadest and most in-depth analyses possible, which stem from broad interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral approaches. Those who will be impacted most positively, or most negatively, by the likely results of the decisions under consideration, need to be the most consulted and the most actively engaged. In the words of the father of modern American education John Dewey, “The man (person) who wears the shoe knows best where it pinches” (Lerner, 2011).

5. Social Justice—PB also strongly encourages, and affords, traditionally underserved communities, especially those of color, access to decision-making processes and levels the playing field considerably in terms of the power they have regarding the formation and implementation of budgets and other instruments of education and public policy. Better balance is achieved in terms of how funds are allocated programmatically and better balance is attained with regard to the demographic apportionment of such funds. Active participation by representatives from underserved neighborhoods, for example, increases the possibility that they will be able to obtain funding for critically needed projects in their areas, including funding for local community colleges.

6. Neighborhood/Community Ties are Strengthened—Active involvement in the budgetary, educational, and public-policy decisions from the grassroots level to the city level, to the county/parish level and to the state level, is essential for the crafting and implementation of budgetary, education, and public-policy decisions which are fair and balanced and representative of all the stakeholders involved. The call and privilege of democracy both require no less. The words of the famous Latin axiom resonate with compelling force: “E pluribus Unum.” Out of the many come the one (people).

Source: Lerner, Josh. (2011). Participatory Budgeting: Building Community Agreement around Tough Budget Decisions. National Civic Review, Summer 2011. Published in Wiley Online Library—www.onlinelibrary.com/ Wiley Periodicals, Inc., Hoboken, NJ. The National Civic Review is a professional and peer-reviewed journal.

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North Carolina Technolo...

2012-01-06T10:11:43-05:00

The Technology Stock Advisor, a weekly online newsletter for technology stock investors, published by Thomas Vass, an investment manager located in Raleigh, N. C., released its 2011, year-end performance, on the 2011 Top Tech stock selections today.

All 10 of the TSA 2011 stocks were selected on January 3, 2011, based upon a 2007 stock selection and portfolio management patent issued to Vass. The method of the patent explains what stocks to buy, the target buy price, the target sell price and the best asset allocation for an investor’s risk profile.

Vass compared his investment performance to both the S&P 500 Index® and to the NASDAQ Index.

Technology Stock Advisor 2011 Year End Performance 10.97%

Google FinanceAttribution

Vass compared his own 2011 investment performance of the TSA Top 10 Stock Selections to the performance of what he considers to be the four best stock pickers in America.

“My top four competitors in the world of stock selection advice have been tested by the market over a long period of time,” said Vass, “and I have a great deal of respect for the professionals who put their reputations on the line at the beginning of every year with their stock selections.”

The top four competitors selected by Vass are described below. All prices for all stocks in the comparison are based upon their closing prices of January 3, 2011. The performance calculations are based upon the data and software available at the Google Finance website.

Goldman's 8 Best Tech Stocks for 2011, compiled by Frank Byrt, The Street, January 28, 2011. 9.81%

Google FinanceAttribution

James Glassman's 10 Stock Picks for 2011, published in Kiplinger, January 2011 edition. (6.04%)

Google FinanceAttribution

Landis 10 Top Tech Stocks for 2011 Selected by Conrad de Aenlle, CBS MoneyWatch, Jan 4, 2011. 6.09%

Google FinanceAttribution

Barron's 10 Favorite Stocks For 2011, by Andrew Bary, Barron’s January 3, 2011. (3.16%)

Google FinanceAttribution

__________________________________________________________________________

“I intend to release my TSA 2012 Top 10 Technology Stocks on Monday, January 9, 2012,” said Vass. Interested readers and investors are invited to subscribe to the free TSA newsletter for updates throughout 2012.

2011 TSA Portfolio of Top 10 Technology Stocks Ends Year Up 10.97%

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If Obama Loses…The Sing...

2012-01-03T14:30:58-05:00

Including Disability Insurance in the Buy-Sell Agreement

In October of 2008, I was asked to participate in a national stock market contest sponsored by The Stock Advisors, an online investment newsletter. The contest involved picking the best single stock if Obama won the election.

I picked Ingersoll-Rand (IR), if Obama won, not because I thought that there were millions and billions of “shovel-ready” jobs awaiting, but more because I liked the company on its fundamentals and technology innovation and anticipated that it would do well with Obama’s talk of increased infrastructure spending. http://bit.ly/uYHRLM

The IR stock was trading around $18 per share in November of 2008 and rose to around $50 per share in May of 2011. The stock price has eased on down the highway since then, and I hope that all the investors who followed my advice in October of 2008 sold out at the high mark in May of 2011.

Here is a graph from Yahoo Finance that shows the last five years of prices of IR stock.

Yahoo FinanceAttribution

Turn about is fair play, so I thought I should offer an early recommendation on the single best stock if Obama loses in 2012.

Eager beaver investors may soon start anticipating an Obama loss, and start piling into this stock pushing the price up before the election, so it is a good idea to begin following the stock price today in order to be ready if it starts a rapid move up.

Badger Meter, Inc. (BMI) engages in manufacturing and marketing liquid flow measurement and control technology products worldwide. Its products are used in various applications, including water, oil, and chemicals. The company offers water meters, and related technologies and services for use by water utilities, as well as for other water-based purposes, including irrigation, water reclamation, and industrial process applications. It also provides other meters, and related technologies and services for measuring various fluids in industries, such as food and beverage, pharmaceutical production, petroleum, heating, and ventilating and air conditioning; and measuring and dispensing automotive fluids. In addition, the company sells registers and radios to upgrade existing meters in the field, as well as radio technology to natural gas utilities for installation on their gas meters.

BMI is a Technology Stock Advisor A-rated stock, that means it should not be as risky and volatile as the TSA B or C rated stocks. It has a current dividend yield of 2%, and the target price to buy at or below, is $30 per share.

Here is a Yahoo Finance graph showing the last five years of stock price history for BMI.

Yahoo FinanceAttribution

My logic for this stock selection is similar to my selection of IR in 2008. BMI is very strong financially and has great product technology innovation.

Plus, all investors must have some linkage or connection to the global economy, whether they work for one of the big companies, or sell goods and services in foreign countries. One way for average, ordinary citizens to have a connection to the global economy is to own shares of companies that are global in scope, and BMI fits that criteria.

In this case, however, if Obama loses, there is going to be a lot of OOUK and smelly stuff that will need to be pumped out of Washington, D. C. and, just like the case of infrastructure for Ingersoll-Rand in 2008, BMI has the right stuff to do the job… under a new President.

I will release my year-end performance review of my best 10 technology stocks for 2011, with my comparison to what I consider to be the top 5 technology stock advisors in the country next week.

In the second week of January 2012, I will release my top 10 technology stocks for 2012.

About Thomas E. Vass: Vass is fee-based portfolio manager located in Raleigh, N. C., and the author of Predicting Technology: Identifying Future Market Opportunities and Disruptive Technologies (2007), which explains his theory of technology evolution and its effect on the economy. His research articles about technology were recently cited by The Social Science Research Network (SSRN) a global publishing platform for social scientists, as being in the top 3% of the most widely read in the world.

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We Humans Have no Contr...

2010-07-03T10:13:12-04:00

What Controls our Behavior?

Most of us would vouch for ourselves:

“I am in charge of myself”. “My behavior is controlled.”

You will be surprised to know that most often, we have very little control over our actions. We are driven to behave the way we do, and we are rarely in command.

Life is full of actions every moment, not all of which are results of our conscious decisions. Most of our actions are driven by the subconscious mind on which we have little control

Unbelievable, but it is true. When we think before we decide or act, we do so with our conscious mind. But life is full of actions at every step. Every moment, our mind is busy analyzing and making split-second decisions. What you are doing now is a result of your decision to do so. Do you know how you arrived at this decision? Not really - not all our actions are results of our conscious decisions. Most often, they are controlled by the subconscious mind. We are not in control of the actions governed by our subconscious mind.

Understanding what is subconscious mind and how it impacts our behavior can help us better understand people and improve our relations with them.

What is Subconscious Mind?

One example often used to explain the subconscious mind is the process of car driving. Initially when you are learning to drive, you have full concentration on the gear, the clutch, etc. You are all concentration on the process of driving; you look at every pothole, every bump, and every obstacle. As you get trained on driving, the act goes into your subconscious mind and you tend to drive without making a conscious effort to drive. You automatically avoid the obstacles, you automatically change gears when required while you could be doing umpteen other things at the same time like talking to your companion sitting beside you, listening to the music and observing the countryside.

Used only with express written permission

As you practice driving again and again, you make decisions automatically and you drive naturally. Driving decisions and actions go out of the conscious mind to the subconscious mind.

We crossed various obstacles and potholes in our life’s journey – with important learning and judgments all along. Based on the positive or negative impact of our actions, we wrote our life's rule book of Do’s and Don’ts

After you have reached the destination, if you ask yourself which potholes or bumps you crossed on the way, you may not remember as you did not even notice when you actually slowed down and possibly changed gear to cross the bump. You did all that without being conscious of it.

Another good way to understand the subconscious mind is to do the following simple exercise. I would request that you actually do this before you read on. Hold your palm up horizontally in front of your face, close your eyes and imagine that you have a lemon on your palm right before your eyes. Did you experience your mouth watering? The conscious mind knows that there is no lemon and that it is only an imagination. The sub conscious mind is illogical and immediately believes what is in the conscious mind and as a result your mouth waters.

What Goes in our Subconscious Mind?

Similar to the example of driving a car on a topsy-turvy road avoiding potholes, we have been driving down our life's journey - a journey which we started as a kid. There were various obstacles and potholes in our life’s journey, and we crossed them all – but with important learning all along the way.

The problem is that some entries in our rule-book were made when we were small kids and did not have the capability to truly judge the situations

Based on whether our actions had positive or negative impact on us, we also made important Judgments on do’s and don’ts, things we should do and what we should not. We made our own judgments on where the life’s potholes lie, what they look like, and what you should do in life to avoid them. The problem is that we started making these judgments very early in our life when we were small kids and did not have the capability to truly judge the situations. But based on our kid-brains, we did pass some important judgments about do's and don’ts in life. We accumulated some learning and created a knowledge-base or a rules-book. We passed judgments about ourselves, about people around us; about what type of people are good and what type of people are bad.

All of us made conclusions about people based on their looks. Just because that person with long nose and grey eyes we met was bad, our kid brain concluded that all men with long nose and grey eyes are bad. A rule was written in the rule-book. So through our kid-eyes, we have actually identified the potholes on the path of our life. These potholes are situations or conditions which our kid brain has directed us to either avoid, or to retract when we come across any of them. Or they are people with some particular physical traits, etc. which we as kids have concluded to be 'bad guys' to be avoided.

Just as the act of car driving goes into our subconscious mind by frequent repetitions, some judgments of our kid brain have gone into our subconscious mind by repeated re-enforcements before we could mature

If some of these experiences get repeated, may be purely by chance, our illogical beliefs get the support that we subconsciously try to seek: “See, I told you so”, we tell ourselves. Our judgment and the rule get reinforced. Just as the act of car driving goes into our subconscious mind by frequent repetitions, a great deal of judgments and rules created by of our kid brain have actually gone into our subconscious mind by repeated re-enforcements before we could mature and analyze them with our mature conscious brain.

Used only with express written permission

Some of these rules may be completely illogical, but they have got so firmly set in our subconscious that now when we see a person with the characteristics we defined in our subconscious rule book, we will automatically react in a particular way and won't even know that we reacted that way. So just as we drive the car while avoiding the potholes and slowing down for bumps without really noticing them with our conscious mind, we tread the life's path avoiding imaginary potholes, slowing down on bumps that we defined in our childhood without even realizing that we do so, without realizing why we do what we do. Just as while we drive a car our brain makes several hundred decisions every moment without our conscious mind knowing it, we make numerous decisions every moment in our life and we obviously don’t make them with the conscious mind. These decisions are based on the knowledge-base and rule-book built in our subconscious mind. Like the physical reflex actions that we very well know about, these are what I call the mental reflex actions. Our behavior therefore is not a voluntary behavior but largely governed by involuntary actions. And we call ourselves highly balanced people acting on conscious decisions.

When we are driving the vehicle of our life today, we actually drive topsy-turvy, because of the mental potholes which may not be there at all

When we are driving the vehicle of our life today, we actually drive topsy-turvy, because of the mental potholes which may not be there at all. We still try unconsciously to avoid those pot holes we defined in our childhood, but do not even know that we are driving the way we are. We are not even noticing the mental potholes. You may have experienced sometimes that you act in a way and then the very next moment, you ask yourself, “Hey, now why did I do what I did?” Most likely, you did so because of a mental pothole. You will be surprised to know that actually the situations have changed, conditions in your life have changed, your own abilities have changed, but you were simply reacting to a mental pothole the way your mind has got conditioned to react to it.

Our Behavior is Driven by our Sub-conscious Mind

We do certain things out of conscious mind, whereas most of our actions are dependent on the subconscious mind. They are like reflex action in some ways, but different in many ways. In case of physical reflex action, there is some action or disturbance in or around you, and before you know or you realize it, your body reacts to the disturbance. But immediately after the reflex action, you know how your body has reacted. However in case of subconscious behavior or the mental reflex action, most often, our conscious mind is not even aware that we have reacted to certain sub conscious stimuli.

It is said that the conscious mind is logical, analytical. Subconscious mind is illogical. And since most of our behavior is governed by the subconscious mind, you can imagine what will be the outcome.

What is the Learning?

There is a very important lesson to be learnt about our relationship with people based on the above discussion. This learning should help us judge people better and react to people more realistically. Very often we are upset by the reactions and behavior of someone known to us or dear to us. We get upset because we feel he is doing it intentionally to upset you, to offend you, or to settle scores with you.

We make numerous decisions every moment in our life and we obviously don’t make them with the conscious mind. These decisions are based on the rule book of our subconscious mind

Whenever this happens, understand that we are all slaves to certain things in our subconscious mind. Appreciate that he may not be behaving intentionally, it may be an involuntary reaction and not an intentional calculated move to upset you. He may not be control, just as we are all puppets to certain conditions under some situations. If you appreciate that he is helpless to his circumstances, just as you are on several occasions, you will understand people better.

The Impact of Subconscious Mind on our Behavior - More Lessons

All of us have in our subconscious mind a list of items about which we think we are "not ok" These items are of two categories:

Those of which we are comfortable and we can comfortably say "I am not ok" or "I can't do this" or "That's not for me", and have no real pangs of conscience while saying it.

Those of which we have a complex and we feel hurt when we know our shortcoming. We have heartburn when we think of our own weakness, and are even ashamed to admit our weakness.

Most of our unnatural or abnormal behavior is due to the second category of “Not OK” items in us.

These are items of which we formed some judgments about ourselves (“I am not ok”) in our childhood, and then they got reinforced into our subconscious mind. Or these could be associated with some embarrassing experiences when we had to be ashamed of our own self, creating a “Not OK” judgment about ourselves.

These are things which we would like to forget about and not think about – we almost try to push them under the carpet and not think of them. They may go out of our conscious mind, but remain in our subconscious mind. These are our subconscious pain points.

When you have a pain in the stomach, the doctor may check by pressing at various points asking you whether it pains. It may not pain when the doctor presses at different points, and suddenly when he presses at a particular point, “Oooi….”, you scream in pain. Similarly, we go through several incidents and experiences in life smoothly, whereas there are some incidents which touch you on your subconscious pain points and you react painfully. You behavior is the most unpredictable and uncontrolled when you are hit on any of your subconscious pain points. Incidents in life or comments of people around you may continuously touch your conscience, but you may not react till it pricks on the subconscious pain point and then the reaction is again “Oooi..!!”. Different people have different pain points. Hence the same comment may not affect one person but may upset another.

It is said that the conscious mind is logical, analytical. Subconscious mind is illogical. Since most of our behavior is governed by the subconscious mind, you can imagine what will be the outcome

When we experience these subconscious pain points, we are overcome with some strange senses and our reaction may not be very controlled. These could well be the same feelings and sensations that you first had when you had the unpleasant experience as a kid, and which you all along tried to push under the carpet and banish from your mind. In such situations, we become absolutely helpless in our actions. We are totally driven and not in control. Whenever we face that situation which touches our subconscious pain point, we always compulsively react with very little control. However hard we try and decide to act differently, when it comes to the real moment, we are helplessly overcome by that same sensation and feeling and we act predictably (against our wish) based on our subconscious mind.

All of us have "pain points". And hence all of us have our idiosyncrasies. Whenever these pain points are disturbed, we react sharply. Since the subconscious pain points are different for different persons, different people may react to same stimuli differently. Whereas one is deeply hurt by a comment, someone else may not care a damn.

Hence again, this shows the driven-ness of our behavior – we are driven to some behavior and are absolutely helpless in these circumstances. However hard we may like not to behave that way, we do still act the way our subconscious mind drives us to.

If we understand this aspect of human behavior, we can avoid getting upset over others' behavior. After all, I am as unpredictable as you are.

How to Discover Our Subconscious

I believe that the pain points in our subconscious mind are hidden in some remote corner of our mind under some self-imposed cover. We prefer to keep them under cover since most of these are recordings of unpleasant experiences which we would like to forget. The difficult part is to discover them hidden in our subconscious mind. Once discovered, it may be easy to remove them. Following exercise can sometimes help to discover and eradicate some unpleasant recordings from our subconscious mind which unconsciously influence our behavior:

Whenever you experience an unpleasantness, like an incident which made you angry, embarrassed, or uneasy, just sit back in a relaxed mood anytime later when you are your normal self. Close your eyes and recreate the same situation (in your mind's eyes) which made you angry, embarrassed or unpleasant. Imagine that situation in great details. Almost relive the same moments and keep noticing the thoughts in your mind. Notice the sensations in your body, any sensation in the stomach or any part of the body as you relive the old unpleasant experience of the day. Again and again keep asking yourself – “What are the thoughts in the mind, what are the sensations in different parts of the body?” You will be able to uncover some of those illogical thoughts, some under-cover parts of your subconscious mind and also be able to discover what exactly made you angry and unpleasant.

Afterthoughts

I think it is worth adding these afterthoughts which are part of my comments on a blog titled "Our Innate Irrationality: Can We Compensate?" at Bestthinking:

Quote

I attribute large part of the irrationality to our subconscious mind. Our irrationality is due to what I call the mental reflex action, similar to the physical reflex action that we all know about. Physical reflex action is a result of a command to react before the message reaches our rational brain, before we are aware of the action. Mental reflex action results when the result is a split second 'mechanical' output of our subconscious rule book titled “What to do When…”. The brain makes a quick reference to the rule book and like a computerized output pulls out and executes the resultant action. Since we make several split second decisions every moment, the subconscious rule book helps us to get instant decisions without the delay of conscious reasoning every time there is a stimulus.

Unfortunately, the rules in this book have been written in a biased manner, most of them in our childhood. There is a major difference between the physical reflex action and the mental reflex action. While, in case of physical reflex action, we become conscious of the reaction in a few moments after the reaction, we may never be even aware of the reactions of our mental reflex action. Hence the irrational rule book never gets revised or corrected.

What can we do about it? For now, you are very right when you say “Stay humble”. I would add, “Empathize with people”. If we realize that the other guy’s actions are as irrational as mine, it may help us understand people better and empathize with them. If you think someone has wronged you, you always thought it was by design - and that is the beginning of a crack in your relationship. If you appreciate that his actions are often as involuntary as yours, you can save relations.

But why settle for less? I think we can do more about it than just accept the status quo. Where we stand today, we are not even aware of this subconscious rule book, leave alone knowing what is written in the rule book. But I always believe that we should think of the unthinkable, only then we can discover ways to achieve the unthinkable. We should look for means to retrieve this rule book, rethink, and rewrite the rules. My optimistic mind thinks that if not today, man will advance to a level where there will be a method to rewrite our subconscious (sometimes irrational) rule book.

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MLR Regulation Creates ...

2011-12-29T14:02:54-05:00

MLR Regulation Creates Challenges for Future of Affordable Coverage

Bronze plans may be scarce in state insurance exchanges

The final medical loss ratio (MLR) regulations will likely create a vacuum for affordable coverage that cannot be filled by Bronze plans under the state insurance exchanges. If the “essential benefits” and “actuarial value” requirements are equally as discriminatory, there will be no affordable options available and the cost of subsidies will skyrocket. As a result, millions of Americans that have policies today that could have qualified as Bronze plans will be forced to change their coverage or drop coverage because they can no longer afford it.

Background

On December 7, 2011, the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) published in the Federal Register the final regulation governing how it will implement the minimum medical loss ratio (MLR) requirements for insurance plans sold in the private market.⁽¹⁾ These regulations have been in effect on an “interim final” basis for all of 2011 and will continue to apply in future years. Although these regulations are “final,” the Department provided a 30-day comment period that ends January 6, 2012.

It is important to understand that the new MLR requirements only apply to policies sold by insurance companies, also known as “fully insured” policies. That means individuals purchasing coverage on their own, small businesses, and some larger businesses will be the most affected by the regulations. But the regulations will not apply to a large number of people, mostly employees of companies that “self-insure” their employee benefits. The requirements likewise do not apply to third-party administrators (TPAs), including the portion of an insurance company’s business involved in administering a self-insured employer’s health benefits for its employees.

What Is a “Medical Loss Ratio”?

A medical loss ratio measures, in percentage terms, the amount of premiums collected by an insurance company that are spent on direct patient care through payment of medical claims. Some adjustments may be made for taxes paid and other items, but the basic concept remains the percentage of premiums spent on medical claims. The health reform law requires that insurance companies spend at least 80 percent of the premiums they collect, on average, as medical claims for policies sold to individuals and to small businesses (less than 50 employees). The law requires a higher MLR – 85 percent – for policies sold to larger companies.

A minimum medical loss ratio sounds good on its face. The intent is to ensure that consumers get good value from their insurance policy, not unlike determining what percentage of funds given to a charity actually benefit the people it purports to help rather than fundraising and other expenses. But while charities are “non-profit” organizations, insurance companies are in the business of making a profit – whether they pay taxes on that profit or not – so they can stay in business providing coverage to Americans who buy their policies. Some insurance companies sell shares of stock in their company to investors and are also interested in providing a valuable return on shareholders’ investments.

Some politicians, insurance regulators, and consumer advocates do not like the fact that insurance companies are in business to make a profit. These individuals and groups frequently criticize insurance companies for making excessive profits and paying their executives exorbitant compensation. Therefore, the minimum loss ratio standards act as price controls, seeking to limit the cost of insurance by controlling the portion of the premium that is available to be spent on administrative expenses and profit (i.e., the remaining 15 or 20 percent of the premium collected). For example, a 70 percent MLR standard would require insurance companies to pay at least $70 of every $100 in premiums collected on medical claims. As a result, the company would be required to spend no more than $30 of every $100 in premiums collected on administrative expenses (including profits).

Only a few states imposed minimum MLR standards on certain segments of their insurance markets before the health reform law was enacted, but most did not. Only one state (New York) imposed any MLR standards as high as those called for in the health reform law. For example, Minnesota imposed an 82 percent MLR in the large group market, compared to the new law’s 85 percent minimum. In the small group market, several states imposed a 75 percent MLR requirement, but that is well below the new 80 percent MLR in the new law, and most states either had lower MLR requirements or did not impose any. In the individual market, only New York and California imposed an 80 percent MLR, but California just raised their minimum MLR to 80 percent earlier in 2011, after the federal law was enacted. With the bar being raised higher than any state had previously, it will be interesting to see how the new higher standards impact insurance companies.

Some states have clearly been concerned about the new higher standards. But states must seek a waiver if they want to use a lower standard to prevent destabilization of their insurance markets. As of December 22, 2011, six states have approved waivers – Georgia, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Nevada, and New Hampshire. Six states’ waiver requests have been rejected – Delaware, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, and North Dakota. Five additional states – Kansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wisconsin -- have applied for waivers but are still waiting for approval from federal officials.

It is important to understand that each insurance carrier must calculate separate MLRs for each market segment (e.g., individual, small group, large group) within each state where they sell products. MLRs are not calculated separately for each product (e.g., HMO, PPO, HDHP) but are aggregated within each market segment in each state. For example, an insurance company that sells products in each market segment in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia would need to calculate 153 separate MLRs. These calculations will then be used to determine whether the insurance company must issue any rebates (partial refund of premium) to particular policyholders.

How Is an MLR Calculated Under the HHS Regulation?

The formula for calculating MLRs under the HHS regulation is a modified version of the ratio of paid medical claims to premiums collected, as follows:

Used only with express written permission

The insurance industry sought a variety of adjustments to the MLR formula but most were not adopted. The adjustments for taxes, fees, and “quality” (e.g., cost of claims audits, wellness, etc.) were adopted but are not significant to this discussion.

The regulation does include two important adjustments in the MLR calculation, but the adjustments are only valid through 2013. The adjustment factors were an attempt to reduce market volatility for new plans and plans with small enrollment (a credibility adjustment) and for plans with high deductibles (a cost-sharing adjustment). These adjustments may reduce or, in some cases, eliminate the need for some carriers to pay rebates for some market segments in some states.

Credibility Adjustment

Some insurers may have a small market share in certain market segments in any given state, making their claims experience more volatile because they have a smaller pool of policy holders over which to spread risk (i.e., one large claim could skew the experience of

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the entire block of business). The credibility adjustment is intended to help “smooth” the volatile experience of small blocks of business.

Here’s how the credibility adjustment works (see chart at right): If a block of business for an insurance company in a state has less than 1,000 life years,^[1] it is considered “not credible” and no rebate is required. On the other end of the spectrum, if a carrier’s block of business in a state has more than 75,000 life years, it is considered “fully credible” and no credibility adjustment is applied. In between the two extremes, there is a positive adjustment to the MLR for small blocks of business, but the adjustment gets smaller as carriers’ enrollment in blocks of business increase.

The adjustment is applied as a “credit” to the initial MLR

calculated by the carrier for the block of business. For example, if a carrier calculates an initial MLR of 78% for a block of business with 5,000 enrollees, it would then add a credibility adjustment of 3.7 percentage points, raising the MLR for the block of business to 81.7% for purposes of determining whether it complies with the minimum MLR standard for the block of business and whether it must pay rebates.

Cost-sharing Adjustment

Insurers that sell plans with high deductibles will also have more volatile claims experience because the plan doesn’t pay for claims costs below the deductible and the plan collects less in premiums. The cost-sharing adjustment is intended to help “smooth” the experience of high deductible plans. The way this is done under the regulation is that the insurance company computes the weighted-average deductible for the policies it sells within the block of business in the state. If the weighted average deductible is less than $2,500, there is no adjustment for cost-sharing (see chart). If the weighted average deductible is greater than $2,500 but less than $10,000, then an adjustment factor is applied. There is no additional adjustment applied when the weighted average deductible exceeds $10,000.

Used only with express written permission

The cost-sharing adjustment factor is a mathematical constant that is determined by linear interpolation. The example below illustrates how this is done.

Example

ABC Insurance Company sells 10,000 policies in the small group market in Idaho with the following enrollment distribution, by policy deductible:

Policy	Enrollment	Adjustment
Deductible	(Life Years)	Factor
$250	500
$500	1,250
$1,500	2,000
$3,000	3,500
$7,500	1,750
$10,000	1,000
Weighted Avg:	Total:
$3,378	10,000	1.282

Where’s the Problem?

After reading an analysis of the MLR requirements by Citigroup⁽²⁾ in October, 2010, I was concerned that the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) would not realize that high deductible plans would need special consideration when determining MLRs. So I was delighted to see the cost-sharing adjustment factor and that it appeared helpful to high deductible plans (i.e., the adjustment factor increases as deductibles increase). But then I discovered a potentially serious problem when I learned that the credibility and cost-sharing adjustment factors are not applied independently as I thought they should be. Instead, the two factors are multiplied together before being applied thereby reducing the impact that the cost-sharing adjustment factor has on the MLR for a block of business, even if they plan has very high deductibles. Here’s how the formula looks after applying the two adjustment factors to the initial MLR:

Adjusted MLR = [Initial MLR] + [Cost-sharing Factor x Credibility Factor]

Applying the formula to the example above, where an insurance carrier has a block of business with 10,000 life years and weighted average deductible of $3,378, the carrier would receive a positive adjustment of 3.3 percentage points. If the carrier’s initial MLR was 73.1 percent, the adjustments would increase the MLR to 76.4 percent for purposes of calculating rebates, as follows:

Adjusted MLR = 73.1% + [1.282 x 2.6%] = 76.4%

In this case, the credibility and cost-sharing adjustment factors reduce but do not eliminate the need to pay rebates for this block of business.

Upon closer inspection, the most adjustment a carrier’s block of business could receive would be 14.41 percentage points (1.736 x 8.3%), so it is not mathematically possible for any plan with an initial MLR below 65 percent to reach the minimum MLR of 80 percent. Keep in mind that this is only possible if a carrier’s block of business has 1,000 enrollees and a weighted average deductible of $10,000 or more.

Most carriers’ blocks of business will likely receive much lower adjustments and the adjustments will approach zero as enrollment grows. If an insurance company grows its enrollment in a block by selling high deductible health plans, the cost-sharing adjustment factor will continue to be reduced by the credibility adjustment factor (which ultimately becomes zero), meaning carriers will receive no adjustment after their enrollment exceeds 75,000 members in the block of business even if they are selling plans with average deductibles above $10,000. I worry that this will discourage insurance companies from selling more high deductible plans in the future, especially in the state insurance exchanges of the future.

Related Issues

Why do high deductible plans have more challenges meeting the MLR standards? There are several reasons.

First, high deductible plans naturally pay fewer claims because of the up-front deductibles. Plans with higher deductibles end up being disadvantaged by the MLR formula because they cannot count claims incurred below the deductible. Since high deductible plans are designed not to pay claims below the deductible, a high MLR arbitrarily discriminates against these plans by requiring them to meet a standard they were not designed to meet. For example, if a “Bronze” plan is only designed to pay 60 percent of the cost of benefits on average, it does not seem appropriate to force it to pay 80 percent of its premiums as medical claims.

Second, high deductible plans still incur expenses associated with processing claims below the deductible even though the claims are not paid by the plan. High deductible plans must process all claims to ensure that they are properly credited towards satisfying deductibles and limits on out-of-pocket expenses. Although the MLR rule does not allow insurance carriers to count claims paid by patients as “paid claims,” the carrier must still incur the cost of processing them.

A potential fix to these first two problems would be to modify the MLR regulation to allow all insurance plans to include claims incurred for benefits covered by the plan below the deductible. This should be permitted for all plans – low deductible and high deductible plans alike. This would remove the bias against high deductible plans.

Third, fixed costs represent a higher share of expenses for high deductible plans because of their lower premiums. Every plan has fixed costs for things such as property rent/lease/mortgage, utilities, liability insurance, telephones, computers, software, etc. All things being equal, $100 of fixed costs represent a higher share of premiums for a plan with a premium of $2,000 compared to a plan with a premium of $5,000. The lower the premium, the higher the percentage of premium fixed costs represent.

Actuaries typically allocate non-claims costs across their company’s product portfolio using an allocation formula. For example, if an insurance company sells a zero-deductible plan with a $10,000 premium, it must allocate $8,000 for medical claims to meet the minimum 80 percent MLR, leaving $2,000 for “administrative costs” and contingencies other than claims (i.e., the remaining 20 percent).

Some portion of the $2,000 “administrative expenses” would be allocated for fixed costs (examples described above) and the rest to variable costs that fluctuate with the amount of premium collected (i.e., commissions, premium tax, profit). The allocation for variable and fixed costs can vary somewhat from company to company, but variable costs typically are given a higher allocation (e.g., 60 percent for variable costs and 40 percent for fixed costs). So in this case, variable expenses would be $1,200 (60 percent of $2,000) and fixed expenses would be $800 (40 percent of $2,000).

If these amounts are applied to a high deductible plan with an actuarial value of 60 percent (i.e., a “Bronze plan”), the premium needed to cover all expenses (claims and administrative expenses) would be determined as follows:

$4,800 for claims ($8,000 x 60%)

$720 for variable expenses ($1,200 x 60%)

$800 for fixed expenses (pre-determined)

$6,320 total premium needed

Interestingly, if the plan actually pays out $4,800 in medical claims per member (on average) as intended, its MLR will be only 76 percent, four percentage points below the 80 percent minimum MLR. In fact, this plan would need to incur claims of $5,056 per member (on average) to achieve an 80 percent MLR. But since the carrier only set aside an average of $4,800 per member for medical claims, it will lose money unless it raises its premium. But if it raises its premium, then the plan will be less affordable.

Fourth, the MLR “cost-sharing adjustment factor” is only based on the policy deductible, not the limit on out-of-pocket expenses. This means that plans with different deductibles but identical limits on out-of-pocket expenses would have different cost-sharing adjustment factors applied. For example, a plan with a $2,000 deductible and an out of pocket limit of $5,000 receives no cost-sharing adjustment (factor = 1.000) because its deductible is less than $2,500. However, a plan with a $5,000 deductible and a $5,000 out-of-pocket limit (i.e., 100 percent coverage after the deductible is met) receives a cost-sharing adjustment factor of 1.402 because of its higher deductible. Note that HSA-qualified “high deductible” plans can have deductibles as low as $1,200 (for 2011 and 2012) for self-only coverage, so none of these plans will have any cost-sharing adjustment applied.

Conclusions

Clearly, the MLR adjustment factors for cost-sharing and credibility help companies offering high deductible plans but only if they have low enrollment. Most companies will likely see little benefit because the adjustments end up being minimal and ultimately disappear because of the way the MLR formula is constructed. In the short-term, this could limit future growth of HSAs in the fully-insured markets (individual, small group, large group) and put extra pressure on premium pricing to minimize potential rebates. Insurance companies (especially the current market leaders) may be encouraged to sell more expensive plan designs with more first-dollar coverage (e.g., HMOs and traditional PPOs) because it will be easier to meet the MLR requirements. The result could be a future market dominated by more expensive plans, dramatically reducing affordability of coverage and adding significantly to the costs of income-based subsidies provided under the law, since the subsidies are based on the weighted average premiums for Silver plans in the “market area.”

The good news is that most of the growth in enrollment in high deductible plans is coming from the large employer market which is largely self-insured and thus exempt from these regulations. The MLR regulations may even encourage more fully insured businesses to become self-insured just to avoid these regulations.

While it is easy to take comfort in the tremendous growth opportunity for high deductible plans in the self-funded employer market, it is also important to keep in mind the uncertainty that remains after the employer and individual mandate requirements become effective in 2014. A relatively low penalty ($2,000 or $3,000) could encourage employers to drop self-funded coverage and overnight lead to a mass exodus of workers into the state insurance exchanges where fully insured plans subject to these MLR requirements will be sold.

Unanswered Questions

This leaves several unanswered questions. Will insurance companies still be selling high deductible plans in 2014? Will consumers demand high deductible plans with low premiums to comply with the individual mandate? Will the income-based subsidies available through the exchanges stimulate demand for “Bronze” and “Silver” plans?

Can the regulation be fixed? Yes, and the 30-day comment period provides an opportunity to do so, but the comment period closes January 6, 2012.

How could the regulation be fixed? One option would be to exempt high deductible plans from the MLR standard altogether. Such an exemption was requested in comment letters submitted by the American Bankers Association HSA Council, America’s Health Insurance Plans, and the Council for Affordable Health Insurance.

Another option would be to set a more appropriate MLR for high deductible plans, one that might mirror the actuarial value standard for the plan. For example, a “Bronze” plan with a 60 percent actuarial value would have a 60 percent minimum MLR requirement applied.

A third option would be to allow all insurance companies to count claims paid below the deductible (by the members, not the plan) for covered benefits as “claims paid by insurance” solely for purposes of calculating whether the plan meets the MLR.

A fourth option would be to change the formula for calculating the MLR so that the credibility adjustment factor and cost-sharing adjustment factors are applied independently. This would eliminate the possibility of having zero adjustment applied to high deductible plans.

This regulation cannot be fixed by adjusting the essential health benefits, as some have suggested.

What You Can Do to Help

Changing the final regulation will require political will. Letting your elected representatives know that the regulation needs to be fixed will help federal regulators make the right decision. You can find out how to contact your representatives online at House of Representatives and U.S. Senate.

You can also submit comments to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The best way to ensure your comments are received is to submit them electronically via the following link Medical Loss Ratio Final Regulations then clicking on the button “Submit a Comment.”

Comments cannot be accepted via email or facsimile. If you choose to send a written letter, be sure to reference file code CMS–9998–FC. However, letters must be received (not just postmarked) by 5:00 p.m. ET on January 6, 2012.

I urge you to comment on this regulation.

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Fraud Makes Blue Christ...

2011-12-28T10:18:43-05:00

As the 2011 holiday season draws to a close statistics show that three days before Christmas there was a 15% increase in holiday spending. This is a great sign for the economy, however, not necessarily for the Merchants.

Fraud is still a factor in gross sales and although fraudulent transactions are down, savvy fraudsters are costing retailers more per transaction. Now, more than ever, fraudsters are buying higher ticket items and services through E-commerce and mobile transactions.

According to a study published by LexisNexis and conducted by Javelin Strategy & Research in 2011 for every $100 a consumer spends the Merchant incurs a true cost of $230.

To combat losses caused by fraud, Merchants should remain vigilant and stay informed about fraud trends. This information can be invaluable when developing a strategy to build a suite of fraud prevention solutions.

Affordable technologies are available for Merchants to employ. Many verification companies offer real-time Identity Verification with or without KBA Challenge Questions and 2-Factor Out-of-Band Authentication Solutions to help combat the growing costs of fraud.

Looking forward to 2012 the New Year presents a fresh opportunity for Merchants to review vulnerabilities, prepare fraud prevention technologies and enforce programs to help prevent identity theft for the future of the Merchant's business growth and success.

^{Comments of the author do not reflect opinions of organizations listed in this article.}

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Collection to Creation

2010-01-20T21:22:34-05:00

Resources are an important part of life. Our resources all come from different places in different ways. I'll discuss some general ways resources are created and the value of each method. There is a brief link to the current financial crisis at the end, for some application of this perspective.

The "collector" has the least trouble creating resources. They simply take what's already available. This is extremely common for individuals, since we live in a world full of resources. Water falls from the sky and food grows right out of the ground. Collectable resources are limited, especially because there's alot of competition for something that's free.

The "miner" also takes that's already there, but they have to work for it. Actual miners have to dig ore from the earth, but also lumberjacks have to cut down and process a tree, or businesses have to advertise before they can collect customers. In the high-tech industry you hear about data mining where a researcher has to work with their information in order to get something useful out of it. Mined resources are also limited, but the cost to collect them makes them less desirable. I'd rather buy lumber from a store than cut my own tree.

The "farmer" is the first in this list to be able to create (nearly) unlimited resources. I need to make a distinction here, though, because the farming I'm talking about involves working with natural systems to get sustained production, and requires recycling of wastes back into the system. The farmer puts in just enough work to keep the system balanced and protected and collects the surpluses. Traditional farming is closer to what I've called "mining": the miner does some work to pull food from the dirt. Farmed resources are unlimited in quantity, but limited in the rate of production. Natural system can only work at their natural pace.

The "factory" is capable of producing artificial resources at artificial production rates. Like each item in the list so far, it requires more energy to keep it going than the previous item, but that energy is added to the value of the product. Factory produced resources seem more valuable because of the work put into them, but end up less valuable because they become ubiquitous. This makes the factory inefficient for creating value over a long period of time. If a factory must create value, then its resources are in fact limited in quantity.

The "creator" creates a resource that has never existed within their knowledge. Creation is costly in time and energy, and wouldn't produce any value except for the fact that the new resource is extremely limited, in fact, unique. Once created it can be produced by a "factory", packaged and transported to shops by "miners", bought by "collectors", and if consumed and wastes collected, recycled back to the factory producing a "farm" of the whole process. Creation is limited only in the need for large amounts of resources to be available to the creator to work with.

This list started with simple, limited resources at no cost and lead up to unique, unlimited resources at high cost. Each method is valuable in certain situations, but overall, farming is the most efficient. When you run out of free resources to collect or mine, old ones must be recycled and the system managed as a farm. When a factory has created too many of a resource, it might as well stop and let the ones it created be recycled, for they've become worthless. Even the creator can rearrange elements of his creation to create new varieties.

For perspective, let's relate this to the current economic trouble. I'll simplify the causes greatly to make the point: someone tried to make as much money as possible. That should be a good thing because our economy is capitalistic: it relies on people trying to make money. Take a look at the list, though: what's the most efficient way to collect a resource, cash, at the lowest cost? If someone becomes influential enough, they can mine cash from society without creating value. Society as a whole becomes poor, and the miner becomes rich. Traditionally, in order to mine a property, the miner must own or license it, because their actions destroy the property, but we have no licenses for this type of thing, every businessman simply fights for control of a segment of society. Now we see what happens when a winner emerges: they consume us.

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Communication in Space

2009-11-24T12:35:11-05:00

Orbital theory begins with the German astronomer Johannes Kepler (1571-1630). He empirically derived three laws that describe planetary motion in our solar system and the orbits of artificial satellites: (This accomplishment is especially impressive because he preceded Sir Isaac Newton and so did not have the benefit of Newton’s physics.)

1) The orbit of a satellite with respect to the earth is an ellipse, the earth being at one of the foci.

2) A line drawn from the earth to a satellite sweeps across equal areas in equal times.

3) The square of the time a satellite takes to complete one orbit is proportional to the cube of its mean (average) distance from the earth.

The first law deals with the shape of an orbit, a circular orbit being a special case of the ellipse. The second law covers the speed of a satellite at various points along the orbit, and the third law has to do with the satellite’s orbital period. The closer a satellite’s orbit is to the earth, the faster it moves and the shorter its orbital period.

The French-Italian astronomer Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736-1813) calculated stable points in the orbit of one body around another where gravitational forces were balanced. His work was relatively forgotten until it was noticed that asteroids in the orbit of Jupiter tended to gather at these Lagrangian points, L1 through L5.

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In 1969 Gerard K. O’Neill, a physics professor at Princeton, asked his students to design a large living environment in space, rather than on a planet or a moon. He published papers at Princeton in 1974 on the construction of space colonies at L5, the most stable position in the lunar orbit, 240,000 miles from the earth.

In this plan solar-powered magnetic launchers would propel material from the moon to L2 where they would be caught by a large “catcher’s mitt.” Then the material would be moved to L5 where it would be used to build large space habitats for thousands of people.

One design is two counter-rotating cylinders (with a net spin of zero) pointed always toward the sun. Each cylinder would be built of strips of land and glass and would have a diameter of up to four miles and a length of up to twenty miles. A cylinder this size would rotate once every two minutes to provide one G of centrifugal force and would house up to one million people.

Lunar ore is rich in aluminum and titanium, and oxygen would be a plentiful by-product of the solar-powered refining process. Carbon, nitrogen, and hydrogen are scarce on the moon, so these would have to be transported from the earth. In particular, liquid hydrogen would be carried in large tanks to make thousands of gallons of water. Alternatively, these raw materials might be obtained in a low-gravity environment from asteroids.

There are three kinds of asteroids, located between Mars and Jupiter. Collectively, they are rich in iron, nickel, magnesium, water, hydrocarbons, and nitrogen. They could also provide raw materials for the construction of space colonies and space ships. They might be moved from their orbits by rockets and placed in orbits near the Earth, or a solar-powered manufacturing plant might be constructed at the Martian Lagrangian point, L5.

After the habitats are constructed, the space colonists could earn their living by manufacturing solar-to-electric power plants to be placed in geosynchronous orbit at an altitude of 22,323 miles in the equatorial plane. (The geosynchronous orbit, proposed by Sir Arthur C. Clarke in 1947, is the orbit most commonly used by television and other communications satellites today. It has the advantage of serving fixed-dish, rather than tracking, antennas.)

These satellite power plants would collect solar energy and beam it as microwave energy to receiving stations on earth where it would be sold as electricity at commercial rates. Critics of this plan say the geosynchronous orbit is already crowded and the microwave energy is likely to be disruptive to communications and also ecologically harmful.

However, the idea of mining the moon for raw material, using solar power to smelt metals, and manufacturing large living environments and even planet-sized space ships in space remains tenable. The essential ingredients for living: light, air, gravity, land, and food could be easily supplied to a living environment in space.

The far side of the moon would be an especially good environment for radio astronomy because antennae and other receiving equipment would be shielded from radio-frequency interference from the earth. Large parabolic reflectors might be constructed in craters or mounted on poles above the moon’s surface. Received signals could be combined to create a very large virtual “dish” with great focusing power. Data gathered from this equipment could be transferred to the earth by lunar-orbiting satellites.

Radio-frequency signals from the earth to the moon or to space colonies at L4 or L5 take about one and one-quarter seconds to travel one way, not long enough to stifle interactive communication. In space-to-space transmissions there is no atmosphere to absorb the shorter wavelengths, so transmission frequencies above the radio frequency range, including laser light, x-rays, and positrons could be used for communication. Optical lenses, small parabolic reflectors, and electrostatic and magnetic fields might focus these shorter wavelengths and particles.

Plans for colonizing Mars in the next two hundred years might include the construction of a “shuttle bus” placed in an elliptical orbit around Earth and Mars with a period of two years. Signals from Earth to Mars take between three and twenty-two minutes to travel in one direction, depending on the relative position of the two planets, and Mars would be eclipsed by the Sun at its greatest distance from the earth every two years.

Because of these time delays, communication would be less interactive, giving each party time to compose letters of information rather than sentences. A radio-controlled robot on Mars would necessarily be intelligent enough to make decisions while awaiting further communication from Earth.

To travel to Alpha Centauri, 4.3 light years away, would require a voyage of at least one hundred years, at speeds attainable by the present liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen yields water plus energy travel technology. This implies a robot-only crew, generations of people, or folks cooled in suspended animation.

Travel distances will be the major restriction for interstellar people-to-people communication. There are eleven stars within 11.1 light years from us, a possible limit for human migration, using present travel technology. At greater distances than these, we might communicate with non-human intelligence.

Fusion power, converting hydrogen to helium plus energy, will be the breakthrough in interstellar travel. Traveling near the speed of light, the passengers will experience time-dilation effects, extending travel distances and human migration throughout the galaxy.

According to relativity theories, developed by Max Planck and Albert Einstein in the early 1900s, a distance like 100 light years would take much less than 100 years to travel, as measured on the ship. As the ship approaches the speed of light, the travel time becomes almost instantaneous.

There are two major designs that can provide artificial gravity for interstellar travel: One is a flat ship or an apartment building that accelerates and decelerates at one G, a space elevator. The other is the rotating Stanford torus, living in a doughnut.

The front part of the interstellar space ships will be a huge scoop to collect free hydrogen in space to use as fuel. The middle part will either be an apartment building or some variant of a rotating wheel or cylinder. The rear part of the space ship will be the fusion engine, using the controlled power of a hydrogen bomb for propulsion.

Interstellar space ships will be like small traveling stars. They will communicate throughout the galaxy by modulating their fusion reactions and exhaust. The output of entire stars might also be modulated by gravity or by huge plates in space with electrostatic or magnetic fields for communication at maximum distances.

Interstellar communication will be slowly interactive. Requests for physical supplies will not be an important item of conversation, since the travel time will be so great. Scientific data, music, philosophy, and the visual arts might be the major subjects of conversation for mutating gene pools of divergent civilizations.

These red-shifted long-distance messages will become historical records, traveling backwards in time through an expanding universe. Such communication would tend to be one-way and documentary in nature. It could be made more effective by including if-then-else or case a, b, c,… type logic in questions that anticipate long-awaited replies. The problem of administrators hogging the mikes might be overcome by sorting information contained in the conglomerate of many individual data packets at the receiver.

There are one hundred billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy, which rotates once every 200 million years. It has a diameter of 100,000 light years and is 5 to 10,000 light years in thickness.

Human transportation and communication will be forever limited to our galaxy, but conversations with non-human intelligence beyond our galaxy are possible. The Local Group, the half-dozen galaxies of which we are a part, is a further boundary.

http://dingo.care-mail.com/cards/flash/5409/galaxy.swf

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NaturesScope

2011-12-24T08:32:12-05:00

NaturesScope

Unlocking Our Natural Empathy and Creativity

By Alan Rayner

O-Books, 2011. ISBN 978-1-84694-980-7

Used only with express written permission

Quotes

"All the signs are that thousands of years of abstract thought have led modern human cultures to become neglectful to the point that we no longer know how or why to care for one another and the natural world" (p.11).

" Once aware of this receptive presence we recognise the impossibility of defining or measuring anything in absolute numerical terms anywhere, because all form has both a 'figural', energetic inner-outer interfacing or dynamic boundary, which makes it distinct, and a 'transfigural' - through the figure - spatial reach that cannot be sliced or limited" (p.13).

"Evolution can only proceed through natural inclusion - the co-creative, fluid dynamic transformation of all through all in receptive spatial context" (p.14)

“Natural inclusionality radically changes our perception of the source of human vulnerability and recognizes this also as vital to our ability to live, love and be loved. This source is nothing less than the receptive space and creative potential that all definitive ways of thinking intransigently ignore or deny” (p.24)

“We move from angrily declaring our autonomous right to be happy and not to suffer, or serenely denying the distinctness of our bodily selves, to accepting our receptive human need for love and care” (p.25)

"There is something about the nature of infinity that defeats the purpose of a controlling mind: a permissiveness that makes room for all kinds of unpredictable possibilities in the long run" (p.33)

"Within this limitless pool and its vital inhabitants we find an understanding that for us brings hope of a more creative, sustainable and loving future for humanity and our companions" (p.39)

"To sustain this understanding depends on the imaginative capacity to hold both the figural (local energetic configuration of space) and transfigural (non-local continuous depth/openness of space) simultaneously and dynamically (i.e. fluidly) in mind" (p.40).

"Beneath all, I am suggesting that we need to learn or re-learn how to live and love a little more, and conflict a lot less, if we are to attune co-creatively with our ever-tranforming natural neighbourhood" (p.124)

"Such is the paradox that has been built into the foundations of human thought for millennia through the mental dislocation of matter from space - that we preach the virtues of tolerance at the same time as fearing that it will expose us individually and/or collectively to enfeeblement and evil forces" (p.144).

" The dynamic inclusion of receptive space in natural fluid flow is the basis for the 'logic of the including middle' or 'inclusionality', which has the effect of transforming the rigid intolerance of abstract rationality into a much more permissive and creative view of life and evolutionary processes" (p.155).

" Something, or rather somewhere vital gets overlooked when striving to preserve life by encapsulating it, whether in some integral whole or in the set apart part that implies the existence of such a whole" (p.170).

"We cannot live without breathing. Yet in opening ourselves up to natural energy flow we also lose some of the local self-definition that would otherwise isolate our insides from our outsides as discrete objects" (p.171).

"Each is variably open to others' energetic influence. It has no need to oppose what ultimately and inescapably includes itself, open to endless creative evolutionary possibility" (p.172).

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Awaiting X Tradition (O...

2011-12-22T11:56:58-05:00

Used only with express written permission

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The Anatomy of a Practi...

2011-12-20T17:04:32-05:00

The Anatomy of a Practical Genius

Practical genius is your jillion-dollar personal portfolio of brilliance. It’s the secret code within you that only you can crack. But once you do, the possibilities are endless.

Contrary to the traditional beliefs around genius, practical genius is based on the truth that each of us possesses genius deep inside, and it’s just waiting to be activated and set in motion. You are capable of exceptional accomplishments in your work, in your community, and with your family and friends. That means you are the genius, not operating in the lofty, exclusive heights of science or culture, but right here, right now.

That’s what practical genius is all about: identifying and leveraging both the soft and hard unique personal assets each of us possesses. Of course, it’s also about using those assets to open doors, attract opportunity, leverage personal power, and succeed beyond your wildest dreams.

Here’s how it works:

Identify your genius. This means consciously acknowledging and taking active responsibility for your unique strengths, skills, expertise, passions, creativity and values. (Hint: the intersection of both these quantitative and qualitative characteristics is where your practical genius lies.) It requires a particular kind of self-assessment, a series of reflective exercises that enable you to identify the genius ingredients that you possess. This extraction phase of work represents your very own genius full-body scan. I promise it won’t hurt.

Express your genius. The greatest challenge for most people—which is rarely addressed in leadership models—is visibility. If you are not actively, purposefully sharing your unique narrative with the world, you’re compromising your personal and professional impact. This is all about your story and how you share it. Think of this as a long-overdue opportunity to the real story.

Expressing your genius is about turning that sweet spot where your hard and soft assets meet into the story you tell others. A person without a story is invisible. It’s in this context that I ask you to consider a range of aspects of your expression including your narrative, your themes, your vocabulary, and your visuals. Expressing genius is about not leaving any side of yourself out of the game. It all matters. Enough with the same narratives; here we push the boundaries and begin to tell new provocative, daring, inspiring stories about who you are and why you matter.

Surround yourself with genius. You are who you walk with. Raise the bar and build your network with others who are living purposeful, inspired lives. This is about reaching out in a non-transactional way and cultivating meaningful, deeply valuable relationships. Raise your expectations, elevate your standards and surround yourself with those who are a positive reflection of your genius.

We have many kinds of relationships in our lives, and who we spend our time with is critical to improving and building upon our goals and experiences. From a genius perspective, there are the kinds of relationships we should be cultivating every day—our Yodas (mentors), our Ambassadors (the cheerleaders), our “fat brains” (smart young people), and a Tribe (our crew). Once you have identified who is on your wish list for each of these types of relationships, I walk you through a simple process that has opened many a door in my own life. These are the rules of engagement and a blueprint for building the genius relationships you want to have.

Sustain your genius. Living your practical genius requires rededicating yourself every day to its mastery. This means cultivating a constant focus on committing to a practice that naturally suits your genius. And as with any successful behavioral model, it requires applying measurements and personal accountability. Broken down into practical terms, this step offers you new daily routines that will keep you healthy, productive and prosperous. It’s one thing to decide to reach for greatness but it’s something else entirely to sustain it. What it boils down to is resilience, staying focused on growth, and holding yourself accountable to your own genius. This means making the right choices for your body and mind, keeping your professional and personal lives deeply connected in order to enjoy and reap the benefits of a life lived within a genius zone.

In some ways, this work is the most important; without constant sustenance, we fall back upon bad habits. Sustaining genius involves a range of factors, from incorporating brain food into your diet, to exercises that work your creative muscles, to establishing rituals that stimulate your intuition. You’ll even create a mantra to help hold you accountable to your daily genius life. Sustaining real smarts takes discipline and commitment. I never said it would be easy.

Market your genius. This is where the game really changes. When you project and broadcast your genius consistently, with clear purpose and passion, your personal and professional dynamic shifts into crazy growth mode. This phase of work is dedicated to leveraging what is distinct and original about your genius to attract, engage, and grow your natural audience. When you are living and working at the intersection of all your assets, you’re marketing your genius on all frequencies.

***

It’s rare when someone can promise you that what they are going to teach you will make you a better person. But that is what I am promising you. I am turning on all the lights, opening the doors and windows, and clearing out the closets to set you on the path to the transformation of your life. When I decided to live my practical genius, I remember feeling guilty about how much fun I was having. “Work is never fun, Gina. There’s probably something wrong with this,” I told myself. This was just the de-genius devil on my shoulder, trying to throw me off my destiny. Instead of internalizing these devilishly false truths, I learned to shut them up and embrace a more natural, exciting, and truly pleasurable approach towards life. My mother used to say, “Everything that is natural is good for you.” Working from a place of obligation and routine for a paycheck is not natural. Working for joy, innovation and autonomy is.

That’s it for the practical genius foreplay. It’s time to get your genius on.

Gina is the President of Genuine Insights Inc. — a contemporary professional development and training practice whose mission is to leverage the genius within every individual and organization. Gina spoke on the subject of genius at the 2010 TED Global conference at Oxford University and is the author of PRACTICAL GENIUS: The Real Smarts You Need to Get Your Passions and Talents Working for You which is published by Touchstone/Simon & Schuster and IN STORES. For more information visit www.PracticalGenius.com.

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Euler and Divergent Mat...

2011-11-23T17:59:00-05:00

12. Conclusion

This article has been devoted to validating Euler’s views on infinite series. Basically, Euler believed that all series, be they convergent or divergent, could be summed to a particular value and that this value should remain invariant whatever method is employed. In relation to divergent series these views are regarded not only as unorthodox, but also totally erroneous. As a result, they are responsible for tarnishing his reputation. On this point, Varadarajan [2] wrote in honour of the tercentenary of Euler’s birth that although Euler was unsure about calling the limit value a sum, he was unable to appreciate just how subtle divergent series are. Yet in this article we have seen the opposite, namely that his views have been shown to be correct.

The only concept that Euler seems to have missed is regularisation. Strangely though, he was the first mathematician to uncover the concept when calculating the constant that now bears his name from the logarithmically divergent harmonic series [10]. Nevertheless, the concept of regularisation as applied to more sophisticated divergent series, particularly those appearing in asymptotic expansions, was left for others to discover. Instead of referring to a limit sum for a divergent series, we now refer to a regularised value, which is defined as the removal of the infinity in the remainder so as to make the entire series summable. On its own, regularisation of a divergent series represents a mathematical abstraction, but it is necessary in asymptotics for correcting the impropriety in the asymptotic method used to derive a divergent power series expansion from a function/integral. Another point that needs to be stressed is that although regularisation is the removal of infinity in the remainder, it does not mean that partial or truncated sums of the remaining terms do not diverge. In fact, quite the opposite occurs. We have seen that once a truncated sum goes beyond the optimal point of truncation, which can at times be non-existent, it begins to diverge. This divergence is countered by the fact that the remainder also diverges, but in the opposite sense. Hence, when the remainder and truncated sum are combined, they yield a finite value, which is invariant irrespective of the truncation parameter.

From the material presented here, we have seen that Euler was clearly way ahead of his time, whilst his later detractors such as Abel and Cauchy were simply wrong to ridicule his views on divergent series. Because of their prevailing attitude, Weierstrass only concentrated on convergent series when laying down the foundations of classical analysis, which resulted in a vast and important frontier in mathematics being largely ignored for about a century. Today, understanding divergent series and developing techniques for obtaining meaningful values from them have become a top priority in mathematics because in general, the most important and difficult problems in applied mathematics and modern theoretical physics are either asymptotic or divergent in nature.

The indifference towards divergent series in the nineteenth century was also responsible for the Poincaré definition being applied universally in standard asymptotics. In this approach an asymptotic series is truncated, usually after a few terms, and the remainder is either assigned the Landau symbol or +... . For example, if an asymptotic series is in powers of beginning at then truncating after two terms means that terms with order two or higher are neglected, and the remainder is denoted as Since each term occurring in the conventional Poincaré definition of an asymptotic series is algebraic, transcendental exponential terms of the form which vanish as 0" src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black{z}\to{0}$" /> for Re 0," src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black\nu>{0},$" /> have been traditionally neglected since they are said to lie beyond all orders in a standard asymptotic expansion.

Over the past two decades the subject of asymptotics beyond all orders or exponential asymptotics [6-7, 29-31] has evolved with researchers actively engaged in the derivation and formulation of methods aimed at isolating subdominant exponential terms in asymptotic expansions. For these problems the Poincaré definition or prescription is simply inadequate, but in order to obtain meaningful numerical values to these terms, which become dominant as one moves further in the complex plane, a theory of divergent series is also required. From Part 2 we have seen that the subdominant exponential terms in both types of terminant arise from the singularities in Cauchy integrals of the Borel-summed forms for their regularised values. These terms occur at Stokes lines and double up when moving into an adjacent Stokes sector. In addition, as we move further into the adjacent Stokes sector, they also begin to dominate. Consequently, if one wishes to carry out extremely precise numerical studies such as those presented in Part 4, then the terms lying beyond all orders need to be included or else one will never obtain the exact values for the original function from which the asymptotic expansion was derived.

We have also seen that the alternative and completely different method of MB regularisation yields identical regularised values to the corresponding Borel-summed forms. In this comparatively novel approach there is no Stokes phenomenon. Instead, the MB-regularised forms are valid over domains of convergence, which overlap each other. In the regions where they overlap, we can use two MB-regularised forms to obtain the regularised value of a divergent series. MB regularisation seems to possess the potential of being applied to far more complicated series where Borel summation cannot be extended and so in this sense, it represents a more powerful regularisation technique than its more famous counterpart.

In this five-part series the steps for developing a complete theory of divergent series have been described, but more sophisticated examples will probably need to be studied before one can say with certainty that a complete or general theory exists. Here, the steps have been applied to terminants, which represent an extension of the series that Euler described as being divergent par excellence. Since Euler, mathematicians have found far more complicated divergent series such as the quotient of gamma functions that appears in the coefficients of the asymptotic expansions of Bessel and related functions [32] including the Airy function [33]. This is opposed to one gamma function appearing in the coefficients of terminants. The specific quotient of gamma functions in the asymptotic expansion for the Airy function also appears in the subdominant asymptotic series represented by T₃^K(a) in Eq. (5), which has not been given in its entirety here, but can be found in Ref. 7. All these asymptotic results, however, represent a subset of a bigger class of function, the confluent hypergeometric functions. In order to demonstrate that we are well on the way to producing a complete theory of divergent series, what is required now is to apply or extend the analysis in either Parts 2 to 4 of this article or in Ref. 9 to the derivation of the MB-regularised and extended Borel-summed asymptotic forms for the confluent hypergeometric functions over the entire complex plane. These will be significantly more complicated than any of the results that have appeared in this article.

Up till now Mellin-Barnes regularisation has only been applied to positive real values of the variable in asymptotic series with the quotient of gamma functions in their coefficients in the following instances: (1) in Ref. 7, and (2) the Bessel and Hankel functions in Ref. 26. Although the derivation of the MB-regularised forms for the asymptotic series in the confluent hypergeometric functions has yet to be undertaken, the material in Ref. 26 is expected to serve as the platform for this study. As for Borel summation, it is shown on pp. 53-54 of Ref. 11 how the complete asymptotic form for the confluent hypergeometric function can be derived for the sector by applying the asymptotic form for a Type I terminant over this sector to the asymptotic form for the confluent hypergeometric function when Consequently, it is seen that the contribution due to the residue in the Cauchy integral of the terminant is responsible for producing another complicated asymptotic series with another quotient of gamma functions in its coefficients. It is most likely that Borel summation will not be able to be used to calculate regularised values for these asymptotic series because when it was applied to the asymptotic form for in Ref. 7 along the positive real axis, multi-dimensional integrals with terminants in the integrands were obtained. These were not only unwieldy, but also not very amenable to numerical computation. In fact, this was was the reason for developing MB-regularisation in the first place. Therefore, even though Borel summation can be used to determine the asymptotic forms of the confluent hypergeometric functions, MB-regularisation will probably be required to calculate regularised values of the various asymptotic forms.

Because this article has involved simpler asymptotic forms, we have been able to keep the forms derived by both methods separate and use standard numerical methods, viz. the NIntegrate routine in Mathematica, to evaluate the regularised values. For more complicated situations, however, it appears that a combination of both techniques will be necessary for evaluating the regularised values. So, we see that MB-regularisation will become the more important regularisation technique in the theory of divergent series, backing up the earlier remarks made about it.

Another consideration in the development of a complete theory of divergent series is what happens when there is an infinite number of singularities situated on the Stokes lines. Such a situation occurs when one wishes to extend the asymptotics of the gamma function beyond the primary Stokes sector. Therefore, instead of evaluating just one residue on each Stokes line as has been the case in this article, we now have to deal with an infinite number of residues. Based on the results in this article, we would expect an infinite series to appear in the Stokes jump discontinuity, but the situation may be more complicated than this. Since we have seen that the residues are subdominant, such a series should be, if not absolutely, then conditionally convergent initially, but as one moves further into the complex plane, these terms will become dominant and probably divergent. To avoid this situation, the series would need to be expressed as a function that can be analytically continued or should this not be possible, it would require regularisation to yield a meaningful value. The latter would, thus, be a case of regularisation on top of regularisation and could also result in having to employ logarithmic regularisation. Whichever situation arises, a numerical study like that presented in Part 4 will need to be conducted just to confirm the validity of the regularised values of the gamma function obtained by extending Borel summation and Mellin-Barnes regularisation to this important function. As a consequence, we would be in a position to solve other problems where there is an infinite number of singularities lying on the Stokes lines.

These are, then, some of the issues that need to be investigated before we can claim that a complete theory of divergent series is available. It might even turn out that the issues raised above are simply natural extensions of the material already presented here and in Ref. 9. Nevertheless, solving these problems should convince the most hardened sceptics that there is a theory that can handle a significant number of divergent series. In the foreword to Ref. 9 Boyd states that the material in the book only captures part of a very broad mathematical toolbox important for solving outstanding problems in quantum mechanics, fluid mechanics, optics, quantum field theory and a host of other fields as described in Refs. 6, 9, 14 and 29-31. In short, he feels that a more sophisticated theory is required before such problems can be tackled. What he does not realise is that the mathematical toolbox to which he is referring may not be as broad as first thought since it actually includes the numerous asymptotic methods employed by the practitioners in these fields. Because there has been no theory of divergent series in the past, practitioners have been forced to truncate at the first few terms of an asymptotic series and then treat each situation on its merits. If a general theory of divergent series were at their disposal, then there would be no need to truncate in the first place and they could immediately extend their methods to the entire complex plane without much extra effort. In addition, if there happens to be something lacking in any of these methods, then one could use known examples where the theory has already been applied in a different context to expose it. For example, the phase integral method, which is more commonly known to physicists as the WKB method, is often used to obtain solutions of the Schrödinger equation in quantum mechanics. Due to the divergence of their terms these power series solutions break down in the vicinity of turning points. Even far away from these points the solutions are truncated. In order to extend the solutions into the complex plane, they are matched asymptotically with the truncated forms of known asymptotic solutions, which often results in ad hoc continuation formulae [14]. In particular, the truncated WKB solution of the Airy function is matched with the truncated form based on the asymptotic form for Bessel functions [34], the latter obtained by either the method of steepest descent [35] or using the asymptotic theory for hypergeometric functions [26,36]. This matching is known as the Langer prescription [37] in physics. It means that either the potential in the Schrödinger equation or the phase has to be modified. Neither of these situations is satisfactory, especially as we have seen in this article that each asymptotic solution represents a distinct representation of the original function or integral. Equating the two different truncated asymptotic solutions to one another is simply not valid, but if both solutions can be regularised and extended over the complex plane via the same theory of divergent series, then they will yield identical results without the need to restrict the potential or phase. On the off-chance that there is something missing in the WKB solution, the other solution could then be used to expose it. Regardless of which situation applies, a totally different physical picture will emerge, because the asymptotic methods will have been rectified as opposed to considering each asymptotic solution as a separate entity of the mathematical toolbox described by Boyd.

At this stage it appears that the only problems where the present material appears to be inadequate are those involving perturbational methods [38], mainly because as the order k increases, more and more new terms are being introduced into the in Eq. (1). This issue is discussed extensively in Sec. 9 of Ref. 11, where there is an analysis of a quasi-perturbational asymptotic expansion based on applying the partition method for a power series expansion to the incomplete gamma function, which, in turn, has been adapted from Ref. 39. There it can be seen that Borel summation and Mellin-Barnes regularisation are able to provide more accurate estimates of the remainder, although not always. Hence, the material presented here and in Ref. 9 is expected to be of assistance in developing more accurate results from the asymptotic solutions obtained via perturbational methods. What is not mentioned in Ref. 11, however, is that by carrying out further analysis of the asymptotic expansion for the incomplete gamma function, one can re-express the asymptotic expansion in a form where the material can be used to obtain exact values for the incomplete gamma function. So, it may be that additional mathematics will be required to transform perturbational asymptotic solutions into appropriate forms that can be handled by the existing material. Again, this would imply a narrowing of the mathematical toolbox envisaged by Boyd. Finally, now that his reputation has been restored, perhaps Euler can lay claim to being the greatest of them all, an accolade that still eludes the other Swiss maestro, Roger Federer.

Victor Kowalenko

ARC Centre of Excellence for Mathematics and Statistics of Complex Systems

Department of Mathematics and Statistics

The University of Melbourne

Victoria 3010

Australia

Explore the rest of this five-part series on BestThinking:

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 1

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 2

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 3

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 4

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 5

References

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V. Kowalenko, N.E. Frankel, M.L. Glasser and T. Taucher, Generalised Euler-Jacobi inversion formula and asymptotics beyond all orders, London Mathematical Society Lecture Note 214, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995).
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V. Kowalenko, The Stokes Phenomenon, Borel Summation and Mellin-Barnes Regularisation, (Bentham eBooks, Bentham Science Publishers, 2009), ISBN: 978-1-60805-010-9, http://www.bentham.org/ebooks.
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V. Kowalenko, Properties and Applications of the Reciprocal Logarithm Numbers, Acta. Appl. Math 109 (2010), pp. 413-437, DOI 10.1007/s10440-008-9325-0.
A. Apelblat, Volterra Functions, (Nova Science Publishers, N.Y., 2008).
V. Kowalenko, N.E. Frankel and K.C. Hines, Response Theory of Particle-Anti-Particle Plasmas, Physics Reports, Vol. 126 (3), (1985), pp. 109-187.
P. Bakshi, R.A. Cover, and G. Kalman, Polarization and Electromagnetic Properties of the Vacuum in the Static Limit for Strong Magnetic Fields, Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 257 (1975), pp. 95-107.
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G.G. Stokes, On the discontinuity of arbitrary constants which appear in divergent developments, in Collected Mathematical and Physical Papers Vol. 4, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1904), pp. 77-109.
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V. Kowalenko, Exactification of the Asymptotics for Bessel and Hankel Functions, Appl. Math. Comput. 133 (2002), pp. 487-518.
V. Kowalenko, Applications of the Cosecant and Related Numbers, Acta Appl. Math. 114 (2011), pp. 15-134, DOI 10.1007/s10440-011-9604-z.
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J.P. Boyd, Weakly Nonlocal Solitary Waves and Beyond-All-Orders Asymptotics: Generalized Solutions and Hyperasymptotic Perturbation Theory, (Kluwer, Amsterdam, 1998).
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R.B. Paris and D. Kaminski, Asymptotics and Mellin-Barnes Integrals, (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001).
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V. Kowalenko and N.E. Frankel, Asymptotics of the Bose Kummer Function, J. Math. Phys. 35 (1994), pp. 6179-7009.

Appendix

The Mathematica module used to generate the results in Tables 2 and 3 is:

Used only with express written permission

The Mathematica module that was used to produce the results in Tables 4 and 5 is:

Used only with express written permission

Finally, the module used to obtaining the results presented in Table 6 is:

Used only with express written permission

The above is only applicable for . For the code needs to be adapted by replacing 1/8 in the integrand to (5/4)³ or 125/64. This value also needs to appear in the range of integration for the NIntegrate routine in BorelVal2.

Explore the rest of this five-part series on BestThinking:

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 1

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 2

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 3

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 4

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 5

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Euler and Divergent Mat...

2011-09-08T11:44:45-04:00

1. Introduction

Contrary to popular opinion, Roger Federer is not the first Swiss maestro to hail from Basel. That honour goes to Leonhard Euler, who was not a tennis player, but an amazing mathematical talent born just over three centuries ago. Euler was reputed to possess phenomenal skills of memory and concentration, learning Russian within a year after being appointed a professor at St Petersburg at the ripe old age of 20. More impressive was his ability to carry out incredible numerical computations in his head without the use of any computing machine whatsoever. He is the discoverer of such beautiful formulae as: (1) e^iπ+ 1 = 0, and (2) V - E + F = 2, the latter relating the number of vertices, edges and faces of a complex polyhedron. The first formula will play an important role in Part 3 of this five-part article, while the second formula together with his solution of the Königsberg bridge problem resulted in the formation of the mathematical discipline known today as topology. Furthermore, despite going blind in the last two decades of his life, he was more prodigious than ever, when it is customary these days to regard mathematicians as spent forces by that age. In particular, in 1775 when he was 68 years old, he produced a mathematical paper each week. Quite rightly, today he is regarded as one of the four greatest mathematicians of all time, the other three being: 1) Archimedes of Syracuse, the father of integral calculus, 2) Sir Isaac Newton, the discoverer of gravitation and the laws of motion and one of the founders of differential calculus and 3) Carl Friedrich Gauss, the founder of differential geometry and the bell-shaped curve in statistics in addition to important results in number theory.

Despite all these achievements, Euler’s reputation is tarnished because of his views on divergent series. He believed that every series, be it convergent or divergent, should be assigned a certain value, although because of the fallacies and paradoxes surrounding the latter type of series, he felt that such a value should not be denoted by the name sum [1]. Moreover, he believed that the value should be independent of the actual method used to obtain it. Later, when the foundations of analysis were laid down, first by Abel and Cauchy, and then by Weierstrass (the “father of modern analysis”) and Dedekind, divergent series were virtually banished from the mathematical lexicon. Consequently, Euler’s reputation suffered. In fact, the extremely gifted Abel, who died at the tragically young age of 26, described divergent series as “the invention of the devil” and that it was “totally shameless to base any demonstration on them whatsoever”. As recently as 2007, in an article celebrating the tercentenary of Euler’s birth Varadarajan [2] wrote that whilst Euler certainly had some misconceptions regarding the summation of divergent series, his greatness on this topic was not appreciated for a century after his death when mathematicians began to consider the development of a general theory of divergent series [3]. Later in the same article he states that although in his opinion Euler had taken the first steps towards creating a true theory of divergent series, which is still lacking today, the situation is much more subtle than Euler could ever have anticipated. Unfortunately, he does not elaborate on exactly what he means by “more subtle”.

2. Divergent Series

When one wishes to discuss Euler’s “unorthodox” views on divergent series, one is inevitably drawn into a study of the geometric series for it is this series that was used as the basis for his views. We shall do likewise, although it should be pointed out that the series has a fascinating history of its own going way back to Archimedes, who used it to calculate the area under a parabola intersected by a line. This became the precursor to integral calculus.

Before the geometric series can be introduced, however, we first need to understand what is meant by a divergent series. In actual fact, there is no formal or rigorous definition of a divergent series. Instead, we must examine what a convergent series is. Then by a process of elimination, any series that is not a convergent series can be regarded as being divergent. According to my old undergraduate text on complex analysis [4], the definition of a convergent series begins with the symbol of . Here, the sum can represent an infinite number of complex numbers. To assign a meaning to this symbol, Copson considers partial sums, s₀, s₁, s₂, ..., where each partial sum is defined as

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If this sequence tends to a finite limit s, then the infinite series is convergent and its sum is That is, . On the other hand, if the sequence of partial sums does not converge, the series is said to be divergent.

This is certainly a strange definition for it not only includes series yielding an obvious infinity such as 1+1+1+1+….. and the sum of squares, 1+4+9+16+…., but also examples, where the series does not yield infinity, but has indeterminate limits such as 1-1+1-1+1-1+... All the examples just presented here can be regarded as special cases of the geometric series, although the last example is now known as Grandi’s series because he was the first to provide a simplistic account of it in 1703 [5]. In particular, he noted that bracketing the series as (1-1) + (1-1) +… gives zero, while bracketing it as 1 + (-1+1) + (-1+1) +… gives unity. Thus, we see that there are two possible limits for this series. Yet, according to Copson’s definition, the series is divergent. However, since the series can be bounded, one certainly does not get the impression that it is divergent. In fact, Grandi himself did not think that it summed to either value, but to 1/2 for various reasons, none of which would be considered a mathematical proof today. Leibniz went further by introducing a “law of justice”, which amounted to averaging the two possible limits. As a consequence, the series is often referred to as Leibniz’s series.

It was Euler who gave what could be regarded as the first proper mathematical treatment of Grandi’s series. To do so, we express the series in Eq. (1) as the geometric series by replacing by ^k, where can be any value. When the magnitude of is less than unity, i.e. for the limit equals The series is said to be absolutely convergent for these values of E.g., for =1/4, the series becomes 1+1/4+1/16+1/64+1/256+ …= 1/(1-1/4) = 4/3. By using this result, Archimedes was able to show that the area enclosed by a parabola and a straight line through it is 4/3 times the area of the triangle inscribed within this area. If we replace by the complex variable (= ), then represents the unit disk centered in the complex plane. Furthermore, if we put equal to -1, then we find that =1/2, but the series is no longer absolutely convergent, which means that it is invalid to use the limit value of Instead, Euler wrote the series in terms of - as

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Then the main objection to the use of when is that the final term or remainder cannot be disregarded as goes to infinity ( ). His idea was that since an infinite series has no last term, it could be neglected. Later, he used finite differences to attack the problem, but in reality his explanation would not be considered valid today. As a consequence, his belief that every series should be assigned a certain value came under attack and his reputation began to wane as indicated earlier.

According to Varadarajan [2], Euler had several different methods for summing divergent series, but most of all he used what is now known as Abel summation, which amounts to extending the limit inside the unit disk of absolute convergence to a domain with Unfortunately, for more intricate examples of divergent series, e.g., where the are equal to , and this method breaks down completely, which is why Euler referred to such series as divergent series par excellence. Unlike the geometric series, which we have already stated possesses a radius of absolute convergence equal to unity, the latter type of series possesses a radius of absolute convergence that is equal to zero. We shall return to these series later in this article.

Despite the tone of his papers, Euler expressed doubt in private correspondence over his methods for handling divergent series, but he never found a counter-example to Grandi’s series equalling 1/2. Then in 1771 Daniel Bernoulli, who had accepted the result, noticed that by inserting zeros into the series, one could obtain any value between 0 and 1. For example, he found that 1+0-1+1+0-1+… = 2/3. This is really counter-intuitive and a theory of divergent series would need to account for how the introduction of an infinite number of zeros results in a different limit. It is precisely this type of result that Abel was referring to when criticising divergent series for producing fallacies and paradoxes. Worse still, if the zeros and minus ones are re-ordered so that the series becomes 1-1+0+1-1+0…, then we would obtain a different limit.

In 1799, long after Euler’s death, the situation deteriorated even further when Callet pointed out to Lagrange that

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gives Grandi’s series for but now the limit is 2/3 instead of 1/2. Lagrange defended Euler by stating that the right hand side (rhs) of Eq. (3) is not a true power series since many powers are missing. When these are included by writing the series as

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the series reduces to 1+0-1+1+0-1+… for As stated previously, Bernoulli had already found that the latter yields a limit of 2/3. Whilst this may have silenced Callet, it is particularly alarming for applied mathematicians who derive divergent series in the form of asymptotic series for often such series are in the form where is a power of another variable. The above would imply that those missing powers would have to be included in the analysis to obtain the limit.

Since Lagrange, many mathematicians have introduced various methods for summing divergent series. Most sum Grandi’s series to 1/2. Others motivated by Bernoulli’s treatment sum the series to another value, while a small minority take the safe option by not bothering to sum it at all. Therefore, the real issue is whether all the inconsistencies or apparent paradoxes raised here can be resolved.

3. Regularisation

In 1993 my former colleague T. Taucher and I carried out a numerical study into the complete asymptotic series of the exponential series . This series was found to possess unimportant constant terms, which were removed so that remaining terms or the tail denoted by T₃( ) yielded an asymptotic expansion composed of two separate divergent series. One of these series denoted by T₃^K( ) was subdominant to the other, which was denoted by T₃^L( ). Subdominance in an asymptotic expansion means that one of the component series possesses an exponential factor that causes the entire series to vanish as tends to zero. Usually, such terms, which are said to lie beyond all orders of the dominant part of the expansion [6] (see Part 5 also), are neglected by practitioners in standard asymptotics, but we found that they were needed in order to obtain exact values of the series regardless of the size of For example, when the first fifteen terms of the dominant series and the first twenty-one terms of the subdominant series are subtracted from T₃( ) with equal to 0.2, one obtains a value of

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The above value represents the combined remainder of two divergent series. By discovering a new mathematical technique, we were able to evaluate the remainder of T₃^L( ), which when subtracted from the rhs of the above equation yielded a value of -1.588955334... x 10^-17. By applying the same technique to the expression for the remainder of the subdominant series, we obtained this value too. The analysis was repeated for many other values of ranging from 0.01 to 10. On each occasion we obtained the numerical values of the remainder for the subdominant series. Therefore, for the first time in the history of mathematics we had shown that an entire asymptotic expansion could be used to generate the values of the original function it represented. All the results from this spectacular study were eventually documented and described extensively in Secs. 7 and 8 of Ref. 7.

The mathematical technique mentioned in the previous paragraph is known today as Mellin-Barnes regularisation. At its heart lies the key concept of regularisation, which is defined as the removal of the infinity in the remainder of a divergent series so as to make the series summable. As we shall see, it is the absence of this concept that has resulted in the fallacies and paradoxes occurring in divergent series as discussed in the previous section. So, let us examine how regularisation can be applied to the geometric series since it represents a generalisation of Grandi’s series. To do so, we write the geometric series as

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Basically, we have multiplied by , substituted by its more general form in terms of the gamma function and then introduced the integral representation for the latter in the next step. That is, has been replaced by . Although the integral in Eq. (6) actually extends from zero to infinity, the upper limit has been replaced by the finite value p, which we will let go to infinity later. Since the resulting integral in the above equation is technically finite, we can now interchange the order of the summation and integration. In reality, an impropriety has occurred here, which will be discussed shortly. Nevertheless, if we continue with the interchanging of the summation and integration, then we find that the summation is not only absolutely convergent, but that it also represents the Taylor series expansion for exp( ). Therefore, by replacing the series by this limit, we find that Eq. (6) becomes

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When the real part of is less than unity, i.e. Re , the first term in the last member of Eq.(7) vanishes and the series yields the finite value of Hence, we see that the same value is obtained for the series when Re as for when lies in the unit disk of absolute convergence. According to the definition on p. 18 of Ref. 8, this means that the series is conditionally convergent for Re . That is, it is not divergent, but is also not absolutely convergent. For Re 1," src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black{z}>{1},$" /> however, the first term in the last member of Eq. (7) yields infinity. Since we have defined regularisation as the process of removing the infinity so that the series becomes summable, we remove or neglect the first term of the last member of Eq. (7). Then we are left with a finite result that once again equals We shall call this result the regularised value of the series when it is divergent. Hence, for all complex values of except for Re , we arrive at

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Frequently, it is not known for which values of an asymptotic series is convergent and for which it is divergent. In these cases we can replace the equals sign by the less stringent equivalence symbol on the understanding that we may be dealing with a series that is absolutely convergent for some values of As a result, for all values of we adopt the shorthand notation of

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Obviously, such mathematical statements are no longer equations for it is simply invalid to refer to the above as an equation because the left hand side (lhs) is infinite when Re 1" src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black{z}>{1}$" /> , while the rhs remains finite for these values of Instead, we shall refer to such results as equivalence statements or simply equivalences, for short. It should also be noted that the above notation is only applicable when the result for the regularised value of a divergent series is identical to the limiting value of the convergent series. This is not always the case as can be seen from the final example presented in Ch. 4 of Ref. 9.

An important property of the above result is that it is one-to-one or bijective for each value of in the principal branch of the complex plane. This is critical for developing a theory of divergent series since it means that each value of will only have one or rather a unique regularised value corresponding to it. This is beginning to strike a chord with Euler’s belief that each series has a specific value. Thus, there is now a possibility that the fallacies and paradoxes which led to the banishment of divergent series from the mathematical lexicon will begin to disappear if we persevere with this concept.

At the barrier of Re the situation appears to be unclear. For the last member of Eq. (7) vanishes, which is consistent with removing the infinity due to For other values of Re the last member of Eq. (7) is clearly undefined, which is expected because this line forms the border or boundary between the domains of convergence and divergence for the series. Because the finite value is the same to the right and to the left of the barrier or line at Re and in keeping with the fact that regularisation is effectively the removal of the first term on the rhs of Eq. (7), we take to be the finite or regularised value when Re Hence, Equivalence (8) becomes

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Since the equals sign is less stringent than the equivalence symbol, we can replace the former symbol by the latter in the above result. Then we find that Equivalence (9) is valid for all values of

The standard rules of differentiation and integration apply to an equivalence statement just as they would do to an equation. That is, the regularised value has to be either differentiable or integrable in order to operate on the series. For example, differentiating the preceding result j times yields

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while if we replace by and integrate between 0 and then we obtain

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The series in the above result is often used as a textbook example of conditional series, e.g. see p. 18 of Ref. 8. If one lets then one obtains log 2 = 1 - 1/2 + 1/3 - 1/4 +... . On the other hand, by putting , one eventually obtains the harmonic series, which is given by 1 + 1/2 + 1/3 + 1/4 + ... . This series is famous for being logarithmically divergent and was also studied in detail by Euler [10]. We shall return to this series in Part 2 because the regularisation of a logarithmically divergent series is very different from that for the geometric series.

4. Divergent Integrals

As was first brought up in Ref. 11, the regularised value of a divergent series is analogous to the Hadamard finite part which arises when divergent integrals are regularised in the theory of generalised functions. For more details on this topic the reader should consult Refs.12 and 13. As an example of a divergent integral, let us consider the integral representation of the gamma function, which was used to derive Eq. (6). This is

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The above integral is convergent for Re 0," src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black\alpha>{0},$" /> but is divergent for all other values of

The divergence in the above integral is associated with the lower limit. If the lower limit is replaced by and the limit of 0" src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black\epsilon\to{0}$" /> is taken, then the above integral can be evaluated by integrating by parts continuously so that after integrations one finds that Re 0." src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black{\left({k}+\alpha\right)}>{0}.$" /> Then one obtains plus a whole lot of contributions such as and so on. In accordance with regularisation these infinities are omitted, leaving only, the same result one obtains for Re 0." src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black\alpha>{0}.$" /> According to p. 32 of Ref. 12, the remaining term was called the “finite part” by Hadamard, who showed that it obeys many of the ordinary rules of integration.

To demonstrate the relationship between the finite part of a divergent integral and the regularised value of a divergent integral, consider the following integral:

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For Re , the above integral is convergent and yields a value of On the other hand, for Re 0," src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black{a}>{0},$" /> it is divergent, but removing the infinity or first term in the last member yields, once again, a finite part of

To connect the above result with regularisation of a divergent series, we write the integral in terms of an arbitrary positive real parameter, say , as

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In obtaining this result we have used the asymptotic method of expanding most of the exponential, which is described in detail on p. 113 of Ref. 14. Next we interchange the order of the summation and integration despite the fact that an impropriety has occurred because most of the exponential has been expanded as a power series. Evaluating the resulting integral yields a divergent series, depending, of course, on the values of and As a consequence, we have to replace the equals sign by an equivalence symbol in the final result. Hence, the integral becomes

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The series in the final member of the above result is merely the geometric series with the variable equal to If we introduce the regularised value of the series, viz. into the last member of the above equivalence, then we obtain the finite value of , just as we did when we evaluated the integral in Eq. (14). That is, by regularising the series in Eq. (16), we have found that which is identical to the direct evaluation of the divergent integral and removal of the infinity or the first term in the last member of Eq. (14). Hence, regularisation of a divergent series is equivalent to evaluating the finite part of a divergent integral.

In Ref. 15 Farassat discusses the issue of whether the appearance of divergent integrals in applications constitutes a breakdown in physics or mathematics. He concludes that divergent integrals arise as a result of incorrect mathematics because an ordinary derivative has been wrongly evaluated inside an improper integral. Therefore, he finds that regularisation of a divergent integral or taking the finite part is a necessary corrective measure. In view of the equivalence between divergent integrals and series, the same can be said of divergent series in asymptotic expansions. By itself, a divergent series yields infinity, but when regularised, one obtains a finite value or part. Yet the original function from which it is derived in asymptotics is finite. Therefore, when an asymptotic method is used to obtain a power series expansion, an impropriety or flaw associated with the method has been introduced. The derivation of asymptotic expansions from integral representations, e.g., via Laplace’s method and the method of steepest descent, invariably involves integrating over a range that is outside the circle or rather disk of absolute convergence of the expanded function, while the derivation of an asymptotic series via the iterative method to differential equations involves introducing an infinity as is explained in Ch. 2 of Ref. 9. Therefore, it is expected that series, which are either divergent or conditionally convergent outside the radius of absolute convergence will possess vastly different properties than those within the radius of absolute convergence. Furthermore, whilst regularisation has been presented so far as a mathematical abstraction for obtaining the finite value of a divergent series, it is required in asymptotics for correcting the impropriety of the method used to obtain a power series expansion from the original function.

With regard to the issue of whether the appearance of divergent integrals and series in applications constitutes a breakdown in physics or mathematics, it is more than likely to be a combination of both when dealing with the very small such as the Planck scale in particle physics and physical cosmology. However, before the physical issues can be tackled, the mathematics will need to be corrected first. At the moment it appears that the wrong sort of mathematics is being employed, which has resulted in the rather bizarre predictions being made by eminent cosmologists and particle theorists.

5. Grandi’s Series Revisited

Let us now return to Grandi’s series, which arises by putting equal to -1 in the geometric series. From our study of the series in the previous section this means that Grandi’s series is conditionally convergent, not divergent as in Copson’s definition given in Sec. 2. Hence, the limit of the series is simply 1/(1-(-1)) or 1/2, a result which is entirely consistent with Leibniz’s law of justice. If it is not divergent, then how can the introduction of an infinite number of zeros affect the limit as Bernoulli found? Before we consider this issue, we need to examine what happens when an infinite number of zeros is introduced into an absolutely convergent series. This can be studied by writing the geometric series as

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Since every second element is now equal to zero, we can express alternatively as

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The above result represents the sum of four separate series. Hence, separating each series we obtain

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The last two terms in the above result vanish according to Equivalence (9), which now becomes an equation for That is, the equivalence symbol can be replaced by an equals sign. Furthermore, for the first two series can also be evaluated with the equation form of Equivalence (9). Then we find that

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Hence, we see that the introduction of an infinite number of zeros into the geometric series has no effect on its limit when .

Let us now consider the introduction of an infinite number of zeros into Grandi’s series as Bernoulli did. Incidentally, Bernoulli’s father Johann was not only a famous mathematician and the doctoral adviser of Euler, but was also instrumental in convincing Euler’s father that his son should become a mathematician rather than follow in his footsteps of becoming a pastor. It is too shocking to contemplate the loss to mathematics had Bernoulli senior failed. Now, returning to the matter in hand, we can write the modified version of Grandi’s series as

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That is, it has been written as the sum of two separate series, and

The first series can also be written as

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while the second series can be written as

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Therefore we see that both and are themselves sums of three specific geometric series. In each case the first series yields a regularised value of infinity, but as we are interested in the sum of and these infinities cancel. To evaluate the other series in Eqs. (22) and (23), we introduce the rhs of Equivalence (9). As is equal to either or in the series, we have Re . Hence, the equivalence symbol can be replaced by an equals sign, resulting in an equation. Combining the regularised values of all the series gives

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which is the result obtained by Bernoulli. In addition, had the series been given by 1-1+0+1-1+0+..., then the series would have become The latter series is the sum of and The limit of the second series is given by

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By combining this result with that for we arrive at

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After some algebra one eventually finds that equals 1/3, demonstrating once again that the position of the zeros in a conditionally convergent series affects its limit.

6. Recurring Series

As a result of the foregoing analysis, we can consider any periodically recurring series of the form:

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From the previous section we know that can be expressed as a finite sum of series involving zeros and one. That is, the above can be written as

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Each series on the right hand side of Eq. (28) possesses an infinite sum over unity, just as in Eqs. (22) and (23). We found that these eventually cancelled each other when evaluating the limits for and In the above result the sums over unity will cancel each other if and only if Otherwise, one obtains infinity. Hence, we need to make this assumption or condition to obtain a finite limit for In addition, if we denote as the series composed of zeros and ones, where the ones occur at the j-th position of each cycle of terms, e.g. has unity appearing at the second position of every triple (0, 1, 0), then the above equation can be represented as

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The infinite sum over can be removed by introducing the rhs of Equivalence (9) except that because Re for all values of in the above result, the equivalence symbol can be replaced by an equals sign. Then Eq. (29) reduces to

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Hence, we arrive at a finite double sum that is very much dependent upon the values of the

It should be noted that in Eq. (30) the need not necessarily be real. That is, they can be complex provided that On the other hand, if they are purely real, then Eq. (30) can be simplified even further because the real part of the final sum, viz. the sum over must vanish. Therefore, in this case Eq. (30) becomes

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If we let and in the above equation, then, as expected, we find that = 2/3, while for and we find that = 1/3. For a more complicated series such as we obtain a limit value of 9/4.

As a result of this analysis we have seen that re-ordering the terms in a conditionally convergent series cannot turn the series into a divergent series. This is because re-ordering the terms does not introduce an infinity in the remainder of a series. Similarly, if an infinite number of terms are introduced into either a conditionallly or absolutely convergent series that are summable to a finite limit, then the resulting series cannot be divergent since again no infinity has been introduced into the remainder. A series can only be divergent if it possesses infinity in its remainder, in which case it must be regularised to yield a finite value.

Since we have seen that Grandi’s series is conditionally convergent rather than divergent, we now turn to the question of who is correct. Callet or Lagrange? In actual fact, both are correct, but for different reasons. First, we note that Grandi’s series admits an infinite number of encodings. To see this more clearly, consider the following series:

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where both Re and Re are greaaater than zero. It is obvious that if we put in the above result, then we will obtain Grandi’s series. Introducing the regularised value of the series on the rhs, viz. Equivalence (9), into the above result, we arrive at

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The last result has been obtained by applying l’Hospital’s rule. Note that there is no equivalence symbol in Eq. (33) because the infinity in the series is cancelled by the factor preceding it. For and we find that

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while if and then S(z) becomes

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Therefore, in the first instance we recover the geometric series with replaced by while in the second case we recover the Callet/Lagrange example. For and however, we find that

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In all these examples putting yields Grandi’s series. In fact, Eq. (33) admits an infinite number of representations for Grandi’s series. Therefore, the problem is that Grandi’s series does not possess a unique representation. To obtain a specific representation we need to impose conditions so that one specific representation can be isolated for This is essentially what Lagrange did by stipulating that had to be a “true” power series. Consequently, the powers of in had to be positive integers, which automatically excludes and being anything other than positive integers. It also implies that all coefficients of have to be non-zero. Then one finds that and which is the value for the limit of the series obtained by Grandi, Euler and Leibniz, not to mention Lagrange, of course.

This problem concerning uniqueness does not arise in asymptotics because an asymptotic expansion is generally determined over a range of values for the variable. Hence, the asymptotic expansion is valid for an infinite number of values of the variable, which guarantees its uniqueness. However, Grandi’s series represents an infinite series for one value of the variable, viz. Hence, there can be a multitude of valid representations for such a series as we have witnessed above. This situation is somewhat analogous to using boundary conditions to derive a specific solution from the multitude of possibilities contained in the general solution of a differential equation.

In Part 2 we shall consider more advanced examples of regularisation including logarithmically divergent series and series in which the coefficients can be expressed in terms of the gamma function. Although the first type of series can be obtained by simply integrating the geometric series, care must be exercised when regularising them. As a result, we shall see that both types of series can be regularised by using the same technique as was applied here to the geometric series. This technique is more commonly known as Borel summation.

Explore the rest of this five-part series on BestThinking:

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 1

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 2

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 3

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 4

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 5

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Euler and Divergent Mat...

2011-11-23T17:59:13-05:00

10. Mellin-Barnes Regularisation

As indicated in Sec. 3, Mellin-Barnes (MB) regularisation was first introduced in Ref. 7 in order to obtain the regularised value of the complete asymptotic expansion for a particular case of the generalised Euler-Jacobi series, viz. . This fascinating technique for obtaining the regularised value of a divergent series has several advantages over Borel summation. First and foremost, the regularised values, which are expressed in terms of MB integrals, are often more amenable to numerical computation than the Cauchy integrals obtained via Borel summation. Second, the technique is not limited to series where the coefficients are expressed in terms of the gamma function. Although it was mentioned at the end of the previous section that Borel summation can be extended to coefficients which can be expressed in terms of Mellin transforms, this too is not necessary for carrying out the MB regularisation of a series. In fact, MB regularisation can be applied to either a series with a finite radius of absolute convergence such as the geometric series or the binomial series or an absolutely convergent series. For a detailed description of how the technique can be applied to the geometric series, the reader should consult Ref. 26, while MB regularisation of the binomial series is discussed in Ch. 7 of Ref. 9. Both references present spectacular numerical results.

Another property of MB regularisation, which we shall observe here, is that the MB integrals resulting from this technique are valid over domains of convergence, which are generally greater than Stokes sectors. This means that not only are Stokes lines non-existent and the resulting MB-regularised values more compact, but that the MB forms for the regularised value overlap. Hence, in the overlapping sectors of the complex plane we have two differrent representations for the regularised value of a series, which can be used as a check on the concept of regularisation. Such checks cannot be performed with Borel-summed forms since we have seen from Part 2 that the Borel-summed forms for the regularised value apply strictly over adjoining sectors and lines in the complex plane.

As explaind in Ch. 7 of Ref. 9, we still need to analyse the two types of asymptotic series presented in Part 2 separately when carrying out MB regularisation, but now we can make them more general. Specifically, for the first type of series we put in Eq. (1), while in the second type of series the terms are given by According to Proposition 3 of Ref. 9, if there exists a real number such that the poles of lie to the right of the line given by Re and the poles of to the left of it, then the MB-regularised value of the first type of series is found to be

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This result is subject to the following conditions: (1) as oo," src="http://content.bestthinking.com/eq2img/?$\displaystyle\black{L}\to\infty,$" /> for and for where (2) and (3) is single-valued to the right of the line. In addition, as the offset continues to increase, the MB integral in the above result will eventually increase exponentially regardless of the magnitude of It should also be noted that the situation can be adjusted when the poles of do not lie to the left of the line Re but then we need to consider the specific form of .

To derive Equivalence (84), we need to consider the following contour integral:

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where Re Here, Re means the real part of and is not to be confused with Res used in Part 2 when determining the residue of a Cauchy integral. The first two conditions below Equivalence (84) ensure that the contour integral in Eq. (85) or decays exponentially at its endpoints, thereby ensuring that the inetgral will yield a definite value. Since is defined, it can be closed to the right by introducing a contour integral along the great arc from to The condition on ensures that the contour integral is single-valued. Consequently, we can apply the Cauchy residue theorem [4]. The third condition means that when the residues of the contour integral are evaluated, one obtains the series on the lhs of Equivalence (84).

Where regularisation becomes an issue is when we wish to evaluate the contour integral along the great arc. In the case of a convergent series the integral along the great arc vanishes and Equivalence (84) becomes an equation. For and the integral along the great arc can vanish, but it will depend upon the algebraic part of However, if or then the integral along the great arc is infinity. In this situation we simply neglect or dispense with the integral, which is consistent with removing the infinity in accordance with the concept of regularisation. For more details on this issue the reader is referred to either p. 85 of Ref. 9 or Ref. 26.

If we introduce the seemingly innocuous factor of in the form of where is an arbitrary integer (this is Euler's beautiful formula taken to the power of ), into then the MB-regularised value of the modified series becomes

Used only with express written permission

where, again, Re Using the conditions on below Equivalence (84), one finds that the above integral is convergent when

Used only with express written permission

On the other hand, if we put in Equivalence (86), then the domain of convergence for becomes . Therefore, there is a common sector given by where the regularised value can be evaluated by either or . Moreover, we can evaluate the difference of the integrals over the common sector. As a result, we obtain

Used only with express written permission

Hence, the difference between consecutive values of for yields a standard inverse Mellin transform [25]. In particular, for those series which Euler referred to as divergent par excellence, or more generally standard terminants, ^[1] Then we find that

Used only with express written permission

Since represents the regularised value of for we see from Eq. (88) that is also the regularised value of the series, but only for However, we know that is defined over So, if is defined over the same region, which is valid for standard terminants according to Eq. (89), then by analytic continuation, becomes the regularised value of over the entire branch of As a result of Eq. (88) we can replace by when The domain of convergence for is Hence, if is defined over the same sector, which is also valid for standard terminants, then is the regularised value of for By continuing this process further, one obtains the regularised value of for all branches of the complex plane. As a consequence, we arrive at the result given in Proposition 4 of Ref. 9 for the regularised value of a generalised terminant. For a standard Type I terminant this means that the MB-regularised value is given by

Used only with express written permission

where since In the event that is greater than -1, we alter the lower bound on the offset to Re This ensures that the singularity at remains to the left of the line contour when

In summary, Equivalence (90) has been derived as a result of the introduction of Euler's beautiful formula into the general form for a Type I series. Although this amounted to introducing a factor of it has a profound effect on the regularised value, which is not so surprising since we have observed in Part 1 that the introduction of an infinite number of zeros or continuously interchanging the order of the terms in an asymptotic series affects its regularised value .

We now turn our attention to the issue of the MB regularisation of the second type of general series, i.e. where the terms in the series of Eq. (1) are given by As indicated in the previous section, this type of series is often derived when the values of are situated initially on a Stokes line, e.g. for As a consequence, as soon as moves off the initial Stokes line, the regularised value acquires jump discontinuous terms in either direction. Therefore, if we carry out the MB regularisation of the second type of series, then whilst the resulting regularised value will be valid for the initial Stokes line, it will not be valid for the adjoining or abutting Stokes sectors despite the fact that we have seen MB regularisation is unaffected by Stokes lines and sectors. Therefore, we have a situation where a Stokes line is important initially, but that the other Stokes lines do not affect the regularised value. We shall refer to this line as the primary Stokes line.

A property of the primary Stokes line is that it is completely arbitrary since it can be set where can be any integer. Without loss of generality we shall choose the primary Stokes line to be Selecting another primary Stokes line will only result in a shift in the domains of convergence, as will be observed later.

Let us now consider the MB regularisation of the second type of general series with the same conditions applying to as in the derivation of Equivalence (84). Then we find that

Used only with express written permission

where again, we have Re The principal difference between this result and Equivalence (84) is the appearance of the multi-valued factor of in the integrand of the MB integral. Because of this factor the regularised value of the series has become ambiguous since it can be interpreted as being either or even where can be any integer. These interpretations reflect the ambiguity in Euler's beautiful formula, which we have already seen has a profound effect on the regularised value of Type I series. We can, however, drop the last interpretation because we can shift the primary Stokes line to compensate. Nevertheless, the MB integral in Equivalence (91) can be expressed more generally as

Used only with express written permission

Besides introducing ambiguity into the regularised value, the multi-valued factor of affects the domain of convergence of the MB integral. If we consider the first interpretation, where (Euler's beautiful formula again except to the power of ) or in the above integral, then the domain of convergence for the MB integral in Equivalence (91) is On the other hand, for or in the above integral the domain of convergence is Therefore, the domains of convergence overlap over the primary Stokes line, which means that either or is valid in the vicinity of the primary Stokes line. Unfortunately, neither form is discontinuous at the primary Stokes line as indicated by the Borel-summed regularised value of the second type of terminant, viz. Equivalence (69). Moreover, both results yield complex values along the primary Stokes line, whereas from the Zwaan-Dingle principle we expect the regularised value to be (purely) real.

As stated on p. 103 of Ref. 9 the problem can be resolved by introducing extra terms into the regularised value of the series such that

Used only with express written permission

For lying on the primary Stokes line we simply average the two regularised values as we did when analysing the first type of series. Then we find that the average of the two MB integrals yields a real valued quantity. This means that we are essentially treating in the MB integrals as

Used only with express written permission

According to p. 12 of Ref. 14, this customary convention for dealing with the multi-valued factor of in asymptotic expansions is an indication that the Stokes phenomenon has occurred. Moreover, because the regularised value is real along the primary Stokes line, equals We have already seen that MB regularisation is different from Borel summation in that the MB-regularised forms for the regularised value share common regions and that there are no lines of discontinuity. The latter are fictitious anyway if the original function is continuous. Hence, the results in Equivalence (93) will be equal to one another in the common region, which includes the line of discontinuity. Subtracting results in Equivalence (93) from each other yields

Used only with express written permission

As a consequence, Equivalence (93) can be expressed as

Used only with express written permission

All these results are identical to each other in common region of Compared with the first type of series or we see that the regularised value of the second type of general series has acquired half the difference between the and versions of the MB integral obtained via MB regularisation. This simply did not occur for the first type of series because its MB-regularised value was derived within a Stokes sector rather than on a singular Stokes line initially. So, if we had been considering a primary Stokes sector rather than a primary Stokes line, then would be zero, but the ensuing expressions for the regularised value would still equal each other in the common region.

To derive the regularised value for other Riemann sheets in the complex plane, we adopt a similar approach to the first type of series. That is, we replace the MB integrals in the first and third results of Equivalence (96) by the MB integrals that overlap with them. In the case of it can be replaced by while can be replaced by Of course, the reason we can do these replacements is because there is a common region between the domains of convergence for the MB integrals. Once each replacement has taken place, we can analytically continue the results to the next MB integral provided both and can be analytically continued. For a standard Type II terminant, where , we find for any value of that

Used only with express written permission

From Ref. 25 we obtain

Used only with express written permission

which can be analytically continued through to all Riemann sheets. Consequently, we can keep replacing MB integrals and analytically continuing the results to next Riemann sheet over the entire complex plane.

The procedure outlined in the preceding paragraph is the method used in Ref. 9 to derive the regularised value of the generalised Type II terminant given in Proposition 5. For a standard terminant this result reduces to

Used only with express written permission

where for the upper-signed result, and for the lower-signed result, Once again, the offset is the same as that given below Equivalence (90), viz. Re

To complete this section, let us now consider an example where the second type of terminant series is only valid initially over a sector of complex plane rather than on a line of discontinuity as is usually the case. In a recent work [27] a series expansion for the trigonometric cosecant function was derived by using the partition method for a power series expansion, in which the in Eq. (1) were expressed in terms of special numbers known as the cosecant numbers. Specifically, the following result was derived

Used only with express written permission

where etc. A more general formulation for the cosecant numbers was then found in terms of the Riemann zeta function, which is

Used only with express written permission

It was also found that the power series expansion given by Equivalence (100) possesses a finite radius of absolute convergence given by

The simplest method of deriving an asymptotic series with the cosecant numbers is to evaluate the Laplace transform of This yields

Used only with express written permission

If we introduce Eq. (101) into the above result and replace the zeta function by its Dirichlet series form, i.e. by then we obtain

Used only with express written permission

Therefore, we see that the asymptotic expansion for is composed of an infinite series of generalised terminants, which is not so surprising as each terminant corresponds to a singularity lying on the real axis.

There is an interesting anomaly arising out of Equivalences (102) and (103). That is, for either large values of or small values of we can truncate the expansion on the rhs of Equivalence (103), thereby obtaining a finite value when both and are real. Yet for these values of and the integral on the lhs of Equivalence (102) is singular or undefined. This is a situation where a regularised value can be obtained, but it does not represent the actual function. Therefore, the rhs of Equivalence (103) can apply to the sectors given by where j can be any integer. That is, the real axis represents a line of discontinuity for with the expansion on the rhs of Equivalence (103) being applicable to each sector.

Because the Riemann zeta function can be analytically continued into the complex plane, the cosecant numbers can also be analytically continued into the complex plane. That is, we can write As a consequence, Equivalence (100) can undergo MB regularisation directly without the need to consider the infinite sum of generalised terminants in Equivalence (103) arising from Borel summation [27]. In the above example, the variable is not but Nevertheless, for and the regularised value of is given by

Used only with express written permission

while for MB regularisation yields

Used only with express written permission

In both of these results the offset is given by Re

The MB integrals in the above results can be expressed more generally as

Used only with express written permission

Hence, the MB integral in Equivalence (104) is basically while that in Equivalence (105) is In addition, the domain of convergence for the integral in Eq. (106) is , which means that both and are valid over the common region of the complex plane given by On the other hand, the difference between the MB integrals is found from the theory of Mellin transforms [25] to be

Used only with express written permission

Therefore, for and the regularised value of can also be written as

Used only with express written permission

while for and we find that

Used only with express written permission

By combining Equivalence (109) with Equivalence (104) or Equivalence (108) with Equivalence (105), and then comparing either result with the regularised value of a general Type II terminant, viz. Equivalence (96), we see that in this anomalous case where the asymptotic expansion has been derived initially in a Stokes sector rather than on a primary Stokes line, there is a discontinuity on reaching the line at while on moving to the adjacent Stokes sector twice the discontinuity applies. Previously, we found that half the difference between the MB integrals was involved when moving in either direction off the primary Stokes line. Now half the discontinuity occurs on reaching the line and the entire discontinuity occurs when moving off the line into the adjacent Stokes sector. Whether half or the entire discontinuity is involved is connected to whether there is a semi-residue or full residue around the singularity.

Although is undefined along the real axis, its Cauchy principal value, however, exists. We can obtain this value simply by averaging Equivalences (104) and (105) or by evaluating either Equivalence (108) or (109) with only half of their second terms on the rhs. For more details the reader is referred to Ref. 27, where a spectacular numerical study into is also presented.

In this part of the article the derivations of the MB-regularised values of both types of terminants over the entire complex plane have been sketched out. For more details including the extension to generalised terminants, where the in the of Eq. (1) are equal to the reader is referred to Ref. 9. Here we have been primarily concerned with terminants since Euler regarded these series as being divergent par excellence, but they are also important in their own right, since the late terms in the asymptotic series of a great number of the special functions in mathematical physics can be approximated by them [14].

The MB-regularised values for Type I and II terminants are given by Eqs. (90) and (99), respectively. To convince the reader of their validity, numerical investigations are now required, which will become the focus of Part 4. Such studies will also require comparing the results obtained here via MB regularisation with the corresponding results obtained via Borel summation in Part 2. If the results agree, then we will have seen that there is a unique regularised value for each asymptotic series as was first postulated by Euler.

Explore the rest of this five-part series on BestThinking:

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 1

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 2

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 3

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 4

Euler and Divergent Mathematics: Part 5

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Evidence of Iranian Res...

2011-12-15T13:24:32-05:00

On 8 November 2011, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) published a report, entitled Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement and relevant provisions of Security Council resolutions in the Islamic Republic of Iran, which states that it ha

Tensions between Iran and the west are escalating, with the recent report of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) saying that Iran is failing to comply with IAEA requirements and UN Security Council Resolutions followed by the attack on, and the closing of, the British Embassy in Teheran and the tit-for-tat expulsion of Iranian diplomats from London. Overshadowing these events is, on the one side, the belief that Iran intends to develop nuclear weapons and, on the other side, Iran’s belief that the US and Israel are planning a military attack on it.

The IAEA Report on Iran’s Nuclear Activities

On 8 November 2011, the IAEA, which inspects and monitors the nuclear facilities of the Parties to the 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), published a report, entitled Implementation of the NPT Safeguards Agreement and relevant provisions of Security Council resolutions in the Islamic Republic of Iran (1), that states that it has evidence that Iran has conducted research is areas which are only relevant to the fabrication of a nuclear weapon. These include work on a device to trigger a nuclear weapon, work on the design of a nuclear warhead, and the conduct of secret non-nuclear explosions and computer simulations.

However, there is virtually no new information in the IAEA report; nevertheless, it is a very useful assembly of what the IAEA has discovered so far. It clearly states that Iran’s nuclear activities violate the NPT. Some of the information in the report refers to past activities that the Agency has been trying unsuccessfully to obtain information about for a number of years.

Most experts believe that Iran has not yet taken the political decision to acquire nuclear weapons and there is no reliable evidence that Iran has a nuclear-weapons program. It is, however, probable that the more influential political leaders in Iran would like the option to acquire such weapons if the political decision to do so is taken at some time in the future.

The technical studies described in the IAEA report have, however, probably been undertaken with the approval of only a limited number of people within the leadership. This may be an element in the on-going power struggle between ultra-conservatives in Iran’s parliament and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government. Be this as it may, American White House officials seem convinced that Iran is intent on pursuing a nuclear-weapons program.

The IAEA report states that Iran has violated Article III of the NPT which requires Parties to submit to IAEA safeguards procedures on all nuclear material. The Article states that: “Each non-NWS party undertakes to conclude an agreement with the IAEA for the application of its safeguards to all nuclear material in all of the state's peaceful nuclear activities and to prevent diversion of such material to nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices” (2).

Iran may also have violated Article II of the Treaty which commits Parties not to pursue nuclear weapons. The Article states that: “Each non-NWS party undertakes not to receive, from any source, nuclear weapons, or other nuclear explosive devices; not to manufacture or acquire such weapons or devices; and not to receive any assistance in their manufacture”. Iran’s apparent weaponization activities are still being investigated by the IAEA.

The main concern relates to Iran’s enrichment of uranium. The question is how far will Iran go down this path? Iran is adamant that it is enriching uranium only for use as a nuclear fuel in nuclear-power reactors (enriched to about 5 per cent of uranium-235) and will not enrich uranium for use in nuclear weapons (enriched to 90 per cent in uranium-235). Iran maintains that it is legally entitled to enrich uranium for civil purposes.

Sanctions Against Iran

A number of countries and multinational entities, concerned about Iran’s alleged nuclear-weapons program, impose sanctions against Iran under United Nations Security Council Resolutions. Sanctions typically prohibit nuclear and missile exports to Iran, and prohibit certain investments in oil, gas and petrochemicals as well as banking and insurance transactions. But are they effective?

Anne Penketh, Program Director of the British American Security Information Council (BASIC), wrote, on 7 November 2011, “The bottom line is that Iran has remained adamant in the face of economic hardship and has refused to yield to the UN Security Council’s demands to halt its uranium enrichment program which has become a source of national pride. It seems that, sooner or later, the world will have to accept Iran’s enrichment program which has produced a stockpile of sufficient fuel for at least four nuclear bombs if enriched to weapons grade”.

Iran, she said, should “accept international controls aimed at guaranteeing the program’s civilian nature. The Obama administration should continue to work through its international coalition, using all the tools at its disposal short of military action which would be a ‘cure’ far worse than the disease” (3).

Relations Between Iran and Western Countries

Relations between Iran and Western countries, already strained, dramatically worsened on 29 November 2011 when the British Embassy in Tehran was attacked and ransacked; the British flag was torn down and burned. This seriously set back further diplomatic efforts to deal with Iran’s nuclear program. Iranian security forces, which should have protected the Embassy, were reluctant to intervene, indicating official approval of the event. The incident seems to have been triggered off by the British decision to isolate Iran by cutting off financial links to the Iranian Central Bank.

British diplomats were pulled out of Iran and their counterparts in London were expelled. The Iranian Foreign Ministry expressed regret over the “unacceptable behaviour by a few demonstrators” and announced a thorough investigation.

The United Nations condemned the attack on the Embassy, with the notable support of China and Russia. But, with the American and Israeli Embassies closed, the absence of a British Embassy will make it that much more difficult to know what is going on in Iran.

Iran’s Nuclear-Weapon Design

The IAEA report describes the Agency’s current knowledge about Iran’s efforts to build or buy the technologies needed to fabricate a nuclear weapon. It suggests that Iran’s may have the ambition to fabricate a nuclear weapon that could be carried by a medium-range surface-to-surface ballistic missile, presumably its Shahab-3 missile. The Shahab-3 is a solid-fuelled missile with a range of nearly 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles). It was added to Iran’s military arsenal in July 2003.

Iran is enriching uranium by gas centrifuges in three known enrichment plants – the Fuel Enrichment Plant (FEP) at Natanz; the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant (PFEP) at Natanz; and the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant (FFEP) near Qom. The gas centrifuges enrich (concentrate) the fissile isotope uranium-235 (which makes up about 0.7 per cent of natural uranium). The PFEP enriches uranium to 19.7 per cent in uranium-235; the other two plants enrich it to 3.5 per cent in uranium-235.

Given Iran’s capability of enriching uranium, it is reasonable to assume that if Iran decides to acquire nuclear weapons it will use, as the fissile material, uranium enriched to more than 90 per cent in uranium-235 (called highly-enriched uranium or HEU) rather than plutonium-239.

The IAEA report suggests that Iran is working on an implosion design for a nuclear weapon in which a hollow sphere of HEU is surrounded with high explosives. The IAEA report tells us that Iran has developed, or is developing, a method of shaping uranium metal into accurately machined components.

The high explosive would be detonated by a number of detonators, fired in precise unison so that HEU is crushed with a very uniform shock wave. The amount of HEU in the core of the weapon would be somewhat larger than the critical mass, the minimum amount needed to support a fission chain reaction. The aim of the nuclear-weapon designer is to create a weapon that will not be blown apart until it has assembled enough HEU to produce the size of explosion the designer wants. In other words, the aim is to keep the fission process going long enough to produce the required amount of energy.

The HEU would be surrounded by an outer shell, or tamper, of natural uranium, or some other very heavy material, to hold the weapon together for a little longer to increase its explosive yield. A neutron initiator, which could be made from uranium and deuterium (a hydrogen isotope) or from polonium and beryllium, would be placed at the centre of the HEU sphere which, at the precise moment at which the HEU is compressed to the maximum extent, would emit a burst of neutrons to trigger the nuclear explosion. The IAEA report suggests that Iranian researchers have tested an implosion device on a dense material – such as natural uranium or tungsten – that can serve as a substitute for HEU.

The IAEA report states that there are “strong indications that the development by Iran of the high explosives initiation system, and its development of the high speed diagnostic configuration used to monitor related experiments, were assisted by the work of a foreign expert who was not only knowledgeable in these technologies, but who, a Member State has informed the Agency, worked for much of his career with this technology in the nuclear weapon programme of the country of his origin.” This expert was apparently Vycheslav V. Danilenko, who worked for about 30 years in the Soviet/Russian nuclear-weapon complex at Chelyabinsk, Russia.

In an effective nuclear weapon, all the detonators in the high explosive would fire at exactly the same moment and the neutron initiator would inject a burst of neutrons at the precise moment of maximum criticality. Timing is the key to success. If these timings are accurate a nuclear weapon of this design could explode with an explosive power equivalent to that of about 20 tonnes of TNT (20 kilotons) - the yield of the nuclear weapon that destroyed Nagasaki, Japan on 9 August 1945, which used the implosion design.

How Much HEU Could Iran Produce If It Chose To Do So?

According to Gregory S. Jones, in a paper prepared for the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center (4), as of 1 November 2011, Iran had a stockpile of 2,810 kilograms of 3.5 per cent enriched uranium plus 517 kilograms of 19.7 per cent enriched uranium. If this material was further enriched, by recycling it through an enrichment plant, Iran could produce about 220 kilograms of 90 per cent enriched uranium.

Using an effective tamper in an efficient implosion design, the Iranians would probably need a total of about 20 kilograms of HEU for each nuclear weapon. Iran could, therefore, in theory, fabricate a maximum up to 10 or so nuclear weapons if it took the political decision to do so.

It must be emphasized, though, that the IAEA has stated that it has no evidence that Iran has diverted any nuclear material to use in nuclear weapons.

Conclusions

Iran may well feel under threat from the West and Israel and this may be increasing its resolve to acquire the option to fabricate nuclear weapons. Examples of US/Israel provocative acts against Iran include: the assassination of two important Iranian senior scientists; cyberwarfare attacks (using the Stuxnet virus, for example) made on Iran’s key nuclear facilities, such as the enrichment plant at Natanz; the killing of an Iranian general; the allegation of an Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to the US; and the flying of American spy-planes over Iran (one of which was shot down early in December).

These acts may be aimed at destabilizing the Iranian regime. But escalation or miscalculation could well lead to full-scale military action against Iran by the US and Israel. This is likely to trigger a devastating war in the Middle East. It would have disastrous global economic consequences if, as is probable, Iran closed the Straits of Hormuz through which at least 40 per cent of the world’s oil passes.

Hopefully, good sense will prevail and negotiations without preconditions will be used to persuade Iran to comply with the provisions of the relevant UN Security Council resolutions rather than military action.

References

2. The text of the NPT is available at www.un.org/en/conf/npt/2010/npttext.shtml

3. Anne Penketh, Iran on the Brink, 7 November 2011 http://www.basicint.org/press/Anne%20Penketh,%20%20program%20director

4. Gregory S. Jones, Iran’s Efforts to Develop Nuclear Weapons Explicated, paper prepared for the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, 6 December 2011. www.npolicy.org/

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Association for Women i...

2011-11-16T15:31:47-05:00

I have just joined a group that is forming a National Women's History Museum in Washington, D.C. As part of my membership I received this button. It bears the slogan, "Well-Behaved Women Rarely Make History." That's certainly true. I'm glad to report that the older I get, the less well-behaved I become, and I'm sure that's a change for the better, because in our culture it's mostly men who decide what women's good behavior is, and men's ideas on women's behavior change too slowly for my taste.

About my behavior: People who interview me always want to know two things: first, how did I become the first woman baseball historian, and second, how come they didn't become aware of me until just lately?

The short answer to the first question, how did I become the first woman baseball historian, is that in 1949 I married the man who became the first male baseball historian. But that exalted title would not have come to him without his partnership with me, as I will explain.

The short answer to the second question, why didn't the public become aware of me until lately, is that my late husband failed to reveal my contribution to the work we produced together, and I waited to explain our partnership until after his death in 1992. That always brings up another question: Why did I wait that long?

To this question there are only long answers, some of which I discuss in my autobiography, A Woman's Work, published by McFarland in 2004. But there's more to it than that.

I was eighteen when I met Harold Seymour. That's a little too early, in my opinion today, for beginning a lifelong partnership of equality with a man who was 17 years older than I was. Harold Seymour was one of my college history professors, so he was already well established in his field while I was only a novice in mine. Our first relationship, therefore, was as mentor and student. Although we gradually broke free of that structure, it continued to color our entire lives.

As an English major in college I was already writing articles, stories, and poems and was part of the leadership of the college newspaper, but on the baseball project he was at first the leader. It was his idea to write a doctoral dissertation for Cornell University about the early history of baseball. Nothing like that had ever been done in the field of history before. No historian had ever attempted to study and write baseball history.

When I met Harold Seymour, Cornell had accepted his proposal for a dissertation on early baseball history, and he had already satisfied Cornell's residence requirements and completed the course work for the doctorate. He was engaged in the research and writing of the dissertation while at the same time beginning to teach history at Fenn College, now called Cleveland State University, where I entered as a student in the fall of 1946.

Our relationship began during my sophomore year at Fenn when he advertised for secretarial help. I needed money in order to continue in college, and although I was already helping the head of the English department, I applied for the Seymour position, too, and was accepted. So my second role in connection with Seymour was that of secretary. As a result, to him I was always his assistant, despite the fact that I was to take charge of many aspects of the project we would work on jointly and eventually would take it over entirely.

For this secretarial position, Seymour said he needed his lecture notes retyped. But when I began work on them, I discovered that they needed a lot more than retyping; they needed reorganizing and in some cases rewriting. I explained that, and he agreed to my changes. While I was engaged in this work, he must have realized that the skills I brought to bear on his lectures could be used in the work he was trying to do on the dissertation. For after a while he began telling me about his thesis for Cornell on early baseball history.

I was intrigued with the idea, for I knew nothing about baseball history and at first had no notion that baseball even had a history. He began telling me about the information he had uncovered in manuscripts and early newspapers in the New York Public Library and other special collections about early baseball organizations and the colorful exploits of the gentleman players in the early New York-area teams, as well as other research he had in mind.

As an English major I had performed research and written research papers, so I understood what he was trying to do. In hearing about this innovative project and examining his first attempts at organizing his research and writing, I found it fascinating.

Seymour must have revealed my interest in his work and my abilities in this field to his friend, another history professor, who promptly asked me to work with him on his dissertation, too. I declined, knowing I could not do it all and carry on with my studies. Besides, Seymour and I were becoming special friends, although he was married. I eventually learned that his marriage was not what he had hoped, and he believed that he would have to end it. After that school year was over, we began to date secretly, and he started the legal proceedings for his divorce, which became final at the end of my junior year, when we were married.

We began our research together immediately after our brief honeymoon by traveling to St. Louis to work on the microfilmed archives of the baseball trade paper, The Sporting News. Immediately, I took over organization of our notes. That led to my organization of all the research material, which to me seemed to fall naturally into topical chapters. Eventually, I began preparing chapter outlines with quotations from the notes and including their citations. Gradually, these outlines morphed into first drafts of the chapters. We passed these drafts back and forth until both of us were satisfied with them.

Not only was I gradually taking over the writing, I was also taking over most of the research. I prepared all of our considerable correspondence, too, and made suggestions for new research. By the time we completed the doctoral dissertation and started on the books for Oxford University Press that followed, I was Seymour's complete and equal partner in the work.

Unfortunately, I still viewed myself as secondary in the baseball project. One reason was that Seymour was the one who'd had the idea for writing academic baseball history. He also had the academic history credentials, having earned the Ph.D. with the dissertation that I'd helped him prepare. I had earned only a master's degree, not in English or history but in education, for at his suggestion I gave up my original idea of becoming a journalist and entered teaching instead so that we would have summers off together to perform research and writing. I did take some courses toward a doctorate but never completed it. Instead, I became deeply absorbed in the preparation of our books for Oxford University Press.

While I was teaching first-grade reading I published my first articles and books in the field of education. Among them were children's books that I originally wrote for my students. One of these children's books, Ann Likes Red, eventually became a classic. But after 17 years I burned out as a teacher and joined a Boston publishing house as a senior editor, doing work that was more to my liking than teaching. While working as a fulltime editor I published more of my own books and articles relating to education. I was producing this research and writing while I continued to work daily on our baseball project.

It was not until we began on the third volume of the baseball history for Oxford that my lack of recognition for my work in baseball research and writing began to really bother me. By then I had left full-time editorial work and was freelancing both as a writer and as an editor. Meanwhile, Seymour's health was declining, and he contributed less and less to the baseball project, finally giving up entirely.

While working as an editor I had noticed that the title pages of many books we published listed husband-and-wife teams, and I realized that the title pages of our baseball books should have done the same. I put off challenging Seymour on this point because I knew he would react negatively. He was in fact too lacking in self-confidence to be able to share credit appropriately.

Finally, I told him that my name should be added to the title page under his, at least on this third volume. He refused. By then, I knew that his health was compromised by Alzheimer's Disease, so I did not press he matter further. Not long after I completed the third book by myself, I found him too difficult to handle, and I had to place him in a local institution, where after a few months he passed away. That was in 1992. It was only then that I felt comfortable revealing to Oxford's editor, and to the other professionals who had begun working in the field of baseball history, my real role in the preparation of these classic books.

Why didn't I insist much earlier on the revelation of my position in writing and researching this innovative project? Partly because it was difficult for me to emerge from the view of myself as an assistant on this project. In addition, I knew that Seymour's personality meant that he was unable to share the limelight. I realized that he thought of himself as very important and believed he was not receiving the attention he believed he deserved from the academic community because he had spent his career on such an untraditional subject. Sharing the credit would have been too much for him to accept.

But our culture is partly to blame, too. If you have read any women's history you know that women were long taught to assume that the male of the species was the creator and leader and that a woman was merely a man's helper. This idea was constantly reinforced by all religious leaders. Girls were brought up to accept that a man could be a physician and a woman his nurse; a man could be a business leader and a woman his secretary. When I was growing up in the 1930s, I must have absorbed this notion at least in part.

It's typical that when I was in high school my mother, a factory worker, once told me, "Wouldn't it be wonderful if you could grow up to be a secretary like your cousin?" I had no intention of growing up to be a secretary; I wanted to be a reporter, like my heroine, Doris O'Donnell of the Cleveland News, where I worked summers during college as a copy boy. There I saw how Doris, the only female beat reporter on the paper, successfully produced excellent bylined news and features, like the ones I was used to writing for the college paper. But Doris was unusual.

The only other women on the staff of the News in the 1940s were assigned to write obituaries or cover socialite engagements and weddings, or they merely typed stories phoned in by real reporters. As you are well aware, it took a while for the male leadership of newspapers to realize that women could be reporters who were as good at the job as men. And getting assigned to sports teams took many years. If you've read Doris's book, you know that like many others, when she tried to enter a baseball stadium's press box to do an assigned job, she was locked out by the other writers.

When in the year 2000 I was preparing my autobiography, called A Woman's Work, I included information demonstrating that throughout history it was not unusual for women to work on their husband's books without attribution and without realizing its unfairness. After A Woman's Work was published, I was swamped with other examples sent to me by readers who told me about famous male writers who used their wives' work or other women's work and let everyone assume it was their own. I included many of these examples in the book that followed, called Chasing Baseball, in which I also reviewed the recent spurt of excellent baseball history writing by women writers and researchers. It's a great satisfaction for me to see women succeed in writing academic books not only with their names on the title pages but also in a field that men have long believed to be exclusively their own: explaining and interpreting baseball history. I hope men have finally grasped that there is no writing that women cannot do.

Virginia Woolf, in talking about authors of books, once said that through most of history, the name Anonymous signaled a woman writer. The era of anonymity is over, even by women baseball historians, because although I was the first woman baseball historian, I'm no longer the only one, and the other women who have entered the field of baseball history will never be called Anonymous.

I'm not claiming that all men now see women as able to do any work they put their minds to. Many men, especially of my generation, still assume that women have a particular place in life, that men know what that place is, and that women should not try to move out of their traditional roles. Once about four years ago in a social situation I listened to a man express a thought like that. I responded, "You sound just like Hitler!" The words just popped out of my mouth. Talk about not being well-behaved! But I had just completed the writing of one of my historical novels, in which Hitler had a cameo role, so I had read a lot of what Hitler wrote, and I was using his real words in that book. You've probably heard that women of the Hitler regime were told that their place in life involved only three institutions: the kitchen, the church, and children. Hitler really believed in limiting women's role in this way. It's too bad that his opinion lived on so long. Nobody loves cooking and baking better than I do, but his idea of limiting women's goals in any way is simply unacceptable in a democracy.

I have discovered that today's men, even though they know better, still find it difficult to see women as able to do most anything men can do if they put their minds to it, and I can tell you two stories proving that some male sport historians of today still do not accept women as colleagues in the field.

First, an incident that occurred at Cornell University in the spring of last year. I was invited to speak for ten minutes at a Cornell event celebrating the Seymour dissertation and our three books published by Oxford University Press that followed, since they are the seminal historical works in baseball history, and they set the stage for all other serious historical work in the field.

The main speaker at this event was a male historian who several years ago wrote for a history journal an excellent analysis of the Oxford books that Seymour and I had produced. This historian spoke for about a half-hour about those books, and in his presentation he constantly used phrases like "in this section Seymour says" and "Seymour presents this information" and "Seymour reveals" and "Seymour comments."

After the historian's presentation, the head of the Cornell history department whispered to me, "He didn't even mention you!" I said, "I know, I'm used to it." He replied, "If you don't say something, I will.'" While I was thinking how I could contradict this main speaker in front of the entire Cornell history department and its grad students and guests, the Cornell department chairman got up and asked the speaker, "What would have happened if a woman had written baseball history in the 1950s?" The speaker gave a non-response by merely talking around the subject and never addressing it.

So I finally got up and said, "You mentioned throughout your presentation what an impressive amount of work went into these books. Who do you suppose did all that work?" He replied, "Oh, the Seymour Crowd." I answered, "There was no Seymour Crowd. There was only Seymour and me." He ignored my remark and still did not mention my contribution to these books. And at the formal dinner that followed he never even looked at me, much less did he speak to me.

When the Cornell History Department chairman drove me back to the airport, he said he could hardly believe what had happened, that he planned to address the matter by asking more women historians to speak, by covering the situation with his senior staff, and by writing about the event on the department web site so that my work could be mentioned. He told me, "It's obvious that some male historians still do not accept women in the field."

The next incident proving my point happened not long afterward. The Society for American Baseball Research is the primary organization to which many baseball historians belong. In 1996 the Society, known by its acronym S A B R, pronounced "saber," recognized my work with Seymour by establishing an award called the Dr. Harold and Dorothy Seymour Medal, which is given annually in our names to the author of the best book of history or biography published in the previous year. This is the most prestigious honor that SABR awards. Not only are both our names and profiles on the medal, SABR even awarded the first medal to me.

I thought that because of the name of this medal and the annual award ceremony, at which I always speak, everyone in SABR was aware that Seymour and I were equal partners in establishing baseball as a legitimate subject for historians to study, especially after the appearance of my autobiography in 2004, in which I explained my work. But I must have been wrong. Last year SABR decided to establish anther award, the Chadwick award, named after an early sports writer, to be given to the members who had contributed the most to the study of baseball. My late husband Harold Seymour was one of those listed to receive the award, and in the paragraph describing him, I was mentioned briefly, in a subordinate clause that read "assisted by his wife Dorothy." There I was, an assistant all over again.

This offhand mention of my contribution to a field that I had done so much to establish surprised and annoyed me, so I protested to the committee, and I informed other baseball historians about what had happened, especially the young women historians, who were well aware of my work since I was mentoring many of them. So the award committee received a lot of email protesting the wording of the award. As a result, the committee changed the wording of the paragraph to give me equal billing with Harold Seymour and pointing out that we were a writing team. Meanwhile, someone informed a New York Times reporter about this controversy. He interviewed me and published a rather inflammatory article about the matter. I hadn't intended it to go that far, but I'm glad now that it did, because I tire of playing second fiddle when I've long since graduated from concertmaster to maestro. The interview in the Times and in other papers who picked up on it meant that the story had a good play for about a month, and this spring CNN.com sent out a reporter to interview me on the same topic, attempting to dig deeper into the matter. So my fifteen minutes of fame lasted more like 20 minutes.

The best result of my having objected to the first wording of the Chadwick Award is that Oxford University Press decided independently to change the title pages of the three Oxford books to include my name as co-author. Oxford has never done anything like that before; in making this change the Press is overriding the person long considered to be the author of these books. In addition, on the third book, for which I was actually the primary author, my name now precedes that of Harold Seymour. You can't begin to realize what satisfaction this gives me. From now on, those who buy the books long considered the standard works on baseball history will see that they were a joint project, not written only by Harold Seymour.

Sometimes things happen demonstrating to me that men are still discovering that women are fully rounded humans. Last month the Associated Press published a story revealing that whiskey isn't just a men's drink any more, that bourbon is popular among women, and the manufacturers, finally realizing that, are actually beginning to market it to women. A Kentucky woman was quoted as saying she felt a sense of relief in finally being at a point where "we can be taken seriously as women who enjoy bourbon and the lifestyle that accompanies it." So perhaps men are beginning to realize that when a woman comes home from a hard day's work, she might like to relax as they do, with a drink and a pair of house slippers.

It's okay to feel relief that women are beginning to be viewed as fully human, but let's not remain complacent about our position, especially in the world of work. I have found it necessary to remain vigilant about proper recognition. Twice recently I had had to point out to leaders in my field cases where I feel other women historians aren't receiving appropriate recognition for their work.

Other things have happened to me to demonstrate clearly that male writers often think of women writers in a different category from male writers. For example I can't begin to recall how many times during my long lifetime that I've listened to a man say to me, "I'd like you to write my book for me." I've come to think of this approach as propositioning. After all, these men have a proposition, one they are sure will meet with a favorable response or else they wouldn't make it. They think it is a flattering proposal. They firmly believe that women writers are there to assist them in presenting their ideas to the world.

To this approach, I have devised a response that I think is appropriate. I reply, "If I write your book, who will write my books?" This helps them realize that I, too, have book ideas. If necessary, I reveal the number of books I've published, which is now up to 25, with one more in press, most of them written independently, without any co-author, and that I have a folder full of book ideas waiting to be worked on. This response may help them realize that women, too, generate books. Perhaps I should be asking if they would like to help me write my books.

I'll bet at least some of you have had men ask for your help in writing their books. Could I have a show of hands?

If it hasn't happened to you, I believe it will happen. And now you know how deeply you can dig a hole in your self-confidence if you don't protect yourself in any such working relationship by seeing to it from the beginning that your contribution to any writing project is appropriately acknowledged.

Women writers make history, too, but sometimes the only way to do it is to become what men may think of as badly-behaved, or demanding, or lacking in the understanding of women's place. I have come to believe that women's place is wherever they want it to be. Today women are competing successfully in Iron Man competitions, they are playing baseball successfully in independent leagues; they are soldiers, astronauts, business leaders, and government leaders. They are making history because they know that they need not limit themselves to any particular role. To me, today's women are Awesome.

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What To Do Before Your ...

2011-12-14T17:06:33-05:00

Including Disability Insurance in the Buy-Sell Agreement

Many of the baby boomers in their 50s and 60s have probably seen the tell-tale signs in their business partners.

Things are starting to get wacky.

Your partner cannot remember to do important daily tasks, misses meetings, fails to call back important clients, and cannot find important documents.

Your dilemma goes beyond trying to figure out how to delicately remind your partner about coming to the weekly staff meeting. If your partner becomes totally disabled, but is still drawing an income, but not contributing to the bottom line, your business will suffer.

The longer this goes on, the more value your business loses and the less attractive it becomes to potential buyers.

Plus, the longer this goes on, the less likely your partner will be competent to engage you in rational conversations about the future of your business.

First Step: Get Business Insurance to Cover the Wacky Partner Buy-Out

Long before things get wacky, you and all of your business partners need to agree on the steps to take if a partner becomes disabled, either mentally or physically.

Generally, you and your partners will need to buy and own three distinct types of busines insurance to cover the loss of income resulting from a partner’s disability.

Disability Income Insurance on yourself and all senior managers, if an executive or owner become sick or disabled. This personal disability insurance covers the payment of a salary to the partner during the time the partner is not contributing to the business. Usually, the term of benefits runs to age 65 of the insured and the income is paid directly to the owner/executive.
Business Overhead Expense, related to the loss of business income if you, or another key executive becomes sick or disabled, and cannot contribute to the sales and revenues of the company during your illness. This insurance covers the loss of business revenues, and is paid to the company, and not to the individual.
Disability Income to Fund a Buy-Sell Agreement to buy the partner’s ownership interests if events in the legal agreement trigger the mandatory buy out. Generally, the disability buy out can either be paid to the company, which buys the shares from the owner, or it can be paid to the other partners, who then use the insurance to buy the shares from the disabled owner.

Business Overhead Expense Insurance Keeps the Business Doors Open Even When the Partner’s Lights Go Out

Business overhead insurance is a form of property and casualty insurance (P&C). The insurance policy generally names the types of perils that could possibly cause a disruption, including a wacky partner, and then describes the types of business costs that the policy would cover, if the business has no income related to the peril. The main goal for buying this type of insurance coverage is to have enough cash to keep the business running if the partner’s contributions to revenues and sales have ended, but the partner keeps coming into work every day. This insurance does not compensate you for your partner for personal or family loss of salary or income that you pay to yourself as a result of the disability.

Most business overhead expense policies can insure up to $30,000 a month in overhead expenses. The policies are written to protect a business owner in the event he or she is unable to perform the material and substantial duties of his or her regular occupation. This language is very similar to the language in the personal or family disability income insurance policy.

The provisions related to the strategy to deal with the wacky partner are part of much more elaborate plan about how to protect the business if something really bad happens. Generally, the right amount of business overhead expense, just for the disability, and not for other natural disasters, like fire or floods, is about 125% of the partner’s annual salary.

The provisions in the legal buy-sell agreement would be coordinated with the 12 months of benefits to trigger the buy-out at the end of 12 months, if the partner is still wacky, and shows no signs of improvement.

Personal Disability Income Insurance: Keeping Body and Soul Together for Your Partner’s Family

The payment of salary to the wacky partner for some period of time, before the buy-out is triggered, keeps the pressure down about how to take care of the partner’s family. In most cases, the legal provisions of the buy-sell agreement will specify when and how the disability buy out occurs, and the partner’s disability income payments run for that length of time.

Disability income insurance provides the partner’s family with income should the partner become sick or injured and unable to work. It helps protect against family financial catastrophe by giving the partner an income to meet daily expenses. The insurance takes the place of revenues from the business that would otherwise be paid out to the disabled partner.

Adding Provisions About Disability to Your Business Buy-Sell Agreement

Only 17 percent of the nation's small-business firms (100 employees or fewer) have any form of disability income insurance coverage on a partner or on key employees, according to an insurance-industry research organization, LIMRA.

Insurance industry statistics generally show a 65% likelihood that a partner will become disabled, rather than die while still a business owner.

The disabled person won't be generating income for the firm, but will want to recover his or her capital investment. The best idea is to fund the buy-out agreement with business disability insurance in addition to life insurance.

A buyout disability policy pays out either in a lump sum or over a period of years (two to five is common), or a combination. Most policies require a waiting period of 12 to 24 months in order to adequately determine that the disabled person will not be able to return, and to prevent healthy owners from prematurely pushing the disabled wacky partner out the door.

As with other types of buy/sell agreements, the disability insurance coverage will either be a cross-purchase, in which each owner individually buys coverage on the other owners, or redemption, in which the business itself buys the coverage.

Generally, the provisions on the disability buy out would follow the same provisions as the death of a partner provisions.

The tax consequences vary depending on the arrangements whether it is a cross purchase buy out or an entity buy out. The attorney who drafts the business buy-sell agreement can help you understand these legal complexities.

Your business CPA can explain how your current year business taxes are affected under either scenario.

In either case, the main legal point is that the agreement contains a mandatory provision that the disabled partner is obligated to sell the ownership interest at an agreed upon price, and the other owners are legally obligated to buy the shares, once the triggering event occurs.

This agreement needs to be implemented long before the partner becomes wacky, but in the worst case, an existing agreement that does not have the disability provisions needs to be modified, ASAP, before the partner becomes even wackier. If that is possible.

The legal and tax issues related to the buy-sell agreement need to be completed first, and then the business needs to buy the right type of insurance policies to fund the legal agreement.

Each product area, personal disability income, business overhead expense, and buy-sell disability income insurance, all have many product varieties to choose from, and the same policy type would not generally fit all three insurance needs.

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Thomas Vass is an independent licensed insurance agent, located in Raleigh, N. C., with a special focus on helping small companies implement buy-sell agreements. He works with the company’s other business professionals as a part of an advisory team that provides advice to business owners on getting the right buy-sell agreement in place. After the legal and tax issues have been solved, Vass provides advice on the right types of life insurance and disability income insurance to fund the agreements for a smooth financial ownership transition.

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Black Metal and New Age...

2011-12-14T10:02:46-05:00

The middle ground. Not Blair's fabled Third Way, nor sitting on the metaphoric fence. The middle ground. Like Zelig, floating, somnambulist in the fog of past, present and future tense. Hard to find a context as one drifts through WH Smith's mega newsagent shelves searching for the elusive zeitgeist. Rudderless, the waking sleeper, in a Tramadol-induced hypnagogia. Titles swim up through the grey fug. New Humanist. Jewish Chronicle. Writers Forum. Zero Tolerance. Belief, atheism, satanism in one fell visual swoop. Still more bemusement. The confusion of competing titles revealing little.

God's dandruff. Higgs Bosun particles. Scientists looking for meaning in the infinitesimal. The titles reveal little.

Back to the egg. WH Smith's echoes my small discomfiture. Zero Tolerance unveils arcane satanism for the geeks who cling to the darkness. Suicide clauses in dark make-up and Finnish miserablism and fashionably bleak nihilism straight from the HP Lovecraft text. Hyper real nonsense, jockeying for position with glossy atheism and its cousin New Humanism. Comedians and scientist united in approval of a boringly rendered future. Nothing really new since Greek antiquity. Obvious stances of the Witchfinder General sort. Spiteful Oxbridge graduates in ivory towered, non-engagement with the great mass of seething, starving humanity. Easy for the Big Pharma-sponsored entertaining elite to talk down to us proles.

What do I know? Just a marginal, gutter cyclist avoiding the twin temptations of the easy cynicism and stoop-to-conquer Dawkins religiosity alongside the mugging, cycloptic light of the New Age idiot brigade. I am empty as a zen koan and as full as a Taoist sunset. Glib theories. Last gasp optimism in a tide of polarities worthy of mental illness indicators. DSM VI for 2011 and beyond. Old certainties and new science still showing a poor imagination at work.

More margins. But then, 'twas ever thus in this new Middle Age. Better to have some outsider view than join a club that admits such as I. Marxism of the right sort. Trying not to be co-opted by the extremities is worth pursuing. Neither a satanist crank nor a righteously hidebound New Humanist. No harm to either as I peddle through the slurry of print in WH Smith's back into the teeming hordes of consumers on Northumberland Street. Christmas in Newcastle. Hope beyond the grand spectacle of bread and circuses for the insomniac, amnesiac shoppers and imbibers of government taxed chemicals and prescribed behaviour. There is hope beyond the cogs driving the invisible mechanics of commerce and faceless enterprise. Gods and monsters? Black looking glasses reveal only more murk. Nietzsche was right in this aspect. Are we as a society blundering into one crises created to keep us spinning the roulette wheels of Sci-Finance? This is Phil Dick reimagined by tedious admen in suitable garb.

I drift back home and try to process all these rallying points. No answers.

Sleep reveals more congruent dreamscapes.

Where does one go from here?

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The Failure of Criminol...

2011-04-30T10:38:29-04:00

Postscript 17th May 2011.

The ideas in this article are considerably expanded upon in a later article entitled:Before the Crime Forecast that outlines the limitations of what I believe to be currently our best policy oriented explanations for crime. In this new article I propose an outline for a new theory - Dynamic Vulnerability (DV) theory - that is designed to scientifically forecast crime and provide a universal theory to explain causal influences upon crime rate changes and shifts. By default, if DV theory can accurately predict crime and its explanatory ideas are supported by observation and experiment then it will solve criminology's search for a universal theory of crime.

Mike Sutton

There has been what criminologist Jock Young has referred to as an unfathomable crime drop (Young 2004) across the western industrialized world.

Some renowned criminologists (Farrell et al 2010) amongst many others, are making a relatively good argument, that I contest in this article in the spirit of scholarly criticism is nevertheless irrational, hugely uninformed and heavily biased, in its attempt to predict the past with a pet theory in order to hypothesize that the 15 year crime drop is due to a decrease in vulnerability of targets due to target hardening - so called 'opportunity reduction related' measures.

In this article I argue that Farrell et al's (2010) attempt to explain the past now is problematic for several reasons: (1) these very same criminologists were strangely unable or at least possibly reluctant to predict the crime drop before or even during much of its occurrence (2) they do not provide us with a base rate for 'normal crime levels' (3) do not predict that crime will continue to fall or that it will stabilize to unknown base rate 'normal levels' (4) do not calculate the probability that they are wrong. and (5) Make the assumption that the reason for crime drops in the future will resemble those in the past (see also Farrell et al 2008).

Why is that so if they are able now to be so wise after the event?

To repeat the point already made, it is in a kindred scholarly spirit of healthy scientific skepticism and criticism that marked The Enlightenment that I wish to know what changed in the work and 'knowledge' of my friends and academic colleagues Farrell et al (2010) other than an only too common human desire to safely explain the past rather than predicting the the future? Too often in criminology, well intentioned healthily skeptical criticism of the type that I hope is contained in this article has been treated at academic conferences and in 'a reply to...' statements as personal attacks, which has led to personal and published animosity. It is as though many criminologists are unaware of the principles of The Enlightenment, which was the beginning of the tradition of healthy scepticism and criticism, and the abandonment of scholarly acceptance of 'knowledge' authorities. But that is another story that could fill an entire article.

Academics are no exception to the general irrationality of others who seek to explain the past. Sutherland (2007. p. 174), for example, explains that we are far more adept at inventing causal explanations for what has happened, rather than what will happen next. After all, he writes: '... explaining the past is not such an exacting task given the multiplicity of possible causes.'

The irrationality of seeking to 'predict the past' with limited evidence, rather than making good guesses at causes and then doing good research to predict the present or future is compounded by the fact that scientists in the physical sciences have long abandoned the notion that scientific theories are obtained by generalizing from repeated experiences along with the 'principle of induction', which is (a) that the future will resemble the past and (b) that this misconception asserts anything about the future (see Popper 1963; Deutsch 2011, p.p. 30-31).

Arguably, a more rational argument is that because crimes are diverse social constructs operating in a complex open social system of interlocking human contingencies, they are at different times, and to different degrees in time, shaped in style and number by diverse factors that are extremely difficult to know during the event never mind after it has happened. Such factors might include legislation, governance, tolerance, prejudice, birth rates, cultural learning in terms of how to deal with crimes and how and why to commit them, efficiencies and other policing and wider criminal justice system impacts, social inequalities, unemployment, the built environment, vulnerabilities of targets (people and their possessions), the varying presence of potential and prolific offenders and targets in the same place or within the same realm of influence (such as online), illegal drug use and its fashions and so called 'epidemics', alcohol consumption, recreational activities (indoors and outdoors), the economy and demand and supply for the targets of theft. Changes in one or two or several of these areas - and perhaps in other unknown areas - may have resulted in a key element or elements impacting on others, or perhaps working together in an unknown combination of forces.

Whatever the cause and mechanism of change behind the crime drop, it might even be understood as an entirely expected regression to the mean effect on the previously high (possibly peak) crime levels.

Just as single causes can cause multiple component failure in complex mechanical and electrical systems - such as happens in nuclear disasters such as the recent one in Fukushima - so too might a single cause be responsible for the crime drop. Or else, it may be the case that a number of mutually dependent causal factors for crime ceased, changed or reduced at the same time.

It shows how little we know about crime that I am unable to decide with confidence, either way, whether it is remarkable that we do not have less or more crime than we do in western industrialized societies. For arguments sake, I will settle on the notion here at least that it is in fact remarkable that we do not have more crime than we do, given the inequalities in society and the disparity between goals and means for large swathes of the population.

If each crime committed, therefore, is in fact a remarkably rare event - given that a wealth of so called ‘opportunities’ for various violent, property and motor vehicle crimes abound daily for most people but are not exploited - then it helps to consider whether the commission of any given crime has just one, or a small cluster, of independent causes or whether its occurrence requires the 'presence' of all of several other events. If any given crime – let us take local domestic burglary as an example - can be caused by any one of a number of relatively small independent probabilities (say by way of just some examples of factors correlated with offending such as: a potential offender's father who has been imprisoned, his history of being a disruptive pupil, living in a high crime area, being aged 15 to 25 and not married, being unemployed, having relatively low impulse control, having criminal siblings and living in an area where homes with stuff worth stealing, because the wider public buy them can be broken into quite easily without detection) then, as Sutherland (2007: p. 171) explains, many small independent probabilities may add up to quite a large probability. If, however, the event of a domestic burglary is determined only by the occurrence of all of several other events then the probability of the event occurring will be much lower than that of any one of those several other events occurring. If that is so then this would explain why burglary is a relatively rare event.

Since, for example, relatively affluent young academic criminologists, whose fathers were not imprisoned, who do not have low impulse control, who are not unemployed, and who do not live in run-down high crime areas, who were not expelled from school, tend not to be domestic burglars even when a wealth of so called opportunities to break in and leave undetected abound on a daily basis, it seems like a good guess that domestic burglary in fact requires the occurrence of several other factors or 'events' than just opportunity. And it is because it depends on several other 'events' occurring that the probability of burglary occurring is lower than the probability of such things as successful 'opportunities' for burglary occurring.

And what exactly is opportunity anyway? My Collins dictionary (1979) defines it as: "(1) a favourable, appropriate or advantageous combination of circumstances (2) a chance or prospect." Given such generally accepted definitions of opportunity, crimes from theft by finding to the most audaciously planned and executed armed bank robbery, indeed every crime that is committed must have had some kind of opportunity - otherwise how else could any of them have occurred?

Crime as 'opportunity' then must be true, which means it is self-evident in that opportunity - post hoc is always there once a crime has been committed. This makes it a truism and, therefore, a very poor explanation for, or predictor of, crime. Because opportunity is used in criminology as a general broad label that merely applies a name to any target that any offender deems - through a process explained in Rational Choice Theory - as worth preying upon and vulnerable enough, rather than as a measurable scale of predictive target vulnerability - opportunity cannot be tested in advance as a theory that it is a causal factor in crime.

The best we can say of opportunity is that it is a necessary but insufficient and very poorly defined condition for crime to occur. No wonder then that proponents of 'opportunity' explanations for crime did not predict the crime drop. And equally we should not wonder why those now seeking to predict the past with such broad and weak explanations cannot do so with any degree of mathematical confidence of the probability that they might be wrong.

In the healthy spirit of scientific criticism, I think that the 'opportunity' explanation for crime is a poor explanation. Because when crime inevitably rises again those who support this explanation can simply shift their explanation - post hoc - with mere biased rhetoric to account for crime by saying that new opportunities have been discovered or stumbled upon by offenders, old and/or new. But opportunity as a cause of crime is not even a good guess because in science good guesses are hard to vary in this way (Deutsch 2011) even before they are tested by experiments and other research. Karl Popper (1963) established this argument and was almost certainly right when he wrote that good theories are those that can be completely falsified by outcomes. Searching for theories to predict the past with 'most likely to be true because they are easy to vary' theories such as opportunity as a cause of crime and opportunity reduction as a cause of crime reduction is a false goal for knowledge.

Failing to accept the fallibility of our own pet theories, seeking out theories that are most likely to be true rather than those that can be falsified, and constantly seeking confirmatory evidence while paying less attention to 'threats to pet theories' is exactly how unscientific fallacies become widely believed and orthodox myths.

Farrell et al confidently predict that improved situational measures - so called 'opportunity reduction' - is the most significant causal factor in explaining the crime drop. But does crime operate in a social bubble? Given the diversity of behaviour that is criminal, the diversity of target types (people and objects), the diversity among offenders, crime might better be understood to be in reality a complex interrelated and ever-evolving adaptive social 'crime system' - which suggests it would be wrong to seek to provide simplistic causal explanations for the past.

I think that a better way forward is to begin studying what a good sample of prolific offenders, and potential offenders, themselves actually do - as they do it live - in the face of, policing, crime reduction measures, sentencing etc. To date, the criminological demand for data has been heavily focused upon heavily flawed and extremely limited official police and crime survey data about offences, offenders and victims. If non-criminologists are aghast that an adequate policy oriented study of how offenders actually deal with attempts to thwart, catch, deter and punish them has never been conducted in real time, they would perhaps be shocked to learn that many (perhaps even most) criminologists have never even conducted face-to-face research with prolific offenders - preferring instead to hide behind statistical analysis, studies of police at work and critical studies of the work of others etc. For my own part, I have personally interviewed over 100 offenders since starting my stolen goods markets research in 1994 - but I have never, I must admit, conducted ethnographic research outside of the relatively safer and much easier to research criminal areas of the internet.

Why assume that 'opportunities' operate independently?

In addition to the five reasons I gave at the start of this paper for why Farrell et al's (2010) paper is problematic I now wish to add a fifth. Namely that it lacks a theory predicting that crimes have significant causal roles (such as vulnerabilities - which go - at least in part - by the name of 'opportunities' in Farrell et al's paper) that impact on crime rates completely independently of other significant causal roles - such as, for example, the international and national demand for supply by theft, (Sutton 1998), which has been recorded in the past in relation to crime rises in jewellery theft, computer chip theft, and scrap metal theft and alternative sources of illicit income such as the production and selling of cannabis or the poorly recorded crime of shoplifting.

The reasons why events such as crime drops or increases in crime happen are difficult to know in advance or as they are happening but they are much easier to guess and it is safer to be wiser about them after the event. By way of example, a much simpler event than crime is the 33 per cent increase in spinach production in Texas USA in 1936 that has been attributed to Popeye. But with what degree of certainty can we possibly attempt know that even a simple cartoon character like Popeye was the cause - or even a cause (Sutton 2011) of farmers producing more spinach once the planting and the harvest is over?

The need for a scientific notion of crime vulnerably reduction is a problem in need of a solution

A better solution to the 'problem' of opportunity as a poor explanation is to substitute this simple woolly rule of thumb notion for one of a scientific scale of vulnerability.

A scientific theory of vulnerability as a causal factor in crime that moves beyond being a simple truism would help to produce a hypothesis that enough measurable vulnerability reduction would cause a general crime drop. To move towards this better explanation for crime and how to reduce it, we would need to (1) formulate some kind of measurement scale of vulnerability that can be understood in terms of resistance to another measurement scale of (a) actual and (b) potential offender motivation and capabilities. To get to that stage, a series of experiments would need to be properly and independently conducted (ideally not solely by those with a pet theoretical axe to grind in favour of situational crime reduction measures) to (i) measure the extent of target (victim) deflection (ii) measure for displacement (iii) measure for diffusion of benefits (halo effect of crime reduction in non-experimental areas) (iv) measure for any reduction in expected offending by potentially new offenders (v) measure for any reduction in offending amongst active offenders (vi) measure the extent to which offenders give up current offending all together. Supporters of 'opportunity factors' frequently claim this has been done with studies such as, for example, Kirkholt and Boggart Hill. But those famous studies, by way of mere examples, are known to be fundamentally flawed by heavy research bias that in the former focused too much on evidence that supported evidence of impact while irrationally playing down any threat to theory. In the case of Boggart Hill - the success of the project may have been in no small part due to police bribing informants with heroin (Sutton 2011).

A criminological theory of vulnerability would be a good explanation for crime and its reduction if it could not be varied even before experiments to test it. Although this should not be an intention in formulating it, such a theory would also be likely to have significant 'reach' (Deutsch 2011) to other areas; for example, such as an evolutionary explanation for why some species and viruses threaten particular organisms. And it might help us also to think about how some vehicles - being stronger and safer - pose a selfish threat to weaker vehicles and their passengers if they collide on the road. Indeed it might help us to better understand the effects of competition as an evolutionary process in all human affairs.

A measurable, and therefore testable, Vulnerability Theory of crime and crime reduction might turn out to be one with unlimited potential to create further knowledge.

Poor crime science leads to general fallacies and myths about crime

Unscientific rhetoric - which has become the accepted norm in much that passes today for orthodox criminology - allows others such as Nottingham's Labour Party to take personal credit for the crime drop in Nottingham. Is the Labour Party claiming credit also for the drop across the entire western world? Or do they think perhaps that Nottingham is an island cut off from the rest of the world? In this respect the Labour party are creating a myth in order to explain something they do not understand in the same way the ancient Greeks chose to delude themselves by inventing the myth of Hades' god of the underworld kidnapping and raping Persephone - which ultimately resulted in Persephone's mother (Demeter) compelling the entire planet Earth to become cold and bleak during Winter. Once the ancient Greeks became aware that the seasons were not the same in different parts of the world at the same time their myth lost its explanatory power. What next myth, I wonder, will the Labour party choose, disingenuously, to invent and then 'believe' once they learn that the crime drop has been the same throughout the Western industrialised modern world?

Conclusion and the way forward

Criminology's failure to predict or rationally explain the crime drop has resulted in the situation where uneducated politicians can make ludicrous claims in order to invent and widely publish the ludicrous myth that they are the ones to receive credit for the crime drop in Nottingham.

Academic criminologists claim to be scholarly experts and so we should expect more from them than credulous, uneducated politicians. While it is probably impossible to take the politics out of criminal justice policy making, such politics needs to be informed, wherever possible, by hard scholarly scientific methods not sloppy fallacies and myths.

It is time that criminologists embraced the need for a crime science that is indeed a true science. Merely calling something crime science does not make it so. The failure of criminology to rationally predict the future, past or present crime drop must become a starting point for change.

I believe that we need to develop a multi-disciplinary approach to understand bad scholarship and bad science in all areas.

Developing a discipline of Dysology would help criminology to develop into a true crime science. What better place to start than with the problems with the notion of crime and opportunity that currently underpins the development of what some pioneers are calling crime science.

References.

Collins Dictionary of the English Language (1979) , London. Collins.

Deutsch, D. (2011) The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that transform the world. London. Penguin Books.

Farrell, G. Tilley, N. Tselone, A. and Mailley, J. (2010). Explaining and sustaining the crime drop: Clarifying the role of opportunity-related theories . Crime Prevention and Community Safety. 12, 24 – 41

Manifesto (2011) Crime Cut to 30 Year Low in Nottingham. In: Proud of Nottingham: Positive Politics for Nottingham Labour: http://www.nottinghamlabour.org.uk/?p=923

Popper,K. (1963) Conjectures and Refutations, London: Routledge and Keagan Paul. See: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/popper_falsification.html

Sutherland, S (2007) Irrationality. London. Printer and Martin

Sutton, M. (1998) Handling Stolen Goods and Theft: A Market Reduction Approach. Home Office Research Study 178. Home Office. London.

Sutton, M. (2011) Did Popeye Really Increase Spinach Production and Consumption by 33 per cent in 1936? BestThinking.com. http://www.bestthinking.com/thinkers/science/social_sciences/sociology/mike-sutton?tab=blog&blogpostid=10536

Sutton, M. (2011a) The Bad Secret of Boggart Hill. Dysology.org:http://dysology.org/page2.html

Sutton, M. (2011b) The Problem of Zombie Cops in Voodoo Criminology: A 27 year old myth about beat patrol policing is busted. BestThinking.com: http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/science/social_sciences/sociology/the-problem-of-zombie-cops-in-voodoo-criminology-a-27-year-old-myth-about-beat-patrol-policing-is-busted

Young, J. (2004) Voodoo Criminology and the Numbers Game. In Ferrell, J. Haywood, K., Morrison, M. and Presdee, M. (eds) Cultural Criminology Unleashed. London. Glasshouse Press. Available online:

http://www.culturalcriminology.org/papers/chap1-jock-young.pdf

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Women Cannot Drive in S...

2011-12-13T16:27:07-05:00

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that doesn't allow women to drive.

The Saudi regime is giving conflicting messages about its intention to expand women’s rights in the country.

In September, King Abdullah, 87-year-old Saudi monarch, surprised his ultraconservative nation by announcing that for the first time women have the right to vote, run for local office and serve on the all-male Shura Council.

But two days later, a Saudi court sentenced Shaima Jastina, a 30-year-old mother, to 10 lashes for defying the kingdom’s ban on women driving. The sentence was removed by the king a few days later.

Such contradictory stances lead to hope, fear and frustration. However, the recent Arab uprising in the Middle East encouraged women in Saudi Arabia to ask for more rights from their government, especially concerning women’s driving.

“It is a scream for freedom,” said Zainab Al-Suwaij, Executive Director of American Islamic Congress. “What happened in the region makes the Saudi government realize that even though there is a ban on driving for women, they need to give women the right to drive until the revolutionary movements calm down.”

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that prohibits women from driving. But now, as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak gave up power, Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh signed an agreement to step down after 33 years in office, and Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi died during a bloody revolution, Saudi women have found breathing room to challenge the traditional rule.

The Historical Challenge

Manal Al-Sharif, an IT expert, decided to drive around the city of Khobar in May. Wajiha al-Huwaidar, a woman rights activist, filmed Al-Sharif during her ride, and later posted the video on YouTube and Facebook.

Shortly after, Al-Sharif was arrested and imprisoned for defying the long-standing Saudi Arabia’s status quo. In the days and weeks following her arrest, Saudi women formed a Facebook group called women2drive, started a Twitter feed and posted guidelines for women wanting to take part in challenging the driving rule in Saudi Arabia.

By mid-afternoon Friday, June 17, a handful of women drove in Riyadh, the capitol, a few in the southern port city of Jaddah and a couple in Dammam in the east. The crowd was something around 30 or 40 in a country with a population of 27 million, including immigrant workers.

The participation in the June 17 protest was the greatest since 1990, when Saudi women publicly took the wheels of their cars in large groups. Saudi women got the opportunity to question the country’s rule against women driving during the Gulf War. Saudi officials retaliated against the protest by blocking nearly all 50 women protesters from their jobs and patronage, by banning them from foreign travel and by firing them, and in some cases, their husbands and fathers.

This time, organizers on the women2drive Facebook page urged women to minimize the challenge to the Saudi power structure. Organizers asked women to drive singly rather than in large groups, and to post a Saudi flag or a picture of the king in their windshield. The campaign organizers directed that only women with international driver licenses should get behind the wheels.

The women’s protest was a breakthrough. Given the Saudi authority, such an open and premeditated campaign sounded like a loud scream. After Al-Sharif’s YouTube video post, and under the spotlight of the international attention, the Saudi officials could not keep quiet.

“This has everything to do with the Saudi national character,” said Eleanor Abdullah Doumato, Saudi Arabia expert and author of Getting God’s Ear: Women, Islam, and Healing in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. “Saudi men would worry that other men would see their wives, and daughters, and mothers, and sisters, and they would think that this woman is someone whose family doesn’t respect her, or doesn’t care about her. [Saudi men] fear that their honor and reputation has been endangered by allowing their women to drive.”

Later that afternoon, on June 17, Mutawa, or religious police who enforce strict gender segregation in the society, started stopping and arresting women drivers.

The Saudi Kingdom

Saudi Arabia is the most important country in the Muslim world. According to Islamic principle, every Muslim who can afford the pilgrimage must travel to Mecca and perform the Haj. The Haj is one of the fifth pillars of Islam and a religious duty that must be carried out at least once in a Muslim’s lifetime. The Haj is a demonstration of the solidarity of the Muslim people and their submission to Allah, "God" in Arabic language. According to Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Hajj, more than 2 million Muslims perform the Haj each year.

For its unique and strategic place in the Muslim world, the Saudi government operates very differently than many other Muslim states in the Middle East. Since its creation in 1932, the Saudi monarchy developed a very strong tie with fiqh scholars, or ulama.

“Any fiqh rule should not cause harm. That is the principle of Islam,” said Asifa Quraishi, professor of law at the University of Wisconsin. “If you can show to the faqih, or Islamic legal scholar, that the rule the government relies on so much is actually causing harm, they may, themselves, do a new ‘ijtihad’ or research, on the question and come up with a new answer.”

And they had done that. Just recently, President of the Association of Muslim Scholars Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, a controversial Egyptian faqih scholar, wrote an open letter to King Abdullah asking him to allow women to drive cars.

In his letter, Qaradawi said that women driving is not forbidden by either Quran, Sunna, or tradition, which clearly outlines prohibited practices.

In his website, Shiekh al-Qaradawi thanked the Saudi King for responding to his letter.

“You will get promises from the mouth of the king or out of the prominent members of the royal family assuring the world that women have the right to drive in the near future,” Doumato said, “but this is not going to happen because it is against the status quo.”

It is one thing when the faqih scholar in Egypt says something about the Saudi Arabia driving ban, yet another thing when the Saudi faqih scholars decides to support it, said Doumato.

The royal family abhors challenging its relationship with the Saudi religious establishment, or the ulama, which sees women's progress as a threat to the foundation of the Saudi political order. So far, no Saudi faqih scholar supported the women driving.

“It is about women’s access to religious knowledge and to sacred spaces in a male-centered environment that marginalizes women’s access to both,” wrote Doumato in her book. “It is about women’s way of getting God to hear them.”

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Credit Card Phishing

2011-12-12T11:19:00-05:00

Used only with express written permission

I recently received an email claiming to be from Microsoft Live. The email stated that due to some processing issues, they could not authorize my credit card and so I would need to login to their website to update my credit card information by clicking on their link.

Over the years, I have seen a number of these types of messages, but this was the first one targeting me personally. After skimming through it, I realized that it was a blatant phishing attempt, nevertheless, I still marveled at the ingenuity of the scammers.

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Billing and Account Management

Dear Windows Live Hotmail member, During our regularly scheduled account maintenance and verification procedures, our billing department was unable to authorize your current payment method information.

This might be due to either of the following reasons:

A recent change in your personal information (i.e. change of address, credit card)

Submitting invalid information during the initial Sign Up or upgrade process.

An inability to accurately verify your selected payment method information due to an internal error within our processors. Please use the following link to update your payment method information :

http://billing.microsoft.com/logon.srf?action=SignIn&reason=auth&type=auto&uid=187&acct=49472101102

The above link may have been blocked for your privacy. To activate the link please look for the Show content link that is usually located on top of this message.

NOTE! If your account information is not updated within 48 hours then your ability to use your Windows Live Hotmail account will become restricted.

Thank you for using Windows Live Hotmail! Please do not reply to this e-mail, as this is an unmonitored alias.

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Anatomy of a Phish

For the uninitiated, phishing (pronounced “fishing”) is a fraudulent attempt to acquire sensitive information from a user. Such information can be: credit cards, user IDs, passwords, and/or account information. It is often accomplished via email or phone.

Phishing falls into the category of exploits known as “social engineering”. Even though they are mostly low tech, (requiring neither sophisticated technology nor advanced programming), they tend to be very successful because most people tend instinctively to do what they are told and will not challenge the authority and authenticity of what seems to be an official correspondence.

In a typical phishing scenario, the perpetrators (usually located offshore) send a simple email—claiming to be from the customer service department of a recognizable organization (like a bank, on-line service, etc.)—the email will inform you of some problem with your account. You are then instructed to provide details of your bank, email, or credit card account in order to correct this problem.

Even though, phishing exploits can have many variations, they can be grouped into the following are five usage scenarios:

Forged identities — In this exploit, the attacker creates an email address that is related to a reputable organization like “Windows Live Customer Support”. Even though on the surface, their email address looks legitimate (as in: billing@windowslive.com), it is not. If you’re not paying attention, it can be easy to mistake a message like this for a genuine customer support request.
Compromised accounts — In this exploit, the attacker uses a compromised user account to send an email to everyone in the address book for that account. An email you receive from a known account dramatically increases the credibility of that message, and therefore the likelihood of a successful phishing attack.
Direct phone calls — In this exploit, the scammer may contact you directly by phone, telling you that they work for some financial institution (may offer to lower your interest rates) or the fraud investigation departments. They will inform you that your account has been breached and will directly ask you for your account details in order to verify it.
Bogus websites — In this exploit, the attacker will send you a link to what seems to be a functional website. The site will include official-looking logos, language, or other identifying information taken directly from a legitimate websites. The address of the site will show resembles the name of a reputable company but with some spelling variations. For example, the name"microsoft.live.com" could appear instead as: “micorsoft.live.com”
Social Network Harvesting — In this exploit, a communication from a scammer will ask you for personal information. You may mistake it for an email from a friend wanting to reconnect. The email will include convincing details about your personal life which ware recovered from social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.

In general, the objective of phishing is to recover your webmail credentials since the resale value of a legitimate web mail account on the black market can be as high as $2-$3—twice the amount they could get for a stolen credit card number. So for a phisher, breaching several dozens accounts a day can be a lucrative business, making $100K-$500K for the life of the scam.

In the case of my phishing email, when I followed the link in it, I was taken to a credit card entry form (Image 1). As I expected, the form looked genuine, it had all the right corporate trimmings: a Microsoft logo, copyright notice, and even a link to a help page (which ironically offered the following advice “You should keep this number secret, protect it, and never write it on your card.”)

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Image 1: Phishing Credit Card Entry Form

As with most phishing sites, I was expecting to find some bogus or misspelled Microsoft URL, but instead I was surprised to see that the web address of the webpage actually belonged to a company called Human & Technology H&T (Image 2), clearly, htech21.com doesn’t even sound like Microsoft. I’ve checked the parent URL out and It turns out, that this company was at one point a legitimate Korean hardware manufacturer, than, two years ago, their CEO was arrested and the company became the target of one of the biggest class-action lawsuits in history.

So what is the connection between htech21.com and this phishing expedition? It appears that the perpetrators of this scam decided to cut some costs and instead of purchasing and hosting their own domain, they chose to break into the H&T corporate web site and place their credit card collection pages on it. At one point, our scammers discovered that Human & Technology has gone out of business (this could also have been an inside job) and safely assumed that this orphaned website (which has not been updated for 3 years) is no longer being maintained or monitored, and as such, was a perfect staging platform for a phishing operation.

It is also interesting to note, that the site’s help file focused on ATMs (Automated Teller Machines), strongly suggests that at least some of the phishing website contents have also been used in other scams.

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Image 2: Phishing Host Website

It is hard to recognize legitimate customer service communications from phishing expeditions. This is difficulty if further compounded by the fact that for many, using services such as Amazon, EBay, and e-banking has now become a a way of life. For most users, the potential inconvenience of being looked out of their favorite on-line services outweighs the risk of disclosing their account information. Unfortunately, the on-line services are not helping this situation either because most are either impossible to reach by phone or their offshore support centers are largely useless.

So how does one survive in the hostile world of email exploits? The following are my top 10 Do’s and Don’ts of email:

1. Do Not open emails that have a wrong or incorrect spelling of your name. Phishers often harvest email addresses in balk and may not have your full name. Because of this, they will try to guess your name from your email address.

2. Do Not open emails that are not addressed to your name. Phishers will almost never personalize correspondences; they will refer to you as “Dear Customer” or “Dear Valued Customer” because they send balk solicitations to millions of email addresses.

3. Do Not respond to any account management email requests that come from your bank. If your bank needs to reach you, they will send you an official letter or leave you a voice mail with a valid callback telephone number.

4. Do Not open unsolicited emails. Nothing in life is free, this includes the invitation to view naked celebrities and the Prozac and Viagra offers in your inbox.

5. Do Not use email links to go to any financial websites. Type in the URL yourself and save it as a bookmark.

6. Do verify the website URL you are about to log into, check the spelling carefully before you provide your login details on any web page. Pay close attention to domain name following the “http://” section of the address. Many phishers will intentionally create very long names to obfuscate the fake URL.

7. Do log in to your on-line accounts regularly and look for unrecognized transactions. Do the same with your monthly credit card statements.

8. Do Not send your account details via email to anyone. email traffic is unencrypted, so anyone on route can intercept the message.

9. Do check that the Internet connection you are using is secure. Look for HTTPS in the address field of your browser. You may also want to click on thepadlock to view the actual server certificate. This will help you verify that it was issued by a reputable authority and assigned to the company managing the website in question.

10. Do make sure that you have an updated anti-virus software and that your firewall is turned on.

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Driving the Message-Soc...

2011-12-02T10:21:53-05:00

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In his post: The bandwidth-sync correlation that’s worth thinking about, Seth Godin argues that in terms of messaging media (movies, TV, books, IM, smoke signals, etc.):

“movies take a long time to make, but they’re high impact. Twitter takes a second to do, but there’s not a lot of info there. One on one coaching is high enough bandwidth that it can change your life and make you cry, in real time, and the Mona Lisa, while less bits per second than a TV show, has enough emotional bandwidth to matter, even if it’s 400 years old.”

This is a great observation. Clearly, bandwidth and synchronicity matter. But what about the relationship between messaging media cost, the time needed to develop it, and its ability to effectively saturate a large population? Is it possible to create effective memes and circulate them widely through 140 character messages? And what about the impact of all of these factors on future social media functionality? Is social media headed towards platform convergence or towards divergence?

Messaging Cost, Development Time, and Outreach Potential Consider a typical Hollywood mega blockbuster like the Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End. This 169-minute long meme bomb carries an enormous amount of content. Every scene was carefully designed to keep audiences glued to their seats. Its production took two years, it required the creative talents of hundreds of individuals, and it cost about $300 million dollars to make (roughly $30K per second of movie). It grossed over $963 million in revenue, which amounts to 320% return rate—not pocket change by any means. The movie messaging medium is so well optimized that it is capable of generating a significant amount of secondary revenue and reach worldwide audiences by sheer inertia. Just think about all the spinoff industries that spring into life when a major movie like this comes out: toys, music, party accessories, food, costumes, books, music, etc.

If you follow a reasonably well proven formula, (standard plot, big name actors, expensive sets, and lots of special effects), you are almost guaranteed at least a 2:1 ROI ratio and a good chance of producing a number of sequels to your masterpiece.

So it does seem that there is a correlation between how much content is packed into the message and its memetic and commercial effectiveness. The movie messaging model (see quadrant 1 in the graph below), is based on a tremendous investment of time and resources. The strategy is to build the best product possible, market it well, and then fire-and-forget it. The forget part has to do with the passive nature of this medium; the audience has no interaction with the content and consumes the messaging passively.

On the other hand, social media messaging like blogs, e-mails, Twitter, etc., (see quadrant 3 in the graph above), can be produced instantly and with little investment or skill. But it’s also difficult to get a quantifiable ROI from it, (ergo, the raise of snake oil salesmen social media marketing gurus). Another observation is that synchronous social media messaging depends on an interactive and free feedback loop. Users demand the ability to interact in near-real time with their network, but they refuse to pay for the privilege.

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From an evolutionary point of view, it seems that the quadrant 1 and 3 messaging mediums represent a form of r/K selection classification. Each trades between quantity and quality. The focus in quadrant 1 is to increase the quality of the content with higher expense per message. The focus in quadrant 3 is to increase the quantity of the content with a corresponding reduction in quality and lower expense per message.

Content Developers and Messaging Strategy The chart data suggests that there is an inverse relationship between the effectiveness of content distribution and the viewer’s exposure time to the message. It seems that quadrant 1 messaging mediums are the most effective in terms of meme creation, distribution speed, and outreach.

Content developers are aware of the limitations of each medium and have developed interesting coping strategies (sometimes reversing r/K selection) in order to leverage various messaging toolsets to promote their content.

Public Domain

For example, the K-selectedmovie, television, theater production, and book publishing industries leverage social media primarily to get a short term engagement with potential audiences. The ultimate objective is not to create a long term social community, but instead to lure users in to consume their product. Once the product is out on the market, most of the related social media interaction around it stops.

A good illustration of this was can be found in the movie Coroline. Eight weeks before the movie release date, one of the characters, the Great Bobinsky, created a blog and started posting on a weekly basis, clearly so as to create a groundswell and buzz. Three weeks after the movie went live, official posting to the blog stopped—to the great dismay of its myriad followers—and Mr. Bobinsky announced:

Thank you for being friends of Bobinsky…Have beet and think of me. Until we meet again. Mr B. signing off.

In complete opposition to movie producers, the r-selected social media authors use content and platforms like Picasa and YouTube to build long term relationships. Their strategy is to create an intimate family environment that will foster a long term engagement with the target audience.

The Social Media Box of the Future In terms of future direction, there is strong indication that just like Apple successfully consolidated GPS, MP3, gaming console, and phone into a single device, so too the social network platforms of the near future will converge on traditional services.

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The future social network platforms will yield a service that offers a suite of products like IM, voice and video chat, conferencing, on-line collaboration, e-commerce, content subscription, and personal reputation management, sort of a LinkedIn/Facebook/Pandora service with hybrid Skype and PayPal/Google wallet-like capability. And all of this optimized and available on a mobile device.

The only question that remains is will this future platform be built on top of one of the current products or will it be mashed and/or assembled from existing services.

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Iran's Nuclear Program:...

2011-12-07T22:36:12-05:00

On December 1, the U.S. Senate passed a bill authorizing sanctions against Iran’s Central Bank, responding to a climate of increased international concern about Iran’s nuclear activity. The Obama administration does not support the measure, arguing that sufficient sanctions are already in place and that new measures could cause steep global increases in the price of oil.

The United Nations nuclear watchdog passed a resolution expressing its “deep and increasing concern” over Iran’s nuclear program on November 18. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) asked Tehran to address pressing questions about its nuclear capabilities. In response to this new evidence, the international community is deciding how to impose new sanctions on Iran’s financial and energy sectors.

In response to the U.N. resolution, the U.S. Press Secretary said that “for years, Iran has sought to defend its growing uranium enrichment program on the pretense that it was solely intended to fuel a civilian nuclear energy program. Yet the Director General’s report and today’s action by the Board of Governors expose once and for all the hollowness of Iran’s claims, and reinforce the world’s demands that Iran come clean and live up to its international obligations.”

In the statement, the Press Secretary called for “broad international coalition to pressure and isolate the Iranian regime, including through an unprecedented sanctions regime” However, Reza Marashi, director of research on the National Iranian-American Council, points out that there is a limit to the number of sanctions that the United States and its allies can implement.

“They cannot really do many more of those sanctions because sanctioning oil and gas or sanctioning Iran’s Central Bank would actually have negative effects on the American own economy and global economy,” Marashi said.

In the face of new questions and new sanctions, Iranian leaders continue to insist on its program’s peaceful purposes. However, Iran failed to report its nuclear plants in different parts of the country to the IAEA, refused to explain it’s ongoing enrichment activity, and denied inspectors access into specific facilities.

The current tension developed from the complicated history of Iran’s nuclear program. Understanding this history, from both a political and technological perspective, provides a much needed context to U.S.-Iranian relations.

From Fossil Fuels to Fission

The British set Iran up as one of their most important enterprises, and they treasured Iran’s oil reserves. They used the oil, at cheap or no cost, to advance their economic programs. The profit they made from Iran’s oil was a one-way street, all pouring inside Britain without ever bothering to consider the people of Iran. With the oil wealth leaving the country, Iranians aimed their disgust and anger toward the government, with street demonstrations in 1950 and 1951.

Iranians turned to Mossadeq, an aristocratic author, lawyer and prominent parliamentarian. His most famous act as the prime minister was to nationalize the oil industry in Iran in 1952 and end the life of the most profitable British business of the day. The British’s exit from Iran’s political and business life paved the way for the United States to climb in.

Due to its rapid industrialization, the U.S. was thirsty for Iran’s oil. In 1953, the CIA arrested Mossadeq, and supported Fazollah Zahedi, a military general and friend of the Shah, to become the prime minister of Iran.

To show its friendship and demonstrate trust with the Shah, the United States agreed to help Iran to build 23 nuclear power stations until the end of 2000. Tehran Nuclear Research Center (TNRC) was established through cooperation from the U.S. and Iran in 1967. Under their agreement, the United States transported nuclear technology, supported Iran’s scientists, and sold Iran nuclear reactor fuel. In return, the US enjoyed buying Iran’s oil at a low price.

During these years, the construction of Iran’s first nuclear station in Bushehr was making a steady progress under US supervision. But Iran’s nuclear program abruptly discontinued due to Iran’s 1979 revolution. The United States failed to take Iran’s revolution seriously, believing that it would not be lengthy or significant. The CIA transported the Shah to a resort in Egypt. Little did it know that the Shah would not return to his country. The Shah died a few months later, and with him, the relationship between Iran and US.

During the political turmoil that followed, Iran was unable to focus on his nuclear program for almost a decade. And then, in the 1980s and 1990s, Argentina, Russia, and China were interested in cooperating with Iran to build nuclear power facilities, under The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. In return, the agency wanted Iran to be transparent and clear about its overall nuclear research and technology.

The U.S. remained suspicious of the Iranian nuclear program even though in 1968, one year after Iranians started building its Bushehr nuclear facility, they signed a Non-Proliferation Treaty, or NPT, a protocol that gives the UN nuclear watchdog the right to inspect of its nuclear facilities. Concerns about Iran developing nuclear weapons capabilities led the United States to intervene and discourage the IAEA from supporting the Iranian program.

Iran decided that they could not depend on foreign sources of nuclear fuel, and began development of their own nuclear program. In 2007, Mohammad Javad Zarif, the former Iranian ambassador to the United Nations, wrote in the Journal of International Affairs that Iran felt that the only way to work around U.S. opposition was to avoid disclosing the details of its program.

On December of 2003, Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran’s outgoing representative to the IAEA signed an additional safeguard on behalf of Tehran. A safeguard sets IAEA standards for meeting international standards not to use nuclear programs to develop weapons. The former IAEA chief, Mohamed Elbradei signed this agreement with Iran on behalf of the UN.

In 2002, a dissident organization in Iran revealed to the world that Iran was constructing nuclear facilities in secret, according to the World Nuclear Association. A vast uranium enrichment facility was started in 2000 in Natanz, approximately 200 miles south of Tehran, made up a six buildings that in total covered around 100,000 square meters. In Arak, construction began on a heavy-water reactor, which could be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium.

In 2003, the international community responded to Iran’s continued enrichment program with sanctions. That summer Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chairwoman of the subcommittee on the Middle East and Central Asia of the House Committee on International Relations, introduced the Iran-Libya Sanctions Act Enhancement and Compliance Act (ILSA-ECA). The bill limited the ability of foreign oil companies to invest in either Libya or Iran’s petroleum sector.

Despite this, and other restrictions, Iran continued to build its enrichment facilities and purchase the necessary equipment. In 2004, a Pakistani nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan was arrested for running a nuclear equipment trafficking program, notoriously selling to Iran and Libya against international sanctions, according to the Fallout: The True Story of the CIA’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking, by Catherine Collins and Douglas Frantz. Even after Khan’s network was shut down, Iran continued to develop their enrichment capabilities.

Today, Iran’s nuclear program is complex. According to Ian Hore-Lacy, the director of public communications for the World Nuclear Association, Iran is simultaneously promoting a commercial nuclear power program with IAEA support and running an nuclear fuel enrichment program against a multitude of international sanctions. “There are two separate things going on,” Hore-Lacy said. “One of which is legitimate.”

Commercial Nuclear Power

The legitimate activity on the part of the Iranians is the commercial nuclear power. While there is no international support for Iran’s enrichment program, Hore-Lacy explained that there is support for building nuclear reactors to produce electricity.

The Russian government collaborated with the Iranians to finish building the Bushehr reactor, which was started up in the spring of 2011, and should be grid-connected by January of 2012. The reactor is expected to produce seven terrawatts of power a year, the equivalent of 11 million barrels of oil, which Iran will now be able to export for cash, according to the World Nuclear Association. The reason that the international community supports the Bushehr reactor project is that under a 2005 agreement, Russia sells Iran the fuel rods, already enriched to about 3 percent, and then takes back the used rods. The IAEA monitors this facility thoroughly, and it meets all safety standards.

Through this agreement, Iran can produce power without the need for any enrichment facilities. Since their commercial reactor program does not require fuel enrichment, Iran’s enrichment program raises concerns about weaponization. The fact that they began construction of the enrichment facilities without informing the IAEA also begs suspicion. Although Iran’s nuclear power plant has international support, the enrichment activities, which are not supported by the safeguards, raise concerns internationally.

Suspicious Enrichment

The remaining uncertainty about Iran’s nuclear aim lies in the fact that the uranium enrichment process starts off the same for both commercial nuclear power and for nuclear weapons. The IAEA report gives a careful count of the number of centrifuges at the enrichment facilities in Iran. These numbers are key indicators of Iran’s nuclear plans.

Todd Allen, the University of Wisconsin professor of Nuclear Engineering, explained that installing a larger number of centrifuges raises concerns internationally. “It’s one of the reasons why people are suspicious of what they are doing. If you’re going to make commercial fuel, you do have to enrich it to about 5 percent. So, if you built a bunch of centrifuges, you can claim that you are just doing it to make commercial fuel, but if you have more centrifuges, right, then you keep things going, then you can make weapons.”

Weapons-grade uranium is enriched up to 90 percent. Commercial power plants usually use around 3 to 5 percent. According to the IAEA, Iran is currently enriching up to 20 percent for use in the Tehran research reactor. Research reactors in the U.S. also typically use fuel enriched to 20 percent.

Enrichment is actually a misnomer. The process is more of a refinement. When you dig uranium out of the ground, most of it is in the more stable form, with only a very small amount of the less stable atoms that are used in nuclear fission. Enrichment processes separate out the stable atoms, so that the percentage of reactive uranium in the fuel increases.

Today, enrichment involves sending uranium fluoride gas through a series of centrifuges, called a cascade. Centrifuges are devices that spin rapidly, and separate out the lighter, more reactive form of uranium from the heavier, more stable form. The process is repeated over and over in successive centrifuges. The more you repeat, the more you increase the amount of the fissionable uranium the fuel.

The process of dividing the natural uranium into the higher and lower concentrations is called separative work. About 90 percent of the total work required to make weapons grade uranium occurs taking the natural uranium to 20 percent, which Iran has already achieved.

Houston Wood, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the University of Virginia, explained that this enrichment work occurs on logarithmic scale, where it is much harder to get the process started, and gets easier as it gets further along.

As of November 2, Iran was running 37 chains of centrifuges, called cascades, comprised of 6,208 IR-1 centrifuges, in the Natanz enrichment facility, according to the IAEA report published on November 8th. These cascades are producing low enriched uranium, about 3.5 percent. Iran also started installing several hundred advanced IR-2 and IR-4 centrifuges that can separate the uranium much more efficiently, reaching almost 20 percent currently. The Fordow enrichment facility, which is under construction, will increase Iran’s production capacity for 20-percent uranium significantly.

The Institute for Science and International Security analyzed the IAEA evidence and measured how much enriched uranium Iran is producing. The report that states, in total, Iran has put 765.5 kg of 3.5 percent low enriched uranium into their enrichment cascades to produce 79.7 kg of 19.75 percent uranium since the beginning of operations in February 2010. The 19.75 percent uranium is just below the legal international limit of 20 percent, but far too enriched for use in their commercial power reactor.

Uranium requires enrichment because producing energy, for power supply or weapons, depends on a greater density of the more reactive form of uranium than is found naturally. Through a process called fission, an atom of radioactive uranium will split if it gets hit with a small particle called a neutron. When the atom splits, it usually releases two more neutrons, and produces a lot of heat.

For a nuclear power plant, Allen explained that the radioactive uranium atoms need to be close enough together that one of the two released neutrons hits another atom, causing another split. The other neutron just flies off into space. This creates a steady stream of fission reactions that produce power.

“If you want to make a bomb, what you really want to do is design a system that captures more than one of those neutrons created in a fission,” Allen said. “If you have 2 releases, starting with a single fission, and that creates two, and each one of those release two, you can see each generation up-ing, and then everything blows up.”

This exponential increase in the amount of power produced by each successive generation of the fission reaction creates the explosive force of the bomb.

Another cause for concern is Iran’s recently constructed heavy water reactor in Arak. According to Hore-Lacy, this reactor is suspicious because it is too small to be used to produce electricity. Instead, it appears designed to use uranium to produce plutonium, which is used primarily in nuclear weapons.

“It looks like a plutonium production reactor such as the one North Korea has used to build up its inventory of weapons-grade plutonium,” Hore-Lacy said.

In addition to the documented enrichment facilities and the potential for plutonium production, the IAEA found that Iran has been testing nuclear weapon components, like detonators, acquiring nuclear weapons development information, running simulations, building a clandestine nuclear supply network, and constructing a large explosive containment vessel.

Political Perspectives

On November 20, Ali-Akbar Salehi, Iran’s foreign minister, responded to the IAEA recent resolution calling the report lacks credibility and effectiveness, according to Islamic Republic News Agency.

“The IAEA has no other option but cooperating and interacting with the Iranian government,” Salehi told reporters, adding that the agency should soften its approach towards the Islamic Republic.

But the approach to the IAEA report has not been soft so far. According to AlJazeera news agency, the United States, Britain and Canada will impose new financial sanctions on Iran in an effort to pressure Tehran to halt its suspected nuclear weapons program. Earlier this month, the House of Representative leadership in a letter urged President Obama to take the next step toward sanctioning the Central Bank of Iran, or CBI.

The rate bi-partisan letter sent on November 17 was signed by Reps. John Boehner, R-Ohio, the House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the minority leader, Eric Cantor, R-Va., the majority leader, Steny Hoyer, D-Md., the minority whip, Illeana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., the Foreign Affaris Committee chariwoman and Howard Berman, D-Calif., the Comittee’s top Democrat.

In this letter, they wrote: “If a review of the facts confirms that CBI is involving in illicit activities linked to Iran’s nuclear program and terrorism activities, we urge you to quickly designate CBI as a facilitator of Iran’s weapons of mass destruction proliferation and terrorist activities for the purpose of imposing sanctions on persons that do business with CBI.”

Barbara Slavin, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Counci, a Washington DC think tank, says the sanctions against CBI is outrageous. “Going after the Central Bank, cutting off Iranian oil export, this would hurt ordinary people, and certainly hurt the world economy, and I think it would be really stupid.”

Sanctions, although controversial, seem to be the only tool that the US has at its disposal right now. To start any form of dialogue or diplomacy with Iran “is not going to be easy,” said Marashi.

“There is a complete and total lack of trust on both sides. There are the ghosts of history in the room, where both sides can point to the past, as an accusation of a negative influence by the other side.”

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The Inadvertent Death o...

2011-12-07T16:36:04-05:00

The Inadvertent Death of Your Company

Introduction

At the birth of your company, you make a hidden decision about your company that you may not realize. That decision affects many other financial, tax, and emotional issues about your company in the event of your death. Without proper forethought, your company may die when you die.

Inadvertently.

Sometimes, unless you make the proper plans before the funeral, the continuation of the company is not legally possible, even though you may have assumed that the company would continue to operate and generate revenues and incomes for your family and employees. This article describes some of the common mistakes owners make that lead to the inadvertent death of their company, and how implement a buy-sell agreement for company, long before the funeral.

What Happens to Your Company If You Die?

At the time of your business creation, you chose a legal form or entity to conduct your business venture. That legal form of business is granted certain types of legal rights by government, including local, state and federal government. The governments also impose certain burdens and regulations on each type of legal entity, including civil liability, taxes, and criminal sanctions. In the event of the death of the sole proprietor, business liabilities and personal liabilities are the same. All of your business and personal property not expressly exempted by state statute can be used in the payments of all debts.

Business debts from a sole proprietor need not be paid from business assets, and personal debts need not be paid from personal assets. Any assets held in or attributed to the estate of the deceased sole proprietor, including that of life insurance proceeds by rights of policy ownership, are used to address all claims and liabilities of the estate.

Rather than being a sole proprietor, you may have chosen a corporate legal entity to conduct your business. When a sole stockholder dies, he or she essentially leaves his or her estate and heirs in a predicament similar to that found in a sole proprietorship or partnership. For example, the personal representative immediately takes possession of all of the deceased’s assets to conserve them and to apply them to the payment of all debts, business and personal. Your personal estate settlement representative must ensure that the remaining property of the estate is then distributed to those who are entitled to it. Your personal estate settlement representative has no authority to continue the business of the corporation and must promptly dispose of it or dissolve it. If a personal representative, especially one who is unfamiliar with operations, continues the business without authorization, then the estate values are often significantly reduced. If the sole stockholder of either a C-corporation, or an S-corporation, does not, prior to his or her death, make arrangements for the future operation of his or her corporation, then the personal representative is required to sell or to liquidate the business.

If the corporation is a successful one, sometimes the personal representative or the heirs attempt to keep the business operating, despite the lack of legal authority to do so. Even if all heirs are competent adults, the personal representative must obtain unanimous consent to keep the business operating. If all of the heirs are of age, competent, and willing to consent, and if profits result, the personal representative must turn the profits over to the estate. However, if losses are sustained as a result of continuing the business, then the consenting heirs have surrendered their right to hold the personal representative liable.

The Transfer of Business Property

There are four ways for you to transfer property through your estate settlement upon your death:

Your valid will and estate settlement plan;
A contractual arrangement, such as life insurance, where the promise involves a contractual provision for a named beneficiary upon death;
Joint ownership, where upon the death of one of the joint owners, the jointly held property is passed on to the other joint owner;
A living trust where, during lifetime, assets are placed in the trust, with provisions of how the assets are to be administered for the benefit of the beneficiaries of the trust.

Each of the four procedures must be legally verified by a court or other legal procedures. One legal verification process involves probate. Probate means, “to prove.” The probate court process is the legal activity of proving the validity of a will and the competence of the deceased to make that will.

In the case of your business, the buy-sell agreement is the legal proof of what you intend to do about your business. The rules of the probate court refer to the procedures by which your personal estate settlement representative, who you appointed must follow. The rules describe the entire process of settling an estate and includes the legal process of changing the title and ownership of assets that were in the name of the deceased to those who are to be the new owners of the assets, according to the provisions of your will. If your personal representative has obtained unanimous consent from the heirs of the estate to continue the business, then he or she is not held liable for any losses incurred while doing so.

However, such continuation may not actually be considered “authorized.” Minor heirs can never consent, as they are legally incapable of giving their permission. However, if all of the heirs are of age, competent, and the consent is unanimous, then the personal representative can continue the business. If profits result, the obligation of the personal representative to turn the profits over to the heirs remains the same.

In the case of unauthorized continuation of a business by a personal representative, especially one who is unfamiliar with the business, losses in the business operations often result in reduced or lost estate values. Your personal representative is fully liable for these negative consequences. Even if the business continues to operate, however, the surviving partners cannot make any payments of any type to the deceased partner’s family until the business is closed out. During this time, the family must rely on life insurance proceeds or on advances the personal representative may make from the deceased’s personal estate.

Is the Inadvertent Liquidation of Your Business Really the Best Idea?

The terms liquidation and dissolution are often confused when referring to the termination of a corporation. Liquidation is sometimes called “winding up,” which is the process of settling or winding up the corporation’s affairs; it is the orderly disposition of the corporation’s assets. Winding up includes discharging the corporation’s outstanding obligations and liabilities and distributing the remaining assets, if any, to the individual stockholders.

Conversely, dissolution refers to the formal termination of the corporation’s existence. It is the official time when the winding up process is concluded, and the company’s Articles of Dissolution must be filed with the state corporation division. Because the corporation was initiated by an act of power by the state, the existence of the corporation cannot be terminated except by that same act of the power. Therefore, a certificate of dissolution is issued by the state in which it was chartered. At this point, the legal existence of the corporation ceases for all purposes. Within the legal meaning, the corporation’s Articles of Incorporation typically provide for its perpetual existence. Its succession is continued for the period specified by its charter or by statute. Because a corporation is treated as a separate entity with continuity of life, events such as the death of an owner really have no effect on the legal structure of the corporation. If continued operation for your business is what you wanted, however, you had to do something to prove it, before you died.

The Buy-Sell Agreement and Funding the Business Transfer

One possibility of preplanning the continuation of you business is to arrange for a buy and sell agreement. This agreement provides that upon your death, the buyer is obligated to purchase the business interest for a specified sum. The personal representative is then obligated to sell to the designated buyer the business interest for that specified amount. Under such an arrangement, the personal representative need only transfer the deceased’s business interest to the new owner

In conjunction with a buy-sell agreement for your business, you also want to coordinate the legal arrangements with your family estate and assets. With a living trust, your estate settlement for both family and business assets can be coordinated with the court process of probate. Sometimes, an insurance policy is bought and owned by, and is payable to this trust, and the amount of the policy is equal to the value of your business.

The insurance proceeds, upon your death, flow to the trust, and are used to settle your debts and provide operational cash to continue your business.

Determining the Market Value of the Business

For a buy-sell arrangement to qualify as a bona fide agreement between family members, the IRS specifies the following three requirements:

The agreement must be part of a bona fide business arrangement.
The agreement must not be a device to transfer the property to members of the deceased’s family for less than full and adequate consideration in money.
The terms of the agreement must be comparable to similar arrangements entered into by persons in other transactions. This is sometimes referred to as an “at arms length” transaction.

A valid buy-sell agreement between stockholders is really the only viable plan to ensure the successful continuation of the business of a close corporation. It ensures that the surviving stockholders will receive the full and complete ownership and control of the business. At the same time, it ensures that the deceased stockholder’s family receives the full value of the stock. In other words, implementing a buy-sell agreement, and funding it with life insurance, before the funeral, proves that you did not want your business to die when you did.

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Estrangement and Reconc...

2011-12-07T16:29:52-05:00

Estrangement and Reconciliation

The liberating and healing influence of natural inclusionality

By Alan Rayner

For the past several thousand years, humanity has been living through a period of profound and paradoxical ESTRANGEMENT of human from non-human nature, male from female, ‘I’ from ‘You’ and ‘Us’ from ‘Them’. With the advent of the philosophy of NATURAL INCLUSIONALITY, now may be the moment for liberation from this estrangement, bringing with it new hope for RECONCILIATION, HEALING AND CO-CREATIVITY. I express this hope in the following painting, called ‘Vernal Illuminations’:

Used only with express written permission

At the root of the estrangement is, I think, the FALSE perception of a mutually exclusive relationship between darkness and light. This has been enshrined in the definitive logic that abstracts energy/matter from space and embedded in the foundations of orthodox philosophy, mathematics, science and theology. Ultimately, it may have arisen from the desire to have ‘definitive knowledge’ of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and so be able to remove the latter from mortal human form (where mortality is regarded as a consequence of ‘imperfection’). But a very unfortunate by-product of this desire has been the association of ‘Good’ with ‘Light’ and ‘Evil’ with ‘Darkness’, from which all forms of human discriminatory prejudice and hatred arise. It has got us into desperate trouble by setting us at odds with one another and our natural neighbourhood, as represented in my following paintings, ‘Arid Confrontation’ and ‘War of the Pots and Kettles’.

Used only with express written permission

Natural inclusionality shows that this dissociation of darkness from light is a FALSE DICHOTOMY. Space as ‘intangible presence’ and energy as ‘tangible’ presence are DISTINCT BUT MUTUALLY INCLUSIVE. Everything is quite literally 100 % space (‘darkness’) PLUS energy (‘light’). The very idea that a 'forceful figure of light' can 'expel darkness' and so isolate 'Evil' (portrayed as darkness) from 'Good' (portrayed as 'light'), therefore makes nonsense.

As my friend, Rev. Roy Reynolds put it to me:

“I guess, in order to be consistent in our each-in-the-other thinking, we need to think of every 'thing' as 'space embued,' even starlight itself. Right? In other words, energy is not isolable as energy itself. Energy occurs in context with and in dynamic relation with space. Right? If so, we always have the co-union, the partnership, of receptive and responsive-reflective. We can never have ONLY receptive OR responsive-reflective.”

With that understanding, I think the road to reconciliation opens up, as described in the following poem:

In the Becoming, All was Well

A limitless pool of infinite depth

Shimmering into form wherever light brought life

To her receptive permissiveness

For a while before resting

Then reshaping into somewhere different

For a while before resting

Life lived in the love of darkness

Darkness loved in the life of light

Until the beginning of the Estrangement

When Men took it into their Heads

To exclude one hundred percent of everything

Leaving their selves in splendid isolation

Under the Spell of One Alone

Where darkness couldn’t reach their non-existence

Every now and then

Darkness would call from all around their self-annihilation

To be allowed back in

To make their presence meaningful

But all they could say from their height of abstraction

Was ‘leave me alone in this world that I own

Amongst others who fight

For my claim to the throne’

So committed were they

To their restless toil

That they just couldn’t see

What was coming to boil

Whilst they claimed from somewhere far out of sight

That nothing could overcome

Their Right to be Light

To serve their Good Fight

In the name of their Lord

Who was nowhere to be seen

But glimpsed in flashes

Thundering uproariously

On and on and on and on and on and on and on

Ground their relentless distraction

From what was really in their midst

To which they paid their utmost disrespect

Until she could stand for it

Not a moment longer

She stamped their blithely marching feet

Upon a different quest

To end her unnatural confinement

Under house arrest

Admitting where she’d been all along

The influence beneath their throng

Their journey now just had to turn

Around from their point of no return

Back into the heart of where they belonged

Shimmering to life

In the love of the limitless pool

Amen

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The Charm of the Game

2011-12-05T19:07:51-05:00

Today we think of baseball as an anachronism, a last vestige of America’s agrarian paradise—an idyllic game that takes us back to a more innocent time. But baseball as we might recognize it originated in New York City, not rural Cooperstown, and in truth it was an exercise in nostalgia from the beginning. Alexander Cartwright and his Knickerbockers began play in Madison Square in 1842, and the city’s northward progress soon compelled them to move uptown to Murray Hill.

Public Domain

American National Game of Base Ball: Grand Match for the Championship at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken, NJ, 1865: This print is often misidentified as portraying the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York in action in the 1840s. However, the portrayed clubs are the Brooklyn Atlantics, at the bat, and the New York Mutuals in the field; the date of the match is August 3, 1865.

When the grounds there were also threatened by the march of industry, the Knicks ferried across the Hudson River to the Elysian Fields of Hoboken, a landscaped retreat of picnic grounds and scenic vistas that was designed by its proprietors to relieve New Yorkers of city air and city care. In other words, the purpose of baseball’s primal park was the same as that of New York’s Central Park or, much later, Boston’s Fenway Park—to give an increasingly urban populace a park within the city, a place reminiscent of the idealized farms that had sent all these lads to the metropolis in pursuit of work.

Thus the attraction of the game in its earliest days was first the novelty and exhilaration of play; second the opportunity for deskbound city clerks to expend surplus energy in a sylvan setting, freed from the tyranny of the clock; and third, to harmonize with an American golden age that was almost entirely legendary.

Simple charms, simple pleasures. In the late 1860s, advancing skills led to heightened appetites for victory, which led to hot pursuit of the game’s gifted players, which inevitably led to sub rosa payments and, by 1870, rampant professionalism. (Doesn’t that chain reaction put one in mind of college football or basketball?) The gentlemanly players of baseball’s first generation retreated from the field, shaking their heads in dismay at how greed had perverted the “grand old game”—now barely 20 years old—and probably ruined it forever.

Public Domain

The Philadelphia Athletic Base Ball Club was one of two to bring America’s game to the Mother Country in the summer of 1874. Standing above his comrades is Adrian Constantine Anson, known in his first seasons as “Baby,” then as “Cap,” and finally as “Pop.”

Sound familiar? It should—the same dire and premature announcements of the demise of the game have been issued ever since, spurred by free-agent signings, long-term contracts, no-trade provisions, strikes and lockouts, integration, night ball, rival leagues, ad infinitum. The only conclusions a calm head might draw from this recurring cycle of disdain for the present and glorification of the past are that (a) things aren’t what they used to be and never were; (b) accurate assessment of a present predicament is impossible, for it requires perspective; and (c) no matter what the owners or players or rules makers or fans do, they can’t kill baseball. All three conclusions are correct. In baseball, the distinction between amateur and professional is not clear-cut: an amateur may play for devotion to the game (amat being the Latin for “he loves”), but a professional does not play for pursuit of gain alone; he plays for love, too.

Used only with express written permission

That doomsday ditty was published in 1886.

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The Writer's Corner: Ge...

2011-12-05T14:18:41-05:00

Silence That Inner Critic and Start Writing!

For most writers, getting started is the hardest part. You may be bursting with good ideas. But somehow, what comes out on paper is…horrible. Because of that disconnect, it’s easy to put writing off.

A major reason writers procrastinate is that little voice inside our heads. It’s the voice that tells you your writing is awful and will never improve. Talk with other writers and you’ll find out what a common experience this is.

If you want to write, however, you must learn to get past this voice by being more accepting of your initial efforts. Or as writing instructor Heather Sellers says, “dare to suck.” Most writing is bad in the beginning. Writing awful first drafts can be challenging for professionals, who are used to being competent. But once you get through this first stage, it gets much easier.

One more thing. As you start writing, avoid drawing false conclusions about your writing based on comparisons with others. Keep that in mind that other people’s writing, although it appears effortless to you, was likely the result of a great deal of effort. So it is absurd to compare your unedited text—especially first drafts--to someone else’s final version, and conclude you can’t write. As you begin, remember the admonition of author Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird, p. 25).

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something— anything—down on paper.

Do I Need Permission to Cite That? The Fair-Use Rule in U.S. Copyright Law

Whether you are writing a short article or a book, at some point, you will likely want to cite someone else’s work. When do you need to get permission from the original author? U.S. copyright law ensures that authors’ expressions are protected. That means if you are using an author’s exact phrasing or sequence of words to express an idea, then you need permission to cite more than what can be considered “fair use.” According to the fair-use rule, authors may make limited use of others’ material without permission. But the guidelines for what constitutes fair use are much vaguer than you might suspect. Indeed, fair use is considered an “affirmative defense,” meaning that the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that your use of the author’s materials falls within in these guidelines.

There are four guidelines to help you determine whether something falls under fair use:

Is your work transformative?

Transformative means that it adds to or extends the existing knowledge base (e.g., a comment, criticism or parody of the original). This can often be a key factor that overrides other considerations. If your use merely substitutes for the original, then it is less likely to be considered fair use.

What is the nature of the prior work?

Unpublished work has more protection than published work. Using someone’s unpublished materials without permission, and simply citing them, is not fair use. Authors should always have the opportunity to publish their work first. If your publication of their materials would deny them that opportunity, then you are infringing on their copyright.

What is the amount and substantiality of the material used?

If what you’ve cited is a large proportion of a short work (e.g., song lyric, poetry), then even if the total number of words is small, it is not fair use. Even in longer works, if the part you’ve chosen to quote is the critical heart of the work, then that may not be fair use.

Will your quotation from the work impact its market value?

This includes not only the economic impact of your use of the material, but the impact if others were to do the same. Copyright may also apply to any derivative work that is so similar to the original that it could impact the sale of the original (e.g., writing a play with a plot highly similar to a recently published novel).

In summary, “fair use” allows you some latitude in citing other people’s work, but it is a fuzzy boundary. If in doubt, you are generally better off if you either ask permission from the copyright holder or seek legal advice.

Should You Join a Writer's Group?

Writers are a solitary bunch. It’s often hard for people who don’t write to really understand what writing is like. Writers’ groups can be a nice source of fellowship. If you are thinking about joining a group, however, be wise in your choice. Consider whether the characteristics of the group are compatible with your goals. Are the other members writing things that differ from your genre (e.g., you want to write non-fiction and other members are writing poetry)? If they differ substantially, the feedback might not be as helpful.

Also consider the quality of the feedback being offered. Writing, especially in the early days, is a fragile thing. You want to be able to show it to people who are going to be supportive and helpful. This is true whether you show your work to one person or many. Unfortunately, some writers’ groups attract people who have never gotten their work published, but nevertheless feel free to offer scathing comments to everyone else. This you do not need! In order to be your most creative, you need to be unafraid to make mistakes—even big ones. If you’re worried about getting torn apart in a group, you’re likely to be more cautious and less creative. So I’d advise you to steer clear of groups with an overall negative tone.

Judging by the number of authors who profusely thank their writers’ groups, it’s fair to say that many authors find them helpful. With some caveats, writers’ groups can be good for you, too—especially if they help you keep your writing on track.

Finding Time to Write

Finding time to write can be one of the biggest challenges that writers face. And it never seems to go away—no matter how much you write. But if you want to write, you must allocate time for it. That may seem obvious, but it is amazing how easy it is to forget.

Much of finding time to write comes down to priorities. If writing is a high priority in your life, then it needs to come before other things. Writing teacher Heather Sellers describes how a friend of hers sets aside time to write in the same way that she trains for a marathon. When writing, she describes herself as “in training” and says no to other things. She refuses to do errands, comes late to social events or blows them off entirely if she is on a roll, and declines a lot of other obligations. It may not be necessary to be so extreme. But her point is well taken: Choosing to write means refusing, or at least delaying, some other things in your life.

Sometimes, circumstances in people’s lives are such that they really don’t have time to write. That being said, sometimes writing becomes a lifeline in times of difficulty—so squeezing it in is a good idea. Both authors Stephen King and Stephen Ambrose have described how writing became an important activity to them during times of serious illness. In short, it kept them sane and from sinking into depression.

My point is that it is not always possible to tell from outside circumstances whether someone has time to write. You may be a person who by all outward appearances has no time to write. And you may decide to postpone writing until life is a little less crazed. Or you may decide that even 15 minutes a day will keep you sane. This is a decision only you can make.

Writing for the Web

Writing for the Web is a great way for new authors to get started on their writing careers. Although the Internet has not replaced print media the way some expected, eventually we may see Web publications eclipse their print brethren. The Web is rapidly becoming the media of choice for the next generation and is changing the way we get information. As an author, you can write content for organizations you care about, or to promote a book, or to make your work more accessible to readers.

Tips for Writing for the Web

In order to write for the Web, there are a few things to keep in mind. First, readers of Web sites have different needs than readers of print material. For example, people tend to read computer screens somewhat more slowly than they do hard copy. As a good rule of thumb, write about half as much as you would usually write for a print article. If you need to provide more content, use hyperlinks to other pages.

As is true for print publications, headers and subheaders help readers scan information and find what they need. Headers also visually break up a page and encourage the reader to keep reading. Bullet points are also helpful for readers who may be looking for specific information, as are lists and pullout quotes. You can also summarize a page’s content at the top of each page to help readers determine whether they want to keep reading.

As for style, similar rules apply to both online content and to print. Write in a conversational tone, using an active voice. Present only one idea in each paragraph, and realize that paragraphs may be read out of order depending on where readers land after searching for specific information. Finally, remember that your readers are from all over the world. English is the official language of high-tech. But there are substantial differences in how English is used in different countries.

Lastly, write about topics you enjoy and find interesting. Bored writers often produce boring prose. Your articles have the potential to reach millions of readers. Make them something that you would want to read. And have fun!

"And Then We'll Get on Oprah..." Don't Sounds Like an Amateur: Know Your Market

One of the best parts of my job as acquisitions editor is talking with aspiring authors about their work. I love seeing book projects in the formative stage. And I love being able to guide them along the way until they are finished products. I do this a lot, and in some of the oddest settings imaginable: in doctor’s waiting offices, in airports, by the pool, or even standing in line at the restroom. (Hint to aspiring authors: the last location really isn’t a good time to chat.)

In these numerous conversations, I’ve noticed one thing pretty consistently: many first-time authors really have no idea who their market is. Basically, they’ll pitch a book idea and then tell me about their marketing plan: “then I’ll get on Oprah…..” That’s a lovely idea, but the truth is that you have a much better chance of being struck by lightening. In fact, a statement like that let’s everyone know that this is your first-time out. Fortunately, there are some things you can do to avoid this common mistake.

Know Your Market. One of the first things I advise new authors to do is make a trip to their local bookstore. After a couple of hours spent browsing, you will have a decent sense of what is out there and who is publishing similar titles. That will give you a short list of publishers to approach with your idea.
Know the Competition. Any acquisitions editor will ask you about books on the market that are similar to yours. Be ready to give an answer. Also, be prepared to explain how your book will fill a particular gap in the existing market.
How You Will Reach Your Audience. A final question that you need to be ready to answer is how will you let others know about your book. This is known in the book biz as your “platform.” Do you speak at conferences on the topic? Do you write for any publications that reach your target audience? Do you have connections with any of the organizations involved in your area of interest? This is important because author promotion is vital to making your book a success. Publishers are more likely to show interest in your project if they know that you have access to the audience you are writing for.

While this may seem like a lot of work up front, it’s much better to do it now than to invest a year of your life in writing a book that no one will read because they don’t know about it. Or because you went with a publisher who couldn’t market it well. A working knowledge of your market is absolutely essential to selling a book project. I wish you great success in this phase of the process.

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Adapted from: Kendall-Tackett, K.A. (2007). How to Write for a General Audience. Wash, DC: American Psychological Association.

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Corruption of Science i...

2011-12-05T10:31:07-05:00

That man will be very fortunate who, led by some unusual inner light, shall be able to turn from the dark and confused labyrinths within which he might have gone forever wandering with the crowd and becoming ever more entangled. Therefore, in the matter of philosophy, I consider it not very sound to judge a man’s opinion by the number of his followers.

Galileo Galilei, The Assayer (1623)

Truth is the pillar of civilization. The word ‘truth’ occurs 224 times in the King James Version of the Holy Bible; witnesses testifying in American courts and before the United States Congress must swear to tell the truth; and, laws and civil codes require truth in advertising and in business practices, to list just a few examples.

The purpose of science is to discover the true nature of Earth and Universe and to convey that knowledge truthfully to people everywhere. Science gives birth to technology that makes our lives easier and better. Science improves our health and enables us to see our world in ways never before envisioned. It uplifts spirits and engenders optimism. And, science provides a truth standard, securely anchored in the properties of matter, a means to expose and debunk the charlatans and science-barbarians who would lie, cheat, steal, and tyrannize under the guise of science.

Prior to World War II there was little government ﬁnancial support for science. Nevertheless, the 20th century opened and seemed to offer the promise of an unparalleled age of enlightenment and reason.

While supporting himself as a Swiss patent clerk, Albert Einstein explained Brownian motion, the photoelectric effect, and special relativity. Niels Bohr, supported by grants from the Carlsberg Brewery, made fundamental discoveries about atomic structure and served as a focal point and driving force for the collaborative effort that yielded quantum mechanics, the ﬁeld of science underpinning the solid state electronics technology that makes possible modern communications and computers. For a time, the meanings of new observations were actively debated. Fertile imaginations put forth ideas that challenged prevailing views. New ideas and new understandings began to emerge, sometimes precise, sometimes ﬂawed, but tending toward truth and inspiring more new ideas and inspiring yet further debate. Individual imagination and creativity, driven by the quest for a true understanding of the nature of Earth and Universe, produced a sense of enthusiasm and excitement; new insights and discoveries enlightened the general public and kindled the imaginations of the young. An air of optimism prevailed.

Although money for science at the time was in short supply, scientists maintained a kind of self-discipline. A graduate student working on a Ph.D. degree was expected to make a new discovery to earn that degree, even if it meant starting over after years of work because someone else made the discovery ﬁrst. Self-discipline was also part of the scientiﬁc publication system. Prior to World War II, when a scientist wanted to publish a paper, the scientist would send it to the editor of a scholarly journal for publication and generally it would be published. A new, unpublished scientist was required to obtain the endorsement of a published scientist before submitting a manuscript. The concept of ‘peer review’ had not yet been born.

But in the ﬁnal decades of the 20th century, circumstances began to change. On one hand, outwardly, it seemed we were poised for yet another renaissance, with ready access to powerful new computers, satellite imaging, network data systems, and global communications. But, on the other hand, out of sight and unknown to nearly everyone, something had gone seriously wrong. Beneath the surface lay the foundations of a system which had been corrupted and had evolved to support a ‘politically correct’ consensus view of Earth and Universe, while tending to discourage, ignore, stiﬂe and suppress advances and challenges by individuals.

Before World War II, there was very little government funding of science, but that changed because of war-time necessities. In 1951, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) was established to provide support for post World War II civilian scientiﬁc research. The process for administrating the government’s science funding, invented in the early 1950s by NSF, has been adopted, essentially unchanged, by virtually all subsequent U.S. Government science funding agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE).

The problem, I discovered, is that the science funding process that the NSF invented and passed on to other U.S. Government agencies is seriously and fundamentally ﬂawed. As a consequence, for more than half a century, the NSF has been doing what no foreign power or terrorist organization can do: slowly, imperceptibly undermining American scientiﬁc capability, driving America toward third-world status in science and in education, corrupting individuals and institutions, rewarding the deceitful and the institutions that they serve, stiﬂing creative science, and infecting the whole scientiﬁc community with ﬂawed anti-science practices based upon an unrealistic vision of human behavior. These are the principal ﬂaws:

NSF Flaw #1: Proposals for scientiﬁc funding are generally reviewed by anonymous ‘peer reviewers’. NSF invented the concept of ‘peer review’, where in a scientist’s competitors would review and evaluate his/her/their proposal for funding, and the reviewers’ identities would be concealed. The idea of using anonymous ‘peer reviewers’ must have seemed like an administrative stroke of genius because the process was adopted by virtually all government science funding agencies that followed and almost universally by editors of scientiﬁc journals. But no one seems to have considered the lessons of history with respect to secrecy. Secrecy is certainly necessary in matters of national security and defense. But in civilian science, does secrecy and the concomitant freedom from accountability really encourage truthfulness? If secrecy did in fact lead to greater truthfulness, secrecy would be put to great advantage in the courts. Courts have in fact employed secrecy – during the infamous Spanish Inquisition and in virtually every totalitarian dictatorship – and the result is always the same: unscrupulous individuals falsely denounce others and corruption abounds.

The application of anonymity and freedom from accountability in the ‘peer review’ system gives unfair advantage to those who would unjustly berate competitor’s proposal for obtaining funding for research and for publishing research results. Anonymous ‘peer review’ has become the major science-suppression method of the science-barbarians. Moreover, the perception – real or imagined – that some individuals would do just that has had a chilling effect, forcing scientists to become defensive, adopting only the ‘politically correct’ consensus approved viewpoint and refraining from discussing anything that might be considered a challenge to others’ work or to the funding agency’s programs. And that is not what science is about at all. Not surprisingly, there exists today a widespread perception that to challenge scientiﬁc results supported by a U.S. Government agency will lead to loss of one’s own support.

NSF Flaw #2: NSF invented the concept of scientists proposing speciﬁc projects for funding, which has led to the trivialization and bureaucratization of science. Why so? The problem is that it is absolutely impossible to say beforehand what one will discover that has never before been discovered, and to say what one will do to discover it. The consequence has been the proposing of trivial projects with often non-scientiﬁc end-results, such as the widespread practice of making models based upon assumptions, instead of making discoveries. Further, bureaucrat ‘program managers’ decide which projects are suitable for the programs that they design. Moreover, proposal ‘evaluation’ is often a guise for ‘program managers’ and ‘peer reviewers’ to engage in exclusionary and ethically questionable, anti-competitive practices. There is no incentive for scientists to make important discoveries or to challenge existing ideas; quite the contrary.

NSF Flaw #3: NSF began the now widespread practice of making grants to universities and other non-proﬁt institutions, with scientists, usually faculty members, now being classed as ‘principal investigators’. The consequence of that methodology is that there is no direct legal responsibility or liability for the scientists’ conduct. All too often scientists misrepresent with impunity the state of scientiﬁc knowledge and engage in anti-competitive practices, including the blacklisting of other capable, experienced scientists. University and institution administrators, when made aware of such conduct, in my experience, do nothing to correct it, having neither the expertise nor, with tenure, the perception of authority or responsibility. The result is that American tax payers’ money is wasted on a grand scale and the science produced is greatly inferior to what it might be.

NSF Flaw #4: NSF began the now widespread practice whereby the government pays the publication costs, ‘page charges’, for scientiﬁc articles in journals run by for proﬁt companies or by special interest science organizations. Because these publishers demand ownership of copyrights, taxpayers who want to obtain an electronic copy must pay, typically US$40, for an article whose underlying research and publication costs were already paid with taxpayer dollars. Moreover, commercial and protectionist practices often subvert the free exchange of information, which should be part of science, making the publication of contradictions and new advances extremely difﬁcult.

Furthermore, publishers have little incentive or mechanism to insist upon truthful representations. For example, in ethical science, published contradictions should be cited, but with the extant system it is common practice to ignore contradictions that may call into question the validity of what is being published. The net result is that unethical scientists frequently deceive the general public and the scientiﬁc community, and waste tax payer-provided money on questionable endeavors.

I have described these four fundamental NSF instigated ﬂaws that now pervade virtually all civilian U.S. Government-supported science funding, and have proposed practical ways to correct them,¹ which I communicated to two NSF directors, who chose to ignore them. There seems to be a widespread perception of intrinsic ‘infallibility’ in the government-university complex, where in any action, regardless of the seriousness of its adverse consequences, is considered beyond reproach.

On December 16, 2004, an individual in the White House to whom I had complained about the inequity of ‘peer review’ sent me a copy of the U.S. Ofﬁce of Management and Budget’s Final Information Quality Bulletin for Peer Review: December 15, 2004. On December 26, 2004, I sent to the White House my critique of that Bulletin and my recommendations for systemic changes, which were neither appreciated nor implemented.² Six years later, the U.S. Government still conducts ‘peer review’ according to that Bulletin, which: (1) Embodies the tacit assumption that ‘peer reviewers’ will always be truthful, and fails to provide any instruction, direction, or requirement either to guard against fraudulent ‘peer review’ or to prosecute those suspected of making untruthful reviews; (2) Approves the application of anonymity and even appears to promote some alleged virtue of its use, “e.g., to encourage candor”; (3) Gives tacit approval to circumstances that allow conﬂicts of interest and prevents the avoidance of conﬂicts of interest; and, (4) Fails to recognize or to admit the debilitating consequences of the long-term application of the practices it approves.

One consequence of NSF’s invention of anonymous ‘peer review’ is that publication of scientiﬁc papers is often delayed for years or prevented by so-called ‘peer reviews’ from competitors, whose primary aim is to debilitate or eliminate their competition. In the 1990s, the National Science Foundation funded the development at Los Alamos National Laboratory of an author self-posting archive, where physicists and mathematicians could post their preprints, without interference from their competitors, making them available worldwide almost instantly. That archive underwent various name changes, eventually becoming arXiv.org.

Since its inception, arXiv.org has become the preeminent means of scientiﬁc communication in the areas of science and mathematics it hosts. Rather than wade through the many hundreds of individual scientiﬁc journals, often having limited access without paying fees, scientists can receive by email a list of daily postings in speciﬁc areas of the scientific disciplines hosted by arXiv.org and can download scientific articles of interest without charge. The development of the author self-posting archive might have become the jewel in NSF’s crown, one of its greatest achievements. Instead, NSF’s mal-administration permitted it to become an instrument for science suppression, and for blacklisting and discrimination against competent, well-trained scientists worldwide.

On or about 2001, key personnel responsible for developing the author self-posting archive at Los Alamos National Laboratory left that organization to become employed by Cornell University. Presumably in a coordinated way, Cornell University, through a proposal to the National Science Foundation [NSF # 0132355, July 16, 2001], took over ownership of the author self-posting archive, now called arXiv.org, and presumably was given the requested US$958,798 to do that. That proposal contains the following statement made to justify Cornell University’s proposed use of a ‘refereeing mechanism’: “The research archives become less useful once they are inundated for example by submissions from vociferous ‘amateurs’ promoting their own perpetual motion machines.…”

The website archivefreedom.org displays case histories of some of the individuals who have been blacklisted by the arXiv.org administration and its ‘secret moderators’, and includes a statement by blacklisted scientist and Nobel Laureate Brian D. Josephson explaining the meaning of blacklisting as applied to arXiv.org.³ Being blacklisted by arXiv.org means that either your attempts to post scientiﬁc papers are disallowed, or they are ‘buried’, i.e., posted in categories where scientists or mathematicians in the speciﬁc area will likely not see them, such as in General Physics or in General Mathematics. The principal consequence of arXiv.org blacklisting is to deceive U.S. Government science funding ofﬁcials and individuals conducting scientiﬁc investigations and teaching science, keeping them in the dark about new ideas and discoveries. Beyond the ﬁnancial and professional debilitation suffered by blacklisted scientists and mathematicians, there is also a human toll, as one blacklisted individual noted: “Blacklisted scientists are subject to derision, ignorance, insults, lies, false accusations, personal attacks against them, misrepresentations regarding their research, culture, faith, etc.”

Hundreds of thousands of scientiﬁc papers have been posted on the author self-posting archive, arXiv.org, without any human intervention at all. Human intervention, but not ‘peer review’, occurs only when an individual is ‘denounced’, intentionally singled out for disparate treatment, through the application of unfair, arbitrary, and capricious standards. Being tagged for disparate human intervention may occur for a number of never speciﬁed reasons. Human intervention is perpetrated by arXiv.org administrators in conspiracy with a small group of arXiv.org ‘insiders’ who may or may not call themselves ‘moderators’ and who discriminate in secret and without any accountability. Moreover, there is no recourse: in my experience, Cornell University’s librarian, provost and president absolve themselves from any oversight responsibility for the conduct of arXiv.org, referring complaints back to the arXiv.org administrators who are the subject of the complaint in the ﬁrst place. Being ‘denounced’ for disparate treatment by secret ‘insiders’, without recourse, is something I might have expected from the now-defunct Soviet Union or from Ceausescu’s Romania. But, here it is in America; bought and paid for by the National Science Foundation. As an American citizen, veteran, and taxpayer, I am justiﬁably appalled!

In my view, there is something fundamentally wrong with Cornell University receiving U.S. Government grants and contracts to conduct scientiﬁc research, and then deceiving the scientiﬁc community, via arXiv.org, by not posting or by hiding new advances or contradictions, especially in instances that potentially impact the investigations being performed at government expense at Cornell. Cornell University is a recipient of millions of dollars in U.S. Government grants and contracts, and is one of a pool of competitors for Federal grants and contracts. The National Science Foundation, I submit, made an institutionally stupid blunder in turning over to Cornell University a powerful tool (arXiv.org) that could be used against its competitors. In doing so, I allege, the U.S. National Science Foundation violated the very law that created NSF:

“In exercising the authority and discharging the functions referred to in the foregoing subsections, it shall be an objective of the Foundation to strengthen research and education in the sciences and engineering, including independent research by individuals, throughout the United States, and to avoid undue concentration of such research and education.” [42 United States Code 1862 (e)]

Instead of obeying that law, the U.S. National Science Foundation placed into the hands of one major, well-ﬁnanced competitor a powerful tool (arXiv.org) which could not only be applied arbitrarily with capricious standards against its competitors, but through such actions would cast a shadow of fear at being ‘denounced’ in secret and there upon being blacklisted, further ensuring ‘politically correct’ consensus conformity and science suppression. So, what should be done?

In my view, the United States Congress should initiate an investigation into allegations of abuse and possible criminal activity in the acquisition and operation of arXiv.org at Cornell University, including the possibility of complicity and/or acquiescence by individuals at other universities and by other government entities, including the U.S. Department of Justice and the Attorney General of the State of New York. If evidence warrants, the United States Government, I believe, should consider initiating legal action to repossess arXiv.org and put it under aegis of a neutral, non-competitor organization, such as the National Archive or the Library of Congress, as should have been done initially.

The noted economist, George E. P. Box, said essentially this about models: all models are wrong, but some are useful. Generally, models set out to model some observable or hypothetical event or process and achieve the result they seek to obtain by making result-oriented assumptions and tweaking variables; those models do not have to be correct and can generally be replaced with other models. To me, it is much more important to discover the true nature of Earth and Universe than to make such models.

Astronomers have made some truly remarkable observations. Astrophysicists attempt to understand the physical basis underlying those observations by making models based upon assumptions or upon other models based on other assumptions. In the 1920s, scientists discovered thermonuclear fusion, the joining of two very light atomic nuclei with great energy release. The process is called ‘thermonuclear’ because temperatures of about one million degrees centigrade are required to ignite the reaction. In the 1930s, scientists worked out the thermonuclear reactions thought to power the Sun and other stars. The million degree ignition temperature? It was assumed to be generated when dust and gas collapsed during their formation. But, as I realized later, there are serious impediments to attaining million degree temperatures in that manner.

A star is like a hydrogen bomb held together by gravity. The thermonuclear fusion reactions of all hydrogen bombs are ignited by small nuclear ﬁssion atomic bombs. In 1994, in a scientiﬁc paper published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, I suggested that stars, like hydrogen bombs, are ignited by nuclear ﬁssion, the splitting of uranium and heavier atomic nuclei.⁴ The implications are profound: stars are not necessarily ignited during formation, as previously thought, but require a ﬁssionable trigger. My concept of the thermonuclear ignition of stars by nuclear ﬁssion has been completely ignored by the model making astrophysicists. Ignoring work that challenges the ‘politically correct’ consensus-approved storyline is common practice, thanks to the fear of retribution by secret ‘peer reviewers’ or to the fear of being ‘denounced’ and blacklisted.

In 2006, I submitted a short manuscript on the thermonuclear ignition of dark galaxies to Astrophysical Journal Letters. I signed the required copyright transfer form, and the manuscript went out for secret ‘peer review’, but it was rejected without any substantive scientiﬁc criticism. So I submitted two other brief, but important, manuscripts. The fact that I was never asked to sign the copyright transfer forms for those other two papers prior to review, as required, was clear indication that they were not going to be accorded the fair and impartial consideration that is supposed to be the usual policy of the American Astronomical Society, the journal’s sponsor. Not surprisingly, those manuscripts were rejected without any scientiﬁcally valid justiﬁcation. I complained to the ofﬁcers of the American Astronomical Society, who never responded, even though the bylaws of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) clearly state: “As a professional society, the AAS must provide an environment that encourages the free expression and exchange of scientiﬁc ideas.” In rejecting those manuscripts, the American Astronomical Society hid from its members, from the scientiﬁc community, and from U.S. Government science funding ofﬁcials, fundamentally new insights about the Universe, including why galaxies have the characteristic appearances they are observed to have.⁵

Not long after the Astrophysical Journal Letters incident, I found myself blacklisted by arXiv.org. Before, I was not only permitted to post, but also to endorse others in the following categories: Astrophysics, Educational Physics, General Physics, Geophysics, History of Physics, and Space Physics. Now, for no legitimate reason, I am blacklisted, stripped of the ability to endorse others, and suffer having my scientiﬁc papers ‘buried’ in General Physics where it is unlikely they will be noticed; that is, if they are allowed to post at all. Even my scientiﬁc papers that call into question U.S. Government funded investigations at Cornell University are either ‘buried’ or forbidden to post in this author self-posting archive, where hundreds of thousands of papers post automatically without human intervention.

A half-century of the use of secret ‘peer reviews’ by competitors, at the National Science Foundation and at the other agencies which followed, such as NASA, has produced a ‘never criticize the science’ mentality among grant-recipients. But science is all about ﬁnding out what is wrong with present thinking and correcting it. American science education has been stunted by that mentality. Educational organizations which receive grants from NSF or NASA almost never teach students or teachers about work that challenges the ‘politically correct’ consensus approved storyline. The same goes for ‘science news’ organizations that rarely report the results of investigations that call into question the ‘politically correct’ storyline. Institutionalized science-corruption is wide spread and pervasive in America, and the fallout is international; the ‘Climategate’ debacle is just one example.

At one time, scientists thought that planets do not produce energy, except small amounts from radioactive decay; planets just receive energy from the Sun and then radiate it back into space. Beginning in the late 1960s, astronomers observed that Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune radiate into space nearly twice the energy they receive from the Sun. For twenty years the source of that internal energy was a mystery to NASA-funded scientists, who wrongly thought they had considered and eliminated all possibilities. In1991, I submitted a scientiﬁc paper to the German Naturwissenschaften demonstrating the feasibility of that energy being produced by natural nuclear ﬁssion reactors at the planets’ centers. I used the same approach that Paul K. Kuroda had used in 1956 to predict the occurrence of natural nuclear reactors in ancient uranium mines, the fossil remains of which were discovered in 1972 at Oklo, in the Republic of Gabon.

When that paper was accepted for publication,⁶ I submitted a research proposal to NASA’s Planetary Geophysics Program. Paul K. Kuroda accepted my invitation to join in as a co-investigator. Kuroda, however, insisted that his efforts be pro bono as he ‘did not need the money’.

The Universities Space Research Association, an association of major institutional recipients of NASA funding, operates the Lunar and Planetary Institute, which operated the Lunar and Planetary Geoscience Review Panel (LPGRP) at the time I submitted the proposal. The LPGRP served NASA by soliciting secret ‘peer reviews’ of submitted proposals, then evaluating the proposals in secret session, based upon those ‘peer reviews’, and ranking them so as to make it easy for a NASA ofﬁcial to decide which to fund. The LPGRP, composed of a group of principal investigators of NASA grants, funded either through NASA’s Planetary Geophysics Program or Planetary Geology Program, conducted the secret ranking of all proposals submitted to one or the other of those same two NASA programs. In other words, my proposal was competing for the same limited pool of funds as proposals from the very institutions whose personnel served on the LPGRP. At the time, the chairman of the LPGRP was associated with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which is operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and which consumed more than 40% of the budget of the Planetary Geophysics Program.

Needless to say, my proposal was not funded. Normally, the LPGRP’s ranking of proposals is kept secret, but through extraordinary efforts I learned from the U.S. Congress’ General Accounting Ofﬁce (called the Government Accountability Ofﬁce since 2004) that on technical merit the LPGRP ranked my proposal lowest of the 120 proposals submitted to NASA’s Planetary Geophysics Program. One might seriously question the integrity of that ranking, as I later independently performed all that I had proposed and much more, including demonstrating the feasibility of a nuclear ﬁssion reactor at the center of Earth, called the georeactor, as the energy source and production mechanism for the Earth’s magnetic ﬁeld.^{4, 7, 11} I also extended the concept to other planets and large moons.¹² The concept of planetary nuclear ﬁssion reactors has received quite thorough vetting in the international scientiﬁc community. So, what was NASA’s response?

In the twenty years that have passed since the proposal debacle, NASA supported scientists, to my knowledge, have never mentioned natural nuclear ﬁssion reactors or cited my publications. But they have discussed numerous observations where they should have, instances of ‘mysterious’ internal heat production and magnetic ﬁeld generation, such as: (1) Internal heat generation in Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune; (2) Our Moon having a soft or molten core; (3) Tiny planet Mercury having a magnetic ﬁeld; (4) Mars displaying evidence of an ancient magnetic ﬁeld; (5) Our Moon displaying evidence of an ancient magnetic ﬁeld; (6) Jupiter’s moon Ganymede having an internally generated magnetic ﬁeld; (7) Saturn’s moon Enceladus showing evidence of internal heating; and (8) Evidence of internal heat generation in Pluto’s moon Charon. I receive numerous emails from people throughout the world who read NASA news reports and wonder why my work is not mentioned, when it would seem to provide plausible explanations.

In a manner no different from astrophysics, the American geophysical community consistently ignores my scientiﬁc challenges to the 1940 vintage thoughts that form the basis of their assumption-based models. Science is not about telling one ‘politically correct’ story and ignoring everything else. Instead, science is about ﬁnding out what is wrong with existing ideas and correcting them. American geophysicists have wasted untold multimillions of tax payer – provided dollars on totally worthless endeavors, instead of progressing in fruitful directions. I publish important, well-founded contradictions to current scientiﬁc thinking in world-class journals. It is the responsibility of an ethical scientiﬁc community to attempt to conﬁrm or to refute the concepts presented. In any case, those contradictions should be cited.¹³

In 1936, Inge Lehmann discovered the inner core, an object at the center of Earth almost as large as the Moon and about three times as massive, that, since about 1940, was thought to be iron in the process of freezing. In 1979, I published an entirely different idea of the inner core’s composition. The scientiﬁc paper was communicated by Nobel Laureate Harold C. Urey to the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London¹⁴ and I received a complimentary letter from Inge Lehmann. But instead of debate, discussion, and experimental and/or theoretical veriﬁcation/refutation, I received silence from the geophysics community, not only on that discovery, but on a host of discoveries that followed as a consequence.¹⁵ Real scientists welcome new ideas and advances as they open the door to more new ideas and further advances. Science-barbarians, on the other hand, ignore what they do not like, and by ignoring, deceive the scientiﬁc community, the general public, and the U.S. Government, which typically funds their questionable endeavors.

In 1838, in an address before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springﬁeld, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln stated: “At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer if it ever reaches us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and ﬁnisher.” Later, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln unknowingly helped to sow the seeds for America’s self-destruction when in 1863 he signed into law the Act of Incorporation of the National Academy of Sciences, which states in part: “The National Academy of Sciences shall… whenever called upon by any department of the Government, investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art.”

Has the National Academy of Sciences ever advised the U.S. Government of the ﬂaws in the operating procedures of science-funding agencies, such as I have disclosed,^1,2 which are corrupting and trivializing American science? Has it ever revealed the existence of organized science-suppression under the guise of secret ‘peer review’ among the so-called professional societies, including within the National Academy of Sciences, the documentation of which I have provided to the president of NAS, and the consequences of which will cost American taxpayers countless millions of wasted tax dollars? I doubt it. Despite ever increasing budgets, American science and education continues to decline toward third-world status as it has for decades. In personal, medical, legal, and business matters, it is common practice to hire an advisor. We all do that. If the advice proffered proves to be faulty, we ﬁre the advisor and hire another. In my opinion, the United States Congress should ﬁre the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and ﬁnd other sources of scientiﬁc and educational advice.

Suppressing and ignoring advances in science can have serious, real-world consequences. The Earth is constantly bombarded by the solar wind, a fully ionized and electrically conducting plasma, heated to about 1,000,000 °C. Fortunately, Earth’s self-generated magnetic ﬁeld deﬂects the brunt of the solar wind safely around and past our planet, protecting humanity from the Sun’s relentless onslaught. But reversal or demise of the geomagnetic field will doubtlessly be catastrophic, a calamity of unparalleled magnitude for our technologically-dependent civilization.

When the geomagnetic ﬁeld collapses, vast segments of the population will be without electricity. Electrical power grids will act like uncontrolled generators as the charged particle ﬂux of the rampaging solar wind sweeps past, inducing into their lines suicidal bursts of electrical current that short circuit and destroy essential elements of the power grid. Powerful, equipment-wrecking electrical currents will likewise be induced in gas and oil pipelines, causing explosions and ﬁres. Electrical charges will build up on surfaces every where and reach staggeringly high potentials at edges and sharp points, posing risks of electrocution and igniting ﬁres. Satellites will no longer function, their electronics fried by the plasma onslaught; there will be widespread failure of both communication and navigation systems. And, even more seriously, the long-term, unknown, but certainly adverse, impact on health will be severe.

Until recently, reversals of the geomagnetic ﬁeld or its complete demise were thought to be events in the far distant future and to occur over a long period of time. But that may have changed dramatically.

Notice that as you heat a pot of water on the stove top, before it starts to boil, the water begins to circulate from bottom to top and from top to bottom. This is called convection and it can be better observed by adding a few tea leaves, celery seeds, or the like, which are carried along by the circulation of water. It occurs because heat at the bottom causes the water to expand a bit, becoming lighter, less dense, than the cooler water at the top. This process of convection is an unstable, top heavy arrangement which attempts to regain stability by ﬂuid motions.

In 1939, Walter Elsasser proposed that the geomagnetic ﬁeld is produced by convection motions in the Earth’s ﬂuid core that are twisted by the planet’s rotation to form a dynamo. For seventy years, the geophysics community has assumed that convection ‘must’ exist in the core. Untold millions of dollars have been spent on modeling convection and its applications in the Earth’s ﬂuid core.

On January 27, 2009, I submitted a brief but important scientiﬁc communication to Physical Review Letters which demonstrated that convection is physically impossible in the Earth’s ﬂuid core because: (1) The core is too bottom-heavy due to compression by the weight above; (2) The core-bottom cannot remain hotter than the top, as required for convection, because the core is wrapped in an insulating blanket; and, (3) The ‘Rayleigh Number’ has been wrongly applied to justify core-convection. I suggested instead that the geomagnetic field is produced by Elsasser’s mechanism operating in the nuclear georeactor subshell. From bottom to top in the review process at Physical Review Letters and at the journal’s sponsor, the American Physical Society, there were no scientiﬁcally valid, substantive criticisms, only pejorative remarks and misrepresentations, including those by one or more members of the National Academy of Sciences. Of course, the paper was rejected by Physical Review Letters and its preprint was ‘buried’ by arXiv.org in General Physics,¹⁶ which effectively hid it from view of U.S. Government science funding ofﬁcials, almost guaranteeing that ﬂuid core modeling activities would continue wasting tax payer funds on fruitless, physically impossible endeavors. But there is a far, far more serious implication stemming from the unwarranted rejection and ‘burial’ of this manuscript.

Earth’s ﬂuid core comprises about 30% of the mass of the planet; the nuclear georeactor is only one ten-millionth as massive, meaning that disrupted convection in the georeactor could lead to very rapid changes, including rapid reversals of the geomagnetic ﬁeld. Think of it this way: the direction and speed of a child’s tiny, self-moving toy train can be changed much more rapidly with far less force than that of the longest and heaviest, fully loaded, full-size freight train. From ancient lava ﬂows, scientists have recently conﬁrmed evidence of episodes of rapid geomagnetic ﬁeld change – six degrees per day during one reversal and another of one degree per week – were reported.^{17, 18} The relatively small mass of the georeactor is consistent with the possibility of a magnetic reversal occurring on a time scale as short as one month or several years. The recently observed more-rapid-than-usual movement of the North magnetic pole toward Siberia is thought by some to suggest that a reversal is imminent, although there is great uncertainty. Because of the global catastrophic signiﬁcance, suppressing science related to the possibility of very rapid geomagnetic ﬁeld changes, in my view, is tantamount to a betrayal of trust and an act of treason against humanity.

For the good of all, now is the time to rid science of the charlatans and the science-barbarians, and to create an environment where science can ﬂourish in truth and where scientists can work freely without fear of retribution or denouncement for challenging extant ideas or for failing to adopt the ‘politically correct’ consensus-approved storyline. I have described four major, science-crippling ﬂaws, instigated by the U.S. National Science Foundation a half-century ago, that are still in effect today at NSF, and at other U.S. Government science funding agencies, and have suggested practical ways to correct them.¹ Implementation should not be too difﬁcult; it just requires courage and integrity.

About the Author

J. Marvin Herndon is well trained: B.A. in physics (UCSD), Ph.D. in nuclear chemistry (Texas A&M), and post-doctoral apprenticeship in geochemistry and cosmochemistry under Hans E. Suess and Harold C. Urey. Dubbed a “maverick geophysicist” (by The Washington Post), this interdisciplinary scientist is responsible for identifying the composition of Earth’s inner core as nickel-silicide and for demonstrating the feasibility of a natural nuclear reactor at Earth’s center as the energy source and production mechanism for the geomagnetic field. His professional life has been one of discovering long-standing fundamental scientific mistakes; now he reveals managerial mistakes that have been crippling and corrupting American science and education for decades.

References

1. Herndon, J.M., American Science Decline: The Cause and Cure. http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/law/government_law/federal_regulation/american-science-decline-the-cause-and-cure. http://nuclearplanet.com/Anerican%20Science%20Decline.html

2. Herndon, J.M., Peer Review Folly: Independent Critique and Recommendations http://www.bestthinking.com/articles/law/government_law/federal_regulation/peer-review-folly-independent- critique-and-recommendations

3. Josephson, B.D., Covert censorship by the physics preprint archive. http://www.tcm.phy.cam.ac.uk/~bdj10/archivefreedom/main.html;

http://nuclearplanet.com/Josephson's%20Statement.html

4. Herndon, J.M., 1994. Planetary and protostellar nuclear fission: Implications for planetary change, stellar ignition and dark matter. Proc. R. Soc. Lond, v. A455, p. 453-461.

5. Herndon, J.M., 2009. New concept for internal heat production in hot Jupiter exo-planets, thermonuclear ignition of dark galaxies, and the basis for galactic luminous star distributions. Curr. Sci., v, 96, p. 1453-1456. http://www.nuclearplanet.com/Herndon%20Current%20Science%2090610.pdf

6. Herndon, J.M., 1992. Nuclear fission reactors as energy sources for the giant outer planets. Naturwissenschaften, v. 79, p. 7-14.

7. Herndon, J.M., 1993. Feasibility of a nuclear fission reactor at the center of the Earth as the energy source for the geomagnetic field. Jour. Geomag. Geoelectr., v. 45, p. 423-437. http://www.nuclearplanet.com/Herndon%20JGG93.pdf

8. Herndon, J.M., 1996. Sub-structure of the inner core of the earth. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci., USA, v. 93, p. 646-648. http://www.nuclearplanet.com/pnas-1996.pdf

9. Herndon, J.M., 2003. Nuclear georeactor origin of oceanic basalt ³He/⁴He, evidence, and implications. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, v. 100, no. 6, p. 3047-3050. http://www.nuclearplanet.com/pnas%202003.pdf

10. Herndon, J.M., 2007. Nuclear georeactor generation of the earth's geomagnetic field. Curr. Sci., v. 93, no.11, p. 1485-1487. http://www.nuclearplanet.com/Herndon%20Current%20Science%2071210.pdf

11. Hollenbach, D.F. and J.M. Herndon, 2001. Deep-earth reactor: nuclear fission, helium, and the geomagnetic field. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA, v. 98, no. 20, p. 11085-11090. http://www.nuclearplanet.com/pnas%202003.pdf

12. Herndon, J.M., 2009. Nature of planetary matter and magnetic field generation in the solar system. Curr. Sci., v. 96, p. 1033-1039. http://www.nuclearplanet.com/Herndon%20Current%20Science%2090425.pdf

13. Herndon, J.M., 2010. Inseparability of science history and discovery. Hist. Geo Space Sci., v. 1, p. 25-41. http://www.nuclearplanet.com/hgss-1-25-2010.pdf

14. Herndon, J.M., 1979. The nickel silicide inner core of the Earth. Proc. R. Soc. Lond, v. A368, p. 495-500.

15. Herndon, J.M., Brief Biography. http://nuclearplanet.com/JMH%20Biography.html

16. Herndon, J.M., 2009. Uniqueness of Herndon's georeactor: Energy source and production mechanism for Earth's magnetic field. arXiv.org/abs/0901.4509. http://www.nuclearplanet.com/Herndon%20Uniqueness.pdf

17. Bogue, S.W., 2010. Very rapid geomagnetic field change recorded by the partial remagnetization of a lava flow. Geophys. Res. Lett., v. 37, L21308, doi: 10.1029/2010GL044286.

18. Coe, R.S. and M., 1989. Prevot, Evidence suggesting extremely rapid field variation during a geomagnetic reversal. Earth Planet. Sci. Lett., v. 92, p. 192-198.

19. Ogrin, S., 2010 (11). Ghost in the Machine. The Dot Connector Magazine, p. 38-40.

20. Perelman, C.C., 2010 (11). The Trouble with Physicists. The Dot Connector Magazine, p. 41-43.

Does the Fast Breeder R...

2011-12-02T15:46:28-05:00

DOES THE FAST BREEDER REACTOR HAVE A FUTURE

A massive 8.9-magnitude earthquake hit northeast Japan on 11 March 2011, causing and a 33-feet (10-meter) tsunami along parts of the country's coastline. The disaster damaged the cooling systems of three of the six General Electric nuclear-power reactors at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear-power plant, causing nuclear meltdowns and releases of radioactive materials. The Fukushima disaster is the largest nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

Before the accident happened many countries were planning to acquire nuclear-power reactors, or to increase the number they operate, in the belief that nuclear energy will give them a more secure supply of energy, one that will emit less greenhouse gases than fossil-fuelled power stations and, therefore, contribute proportionately less to global warming. But after the Fukushima accident some countries are reconsidering their nuclear policies.

In Europe, some countries have put their nuclear power plans on hold; some are reviewing them; some, including Belgium, Germany and Switzerland, have decided to scrap nuclear power entirely; and some, like the UK, seem intent on going ahead with their nuclear programs. In Asia, China and India are forging ahead with ambitious programs to construct and operate nuclear-power reactors. Japan, not very surprisingly, is rethinking its nuclear policy. And so is the USA. According to a draft copy of the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) 2011 World Energy Outlook, the Fukushima disaster could lead to a 15-percent fall in world nuclear power generation by 2035.

However, in spite of worries about the safety of nuclear-power reactors, enhanced by the accident at Fukushima, a significant long-term increase in the global use of nuclear power for electricity generation, known as a nuclear renaissance, will probably go ahead.

The IPFM report

Nuclear enthusiasts believe that fast breeder reactors (FBRs) will play a key role in the nuclear future. Are they right? Not according to a research report, entitled Fast Breeder Reactor Programs: History and Status (1), recently published by the authoritative International Panel on Fissile Materials (IPFM) (2).

The IPFM report is in seven sections. The first gives an overview of plutonium breeder reactor programs. This is followed by separate studies of the six countries (France, India, Japan, the USSR-Russia, the UK, and the United States) that have in the past constructed breeder reactors or which are now operating them.

China does not get a section of its own in the report even though it is operating, for research and development purposes, a small sodium-cooled fast reactor, the China Experimental Fast Reactor. The CETR, built with some Russian assistance at the China Institute of Atomic Energy (CIEA), near Beijing, can generate 20 million watts (20 MWe) of electricity.

American scientists working in the atomic bomb program (the Manhattan project), during the Second World War, first raised the possibility of a nuclear reactor, fuelled with plutonium, that produces more nuclear fuel than it consumes, a breeder reactor. A family of breeder reactors will, in time, become almost self-sufficient in fuel, requiring only a small input of uranium.

Following the Second World War, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan and India followed the United States in establishing plutonium breeder reactor programs. Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands became partners in the French and German programs.

So far, nineteen pilot and demonstration FBRs have been built: three in France; two in India; two in Japan; five in USSR/Russia; two in the UK; and five in the USA. Only five of them are still in operation; two in India; one in Japan; and two in USSR/Russia;

As described in the IPFM report, these FBR programs were driven by the vision of satisfying an escalating demand for energy by the large-scale use of nuclear energy to generate electricity. At the time, it was thought that uranium was scarce and “high-grade deposits would quickly become depleted if fission power will deployed on a large scale”. The vision could, therefore, be supported only by the use of other types of reactors – i.e. breeder reactors – that would not require much uranium.

It turned out, however, that uranium is more abundant than was originally thought. Moreover, the growth of nuclear power slowed considerably in the late 1980s and “the global nuclear capacity is today about one-tenth the level that had been projected in the early 1970s”. And so interest in the FBR declined.

The uranium question

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the known recoverable uranium resources are 4.7 million tones. As of 11 October 2011, the world’s nuclear-power reactors consumed uranium at the rate of 62,552 tonnes a year. If this rate stays constant, known uranium reserves will last for less than 70 years (3).

The quality of the uranium ores is, in practice, more important than the quantity. The quality can be measured in terms of the net energy, which is the energy produced per tonne of uranium nuclear fuel minus the energy used to produce the reactor fuel elements to be used in the reactor, including that used for mining, refining, and enriching the uranium and manufacturing the fuel elements.

If the usual purpose of increasing the use of nuclear power is to meet energy needs while mitigating climate change, the quality of the world’s uranium resources is much more important than the quantity of them resources, at least for as long as fissile fuels are used to drive the uranium mining and reactor fuel production process.

According to calculations made by Jan Willem Storm van Leeuwen (4 and 5), assuming the world nuclear capacity remains constant at 372 gigawatts of electricity (GWe), the net energy from uranium will fall to zero by about the year 2070. Any increase in the use of nuclear power will, of course, result in the net energy from uranium falling to zero by an earlier date.

The dispute about the world’s resources of low-cost uranium has yet to be satisfactorily resolved. Nevertheless, the debate about the nature of any nuclear renaissance and the need for breeder reactor programs goes on. In India, Russia, and China, for example, there are considerable concerns about supplies of uranium in the short-term and new experimental breeder reactors are being constructed.

The nuclear industry, not very surprisingly, is very enthusiastic about the future of FBRs, hoping that they will be used commercially after about 2050.

Problems with FBRs

Apart from the uranium issue the IPFM report lists a number of serious problems with FBRs. They are expensive to build and operate. “Few if any argue today that the capital costs of breeder reactors could be less than 25 percent higher” than that for ordinary reactors of “similar generating capacity. This would be a capital cost difference on the order of $1000 per kilowatt of generating capacity”.

The second problem with FBRs is that they have special safety problems. The coolant (to carry the heat away from the reactor core) that has been used in all experimental breeder reactors is a liquid metal that melts at relatively low temperatures – namely sodium. Sodium is a very difficult substance to deal with. It reacts violently with water and catches on fire if it is exposed to air. A large fraction of the liquid-sodium-cooled reactors that have been built have been shut down for long periods because of sodium fires.

Another problem is that sodium-cooled reactors have serious reliability problems. The IPFM report explains that the reliability of ordinary reactors is such that now, “on average, they operate at about 80 per cent of their generating capacity. By contrast a large fraction of sodium-cooled demonstration reactors have been shut down most of the time that they should have been generating electric power”.

A significant part of the problem with FBRs “has been the difficulty of maintaining and repairing the reactor hardware that is immersed in sodium. The requirement to keep air from coming into contact with sodium makes refueling and repair inside the reactor vessel more complicated and lengthy” than for conventional reactors. “During repairs the fuel has to be removed, the sodium drained and the entire system flushed carefully to remove residual sodium without causing an explosion. This process can take months or even years”. The maintenance and repair of ordinary reactors is comparatively straightforward.

The history of breeder reactors shows that they have severe reliability problems. France’s Superphenix, the world’s only commercial-sized breeder reactor, began operating “in January 1986 but was shut down more than half the time until it was shut down in December 1996”. Japan’s Monju and the UK’s Dounreay and Prototype Fast Reactors and the US Enrico Fermi I demonstration breeder reactors were also subject to long shutdowns. Russia’s BN-600 has worked reasonably well but only “because of the willingness of its operators to continue to operate it despite multiple sodium fires”.

The plutonium problem

Ordinary nuclear reactors rely on nuclear fission, in which a nucleus (usually of uranium) splits into two or more smaller nuclei. During this process energy is released which is used to generate heat which produces steam from water; the steam is used to drive a turbine to generate electricity. When a uranium nucleus fissions it produces two or more neutrons that can be used to fission other uranium nuclei, releasing more neutrons, to produce a sustainable chain reaction.

The neutrons produced by fission move very rapidly – they are fast neutrons. Fast neutrons are not as efficient at causing fission as neutrons that move more slowly. In normal nuclear reactors the fast neutrons are slowed down by a ‘moderator’ – water or a gas like helium. The fission neutrons are slowed down by collisions with atoms of the moderator as they pass through it.

A fast breeder reactor, however, uses a coolant that is not a good moderator, like liquid sodium, so that the neutrons remain fast ones. Although fast neutrons are less good at causing fission, they can be easily captured by nuclei of an isotope of uranium, namely uranium-238, producing uranium-239. Uranium-239 undergoes radioactive decay to become plutonium-239. This plutonium isotope can be separated chemically in a reprocessing plant and, being fissile, can be used as reactor fuel. Breeder reactors are designed to produce more nuclear fuel (plutonium) than they consume. Plutonium-239, however, can also be used to fabricate effective nuclear weapons.

If the world comes to rely on FBRs very large amounts of plutonium will be in circulation. Any country that chooses to operate FBRs in the future will have relatively easy access to plutonium, of a type usable as the fissile material in the most efficient nuclear weapons, and will have competent physicists and engineers that could deign and fabricate them.

Because they could produce a nuclear-weapon force in a short time – weeks rather than months – these countries would be regarded as latent nuclear-weapon powers. It must be expected that some of them will take the political decision to become actual nuclear-weapon powers. There will also be a much increased risk that terrorists will acquire plutonium, fabricate a nuclear weapon and detonate it.

Conclusion

The IPFM concludes that: “After six decades and the expenditure of the equivalent of tens of billions of dollars, the promise of breeder reactors remains largely unfulfilled and efforts to commercialize them have been steadily cut back in most countries. The breeder reactor dream is not dead but it has receded far into the future. In the 1970s, breeder advocates were predicting that that the world would have thousands of breeder reactors operating by now. Today, they are predicting commercialization by approximately 2050. In the meantime, the world has to deal with the legacy of the dream; approximately 250 tonnes of separated weapon-usable plutonium and ongoing – although in some cases struggling – reprocessing programs in France, India, Japan, Russia and the United Kingdom”.

Only Russia and India remain players in the game – they are building demonstration breeder reactors, two in India and three in Russia. Japan remains officially committed to FBRs but their commercialization date has receded into the far future; it is now 2025. Japan’s Monju fast-breeder reactor began operating in 1994. But it has been plagued by a series of serious problems, including a leak of sodium coolant that started a fire in 1995. Although the reactor resumed operations in May 2010 it experienced further problems and was suspended three months later. The Japanese government may soon scrap Monju. As the IPFM report concludes, “the breeder reactor dream is not dead but has receded far into the future”.

References

1. International Panel on Fissile Materials, Fast Breeder Reactor Programs: History and Status, IPFM Research Report 8, February 2010.

2. International Panel on Fissile Materials, founded in 2006, is an independent group of arms control; and nonproliferation experts from seventeen countries, including nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear-weapon states. Its mission is to analyze the technical basis for practical and achievable policy initiatives to secure, consolidate, and reduce stockpiles of highly enriched uranium and plutonium.

3. World Nuclear Association, Nuclear Power in the World Today; World Nuclear Power Reactors & Uranium Requirements, 21 October 2011. www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf01.html

4. Storm van Leeuwen, J. W, Into the Unknown, fuelling civil nuclear power? In Barnaby, F. and Kemp, J (eds.), Secure Energy, Civil Nuclear Power, Security and Global Warming, March 2007, London, Oxford Research Group.

5. Österreichisches Ökologie Institut (Austrian Institute of Ecology) and Austrian Energy Agency, Energy Balance of Nuclear Power Generation. Vienna, 2011.

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ENvisioning

2011-12-02T10:16:44-05:00

Envisioning natural inclusion

Why, if REAL transformation is to be possible, we need to cultivate our capacity to ENvision what resides IN our hearts

By Alan Rayner

I have been wondering why what seems so very ‘obvious’ to me in my understanding of ‘natural inclusion’ as ‘the co-creative, fluid dynamic transformation of all through all in receptive spatial context’ seems not to be at all obvious to most people I try to communicate this understanding to. What occurs to me rather suddenly is that a meditative practice that I have used unwittingly throughout my life (which might be described as "looking into the zero in the light" or 'zeroing in to the light') might not be what everyone else does as a 'matter of course'! I think this practice may have originated from when, as an infant, I came very close to death (my mother often recalled saying to me, repeatedly, don't die little baby, please don't die). I can recall to this day a searing pain in my abdomen that I focused on inwardly as a deep and cavernous blackness within. From then to now, I think I have always ENVISIONED my 'self' and 'others' as natural inclusions of our neighbourhood.

I think another ‘formative experience’ occurred when I was around six or seven years old. I recall that some friends of my family in Kenya gave me a picture book about the life of Jesus. My parents, being strong agnostics, were rather disapproving, and I was never able to take it (or anything else representatives of the Christian Church have represented to me) literally. But I was deeply affected by two images. One was of Jesus, as a child, horrified by the use of the 'good wood of a tree to nail a human figure to'. The other was the crucifixion itself, its repercussions and its association with the infinite depth of compassion needed to 'love your enemy', no matter what they might 'do'. Later, at secondary school, I was myself horrified to hear our 'Religious Education' teacher describe the symbol of the cross as 'I' crossed out, as if 'self' could or should be 'annihilated'. That made no sense to me whatsoever, and I now recognize it as a ‘trick’ of what I call the 'vampire archetype', used to render subservient and fill with guilt for the 'offence' of having the inescapable 'self-interest' of being 'needful' for energy in order to be able to 'live, love and be loved'. My natural inclusional understanding of the symbolism is the narcissistic, solipsistic (self-referential) 'vertical' singular figure of , 'I', crossed through with the receptive 'horizontal', '-', to co-create '+', with a zero, 'O' at heart, around which 'passion' - 'energy' - circulates/spirals and from which arises the inductive bringing of 'other' into 'one's' compassionate reach. This understanding is depicted in the following painting.

Used only with express written permission

Now to a description of my 'everyday envisioning practice', which anyone reading this essay might like to try for themselves.

Look out from yourself with eyes wide open and allow your view of the world about you to impress itself upon you. Recalling what you have just 'seen', close your eyes. Focus on the blackness now 'in front of you' and allow this to permeate throughout your body, so that your sense of self becomes a deep, deep cavern spiralling down to somewhere ultimately inaccessible in the centre of your chest and/or (yes, there is that 'ambiguity') solar plexus. Snuggle down into that deeply buried place. Then, when you feel like it, slowly allow your eyes to open and allow you to become aware 'once again' of 'the world about you'. Hold those two images, of the outer and inner infinity together in mind and never close them in. Feel the energetic lining/surfacings of your bodily boundaries as the place where those 'two worlds' come together co-creatively, not where they are cut apart.

An illustration of how such envisioning works in practice to provide radically different interpretations of natural phenomena that are radically different from, and to my mind much deeper and more comprehensive than those of abstract rationality is provided by wonderful fluidity of flocks of starlings (‘murmurations’), evocatively shown in the following video:

Rationalistic explanations of such phenomena in terms of ‘safety in numbers’ and ‘individuals sustaining a specific distance from one another’ are, to my mind, woefully inadequate. My own appreciation is depicted in the following painting and poem:

Used only with express written permission

Starlings - Revelations of Invisibility

Smoke Rises

In Bird Form

Lining Pockets of Air

Horizontal Aspirations

To Vertex

From Vortex

Reflected in Currents

Between Waves

Rippling Fenestration

Mercurial Shimmering

In Forming Invisible Space

Reminding of a Presence

Of Absence

Mimicking Human Machine Code

Along Telegraph Wires

In Subtle Mockery

Of Abstract Logic

Forever Finding Holes

In the Solid Geometry

Of Artificial Edifice

Black Iridescence

Penetrating the Riddles

Of Brick Walls

With Natural Fluidity

------

Whereas abstract rationality SEES a flock of wholes FORCED into collective flight, natural inclusionality ENVISIONS a flock of holes induced into mutual uplift as a 'dynamic nested holeyness'.

The imaginal/imaginative capacity to ENVISION the space within and throughout as well as between and around natural energetic figures does seem to be what is needed to bring about the INVOLUTION from abstract to natural inclusional thought that I feel is so urgently needed in the world.

Where abstract rationality can only SEE SUPERFICIALLY, natural inclusionality can also SEE INWARDLY (ENVISION) and hence empathize with how it feels to be within the place of another.

To have 'lift off' we have to use our capacity to ENVISION.

Otherwise, we'll remain anchored to the spot, as depicted in the following painting:

Used only with express written permission

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"Pain:" An Excerpt from...

2011-12-01T14:27:36-05:00

"Who Said It Couldn’t Be Done?" candidly chronicles my journey from life on Chicago’s West side involving poverty, incest, drug addiction, incarceration and lesbianism to sobriety, spiritual redemption and inner peace. Deep insecurity, drug addiction and role confusion tormented me for years. Often I wondered if I were a boy or a girl; if I were human or an animal. Who am I? What am I? Why am I? The following is an excerpt from my book:

Used only with express written permission

My earliest memory is of pain. I remember lying across my mother’s lap on the living room sofa very early one Saturday morning. She was wasted from the night before. I could smell a creepy odor climbing out of her mouth. Years later, I learned it was the tart tinge of alcohol, forged with cigarette smoke camouflaged by Big Red chewing gum. Mother and her cheap wine had become one. The sultry lure of the liquid spirit had a bewitching way of overtaking her, causing her to believe she possessed incredible abilities. The prolific impulses came sharply; this time in the form of surgical powers.

Mother rummaged through the house searching for a sewing needle. She found the small piece of metal in one of the kitchen drawers, between a stack of folded grocery receipts and unopened junk mail. She burned the tip on the blue flame coming from our stove and then dipped it in rubbing alcohol. I can still remember the hissing noise that broke the uneasy silence as the hot steel collided with the cool liquid. She returned to her same position on the sofa and put my head back on her lap. She looked down at me and smiled, then pressed a small piece of ice against my earlobe to deaden my nerves, but it did not work. I cringed in blinding pain as my chilled skin cracked open under the sharp blow of that needle, then the slow sliding of it through my flesh. I screamed powerlessly at the top of my lungs and struggled pointlessly to free myself from the ‘giant hand’ possessing the ‘evil dagger.’

Mother, still high and obviously oblivious to my mangled emotions and mounting agony, coldly immobilized my whirling head, then stabbed me a second time, ramming the ‘dagger’ clean through my other ear lobe. The nurturer who caressed my head upon her lap just moments earlier had grown fangs. My struggle was futile against her greedy assault. She seemed amused, pleased even, at the escalating level of my terror. I looked up at her again, but this time in stark confusion; she was still smiling, and then she started laughing. Her wicked laughter taunted my dizzy head, which was still pinned to her hard, collaborating knee. I shivered in fear; my teeth chattered. A quiet stream of blood flowed from my nose but no tears would follow. Suddenly I was more afraid than I had ever been, especially of my mother’s hand. Her hand had frightened me many times before; it had always been harsh, but that day it was harsher, colder, than I had ever seen it. Her hand seemed hungry somehow; salivating as if it wanted to kill me and swallow me whole. I felt a need to keep my mother’s hand back, but her teeth were still showing and that frightened me. I shut my eyes tightly, took in a deep breath…and screamed some more. At three years old, that was all I could do.

I suppose that ear piercing was an omen of the pattern of my early life: hurt and abuse often inflicted by my mother, and me unable to do anything about it. I became an unread paperback in my mother’s hand: she was bending me backward as if she were interested in the pages of my life, but line after line went unread. My preface, my forward, my contents, each chapter were all but mere shadows in her hand; jumbled messages of oddly constructed paragraphs of meaninglessness. She could not decipher the words of the script. They were left dangling on the pages of chance. I didn’t understand why she did not respond to the many times I reached for her. My love that I offered unconditionally, the smile upon my face that lit whatever room she entered, the interest I took in her walk, her smell, the sound of her voice, even her slap and the pain that it caused on the side of my face. I was attentive to every line she wrote, but my life was not translated. The late nights I stayed awake listening for her keys to jingle in the door, or to hear her cowboy boots scrape across the floor; the noise I made, the tears I cried and the tears I carried in my heart; the trouble I started, the fights I had, the mistakes I made; nothing I did seemed to matter. My emotional state went undetected, like an unsolved mystery.

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WARNING: This Degree Ma...

2011-11-30T16:36:56-05:00

Economics dictates how the world works. I didn’t learn this from my father, who is an academic economist, or from my undergraduate schooling in economics, or even from my first year of graduate studies in economics. Rather, I learned this from simply being alive. In both a theoretical and practical sense, economics is the study of scarcity and nothing in life is immune to the forces of economics, including higher education.

In the classroom, I’ve engaged in debates about what makes something valuable and what ought to be valued. There is, however, one thing that I’ve never heard discussed in an economics classroom: is higher education worth it? Or, in economic parlance, do the benefits of higher education outweigh the costs?

This is a tricky question, however, because I think there is a difference between ‘schooling’ and ‘education’ that is oft ignored in the discourse around this topic. ‘Schooling’ is largely about garnering credentials and ‘education’ is largely about learning; schooling is a ‘results oriented’ process and education is a ‘process oriented’ process. Sometimes there is some overlap between the two, but not always.

In economically positive terms, we live in a society in which schooling is valued more than education is valued. This isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s just how things work in a highly specialized economy. I think it’s important to acknowledge this point when talking about the distinctions between schooling and education. If one wants to increase their chances of financial success in a highly specialized global economy, then credentials don’t hurt. If one wants to increase their chances of being a decent human-being than getting an education won’t hurt either.

In a society that largely values financial success, it’s not surprising to learn that the number one reason most people choose to attend college in modern times, then, is because they believe that having college credentials will increase their lifetime earning potential. In fact, high school students are inundated with this message and with the statistical evidence supporting it.

It’s certainly true that, on average, those with college degrees earn more than those without degrees. Average, however, can be a misleading term. Psychological research consistently shows us that, in general, people overestimate their own abilities when compared to the average because we look at ourselves in what UVA psychology professor, Jonathan Haidt, calls a “rose-colored mirror”.

As any statistician will quickly notice, some graduates will earn significantly more due to their degrees and for some it will not make a difference. This wouldn’t be problem if a financial return weren’t necessarily expected; however, most people expect a financial return on their education investment. Somewhere along the way, we forgot to tell young people that twelve percent of mail carriers have an undergraduate degree. There is nothing wrong with being a mail carrier with a college degree in the slightest, but it would be somewhat sad to learn that many of these mail carriers thought their degree would improve their financial prospects.

For most young people, it’s fairly evident that most of the best paying jobs in today’s economy require some form of schooling credentials. What’s not always tacitly understood is what makes those credentials valuable or the ruthless competition that occurs to get those jobs. As any economist will tell you, the important thing to note about credentials is that they become increasingly valuable as a signaling mechanism when they are scarce. When only a few people have college degrees in a job market, they stand out to potential employers. What happens, however, to the signaling mechanism when everyone graduates from college? The answer is simple: the degree becomes less valuable as a signal if everyone has one or can easily attain one. Employers must find another way to find the best candidates.

In today’s economy, many people are frustrated with a system in which they apparently didn’t fully understand. We’ve told our young people that schooling will help them make more money over the course of their life and most of them go to college with an ingrained belief that a college degree will help earn them more money over their lifetime. They are thus disappointed to find out that this isn’t always true. By telling lies, we’ve inflated their expectations into a bubble that is bound to burst with disappointment.

There is some good news, however, for those who want to drop out of the credentials arms-race. If one has ambitions to pursue a career or entrepreneurial dreams that don’t require credentials they can still school themselves at a fraction of the cost. It has never been easier and cheaper to become schooled if you live in a developed country with access to the Internet. A financially expensive formal schooling isn’t necessary when there is a vast amount of technical knowledge that can be consumed online and at libraries for free. This isn’t devaluing the hard fought knowledge that is won in academia, but merely helping to share it with people who may not otherwise be able to afford it.

Higher education was never meant for everyone and when push comes to shove, for many people the financial costs of school simply outweigh the financial benefits. This should not be kept a secret. We should stop lying to high school kids and pretending that this reality doesn’t exist. Colleges and universities should also try to drive this point home. WARNING: This degree may make you no better off financially.

I’m sure many people on the business side of academia scoff at this idea because it would decrease enrollment and thus decrease the institution’s bottom-line. The reality is that this is true, but it is also necessary. Schooling is a business, but education shouldn’t be.

I believe that those who recognize the non-financial value in a formal education will analyze their decision in non-financial terms and move onto higher education regardless. Alas, I think these are the exact kind of kids we want moving on into the higher education system anyway, not the ones who are simply money hungry.

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Social Justice, Greed a...

2011-11-29T09:08:22-05:00

This article was originally posted to Forbes.com on November 21, 2011.

Steve Allen

“It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program – on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off – than on any positive task.” Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom

Occupy Wall Street (OWS) has provided a rare up-close and personal look at a social system animated by the desire for political power that disrespects, if not completely disregards, fundamental property rights. What we can see is a society that fosters squalor, theft, rape and pillage and a political movement based on the very greed it claims to abhor.

The OWS movement began with an idealistic impulse which a majority of Americans support. The grievances against the bailouts of banks, auto companies, and major corporations including GM, Chrysler and GE are real and justified. But, idealism and good intentions cannot excuse the results produced within the OWS community itself, nor the substance of its political agenda.

To excuse or glance over this reality is to avert one’s eyes to the inevitable consequences of a social philosophy that believes human rights can be detached from property rights. We are told that if humans would just be willing to share in the pursuit of the common good, harmony and social justice would prevail. Instead, what we observe is absent the right to property, all other human rights – including the right to one’s body – gives way to the rule of force.

Disregard, if not the abolition of property rights, is at the heart of the OWS movement. The attack on property rights begins with the act “to occupy,” that is to take possession of someone else’s property through the power of the mob. And, it is manifest in the communal nature of OWS movement. The first and most obvious result is the squalor of the camps, from accumulation of trash and litter, to the lack of sanitation. Nor should we be surprised by the growing lawlessness of the movement or the crimes committed within the OWS community itself. Laptop computers quickly disappeared from Zuccotti Park because they were stolen or the occupiers stopped bringing them. That is what happens when no one’s property is safe from theft or abuse. A world without property rights quickly runs out of capital, because capital cannot exist without the protection of individual property or the state asserting property rights in its own name. The consequence is poverty for all but the political elites.

The worst crimes, however, were committed against individuals, including sexual assaults and rape. But these crimes, too, are symptomatic of a society that eschews private property. As John Locke wrote:

“Though the Earth and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a property in his own person. (emphasis in original) This no Body has any Right to but himself.”

In other words, the first and most precious property right is your ownership of your own body. This sounds strange to our modern ears, but it goes to the very essence of why property rights are at the very foundation of liberty, and why those who seek power over other human beings advocate abolishing private property.

With the exception of small communes, usually organized around religious principals, the abandonment of our right to private property puts at risk our life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Without property rights, there is also little commerce. Commerce exists where individuals are free to enter into mutually beneficial exchanges. Absent the ownership of property, there is nothing to exchange. Therefore, the movement was dependent upon outside resources. Unlike most gatherings of thousands of people, OWS has been a scourge on the businesses surrounding Zuccotti Park.

A society without property rights also shows little compassion for those outside the community who are in need. The homeless who were attracted to Zuccotti Park by “free food” and tents were not welcome to share in the relative abundance of the protestors.

Finally, the OWS movement demonstrates that “social justice” is based on unjust policies similar to those they condemn. The protestors rightfully assail the bailouts of banks and Wall Street executives, but their solution is more of the same including bailouts for student loans and individuals who took out mortgages on houses they could not afford.

In truth, the OWS protestors are only skirmishing over the distribution of the spoils system they claim to abhor. Their demands for higher tax rates on the “1%” shows their desire to join those who pillage through the power of government. They call it social justice. But its credo is the same as the crony capitalists who exploit the American people through government handouts: Both seek to use political power to satisfy their needs by taking the income of others rather than through voluntary exchanges. In each case, its true name is “greed.”

As such, OWS is the antithesis of the civil rights and anti-war movements. Those were rebellions against oppressive government policies and grounded in the fight for liberty. Interfering with the right of thousands of honest Americans to go peacefully to work is not the same as demonstrating against the injustice of Jim Crow laws by riding in the front of the bus. Nor is demanding more government handouts and higher taxes the equivalent to demanding a stop to the shedding of blood and treasure in a far off land that the American people no longer believed was vital to the national interest.

The great irony is those protesting are suffering the most from the very policies they largely support: The massive increase in government spending; the de facto government take-over of the health care and financial services industries; the blocking wherever possible of the production or delivery of traditional energy – from new EPA mandates designed to force the shut-down of coal fired generating plants to the postponement of the Keystone XL pipeline; and the threat of higher tax rates on those with the income and capital to create private sector jobs.

Faced with the failure of the Obama Administration’s grandiose plans to produce either jobs or a more just society, they choose to blame those who have figured out a way to manage, if not prosper, under the rules that the OWS crowd supports – ever heavier government regulations and taxes. They applaud when the government forces insurance companies to keep them on their parents health plans until they turn 27, but complain that they have no job and have to live at home.

Sadly, they either refuse or are incapable of seeing the connection between the two.

The nation’s ills will not be solved by shutting down businesses and empowering government to take even more resources from the private sector. The answer lies in more liberty and less government control of the economy and our lives. To change America for the better, occupy Pennsylvania Avenue.

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American Science Declin...

2009-07-30T21:55:09-04:00

Science is an important component for the strength of America and for the well being of her people. Science is the mother that gives birth to the technology that makes our economy robust and our military strong. Science improves our health and enables us to see our world in ways never before envisioned, uplifting spirits and boosting national prestige. But for the past four decades, despite ever-increasing science budgets, American science has continued to decline toward third-world status. Why? Because fundamental mistakes underlie the methodology by which the U.S. Government supports science.

Before World War II there was very little government funding of science, but that changed because of war-time necessities. In 1951, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) was established to provide support for post-World War II scientific research. The methodology for administrating science-funding, invented in the early 1950s by NSF, has been adopted essentially unchanged by virtually all subsequent U.S. Government funding agencies, such as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). The problem is this: That methodology is flawed and those flaws have been gradually undermining, corrupting, and trivializing American science for decades. Here I disclose the principal flaws and point the way for the President of the United States to correct them.

Statement of Flaw #1: Proposals for scientific funding are generally reviewed by “anonymous peer reviewers”. NSF invented the concept of “peer review”, wherein a scientist’s competitors would review and evaluate his/her/their proposal for funding, and that the reviewers’ identities would be concealed. The idea of using anonymous peer reviewers must have seemed like an administrative stroke of genius as the process was adopted by virtually all government funding-agencies which followed and was adopted almost universally by editors of scientific journals. But no one seems to have considered the lessons of history with respect to secrecy.

Secrecy is certainly necessary in matters of national security and defense. But in science does secrecy and concomitant freedom from accountability really encourage truthfulness? If secrecy did in fact lead to greater truthfulness, secrecy would be put to great advantage in the courts. Courts have in fact employed secrecy – during the infamous Spanish Inquisition and in virtually every totalitarian dictatorship – and the result is always the same: Unscrupulous individuals falsely denounce others and corruption abounds.

The application of anonymity and freedom from accountability in the peer review system gives unfair advantage to those who would unjustly berate a competitor’s proposal for obtaining funding for research. The perception – real or imagined – that some individuals would do just that has had a chilling effect, forcing scientists to become defensive, adopting only the consensus-approved viewpoint and refraining from discussing anything that might be considered as a challenge to other’s work or to the funding agency’s programs. And that is not what science is all about.

First-step Correction of Flaw #1: The President of the United States could sign an Executive Order forbidding the U.S. Government from engaging in anonymous peer review and forbidding the U. S. Government from doing business with organizations that do.

Statement of Flaw #2: NSF invented the concept of scientists proposing specific projects for funding, which has led to the trivialization and bureaucratization of science. Why so? The flaw is that it is completely impossible to say beforehand what one will discover, which has never before been discovered, and to say what one will do to discover it. The consequence has been the proposing of trivial projects often with non-scientific end-results, such as the wide-spread practice of making models based upon assumptions, instead of making discoveries. Further, proposal “evaluation” is often a guise to engage in exclusionary and ethically questionable, anti-competitive practices. Moreover, bureaucrat “program managers” decide which projects are suitable for the programs that they design. There is no incentive to make important discoveries or to challenge existing ideas; quite the contrary.

First-step Correction of Flaw #2:

Science funding should be based, not upon proposals of what scientists say they will do, but should be based upon the scientists’ successful track record of making important discoveries. In other words, support scientists, not proposed projects; give scientists the freedom to chart their own paths with the survival-incentive being to make important discoveries. Instead of managing programs, agency officials could be charged with identifying important new discoveries and helping to facilitate access to government-funded laboratories and repositories.

Of course, large-scale projects, such as the construction of a new telescope, would continue to be proposed much as at present, but without anonymous reviewers. A mechanism should be put in place to support new, promising scientists, perhaps as part of their education, to provide support for a period of a few years so they could attempt to establish a track record of making discoveries.

Statement of Flaw #3: NSF began the now wide-spread practice of making grants to universities and other non-profit institutions with scientists, usually faculty members, being classed as “principal investigators”. The consequence of that methodology is that there is no direct legal responsibility or liability for the scientists’ conduct. As a consequence, all too often with impunity scientists misrepresent the state of scientific knowledge and engage in anti-competitive practices, including the black-listing of other capable, experienced scientists. University and institution administrators, when made aware of such conduct, in my experience, do nothing to correct the mal-conduct, having neither the expertise nor, with tenure, the perception of authority or responsibility. The result is that American taxpayers’ money is wasted on a grand scale and the science produced is greatly inferior to what it might be.

First-step Correction of Flaw #3: Consistent with the concept of supporting scientists based upon past performance, scientists should be treated individually as U.S. Government contractors, subject to Federal Acquisition Regulations. This methodology would put all government-funded scientists on an equal footing, with the scientists themselves being legally accountable for their actions. Such a plan would not preclude scientists from making individual contractual arrangements with parent institutions to provide overhead facilities.

Statement of Flaw #4: NSF began the now wide-spread practice of the government paying publication costs, “page charges”, for scientific articles in journals run by for-profit companies or by special-interest science organizations. Because these publishers demand ownership of copyrights, taxpayers who want to obtain an electronic copy must pay, typically $40.00, for an article whose underlying research and publication costs were already paid with taxpayer dollars. Moreover, commercial and protectionist practices often subvert the free exchange of information, which should be part of science, making the publication of contradictions and new advances extremely difficult. Furthermore, publishers have little incentive or mechanism to insist upon truthful representations. For example, in ethical science, published contradictions should be cited, but with the extant system it is common practice to ignore contradictions which may call into question the validity of what is being published. The net result is that unethical scientists frequently deceive the general public and the scientific community and waste taxpayer money on questionable endeavors.

First-step Correction of Flaw #4:

The U.S. Government should consider establishing an e-journal with a specific template as the sole publication outlet for government supported science and technological results, which would be open as well to non-government-supported research publication. Therein each researcher would be able to publish his/her/their research results without any review, other than internal reviews and standards possibly imposed by the individual’s respective institution. In addition to adapting certain strategies from existing e-journals, such as links to research data, the proposed new system may contain unique elements, such as templates for specific comments from the posting author(s). The questions below provide some possible examples:

“What is the importance and uniqueness of this report?”The answer to this question may be of value to government administrators, to other scientists in the field, to commercial organizations, to the public and to the media. But there is the additional benefit of helping to bring into focus the idea that success should relate to the importance and uniqueness of the work, and not to the number of papers published.

“What approaches were tried but did not work?” Scientific reports rarely address this question, but the answer provides useful information that may help to keep others from repeating fruitless activities, or it may allow others who have different insights to glimpse new paths to try.

“What are the competing and conflicting ideas?” Actually, this information should be part of any good scientific report. But, over the past several decades, either out of fear of anonymous reviewers or to keep an unbreakable lock on research funds, it is not unusual for scientists to completely ignore contradictory work, which is poor science that can lead to wasted resources and missed opportunities.

“What are the lessons learned?” Scientific reports rarely address this question, but in any truly pioneering endeavor the answer to that question helps individuals focus on improving their techniques and methodologies.

Many benefits are to be gained through implementing the above described publication system as the primary publication outlet, including:

·A low-cost means to guarantee free access to research without attempting to force change on the organizations that presently control access, such as publishing companies that charge fees both for publishing and for copies of reports they have published.

·A means for rapid publication of research results, while obviating many of the impediments existent in the other, older publication system, such as the delays caused by reviewers whose intent is to delay or prevent publication of competitor’s work.

·Providing government and private-sector administrators with readily accessible, across-the-board, easily-tracked, current-view project information.

·Help researchers focus on the important elements of their investigations, rather than deflecting energy and resources on exaggerated publication.

The prototype primary publication system suggested above may be readily adapted to the concept of supporting individuals based upon their track record of important discoveries, rather than supporting proposals for future projects. Properly executed, this system provides a level playing field with equal access, free from exclusionary and anti-competitive, self-interest opposition. It is a system which can be designed to allow outside comments and author responses. And, it would save the government money.

Administrative Initiatives: Beyond correcting the above described flaws, the President of the United States can accelerate the rejuvenation of American science in the following ways:

(1) Champion the exciting ideal that science is about discovery, about new ideas, about debate and discussion, about new and improved technologies, about invention and innovation, and about solving America’s problems – now.

(2) Initiate open competitions to solve specific problems, like a new efficient process for removing salt from seawater, and unspecific competitions as well. Sizable cash awards and/or government contracts can be powerful incentives with the only significant costs being the rewards themselves.

(3) Set up a series of state-of-the-art laboratories with charters allowing individual American researchers to request specific measurements. This would allow the opportunity for new ideas to receive experimental justification and would serve to boost the economy, creating jobs, and encouraging innovations in scientific instrumentation.

(4) Critically and questioningly review all existing major government-funded research endeavors. Will they advance American interests? Are they practical? Is the potential gain worth the expense? Can the money be spent better in other endeavors?

For half a century, the U.S. Government, through NSF-instigated flaws, has been responsible for producing inferior-quality science, often opposing scientific advances made without government funding, and generally driving American science toward third-world status. Here I have revealed the underlying flaws and proposed corrective actions.

J. Marvin Herndon, Ph.D.

Transdyne Corporation

11044 Red Rock Drive

San Diego, CA 92131 USA

Herndon@NuclearPlanet.com

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An Evolutionary Economi...

2011-11-29T09:49:55-05:00

Ratcheting Down Through A Micro Economic Bifurcation Point

"Basically, we’re now at the point where a recession means they dump the bad workers and we subsequently have a jobless recovery." -- Professor Tyler Cowen, Department of Economics George Mason University, November 23, 2011.

Equilibrium In Global Economic Dysfunction

Much of the economic commentary and analysis of what is wrong with the U. S. economy contains an initial starting assumption that is taught in all introductory college economic classes in the U. S. That starting assumption is called “equilibrium,” which means that the philosophical end point to which the economy is headed is a future point of equilibrium.

A major conundrum in any theoretical paradigm arises when the reality is not explained by the theory. In many cases, economists and journalists cannot bring themselves to admit that their theory is wrong. Rather than embracing a better theory, they usually suggest that the reality is wrong, not that their theory is wrong.

Very smart economists, such as Larry Summers, the former advisor to President Obama, have expressed uncertainty about why the economic recovery is not producing jobs, or why the massive government stimulus did not work.

A better theory for understanding and predicting economic activity is based on applying genetic evolutionary principles to explain economic behavior. This time, it is different. The U. S. economy is not going to return to a prior point of equilibrium, or even to a more modest claim by equilibrium theory that supply in the labor markets will eventually match demand in the labor markets.

Basically, evolutionary economic theory would suggest that the U. S. economy has slipped down through a micro bifurcation point, which acts as a ratchet. Coming back up through the ratchet to regain a point of prior equilibrium is not possible.

Genetic technological diversity in the U. S. economy has been destroyed by the way politicians implemented globalization. Technological diversity and product innovation were the initial factor endowments that made the U. S. economy different than other economies.

When the U. S. economy started on the pathway of looking like any other national economy, it lost its unique economic comparative advantage. The every day contemporary language used by non-economists to describe the new U. S. economic reality is: the new normal.

The Shadowy Equilibrium Explanation

Tyler Cowan, a professor of economics at George Mason, provides the best analysis that equilibrium theory can offer about the national and global economic dysfunction, and how the fate of the U. S. economy is linked to the fate of Europe.

He begins with trepidation by saying, “This is the least certain part of the story, but here goes.”

“The creation of the eurozone financialized Europe to a much greater degree and U.S. borrowers assumed this financialization was permanent, more or less,” he writes. “It isn’t! Our shadow banking system could see a very significant whiplash from all of this turmoil, possibly culminating in (shadow) bank runs over here too. We are trying to gently unwind our shadow banking system connections with Europe but we may not have the time. By the way, trying to unwind those ties just causes Europe to unravel more quickly, so we are like a dog trying to chase our own tail.”

Beyond mixing the metaphors of dogs chasing tails with shadows, Cowan is using traditional equilibrium assumptions to describe how the U. S. financial system is tied into the European financial crisis. He uses the royal “We,” to suggest that banking officials in the U. S. are gently trying to extricate the U. S. market from the European crisis.

Cowan is wrong. There is no shadow of the banking system on the wall of the U. S. economic cave, and “we’ do not exist as a “we” in the sense of national sovereignty. Sticking to his initial equilibrium assumptions, however, forces Cowan to adopt shadows and imaginary forces to explain how global financial markets are acting.

The first major distinction between equilibrium and evolutionary theory is that equilibrium does not work very well in the context of a borderless global market that is controlled by elite bankers. Equilibrium works well when there are many buyers and sellers in market competition acting independently of each other’s welfare functions.

Our Curious Economic Strength?

Ezra Klein is a columnist at the Washington Post, as well as a contributor to MSNBC. His work focuses on domestic and economic policy making.

Generally, one sign of theoretical economic malfunction occurs when an anomaly arises that the theory has a hard time explaining, and Klein asks in his recent column how it can be that one part of the U. S. economy seems to be recovering, but without any job creation.

“Initial unemployment claims have fallen for four of the past five weeks,” he notes. “They're at their lowest point since April. Fourth-quarter growth is tracking, according to Macroeconomic Advisers, at 3.2 percent. Mortgage-purchase applications are above their October levels, vehicle assembly is coming in above expectations, industrial production is rising, and this quarter's retail sales are off to a strong start. As Neil Irwin writes, "despite it all, the U.S. economy has entered a strong patch." Is that really what you'd expect in a month where the largest economy on earth -- the Eurozone -- is in an acute state of crisis?

Klein suggests that one explanation of the divergent economic recovery could be that the country has entered a new normal.

“Another possibility is that we're not recovering for the same reason we're not faltering: we're already hunkered down for a crisis.” Klein cites another journalist Neil Irwin, who writes about economics and the Federal Reserve for The Washington Post. Irwin also embraces the starting assumptions about equilibrium theory.

“Irwin (has) argued that businesses are so lean and households have put off so many purchases that it's actually hard for the U.S. economy to slow much more than it already has. I find that convincing,” Klein writes.

In other words, the U. S. economy has hemorrhaged so many jobs and gotten so bad, that it cannot get any worse. According to equilibrium theory, once the economy has hit rock bottom, it is likely to rebound to a prior point of equilibrium. According to Klein, the explanation for the curious strength in one part of the U. S. economy is that it apparently hit rock bottom and is recovering faster than the other parts of the economy, like job creation.

Don’t Kid Yourself, It Can Always Get Worse

Irwin’s explanation is that “Many economic sectors don’t have much more room to fall,” but hitting rock bottom does not help Irwin explain how it gets better.

Irwin embraces equilibrium theory, while at the same time, providing the economic facts that suggest that a prior level of economic activity is impossible to attain.

“Since hitting its low ebb,” Irwin notes, “residential investment spending has rebounded only slightly, to a $336 billion annual rate this past spring. That means that, mathematically, it would be impossible for a new housing downturn to be as powerful an economic drain now as it was over the past several years; there isn’t $500 billion worth of housing activity left to vanish. Even if housing investment fell back to its low point from last year, that would subtract a trivial $9 billion in economic activity from overall growth.”

Part of the factual anomaly that equilibrium is having a hard time explaining is that the domestic economy looks weak, but domestic corporation look strong. How can this be?

“Since the onset of the recession, companies have been focused on improving their balance sheets, deleveraging, and increasing productivity,” said Tom McGee, managing partner of Deloitte Growth Enterprise Services, which surveys chief executives of mid-size companies nationwide to gauge the outlook. “We’re not seeing signs that there are mass workforce reductions on the way.”

In other words, one part of the economy, residential housing, has not yet hit rock bottom but there are not reasons to suggest that once it hits rock bottom, it will recover to a prior point.

As Irwin notes, “Moreover, the corporate sector’s financial situation is by many measures stronger than it was before the last recession, meaning companies are less likely to be forced to cut workers to stave off bankruptcy. Non-financial U.S. businesses have $15 trillion in cash or investments that could easily be converted to cash on their books, up from $13.7 trillion in 2007.”

Large multi national corporations are sitting on gobs of cash and are making record profits. Equilibrium explanations would suggest that this capital supply must find a way to be deployed, albeit, in the U. S. domestic economy, which begins to get at the flaw in equilibrium theory.

The theory works well in the world of 1750, where there are distinct sovereign nations. The theory does not work well when sovereign boundaries do not exist as the units of economic analysis.

The “New Normal” For the Global Economy Looks Alot Like A Permanent Depression

Simon Cox is an economic journalist who writes for the British publication, The Economist. He explains the genesis of the term “new normal,” in his explanation of the new depressed global economy. “But the prospect of a “new normal” (a phrase popularised by Mohamed El-Erian, the boss of Pimco, a fund manager), writes Cox, is not a return to equilibrium.

“The world economy may see a few quarters of respectable growth,” Cox writes, “but it will not bounce back to where it would have been had the crisis never happened…The second, more depressing possibility is that growth stays at a permanently lower rate, with investment, employment and productivity growth all feebler than before.”

The permanently lower rates of economic activity cannot be explained by equilibrium theory, which suggests that all factors of production are fully employed, at equilibrium.

Cox points his accusatory finger at the financial crisis and notes that it is not obvious, according to equilibrium theory, why this part of the economy would have such a disproportionate\permanent effect on the economy.

Cox writes, “From the start of 2008 to the spring of this year the crisis knocked $30 trillion off the value of global shares and $11 trillion off the value of homes, according to Goldman Sachs, an investment bank. At their worst, these losses amounted to about 75% of world GDP. But despite their enormous scale, it is not immediately obvious why these losses should cause a lasting decline in economic activity. Natural disasters also wipe out wealth by destroying buildings, possessions and infrastructure, but the economy rarely slows in their aftermath. On the contrary, output often picks up during a period of reconstruction. Why should a financial disaster be any different?”

He almost stumbles into a reply to his own question. This financial crisis is different because of global financial integration, managed by global central banks. In the new world order, there is managed global corporate cronyism, not competitive free markets.

Factual exhibit number one is the recent news that the U. S. Federal Reserve Bank secretly loaned European banks about $7 trillion dollars during the period following October 2008.

Equilibrium theory assumes a return to equilibrium under conditions of market competition. The theory does not work under conditions of global crony capitalism where the U. S. central bank is protecting the economic welfare of European bankers, and not the welfare of U. S. citizens.

Managed Global Crony Capitalism Does Not Work

The recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report, World Economic Outlook, examined the economic effect of 88 banking crises over the past four decades. They find that, on average, seven years after a bust an economy’s level of output was almost 10% below where it would have been without the crisis.

U. S. taxpayers contribute 20% of the annual operating capital to the IMF, which uses the capital to make loans to “stabilize” the world economy. How is that idea working out so far?

A level of GDP that is repeatedly 10% lower does not look like equilibrium, that looks like an economic downward ratchet.

Using Japan’s economy as an example of the downward ratchet, from its economic crisis beginning in 1988, Japan’s economy stagnated. By 2002 Japan’s output was almost 23% below its 1988 GDP.

The explicit anomaly that equilibrium theory, and its many adherents, cannot explain, is how the global economy can be so bad, while at the same time factual indicators of corporate success, globally, appear so strong.

The theory is inadequate to the task of explaining the managed global economy and needs to be replaced by a better theory.

A better economic theory starts out with a different assumption about market competition, and what happens when an economic environment loses its genetic technological diversity.

That end point is called “extinction” not equilibrium.

About Thomas Vass: Vass is fee-based investment portfolio manager located in Raleigh, N. C., and the author of Predicting Technology: Identifying Future Market Opportunities and Disruptive Technologies (2007) which explains his theory of technology evolution. His theory formed the basis of his 2007 patent that explains his method for selecting technology stocks for inclusion in an investment account.

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Your First 90 Days on t...

2011-11-10T13:24:54-05:00

Used only with express written permission

You just landed the technology executive job of your dreams, so what do you do next? Do you concentrate on the dysfunctional engineering/architectural environment? Do you accelerate the delivery schedule on the flagship revenue platform? Do you tackle that daunting platform upgrade that everybody has been steering clear of for the past several years? Well, you should do none of those, and I’ll tell you why.

Your first ninety days on the job are critical to your long term success. This transition period is characterized by great uncertainty and the risk of deadlocks. As many eventually discover, the inability to make significant headway during this initial period has little to do with technical intelligence or leadership skill. The common cause for the ninety day blues has to do with communication breakdowns, misaligned expectations, and the onset of a psychiatric condition known as the “Hero Syndrome”.

If you have just given notice and are about to take over new technical management responsibility, you may want to consider the following tips and tricks:

1) Committing to unrealistic deliverables and timelines The number one trap on my list is to promise too much and commit to specific deliverables too early. Creating unrealistic expectations is one of the most common pitfalls for a new manager. It is all too human to endeavor to dazzle your boss and peers by establishing the reputation of a mover and shaker. Fight this urge until you get a good understanding of what it is exactly that you are about to move and shake.

One great example to illustrate this is the story taken from the Mahābhārata about king Santanu, who commits to a deadly relationship with Ganga without first understanding the repercussions of his decision. It cost him 7 of his 8 children.

2) Pretending you know it all The second pitfall is believing that you have been there and done that. Regardless of your pedigree and illustrious career, no two projects are ever the same. You must come to terms with the fact that you can’t possibly have all the answers. My favorite tactic for addressing this is to schedule a day long summit that is dedicated to one core problem. During the summit, the stake holders present and openly discuss their concerns and views. Spend the time listening to all the stake holders. Don’t be shy, if you don’t understand the issues discussed, ask for a simplified explanation. In all likelihood, when the fog eventually lifts, you will find that the problem is more complex than you had initially thought.

Another variation on the knowing-it-all syndrome is jumping to conclusions. Quickly embracing a substandard solution as a simple fix to a complex problem can alienate your organization. Team members who believe their leaders’ minds are made up about a problem are usually reluctant to share information or ideas, and this can further impede your ability to learn the true nature of the issue.

3) The good ol’ days and clinging to your old persona Sometimes without even realizing it, you may discuss your former company or your past success too frequently. The psychology behind this behavior is to use past achievements (real or imaginary) to shore up an argument. This may work some of the time, but it is a double edged sword because doing it habitually can disenfranchise your new team and create the impression that your former company was so much better than your current one, at least in your mind. People may also wonder why—if you loved your old company so much—you didn’t marry it and stay there.

4) Suppressing bad news and dissent Managers who quash disagreements, bad news, and dissent remove themselves from the real feedback loop and lose the ability to identify and correct problems. It’s easy to create a top to bottom environment that is based on fear. This, however, is guaranteed to drive your brightest team members out the door. The highways are full of smart employees who were given draconian decrees in the style of "it’s my way or the highway." The only ones left in your company parking lot will likely be the mediocre talent who have difficulty driving to their next gig.

5) Chronic Hero Syndrome Trying to go at it solo is romantic but foolish. If you operate as a lone wolf who insists on forging his/her own way and doing all the work yourself (design, coding, architecture, etc.), you will cut yourself off from valuable sources of domain expertise. Even if you are on the right track, you will eventually burn out because in additional to your job, you are now doing someone else’s work.

6) Failing to identify the true sources of corporate power One important quality you should work on is reading the unwritten laws of your organization. Depending on the structure of your new company, (startup v. Fortune 500), you may find that real power and ability to effect change is held by the likes of senior architects, product managers, etc. and not your C-class peers.

7) Fighting the wrong battles As a new leader, you instinctively want to focus on high visibility problem areas and figure out how to solve them. Nothing is more rewarding than to take a leading role in a gunfight at the O.K. Corral. That’s commendable, but not if it comes at the expense of sustaining small gains at GTB (growing the business) while suffering significant losses at RTB (running the business). There is a tendency in the beginning to think that it’s more important to be visible. Fighting too many of these battles can quickly become a huge black hole that will suck every free moment of your day.

8) "Trashing" your predecessor My golden rule is to always be respectful and sensitive about my predecessors on the job. Consider the fact that most of the people you will work with knew the old manager and many are still in touch with him/her and are probably still on friendly terms. Learn as much as you can about your predecessor and the reason for his/her actions. Try to figure out what was done well and what went wrong. If at all possible, insist on getting access to old e-mails and work files. As I have discovered many times, this data can contain pure gold and is probably a good indication of the type of bus that is heading your way.

9) Attempting too much Whether you like it or not, you are going to be judged on specific deliverables. If you concentrate your focus on too many activities, you may miss the opportunity to allocate a critical mass resources and time to complete high priority projects. To avoid this pitfall, work to prioritize your assignments. My rule is no more than three vital priorities for the first 90 days.

10) Hanging around with the wrong crowd In life, hanging around with the wrong crowd can get you into trouble. The same thing applies to your new team. If you get inadequate or skewed information, or make all your decisions based on poor advice that comes only from a handful of individuals on your team, you may end up inadvertently politicizing trivial issues. Keep the lines of communication open outside of your organization in order to make sure that you balance inter-team influences.

11) Failing to build a cross-organizational coalition It’s impossible to get anything done effectively in any size organization without critical mass of support. This is even more important for large corporate initiatives. For you, this means that you very quickly need to identify who the key decision makers are and what they care about, map the organization’s political networks to figure out who influences the influencers, and craft a plan to reach out to build strategic relationships.

Your Recipe for Success Avoiding the above mentioned traps depends on how well you manage your first ninety days on the job. This means taking the time to evaluate situations, identifying team member strengths/weakness, accelerating learning, negotiating success, building coalitions, and achieving early victories.

Coming into a senior management position from the outside of the organization is tough. You don’t have a reputation to fall back on yet nor an internal Goombah to speak up for you. You must quickly learn about new products, market opportunities, and the mechanics of day-to-day operations – and all this in the context of an unfamiliar political culture.

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To execute your vision successfully, avoid using political clout and authority. Instead, leverage your team members to get the job done. I use the “clip with 3 silver bullets” metaphor. You can use management directives 3 times, but each time you do, you spend one of your silver bullets. After your last management directive, you are effectively out of ammunition and it’s only a question of time before the werewolves will get you.

This means building a good relationship with team members from other business units who have their own agendas. It means creating supportive relationships with your manager and peers who have different styles and objectives. It means motivating a wide range of employees who probably feel threatened by you. So how do you put this hundred ton flywheel in motion and secure support? You do it by following these battle proven directives:

1) Manage your management team Everyone knows that what makes successful companies What makes companies like Intel, Google, and Apple successful is their talented and high-performing employees. Creativity, product innovation, and development efficiency are largely based on good technology management practices. Whether you are coming in as CTO to resuscitate a fallen giant, or as a VP of engineering in a startup to get their product to market, the primary lesson is that you can’t do it alone. You need to build a dependable management team that should be able to survive the loss of any of its key members (including you) and still continue to function. For you, that means working out individual secession plans and career paths.

Neff and Citrin, in their book, You're in Charge-Now What? argue that the difference between short term success and great enduring success is how you practice leadership and shape your management team in the early days, and then motivate and develop them over a longer period of time.

2) Develop and articulate your strategic plan In the fog of battle, it may seem as if there is no time to think, but that’s not the case. Take your time and work out your plans. As a new executive, you are not expected to produce a fully functional strategic plan in the first ninety days. You should instead try to strike a balance between developing a comprehensive map of where you want to take the organization without immediately becoming prematurely bound to it.

The first ninety days are your honeymoon period and as a new manager, you are allowed to walk a fine line. You must develop credibility through action but at the same time, if you act too quickly before gaining a complete understanding of the situation, you may risk making the wrong choices.

3) Communicate Communication is probably the most important aspect of good leadership. Effective communication has a disproportionate effect on your success during the early period.

Don’t miss the opportunity to communicate daily and to communicate well. Listen carefully during meetings, take careful notes (write down and learn every acronym), follow-up on conversations to get in-depth explanations for issues that you didn’t grasp initially, be punctual showing up to meetings and returning e-mails and phone calls, and provide constructive non-polemic feedback.

4) Transform the culture, but do it slowly… Every organization has a different ecosystem and operational nuances. Before you start transforming the organization, learn about the culture of the company and identify its bureaucratic and operational bottlenecks. It is critical to first learn "how they do things around here" and to identify the knowledge network, secret handshakes, chief influencers, decision-protocols, and unwritten conventions that form the nervous system of your new organization.

A few good areas for investigation are procurement, recruitment, release management, and quality tracking. My two personal favorites are to go through the actual steps of composing and submitting a request for a piece of software or hardware and a new headcount justification request. You will be amazed how much you can learn about the company by completing these two tasks. Once you get your finger on the pulse, you can begin to intelligently effect change and take the right transformational steps. This would include: instituting new operating procedures, choosing a new management team, setting up governance boards, identifying change leaders, and leading by example.

Finally, change is unavoidable, but it is important to remember that rapid and excessive change can destroy the work culture and the change agent (i.e., you). So, instead of adapting a deeply disruptive strategy such as reinventing everything or replacing key people, try the following long terms initiatives:

Set up pilot and POC projects
Change the way performance is measured and tracked (digital dashboards)
Educate and train your team (gain expertise in your entire technology stack)
Build up islands of excellence (tiger team, high performance SCRUM teams, etc.)
Document how the technology organization operates (process and roadmaps)
Collectively envision new ways to operate (what to sunset, upgrade, etc.)

5) Get to know your boss, your greatest ally A key success factor in your new job is to establish a productive working relationship with your new boss. It is important that you spend some time together on daily basis. This includes keeping him/her informed of your thoughts and actions, discussing proposed changes, and updating him/her on your deliverables.

It is also important that you quickly size up your boss, including relevant goals, pain points, strengths, weaknesses, blind spots, and preferred work style.

Remember, your boss is your greatest ally, because he/she can link you to all the right individuals in the rest of the organization, help you set priorities, and secure the resources you need to get your job done. All of this is free and comes without your having to spend any political capital at all.

For a more detailed treatment on how to max the first 90 days on the job, check out: The First 90 Days: Critical Success Strategies for New Leaders at All Levels by Michael Watkins.

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Creativity Stymied by E...

2011-11-28T11:21:44-05:00

I often find myself scratching my head at my local ATM. Where did that last five spot go? I also often find myself on the 'phone for hours at a time trying to reclaim state welfare benefit owed, legitimately, to me. At my own expense. A financial double bind. The lot of the modern, or post-post modern, or new realist writer, or whatever arbitrary phrase created by some PR hack or phoney sociologist to keep them in The Krug Lifestyle class. In any case, I often have to really shave the household budget to merely get by. Few foreign trips or days out for this grafter. I also have to place myself in the marketplace, the shop window, in order to make ends meet. In the UK, writers and artists are regarded as annoyances by The State, and Big Business is running the show in all aspects of our lives, working and otherwise. And yet, it doesn't work. The truth is, there is no conspiracy, no New World Order, just a bunch of stooges without a rudder. A chaotic world in which no one in power has a clue and the marginals, such as myself are an irrelevance.

I'm not carping here, just pointing out the inadequacies of the current system. As the predicted global financial meltdown continues and everyone is being forced into paranoid stances by the continuing atomisation of communities, I have to laugh at the millionaires in the Tory cabinet preaching at us to prune back, batten down the hatches, roll back The State and wait for charities to mop up the survivors of the roulette wheel risk-taking empire known as The City of London Stock Exchange. Now, you could argue that I am a communist crank or worse an anarchist utopian visionary, but I am neither. And I can't see an alternative to this crushing system. I compare it to the man in the bookmakers down to his last pound, betting on a 100-1 shot hoping against logic that it will yield a week's housekeeping dough. Crazy? Not really.

All I am looking for is fairness and true democracy, neither mob rule, nor state control, anarchy, nor hyper kapital worship. Until this is achieved, millions will continue to starve, arms dealers with flourish, and artists, poets, writers and associated creative thinkers will always be on the very margins. That is where I find myself, despite the occasional commercial piece of work I churn out. Without the dubious bestseller, we are sunk. Only communal support and a group of collaborators, plus a very kind boss at the company I copywrite for has kept me from breadline poverty. No joking. Best Thinking has also been a lifeline in the teeth of utter indifference. Thank you global pards!

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Leaving Racism And Euro...

2011-11-23T11:32:35-05:00

Until 1978 no black person had attained the priesthood in the Mormon Church. When asked why it took such a long time to overcome this blatant racism Gordon Hinckley, the previous President of the Church replied,”I don't know.” To add fuel to the fire Glenn Beck, Mormonism's T-total, pseudo-celebrity proudly associates himself with European populist parties whose leaders are known racists and well beyond the crackpot fringe. Beck is known to sympathize with Geert Wilders, the leader of the populist Dutch Party for Freedom, who is of the view that “political correctness and multiculturalism is killing Europe.” However, if the words spouted by the Texan Evangelical Leader Robert Jeffress are to have a sustained effect, then the Mormon Church's association with racism and populism should be the least of its worries.

Mitt Romney, a candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, is a Mormon. Jeffress recently said that Romney belongs to a “cult,” and that evangelicals have only one real option in the 2012 primaries, the Christian, Rick Perry. A more mealy-mouthed statement would have been to say that Romney is a member of a devout religious organization. “That is a mainstream view, that Mormonism is a cult,” Jeffress told reporters. While the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the world, supports Jeffress's view, the United States constitution does not. Article IV paragraph 3 endorses the separation of church and state:”no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” Despite this, when it comes to voting, “every true, born again follower of Christ ought to embrace a Christian over a non-Christian”, said Jeffress.

In doing so, he is following the Christian apologist's definition of a cult which is, according to Walter Martin, “a group of people polarized around someone’s interpretation of the Bible and is characterized by major deviations from orthodox Christianity relative to the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith, particularly the fact that God became man in Jesus Christ.” In other words, all systems of belief that are not Christian can be seen as cults. This is history repeating itself as a number of other Christian church leaders have maintained that Mormonism is a cult and has been since its nineteenth century beginnings in the so called "burnt over district" of upstate New York. The main worry for the Mormon Church today is that, the cult badge may remain pinned on Romney's lapel, and even worse be spun by the media to be associated with other cults such as Heaven’s Gate, Word Centre Ministries and The Watchtower Organization.

Writing in the American Conservative, Rod Dreher, an Eastern Orthodox Christian, takes a different view to Jeffress:

“It is especially offensive, at least to me, to hear Christians speak of Mormonism as a ‘cult.’ Usually when you hear that word being applied to a church or religious group, it’s designed not to describe, but solely to marginalize…In my experience, Mormonism produces exemplary people, the kind who form stable families and strong communities, and who make good neighbors. I do not believe in Mormonism, nor do I have the slightest interest in becoming Mormon. That Mormons tend to be good people does not make their doctrines true. But inasmuch as Mormons—and I’m generalizing here—tend to produce people who are often better Christians, in terms of their behavior, than the more orthodox expressions within the Christian tradition, should make thoughtful Christians consider what truth may exist within Mormonism and what we may learn about how to live well from the Mormon experience. “

The British philosopher John Stuart Mill referred to the Tories as “the stupid party.” After a while the Tories began to use this expression to describe themselves. It seems unlikely that Mormons will follow suit and refer to themselves as a cult. This is probably because Jeffress meant cult to be precise and harmful. What irritating ointment for any religion to be smeared in and it is bound to sting all the more in the run up to public office.

Public views are mixed. According to a Gallup poll, from June 2011, 22 per cent of Americans wouldn’t vote for a Mormon, more than 90 per cent would vote for a Jewish, black or female presidential candidate, 32 per cent wouldn’t vote for a gay or lesbian and 49 per cent wouldn’t vote for an atheist.

The election of President Romney may not be a real winner for the Mormon Church. Some observers have suggested that the Church would be uncomfortable with having its belief system dragged across the White House’s manicured lawns and further out into the public realm for all to scrutinize. Needless to say, it would be a tall order to keep any ensuing media circus under the big top. The Mormon Church has control over publications like Correlation but, not the free press which may be a lot less forgiving to any organization that has been labelled as a cult.

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The Major League Baseba...

2011-09-22T14:39:14-04:00

First Published: Journal of Interdisciplinary Mathematics, Vol. 10 (2007), No. 2, pp. 229 - 244. Reprinted courtesy of TARU Publications.

Abstract

In the following work we regard any given Major League Baseball game as constituting a dynamic system, characterized by a sequence of inherently unpredictable events (the results stemming from pitches to batters, mainly). Hence, and also due to the game’s extreme sensitivity to initial conditions (imagine, for example, attempting to play the game with a ball whose coefficient of restitution approaches one, i.e., a superball; pitchers, infielders and fans close to the field would become especially at risk for serious injury or death from the missiles leaving the home plate area at well over 200 mph; games played in indoor stadia would look more like some wild form of pinball than baseball, games in general would be interminable, and all structures as part of all ballparks would be in jeopardy), Chaos theory applies to the game of baseball in classic fashion, the ordered end of its spectrum represented by the sublime beauty of the 1-0 pitching duel and the chaotic end by the “Keystone Cops-like” performances resulting in the 20 or 30 or even 40-plus run games. Concomitant with extant chaos is the system’s “attractor”, which is representative of an underlying order associated with the system. We will focus upon the “essential product” of the Major League Baseball game, i.e., the scoring of the run. Specifically, we seek to identify a statistical model for the runs-per-game frequency distribution, which is to say a ”Universal Function” to which said frequency distribution tends for any Major League Baseball team, any year. Nine recent Chicago Cubs teams (the 1995-2003 Cubs) along with all their opponents over a total of 1456 games provide the data from which such “Universal Function” as mentioned above is derived with approximately 98% confidence. In order to be consistent with the root philosophical idea as to the applicability of Chaos Theory, we will call the above-mentioned Universal Function the “Major League Baseball Attractor” in the sense (as will be statistically shown with high confidence) that over a large number of games the runs-per-game frequency distribution is expected to be “attracted (inexorably) towards” the derived Universal Function. Said attractor, however, is an “attractor” of a frequency distribution only, not of the game of baseball itself.

I. Introduction – The Chaos Theory Attractor

From the view of Chaos Theory all events or series of events, no matter how chaotic or random they may appear, have underlying them a single, unique, and well-ordered function, called the event’s “attractor”, or, by extension, the system of events’ attractor (see for example “Chaos: The New Science”, one hour VHS video, distributed by New Dimension Media, Inc.; Eugene, OR). A series of numbers between zero and one, for example which appear by casual inspection to consist of randomly produced entries, can be produced by successive iteration of the simplest quadratic Cebysev polynomial as per the following: x_i+1=|x²_i– 1|, where i = 0, 1, 2, … represents the number of iterations required to produce the ith number in the series, assuming x₀,the so-called “seed” of the series, is in the (non-inclusive) interval, (0, 1) (D. Gavelek and T. Erber, J. Comput. Phys. 101, 25 – 50 (1992)). Here, we see that a very simple function is at the heart of an apparently random sequence of terms.

Theoretically, for complex systems assumed to be governed by a set of rules, a unique attractor exists which will describe certain facets of the system. If the rules change, or if the otherwise “normal” conditions are changed enough, the initial attractor may spontaneously shift to a completely new form. For example, in the above sequence, x₀, x₁, x₂, …, if we change the rules such that x₀ must be either 0 or 1, then |x²_i– 1| essentially collapses to so that the sequence shifts radically to x₀, x₁, x₂, x₃… = 0, 1, 0, 1 … or 1, 0, 1, 0 …, respectively.

In the work which follows we will first look at the highly complex system, containing an extensive sequence of events, each one essentially unpredictable, but each one nevertheless governed by a well-established essentially rigid set of rules – the Major League Baseball game. The attractor we seek is one which produces the true runs per game frequency distribution (as a function of x = # runs scored by both teams playing a given game, i.e., a distribution which yields how many games with x runs scored we can expect from any team over any season, say, or any number of seasons). Our search is the easier, as the basic rules of how the game is played, viz., what constitutes an out and permissible ways a player can reach base, have not changed in any substantial way for over one hundred years.

II. The Major League Baseball Attractor

Our first thought was that the attractor for the runs per game frequency distribution (RFD) for a Major League Baseball team was most likely based upon probability theory. As such, a theoretical RFD could be determined in a fairly straight-forward manner. Using the 2003 Chicago Cubs as the model, we sought a frequency distribution consistent with an assumed nine runs per game as an average figure. (The 2003 Cubs averaged 8.75 runs per game – including post-season games.) We reason that in the “average game”, so to speak, nine batters score, fifty-four batters make outs, and we assume each team left nine runners on base over the course of the game. So, on average, nine batters score out of the approximately eighty-one batters who went to the plate during the game. Hence, under the (rather naïve, as it turns out) assumption that all batters (from batter number one through batter number eighty-one) are equally likely to score a run, each batter is assigned the probability of α = (1/9) to “couple to a run”, as it were. So, the probability, P(x), of scoring x runs in a given game would be given by

Used only with express written permission

which, when multiplied by 162 games for the season, produces essentially a normal distribution with a peak at and a width, Δx, of about 6.5 (see Fig. 1), the number of games with x = 9 being 23.

Used only with express written permission

Now, the actual RFD for the 2003 Cubs can be constructed from a compilation of the scores of 2003 Cubs’ games – a matter of public record. The more data, the better, so we constructed the RFD for all 174 games played last season. Still, the statistical fluctuation expected is on the order of (174)^-1/2 7.58%, so we had the distribution plotted on Microsoft Excel and had the Excel software calculate and display the best fourth-order polynomial fit to the data, thus producing an associated function, A₀₃(x) (see Fig. 2), which then could be compared to P(x) above.

Used only with express written permission

About Fig. 2 we notice several facets. First, the equation associated with Fig. 2 given by Excel is such that y represents A₀₃(x), where x = number of runs scored. Second, we see that the correlation coefficient (R) tying A₀₃(x) to the raw data is R = (0.8077)^1/2 = 0.8987, a bit lower than expected from statistical considerations mentioned above, but still in line, more or less, with same. A possible reason for R being less than the statistical expectation, R_stat= 1 – (174)^1/2 = 0.9242, is that Major League games hardly ever end in a tie; so, because of extra innings played in order to decide a winner of a tie game after nine innings, x = odd integer is most likely enhanced over x = even integer, since, usually, one more run in the extra innings ends the game. The best computer fit of the data, then, must “average out” the enhancements of x = odd at the expense of x = even, something it would not have to do if ties after nine innings were allowed to stand as final scores.

Third, A₀₃(x) does not look anything like P(x). Considering now A₀₃(x) as the “Attractor” of the RFD based upon the 2003 Cubs’ data, A₀₃(x) rises sharply to a maximum of about 14.5 games at x = 6 then falls off slowly to one game or less for x≥ 21. Renormalizing A₀₃(x) to a distribution, A′₀₃(x), associated with a 162 game season (see black curve in Fig. 2A), we see that the attractor has a maximum of only about 60% that of P(x) and is skewed much toward the lower x values relative to the nearly symmetric P(x). Could such a “squashing down” and “pushing to the left” of the intuitive P(x) distribution be a result of the Cubs’ exceptional pitching staff last year? Was it just an odd combination of holding opponents down to low scoring “more than your average team” while the Cubs were not scoring that much themselves over a significant number of games?

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One doesn’t have to go back very far in time to find a Cubs team quite different than the 2003 Cubs, who won 88 regular season games and made it all the way through Game 7 of the National League Championship Series. The 2002 Cubs had an abysmal 2002 season, winning only 67 games while losing 95. The Attractor for 2002 (A₀₂(x)) couldn’t appear anything like A₀₃(x), could it? Well, take a look again at Fig. 2A in which A₀₂(x) is represented by the red curve. Plotted on the same set of axes, A₀₂(x) lies practically right on top of A′₀₃(x), any noticeable difference between the two showing up only in the tail ends of the distributions. The similarity between A₀₂(x) and A₀₃(x) is all the more remarkable due to the statistical scatter in each set of data being on the average of 10%, as R for A₀₂(x) = √0.8107 = 0.9004 ≈R for A₀₃(x).

So, what we have before us are two attractors, one each from very different Chicago Cubs teams in terms of success on the field, nevertheless virtually identical. Such circumstance is completely in line with the basic tenets of Chaos Theory. Clearly, an Attractor based upon the Normal Distribution of probability theory must be discarded. If a case for a unique Attractor function describing the RFD for Major League Baseball can be made, it will have to be made starting with the computer best fits to actual RFD data.

As mentioned above, we plan to view raw data as to the RFD associated with each of nine Cubs teams – the 1995 Cubs on through to the 2003 club. Before we start our analysis, we want to mention the rules followed for obtaining the nine individual best fourth-order polynomial fits to the raw data. First, since no game over the nine-season span of concern ended in a zero to zero tie, we had Excel fix the vertical axis intercept of its best fit at zero. Second, when entering raw data to be analyzed, we entered a “0” for the final x-value (x_f) entered, where x_fis given by x_f= x_e+ 1, x_ebeing the x-value associated with the non-zero entry with the largest x. The same rules were applied to the analysis of the “grand total”, i.e., the raw data associated with the RFD compiled from all nine years mentioned above taken as a whole.

Now, let us focus on the computer best fit to the 2003 data, A₀₃(x) = 5.7719x– 0.7411x² + 0.0332x³– 0.0005x⁴. Considering the fourth-order polynomial to be possibly representative of the first few terms of a power series representation of a function which can be expressed in simple form, we factor out 5.7719x from all terms on the right hand side to obtain:

Used only with express written permission

The terms, 1 – 0.1284x + 0.0058x²– 0.0001x³, are reasonably suggestive of the power series representation of the function, e^-γx, where , being the average number of runs (x̅ = 8.75) per game in 2003. However, the coefficient of x³ is way too small for such function. We assumed, therefore, a form for A₀₃(x) as follows:

Used only with express written permission

where A is a normalization constant, b is a constant, and N₀ represents the number of games played in 2003 (N₀= 174).

Numerically, A = (5.7719)(8.75)²N₀^-1 = 2.54.

Because of the way behaves, however, we choose A to be 2^4/3= 2.52 (see discussion below on estimating ). The constant b was determined by setting A₀₃(8.75) = 13 (see Fig. 2). By such calculations b= 0.42; however, taking same license, we set b = 1/2. (Actually, there is not much license taken: if we use A₀₃(6) = 14.5, then , and in any event because of normalization considerations below, the choice of A = 2^4/3 is commensurate with b = 1/2 to a very high degree of confidence, as we shall see.) Hence, barring problems with its normalization, we arrive at the specific representation of A₀₃(x) as

Used only with express written permission

We may immediately recognize A₀₃(x) as the product of two functions, one of which is primarily associated with the offensive part of the game of baseball, and one of which is mainly associated with the defensive part. Specifically, the function, has a maximum at γx = 1, which means that peaks at , the average number of runs per game. Hence, “sets the tone”, so to speak, for the scoring of runs in the game, while , a strong squelching function for , serves to limit the scoring.

Before going any further, we need to check as to how well A₀₃(x) is normalized. If A₀₃(x) is properly normalized, then

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So, we need to evaluate the integral,

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Unfortunately, I is not tractable, but we can estimate its value by numerically counting the total number of games contained in the distribution, A₀₃(x), as given by EQ. 1, from x = 0 to x = x₀= 25 and then estimating the number (N_T) of games contained in the tail of the distribution where x > x₀. To that end, binning the number of games according to EQ. 1 to the nearest tenth of a game for each x from x = 0 to 25, we count 170.0 games. To estimate N_T, we set

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Since the integral is not tractable, we replace e^-γx inside the integral by its average value over the range of integration to obtain

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Now, is fairly messy, but according to the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 54^th edition (p. 116),

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where k = (a/b)^1/3. For us a = 1 and b = (1/2)γ³, so k = 2^1/3γ^-1.

Hence, with b and k as given above,

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Therefore

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Inside the brackets above is 0.97, which for our purposes is close enough to 1 for us to say

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We estimate the uncertainty in N_T to be roughly half of N_T.

For 2003, then, with N₀ = 174 and γ = (8.75)^-1 = 0.1143, N_T≈ 6.7 ± 3.4. So A₀₃(x) would tell us that the Cubs played 176.7 ± 3.4, or to the nearest game, 177 ± 4 games in 2003, in fine agreement with N₀= 174. So, it appears that A₀₃(x) is reasonably well normalized.

To further check our work as it pertains to normalization, we constructed eight other “yearly attractors” of the same form as A₀₃(x), one each for the years, 1995 through 2002. Said attractors are designated as A_ij(x), where “ij” corresponds to the last two digits of the relevant year. We then counted up the games in the manner described above and compared the total number (N_A) of games given by each attractor to the actual number of games played in each year. Finally, we constructed the “Grand Attractor” (A_G(x)) associated with all nine seasons (1995-2002) as a composite and carried out the calculation to see how many games A_G(x) says were played over the nine year period mentioned.

In Table 1 below is listed for each year considered N_C = # games binned from x = 0 to x = x₀= 25, N_T, N_A = N_C + N_T and N₀. The bottom row of Table 1 contains the same data associated with the nine-year composite mentioned above. The associated is also provided for each data set.

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In all cases the uncertainty (from 2% to 3% of N_A) in N_A allows N_A to overlap N₀. Year by year, the ratio, (N_A/N₀) is consistently greater than one, the average of the same being 1.0175. However, A_G(x) gives us (N_A/N₀) = 1.0041, indicating that as N₀→∞, (N_A/N₀) → 1. Hence, we are now in a position to postulate that we have before us the normalized candidate to serve as Chaos Theory’s attractor for the RFD associated with the game itself of Major League Baseball. Its form, viz., A(x) 2^4/3γ²N₀xe^-γxg(γx), depends only on γ = ( )^-1 and is normalized to any sample size N₀>> 1.

With questions about normalization taken care of, the crucial test remaining would consist in viewing A_ij(x) side-by-side with C_ij(x), the computer best fourth-order polynomial fit associated with the raw data corresponding to the RFD for the Cubs season of the year indexed by subscripts, ij. Such viewing would allow the reader to make a qualitative judgment as to how well A_ij(x) tracks C_ij(x). To such end, please view figures 3-11, on each of which are plotted A_ij(x) and C_ij(x) on the same set of axes. On each figure A_ij(x) is in black and C_ij(x) is in red. In all cases, the larger R² value refers to how well the Excel fourth-order fit correlates to A_ij(x) (the blue diamonds); the smaller R² value refers to how well C_ij(x) conforms to the raw data (the red boxes). Also, in all cases the views are cut off at x = x₀= 25 and y = 20, respectively.

Used only with express written permission

To obtain the quantitative measure of how A_{i j}(x) correlates to C_{i j}(x), we can plot C_{i j}(x) along a vertical axis (y) versus Ai j(x) along the horizontal axis (x) and ask Excel for R², the square of the correlation coefficient, R, associated with the best linear fit. Obviously, if R = 1 for a given plot, then for that plot C_{i j}(x) = A_{i j}(x) for all x considered. Any departure from the ideal case (C_{i j}(x) = A_{i j}(x)) would result in R rules we followed in constructing our “correlation plots” were (1) the point (0, 0) was always entered as data and (2) C_{i j}(x) vs. A_{i j}(x) was entered as data for any integer value of x from x = 1 on through to x = x*, where x* >> 1 was such that (for the first time) (a) C_{i j}(x) was zero at x = x* or (b) C_{i j}(x* + 1) was less than zero or (c) C_{i j}(x*) was less than C_{i j}(x* + 1).

The results of our correlation plots are summarized in Table 2 below, in which table is listed the year associated with C_{i j}(x) and A_{i j}(x) and the corresponding correlation coefficient (R) between C_{i j}(x) and A_{i j}(x).

Used only with express written permission

For the nine seasons considered on a year-by-year basis, the average correlation coefficient tying A_{i j}(x) to its associated C_{i j}(x) is = 0.9653, remarkably high considering that the statistical uncertainty in the raw data itself with a given year is roughly β (162)^-1/2 = 0.0786. Hence, on average, A_{i j}(x) tracks C_{i j}(x) better than one would expect based upon inherent statistical fluctuations in the year-by-year raw data.

We may now take a look at how well A_G(x) (the black curve on Figure 12 following the red boxes) tracks C_G(x), the computer best fit to the nine year composite RFD (see again Figure 12; C_G(x) is the red curve following the blue diamonds representing the raw data). The correlation coefficient (R_G) representing how well A_G(x) conforms to C_G(x) turns out to be R_G = 0.9781. So R_G > from above. Furthermore, the statistical uncertainty associated with the composite distribution is given by _G ≅ (1456)^-1/2 ≅ 0.0262, which shows us that the difference between R_G and 1 is on the same order as the small amount of inherent statistical fluctuations in the data forming the composite RFD from which all calculations were made. In short, we can’t really expect the correlation between A_G(x) and C_G(x) to be any better than it is here demonstrated to be.

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III. Discussion of Results

One feature of the UBA is that approximately one third of games are played such that x ≤ x* 6, where x* represents the x-value associated with the peak in A(x). Identifying the x ≤ 6 games, then, as characterized by “order” or “control”, in the sense that pitching and defense dominates, keeping the scoring down to significantly below average (recall 1.5x*), the key to a given team’s success should lie with how well said team does in the x ≤ 6 games. The x ≥ 6 games head more and more into the realm of “chaos”. The larger x becomes, “control” becomes less and less of an issue. Hence, we would expect that, roughly speaking, the x ≥ 7 games for any given team will end up with about as many wins as its opponents, leaving success or failure for the season determined by its record in the x ≤ 6 games.

To test the above idea we tabulated the Win-Loss (W-L) record for the nine Cubs’ teams of Section II associated with each one’s x ≤ 6 games, assumed wins in 50% of the remaining (x ≥ 7) games and entered a figure for the resulting predicted # of wins, Wp, in Table 3 below. Alongside W_p is W_A, the actual # of wins for the given year, and the relative discrepancy (δ) between W_p and W_A is also provided.

Used only with express written permission

On a year-by-year basis the average relative discrepancy, ⟨δ⟩, between W_P and W_A is ⟨δ⟩= 0.094, which is the important figure to keep in mind because after a very large number of seasons, one would expect the associated W-L to converge to W = L, thus making W_P = W_A = half the total number of games played, which causes the associated δ to converge to zero. So, based upon ⟨δ⟩= 0.094, it appears that with about 90% confidence we can answer the age-old question: “How important is pitching and defense in Major League Baseball?” Since the x ≤ 6 games are roughly three times as important as the x ≥ 7 games, which result, approximately, in a “wash”, pitching and defense is basically 75% of a given team’s success.

Finally, defining the overall confidence level, C, in regarding A(x) 2^4/3γ²N₀xe^-γxg(γx) as the “Universal Baseball Attractor” (UBA) for any Major League team (and probably beyond such limitation) as the geometric mean of (1-β_G) and R_G, we find C ((0.9738)(0.9781))^(1/2) = 0.9759.

IV. Concluding Remarks

T. Erber has remarked in his “Reflections on Parity” (Foundations of Physics, Vol. 34 (10) (2004), pp. 1515–1540) that “in dynamical systems theory the evolution of a system through a discrete set of states is described by the iteration of functions”. As mentioned in the abstract, for us the game of baseball itself constitutes the dynamical system. By analogy, then, the discrete set of states in baseball (which are quantized) is represented by (a) the ball and strike count on the batter, (b) the number of outs recorded in a given half-inning, (c) the position(s) of runner(s) on base, and (d) the number of runs scored by each team to the given point in the game. The analogous iteration of functions would comprise in the main the individual pitches made to batters. (Although rare, some change of state can occur without a pitch being made). That the result of each “iteration” (i.e., pitch) is utterly unpredictable is what makes baseball interesting. From a scientific point of view the latter is also what suggests application of Chaos Theory to one of the game’s “State Functions”, i.e., the distribution of the “State Variable”, x, which represents the number of runs scored in a game. It is well-known that Chaos Theory has been successfully applied to human heart conditions (the discovery of “alternands” (Ref. 2)), worldwide economics (rules governing computerized transfer of information (Ref. 2)), and climatology, a field which also is concerned in part with human activity (Ref. 2). We hope to have demonstrated by the foregoing that “America’s Pastime” can be included in the above list.

References

www.cubs.com
???, Chaos: The New Science (VHS Video), New Dimensions Media, Inc.
T. Erber, Reflections on parity, Foundations of Physics, Vol. 34 (10) (2004), pp. 1515–1540.
D. Gavelek and T. Erber, Shadowing and iterative interpolation for Cebysev mixing transformations, J. Comput. Phys., Vol. 101 (1992), pp. 25–50.
???, Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, 54th edn., CRC Press, Cleveano, Phio, USA, 1973.

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1871	Von Wolff’s 'bad science' is said to have exaggerated spinach iron content
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1907 - USA	Sherman explains 19th Century bad science
1920 - Germany	Noorden & Salomon still citing old German bad science
1972 - UK	Bender publishes spinach Popeye iron decimal error myth
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I. Introduction

II. Calculation of f1 , the Form Factor of the Ψ-Series

A. The Ψ(1S)

B. The Ψ(2S)

C. The Ψ(4040) [Our Designation: Ψ(3S)]

D. The Ψ(4160) [Our designation: Ψ(4S)]

E. The Ψ(4415) [Our designation: Ψ(5S)]

F. Short Summary of Section II

A. The Y(2S)

B. The Y(3S)

C. The Y(4S)

D. The Y(10860) [Our Designation: Y(5S)]

E. The Y(11020) [Our Designation: Y(6S)]

F. Short Summary of Section III

Concluding Remarks

Figures

D. White (2010), “ Evidence for Color-by-Color Disengagement from the Process of Lepton Production Associated with the ψ-Series and Y-Series Mesons”, Communications in Mathematics and Applications, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 183 – 193. References

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II. Calculation of f₁ , the Form Factor of the Ψ-Series

D. White (2010), “ Evidence for Color-by-Color Disengagement from the Process of Lepton Production Associated with the ψ-Series and Y-Series Mesons”, Communications in Mathematics and Applications, Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 183 – 193.
References