familiar

Sometime in August 2011, a boxy space probe called Dawn will settle into orbit around one of the most underrated and overlooked objects in the solar system, a giant oblong asteroid named Vesta. After lingering for almost 10 months of study, Dawn will depart for Ceres, the biggest asteroid of all. Ceres is so large that it was recently promoted to the rank of dwarf planet, putting it on a par with Pluto and highlighting its status as a key planetary missing link.

Vesta and Ceres are the big enchiladas of the asteroid belt, a loose collection of rubble left over from the earliest days of the solar system. They are interesting because they’re like time capsules. “These two bodies are building blocks,” says Chris Russell, the principal investigator for the Dawn mission. It was asteroids like these that “came together to make the rest of the planets. It might have taken millions of Vestas and Cereses to make Earth. We want to understand how the building blocks were different from one another and how they came together to build the planets. Vesta and Ceres represent an important stage in the history of the solar system.”

Vesta and Ceres, along with the rest of the material in the aster–oid belt, would have coalesced into a planet too, were it not for Jupiter’s powerfully disruptive gravity. Ceres is 585 miles wide and contains more than a quarter of all the mass in the asteroid belt. It was the first asteroid discovered, spotted by Italian astron–omer Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
Vesta, the second-largest asteroid, was discovered six years later. For a few years, both were regarded as bona fide planets, but scientists soon discovered many more small bodies in similar orbits. In the mid-1800s these objects were reclassified as “asteroids” and largely dismissed as bit players. It has taken a century and a half to shift that view.

Although Vesta is just under one-third the mass of Ceres, in some ways we know it much more intimately. Vesta’s composition closely matches that of a group of common meteorites that have been found on Earth, called HED meteorites; these are literally chips off Vesta’s block. Blurry but tantalizing images from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest where those space rocks came from: A massive crater dominates Vesta’s southern hemisphere, testifying to a powerful collision that gouged out nearly 1 percent of its volume a billion years ago. From studies of the HED meteor–ites and from measurements of light reflected off the asteroid’s surface, scientists have concluded that Vesta has a very planetlike nickel-iron core. And its surface is basaltic—largely formed by lava flows from below.

Ceres, by contrast, is a far more mysterious body that could yield more profound discoveries. Its dark surface (Ceres reflects just one-fourth as much light as Vesta) indicates a water-rich interior; some researchers even speculate that it could have a mile-deep ocean under a frozen surface. Water raises the possibility of life, which automatically elevates asteroids in the cosmic pecking order. It also implies that Ceres is the largest intact piece of the raw material that built Earth into the wet, living world it is today. But without close-up observations, these ideas remain hypothetical.

“We have no meteorites, nothing that’s associated with Ceres,” says Tom McCord, a longtime asteroid hunter and an investigator on the Dawn mission. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
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“Its surface looks like clay, which is the result of an interaction between water and rock. Where do you get clay on Earth? In riverbeds! Why would the surface of this asteroid be like the clay we see on Earth when we look at riverbeds? That is a mystery to us.”

Russell has spent much of the past 15 years fighting to get the crucial close-up of these two forgotten miniplanets. When a Delta II rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral (video) shortly after sunrise last September 27 and shoved Dawn onto its 3.2-billion-mile journey, he finally let out a deep sigh of relief; for a long time it had not been clear that NASA could muster the money and the technology to make the mission happen.

To conduct meaningful studies of both Vesta and Ceres, Dawn will be the first spacecraft to orbit two extraterrestrial bodies in a row, a major engineering challenge. Entering and leaving orbits require a lot of energy—too much energy, in fact, for a conventional rocket. What makes Dawn’s mission possible is a type of propulsion known as an ion engine.

Ion engines work by stripping electrons from the atoms of an inert gas such as xenon, making them positively charged. A negatively electrified grid at the back of the engine attracts the ions, accelerating them backward. The ions fly past the grid and out the back of the rocket, pushing the rocket forward. A typical ion engine provides 10 times the specific impulse of a conventional solid-fuel booster (specific impulse can be thought of as a spaceship’s miles-per-gallon rating). In gaining fuel efficiency, ion engines sacrifice thrust, the ability to deliver strong acceleration. On Earth they are useless because they are too weak to get off the ground. But in space they can slowly but steadily—and very efficiently—build up to extremely high velocities.

Russell got interested in ion engines in 1992, when he met Scott Benson, an engineer at NASA’s Lewis Research Center in Cleveland (now the Glenn Research Center), who had recently begun experimenting with ion propulsion. In fact, NASA had explored the technology as far back as the 1960s but lost interest as the agency’s focus shifted to the space shuttle; ion engines had been developed only to make minor adjustments in the paths of Earth-orbiting satellites
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When NASA started its New Millennium program in the 1990s to develop innovative spaceflight technologies, research on ion thrusters began again, this time in earnest. “One of the features of ion propulsion is that it essentially allows you to fly on a smaller launch vehicle, at lower cost, to destinations that would require a larger vehicle with chemical propulsion,” says Benson. At first Russell’s instinct was to use ion propulsion to go back to the moon. As a postgraduate researcher on the Apollo program, he had developed instrumentation for the command module that measured the lunar magnetic field. With Benson he spent two years on a sequel of sorts, a lunar orbiter that used an ion engine, but the idea was passed over. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/He next worked up a proposal to go to Vesta but again failed to win backing from NASA. Russell suspects that ion propulsion was deemed too risky—it had never been used on a space probe. He tried to be philosophical: “Each time you lose,” he says, “you learn something.”



The challenge was to turn an engine intended for occasional use on a satellite into a trustworthy interplanetary thruster. Deep Space 1, an engineering test mission launched by NASA in 1998, demonstrated that an ion engine could be used to move around the solar system. “That excited people,” Russell says. “That was a winner.” In December 2001, NASA gave Dawn a green light.

“Dawn really reflects a big departure from what we used to do in planetary exploration,” Russell adds. “The way we’re probing these bodies is very cost-effective.” NASA considered the cost of exploring both Vesta and Ceres with chemical rockets and concluded that it would have required two missions at $750 million each, as opposed to Dawn’s sub-$500 million price tag. “We’re saving a billion dollars compared with what it would have cost us to do it any other way,” Russell says.

In Russell’s proposal, Dawn used the same basic engine design as Deep Space 1 but needed a larger xenon fuel tank and other changes to ensure the system would survive its eight-year mission. Making these alterations nearly doomed the project, forcing it way over its $373 million budget. “The design parameters of Dawn were ambitious,” says Tom Jones, a former shuttle astronaut and now a consultant to NASA. “No probe had ever gone to one body, slowed down and achieved orbit, and then turned around and gone to a second body. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/That puts a lot of stress on an engine, and you have to make it reliable.”

By October 2005 Dawn was $73 million over budget. That, combined with concerns over the fuel tank’s design and the mission’s management, prompted NASA to pull the plug, canceling the project altogether in March 2006. NASA was also scrambling for funds to cover President George W. Bush’s moon program. Despite having already spent hundreds of millions of dollars, administrators may have been willing to scrap Dawn to avoid spending any more. Russell insists the project’s technical troubles were nothing out of the ordinary for such a complicated mission, and that NASA’s decision to cancel the project was foolhardy. “I don’t have any logical reason for why they did that,” he says. “To throw away the roughly $300 million that had been invested was crazy. Why not just finish off the project and get a return on this investment?” Fortunately, NASA’s chief administrator, Michael Griffin, allowed an appeal, and the mission was reinstated.

Now journeying outward, Dawn is following a flight plan unlike that of a conventional spacecraft. To set course for Vesta, a chemical rocket would burn for a few minutes near Earth, putting it on a path that intersected Vesta’s orbit, and then burn again to enter that orbit. Dawn’s ion engine, by contrast, has to accelerate the spacecraft continuously for months on end, spiraling outward until its trajectory matches Vesta’s orbit. The thrust from each of Dawn’s three ion engines is minuscule, a force equivalent to that of the weight of a piece of paper resting on the palm of your hand. But an engine will be firing during 90 percent of the trip, building up a speed as high as that attained by any chemical rocket.

A Mars flyby in February 2009 will help things along, giving Dawn a gravitational kick. In August 2011 it will begin slowing down as it approaches and then settles into orbit about Vesta. The craft will fire up its engines again in May 2012 to set course for Ceres. It will arrive in February 2015, once again slowing down to enter orbit and snap photos.

Taking snapshots will be a major part of its mission, because Dawn is not exactly a flying lab bristling with instruments. It has only three—part of the trade-off necessary to keep its weight and cost under control. A camera will create detailed maps of the two asteroids, with a resolution of about 225 feet for Vesta and 400 feet for Ceres. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/A spectrometer will measure the light absorbed by the asteroids’ surfaces, which will tell much about their composition. And a gamma ray and neutron detector will measure cosmic radiation bouncing off the surface of the asteroids. (It will be able to scan several yards below Ceres’ surface, searching for ice or liquid water.) In addition, variations in Dawn’s radio signal will be monitored to provide information about the gravitational pull—hence the internal structure—of the asteroids.

During the years of proposals and rejections, Russell had plenty of time to think about what Dawn might find when it finally reached its mystery worlds. His interests naturally led him to McCord, another asteroid hunter, who had gotten into the business indirectly. At Caltech in the 1960s, McCord helped develop instruments for remote spectrometry—analyzing the light coming off planets and stars. The first thing McCord and his colleagues trained their new instruments on was the moon, but soon they began measuring everything in sight. They worked their way through the planets and down to the asteroids, and eventually Vesta found itself in their crosshairs.

“It doesn’t sound like exploration, but that’s the way it really works,” McCord says. “You’ve got an instrument and you just go out and do everything you can with it. New data are power in science, and if you can measure something 10 times better than somebody else can, you’re going to learn a lot of exciting things.”

McCord didn’t get around to looking at Vesta until the early 1970s, and even then he didn’t give it much thought until his team got around to processing the data. “I was in the lab one day and one of the guys pulled the Vesta spectrum out of the computer, which we had observed a week or a month before,” he says. “And my God, it had one of the most beautiful absorption features you ever saw on a planetary object.” The data indicated that Vesta was basaltic, which suggested that Vesta’s rocks had been heated to melting at some point and then cooled. The discovery also established that the HED meteorites and Vesta shared the same composition.

McCord and his researchers also looked at Ceres but didn’t get far. Ceres was darker and murkier, and it didn’t have the clearly identifiable spectrum of Vesta. McCord’s grad students set to work on the data and came up with some preliminary findings: Ceres was a carbonaceous chondrite (a type of asteroid composed of water locked in minerals and carbon-based materials), and it had not been thermally altered. In other words, it had never melted and cooled, as Vesta had. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/This posed more questions than it answered. How did a large asteroid evolve and retain significant amounts of water? Nobody had any theories to explain it, and the researchers dropped the subject.

When the Dawn mission was approved, much of the focus was on Vesta. “You’re human, so you’re generally interested in things you know about,” Russell admits. “If you don’t have any information, you don’t have that thing to grab your interest.” That attitude began to shift in 2002, when McCord took a sabbatical to Nantes, on France’s west coast. “I got to thinking about Ceres, and I learned that the people who had been doing the most careful orbit and mass determinations were at the University of Bordeaux, a two-hour drive to the south.” McCord went down and learned that researchers there had been able to make accurate estimates of Ceres’ density. Pure water has a density of 1 (measured in grams per cubic centimeter). A conventional dry asteroid, made of silicates with some iron mixed in, would have a density of 3 or 3.5; Vesta’s is thought to be in this range. Ceres has a density only slightly higher than 2. That means there is a lot of water in the mix.

McCord found the work of Christophe Sotin and his graduate students at the University of Nantes even more intriguing. Sotin had developed a computer model of how Saturn’s biggest moon, Titan, could have formed without its liquids boiling off. Although Titan is chemically very different from Ceres, it too contains a lot of water. Perhaps, thought McCord, some version of Sotin’s model could explain how Ceres could have formed with its water intact. “We began to see that it was easy for Ceres in the early, early history to have created a liquid ocean,” McCord says.

Here’s how the theory goes: In the early solar system, dust particles glommed together to form bigger dust particles, which formed pebbles, then rocks, and so forth, until they combined into an object up to several hundred miles in diameter. The original dust particles were made largely of silicates mixed with other materials, including water and aluminum 26, a radioactive isotope with a half-life of about 700,000 years. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/That’s just long enough to make a big difference in how an asteroid evolves. Vesta and most other asteroids, the theory goes, accreted quickly and accumulated a lot of aluminum 26 that had not yet decayed. The aluminum 26 produced so much heat inside the asteroid that any water evaporated into space. Ceres, by contrast, accreted more slowly, so by the time it formed, the aluminum 26 had already mostly burned itself out. As a result, Ceres retained most of its water—and a memory of the solar system’s original composition.

These findings ignited McCord’s interest in Ceres, to the point where “I kept demanding we go to Ceres first,” he says. Russell sympathizes. “If we had to pick which was the most interesting, Ceres or Vesta, it’s not clear which one would win,” he says.

The argument is moot: Vesta is closer than Ceres, and therefore it must be Dawn’s first stop. But Ceres may make the bigger headlines. Vesta seems like Mercury or the moon, writ on a smaller scale. Ceres is unique. Imaging of the surface may reveal whether there is indeed an ocean beneath an icy crust. Observing the surface should allow scientists to glean some idea of how the interior behaves—if there’s volcanic activity that could provide the heat to sustain life, for instance. Dawn’s spectrometer will be able to detect the presence of organic molecules.

Unfortunately, Dawn isn’t equipped to search for past or (dare we dream?) present life on Ceres. That would require penetrating the surface and taking and analyzing samples. “To detect life, you need a pretty sophisticated lab on the surface or in the interior or wherever the environment is,” McCord says. “That’s technically a major challenge and virtually impossible—nobody’s willing to spend the amount of money to do that.”

For now, at least. After Dawn’s visit, attitudes might change.


No one expects a 3-year-old who loves to dress like a princess to swear like a sailor.

But early exposure is not so uncommon. Who's to blame? Well, there's a pretty apt quote from a 1970 Pogo cartoon: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

The "us" are parents. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/A few weeks ago, I put a question out to hundreds of mothers on a local list-serv asking for anecdotes about the first time they heard their children use inappropriate words.

Many responses were similar to mom Julia Gordon of Silver Spring, Md. She was in her car, in a hurry and trying to park.

"The parking lot was crazy," says Gordon, a lawyer and mother of a four-year-old daughter. When someone sped into a parking space she had been waiting for, Gordon said under her breath, "He totally screwed me."

And a few minutes later, she heard her daughter parrot back the same phrase.

"I have to admit I did laugh at first," says Gordon. "Then I immediately stopped and told her, 'We don't say that word!'"

The Worst Swear Word of All

Psychologists say it's no surprise that children mimic words and phrases.

"That's just language learning. These words have no special status as taboo words," says Paul Bloom, Ph.D., of Yale University. "Learning they're taboo words is a later step."

Bloom explains that children are using words to communicate instinctively. They don't yet have the judgment to take a step back and think about whether a word is appropriate for a given situation.

Bloom remembers one day when his son Max, then 6, came home from school.

Max asked in a hushed voice: "Dad, do you know what the worst swear word of all is?"

His son then went on to explain that "damn" must be the worst. When Bloom asked why, his son said, "I listen to my babysitter talk on the phone, and she uses the 'f' word, and the 's' word, but she never says 'damn!'"

A study by the Parents Television Council found that about once an hour children watching popular children's networks will hear mild curse words such as "stupid," "loser" and "butt." The scope and frequency can rise immeasurably with exposure to adult programs and popular music.

Lessons from the Playground

As an experiment with his children, Bloom and his wife tried their hand at creating their own family curse words.

"So one of them was 'flep,'" says Bloom. Whenever someone would bang their foot or hurt their toe, they'd scream "flep" as if it were an obscenity.

The experiment was very short-lived.

"It was a total failure," says Bloom. "The children looked at us as if we were crazy."

The story gives one of Bloom's mentors, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, a chuckle.

"Children are far more influenced by peers," says Pinker. "That's why kids of immigrants end up with the accent of their peer group rather than their parents."

Particularly once they've entered elementary school.

When it comes to choosing words, our society has a bent toward novelty. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/ Pinker explains we're forever coming up with new ways to express that things are "good" or "bad." He says there's always a little "semantic inflation" going on.

For instance, if members of Generation X hear a song they like, they may say, "It's awesome." A teen of today may say, "It's bitchin'." If the song is lousy, they may say, "It sucks."

"When I was a kid and you said something sucks," says Pinker, "it was pretty clear what sexual act they were referring back to." But today kids have no idea. The term is just part of their common language.

Perception Is Everything

Frequent use, over time, has stripped away the original connotation. Pinker says the evolution of "sucks" is similar to that of "jerk" or "sucker."

"There is an assumption that 'sucks' was a reference to oral sex," explains Jesse Sheidlower, editor-at-large of the Oxford English Dictionary. . http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/page1.aspxSome scholars debate this, but Sheidlower says perception is what matters.

"Suck" may sound edgy or obnoxious to middle-aged ears, but parents may be at a loss to explain why it's a bad word, especially to an 8- or 9-year-old. "It brings up a conversation you might not want to have right now," says Sheidlower.

Not everyone's on the same page about what constitutes offensive language. The boundaries of what's acceptable vary from community to community and family to family.

Setting Boundaries

Some moms listen for attitude and intention in their children's words. Chevy Chase, Md., resident Sarah Pekkanen is the mother of two boys, ages 6 and 8, and she has found her dividing line.

"I would be much quicker to jump on my kid for saying an unkind thing," says Pekkanen, "even if he used perfect language to do so."

Pekkanen says a borderline phrase like, "it sucks," isn't as offensive if it's not intended to insult anyone.

A clear message about respect may be more fruitful than trying to police every word. By the time kids enter the teen world, swearing is almost a rite-of-passage.

"It's hard sometimes," says pediatrician Monika Walters. "As parents, you worry that they're going to grow up and be vagrants or a menace to society."

When parents like this come to see her or pull her aside after an office appointment, worried about vulgar words they spotted in their teens' text messages, she asks them to remember how they talked when they were 15.

Walters says if offensive language is part of a pattern of aggressive behavior, there's a problem. . http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/page1.aspxBut in most cases, it's just the way teens salt their language.

"Obscenity is a sure ticket to adulthood," says Paul Bloom.

Or at least a way for teenagers to perceive that they sound older.

Bloom says he doesn't want to control the words his children choose to use with their friends. "That's part of growing up," he says.

Another part of growing up is knowing how to speak with adults and in formal situations. "So we'd like our children to grow up knowing when it's appropriate to use these words," Bloom says.

As most parents come to recognize, teaching good judgment is not a one-time event; it's a process.


Piaśnica Wielka (German: Groß Piasnitz; Kashubian: Wiôlgô Piôsznica) is a village in Poland in Puck rural commune, Puck County, Pomeranian Voivodeship.

In the forest next to the village during World War II, German Schutzstaffel executed about 12,000 people, mainly Polish and Kashubiann intelligentsia from Gdańsk Pomerania. Among the victims were approximately 1,200 mentally ill persons from local hospitals.

The mass executions began in October 1939 and lasted until April 1940. An exhumation of mass graves was carried after World War II in 1946. Out of total number of 35 graves, 30 were localised of which 26 were exhumed. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
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Only 305 bodies (in two mass graves) were found, the rest of the bodies was burnt by Germans in August-September 1944. Forced prisoners from Stutthof concentration camp were used to cover up the tracks and were later executed.



After World War I
o 1919: Treaty of Versailles, most of West Prussia (including Pomerelia or Gdańsk-Pomerania) becomes part of the Second Polish Republic
o 1939: Nazi Germany annexes the territories lost in 1919
o 1945: Soviet capture, Oder-Neisse line becomes new border between Poland and Germany, the historical duchy / province of Pomerania ceases to exist
o 1945/46: Pomeranian population form Farther and Eastern Hither Pomerania, except for Polish and Kashubs, is expelled to post-war Germany, as well as the German population of all other "German territories under Polish and Soviet control". The area is resettled and rebuilt by Polish who were expelled from Polish settlement areas annexed by the Soviets. Hither Pomerania without the Stettin/Szczeczin area and Wollin/Wolin was fused with Mecklenburg to form the (East-) German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the former Farther Pomeranian area is roughly represented by Polish West Pomerania


20,000 years ago the territory of present-day Pomerania was covered with ice, which did not start to recede until the late period of the Old Stone Age or Paleolithic some 10,000 years BC, when the Scandinavian glacier receded to the north. Various archaeological cultures developed in the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age.

Initially at least part of Pomerania was dominated by Baltic tribes. Since around 500BC and before 500 AD Pomerania was dominated by East Germanic tribes including several tribes of Goths, who according to archeological evidence and their own tradition have come from Scandinavia. Goths and Rugians are recorded by Roman historians in the areas of Pomerania in 98 AD. The Veneti, non-Germanic tribe, which later assimilated with Slavs, are recorded by Ptolemy and Pliny the Elder around Vistula in first century AD. By the 7th century Slavic tribes (Wends) such as the Pomeranians settled the area.

Pomerania was first conquered by the Polish duke Mieszko I in the second half of the 10th century. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
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Pagan uprisings in 1005 and 1038 resulted in independancy for Western Pomerania and Pomerelia, respectively. Regained by Poland in 1116/1121, the Polish could not hold the Pomeranian duchy longer than 1135, whereas Pomerelia after the 1138 partition of Poland among the sons of Boleslaus Wrymouth became a part of the Polish seniorat (see Map of Poland before the fragmentation period) which was declared fief of the Holy Roman Empire in 1156.

The Western part, the Duchy of Pomerania, was declared part of the Holy Roman Empire (1181). After a brief period of Danish rule (1168/1186-1227), it remained part of Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation until 1806.


The Eastern part, Pomerelia, which was directly part of Kingdom of Poland, was disputed by Brandenburg and conquered by the Teutonic Knights in 1309, becoming part of the Teutonic Order state. After the rebellion of the Prussian Confederation, it was then annexed by the Kingdom of Poland in 1466 as a province with considerable autonomy. This part of Pomerelia and Prussia was centuries later referred to as "Royal Prussia". In the Union of Lublin of 1569 the province agreed[citation needed] to sacrifice part of its autonomy to join the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as the new entity to unify lands of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Since ~1200, a steady influx of German settlers had been arriving in Pomerania. One of the first recorded German settler came to Stettin (Szczecin) in 1187. Some rural parts of Pomerania were however still predominantly Slavic in character before the advent of Protestantism. Later though the duchy of Pomerania became German by ethnicity, language and culture, whereas Pomerelia still preserved a Slavic character.

In 1425, conflict with Brandenburg about the rule of the Uckermark and Pomerania resulted in a war of Brandenburg against Pomerania,
The total number of Kashubians varies depending on one's definition. A common estimate is that over 300,000 people in Poland are of the Kashubian ethnicity. The most extreme estimates are as low as 50,000 or as high as 500,000

In the Polish census of 2002, only 5,100 people declared Kashubian nationality, although 51,000 declared Kashubian as their native language. Most Kashubians declare Polish nationality and Kashubian ethnicity, and are considered both Polish and Kashubian. However, on the 2002 census there was no option to declare one nationality and a different ethnicity, or more than one nationality. Some claim that the census was misleading and inaccurate, or even falsified.


Kashubians are the direct descendants of an early Slavic tribe of Pomeranians who took their name from the land in which settled, Pomerania (from Polish Pomorze, "the land along the sea"). http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
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It is believed that the ancestors of Kashubians came into the region between the Odra and Vistula Rivers during the Migration Period. The oldest known mention of the name dates from the 13th century (a seal of Duke Barnim I of Pomerania), when they ruled areas around Szczecin (Kashubian: Szczecëno).

Another early mention of the Kashubians from the 13th century saw the Dukes of Pomerania including "Duke of Kashubia" in their titles. From the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, after the Thirty Years' War, parts of West Pomerania fell under Swedish rule, and the Swedish kings titled themselves "Dukes of Kashubia" from 1648 to the 1720s.

The Landtag parliament of the Kingdom of Prussia in Königsberg changed the official church language from Polish to German in 1843, but this decision was soon repealed. In 1858 Kashubians emigrated to Upper Canada and created the settlement of Wilno, in Renfrew County, Ontario, which still exists today. Kaszub immigrants founded St. Josaphat parish in Chicago's Lincoln Park community in the late 19th century. In the 1870s a fishing village was established in Jones Island in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, by Kashubian and German immigrants. The two groups did not hold deeds to the land, however, and the government of Milwaukee evicted them as squatters in the 1940s, with the area soon after turned into industrial park.

Many Pomeranians in the former Duchy of Pomerania, most of them Lutheran Protestants (including the Slovincians), were Germanised between the 14th and 19th centuries in the wake of the Prussian political program of Germanisation. Some communities in Pomerelia (Eastern Pomerania) have survived and today regard themselves as Kashubians in modern Poland, although others were expelled by Poland's Communist government as "Germans" after World War II. Most Kashubians in Eastern Pomerania, unlike Slovincians and Pomeranian Slavic Wends, remain Roman Catholic. During the Treaty of Versailles, Kaszub activist Antoni Abraham in agitating for Cassubia's integration into Poland issued his famous quote Nie ma Kaszub bez Polonii a bez Kaszub Polski" which translates into English as- There is no Cassubia without Poland, and no Poland without Cassubia.

During the Second World War thousands of Kashubians were mass murdered by German forces, particularly those of higher education. The main place of executions was Piaśnica.

About 50,000 Kashubians speak Kashubian, a West Slavic language belonging to the Lechitic group of languages in northern Poland. Many Polish linguists formerly considered Kashubian to be a Polish dialect, though most now believe it is a separate Slavic language.

There are other traditional Slavic ethnic groups inhabiting Pomerania, such as the Kociewiacy, Borowiacy, Krajniacy and others. These dialects tend to fall between Kashubian and the Polish dialects of Greater Poland and Mazovia. This might indicate that they are not only descendants of ancient Pomeranians, but also of settlers who arrived to Pomerania from Greater Poland and Masovia in the Middle Ages. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
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However, this is only one possible explanation.

The earliest surviving example of written Kashubian is Martin Luther's 1643 Protestant catechism (with new editions in 1752 and 1828). Scientific interest in the Kashubian language was sparked by Mrongovius (publications in 1823, 1828) and the Russian linguist Hilferding (1859, 1862), later followed by Biskupski (1883, 1891), Bronisch (1896, 1898), Mikkola (1897), Nitsch (1903). Important works are S. Ramult's, Słownik jezyka pomorskiego, czyli kaszubskiego, 1893, and F. Lorentz, Slovinzische Grammatik, 1903, Slovinzische Texte, 1905, and Slovinzisches Wörterbuch, 1908.

The first activist of the Kashubian/East Pomeranian national movement was Florian Ceynowa. Among his accomplishments, he documented the Kashubian alphabet and grammar by 1879 and published a collection of ethnographic-historic stories of the life of the Kashubians (Skórb kaszébsko-slovjnckjé mòvé, 1866-1868). Another early writer in Kashubian was Hieronim Derdowski. The Young Kashubian movement followed, led by author Aleksander Majkowski, who wrote for the paper "Zrzësz Kaszëbskô" as part of the "Zrzëszincë" group. The group would contribute significantly to the development of the Kashubian literary language.


In 2005, Kashubian was for the first time made an official subject on the Polish matura exam (roughly equivalent to the English A-Level and French Baccalaureat). Despite an initial uptake of only 23 students,[citation needed] this development was seen as an important step in the official recognition and establishment of the language.

Today, in some towns and villages in northern Poland Kashubian is the second language spoken after Polish, and it is taught in regional schools.

Kashubian presently enjoys legal protection in Poland as an official minority language.



Disputes with Brandenburg continued. These were partially agreed at the Conference of Juterbog (1527) between Joachim I Nestor, Elector of Brandenburg, and the Duke of Pomerania. As the Protestant Reformation gathered pace, Pomerania also converted to Lutheranism, but the process was slower than in Brandenburg.

In 1637 the last of the Dukes of Pomerania, Boguslaw XIV, died without direct male successor. During the Thirty Years' War, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden occupied Pomerania. In the negotiations between France, Brandenburg, and Sweden following the Northern War the Brandenburg diplomats Joachim Friedrich von Blumenthal and his son Christoph Caspar obtained the rights of succession for Brandenburg, though the argument with Sweden, especially over Hither Pomerania, continued to the end of the 17th century and beyond, until the Treaty of Stockholm in 1720.


Prussian noblemen began to acquire estates in Pomerania, while Pomeranian noblemen were integrated into Prussian society. Thus originally Wendish noble families such as the von Lettows, von Strelows, von Peglows, von Zitzewitzes and von Krockows intermarried with German families from Brandenburg such as the von Blumenthals, who possessed great estates at Quackenburg, Varzin, Dubberzin, Schlönwitz and elsewhere. By the nineteenth century Pomerania was mostly Germanised, and was a popular place of retirement for the well-to-do such as Bismarck, who bought Varzin.

After the first World War, Pomerelia (as West Prussia and Danzig (Gdansk)) came to Poland. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
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After the defeat of Germany in World War II in 1945, the Potsdam Conference placed most of Pomerania under Polish administration. The German population of the transferred territories fled, was expelled, or lost their lives. Some Germans were retained by Soviet authorities to do forced labour in the Soviet exclaves for a number of years after 1945. The now Polish parts of Pomerania were resettled with Poles.




FEARnet
Overview:

October 31, 2006, fear is born with the launch of FEARnet, the worlds’ premiere destination for horror. The first multi-platform horror network, FEARnet will debut on demand, online and on mobile devices. Featuring the largest library of horror films, FEARnet will deliver fans uninterrupted FEAR 24/7



Multi-Platform Network Format


On Demand:

FEARnet ON DEMAND features approximately 200 titles a year with more than 70 hours of programming a month

* Programming: features the largest library of horror, thriller and suspense films includes short and long-form original films from slashers to psychological thrillers and “J-Horror”, a special section devoted to Japanese horror
* Spanish Programming: more than 10 hours of Spanish language programming a month
* High-definition: more than 25 hours a month

Online:

Explore the world of the macabre in FEARnet.com’s video-rich environment packed with free movies, interactive community features and fresh original content

* Video: FEARnet.com offers nine free feature-length films and 200 shorts for free streaming and more than 50 downloadable movies to buy or rent a month. With FEARnet.com’s integrated video player, fans can simultaneously watch streaming video and chat or post to the community or read about its cast and crew without leaving the film
* Horror A-Z: enter the “Web of Fear” with this interactive database that allows users to explore all things horror and links film stars, movies, directors, producers
* News and Reviews: offers fans the latest industry happenings, interviews and film reviews
* Community: become a true FEARnet “victim” as you create a profile and chat with other fans in a user-focused community section




Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
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The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.



From the lofty deck of the Hiva Oa Hanakee Pearl Lodge, the only hotel on the remote South Pacific island of Hiva Oa, the view is of lush forest, crashing cobalt sea and, if it is morning, a very misty Mount Temetiu. Below and for miles beyond, nature runs wild: steep cliffs and deep valleys covered with luxuriant tropical vegetation. No reefs surround the island, allowing the sea to pile wildly onto the sandy, rocky shoreline. The only thing missing is ... people. Which is a good thing when you’re contemplating the idea of paradise, which I happened to be doing on a recent morning, my legs dangling in an infinity pool that seemed to spill into Hanakee Bay.

Oddly, the Marquesas were among the first South Pacific islands to be settled, and from their shores departed some of the greatest navigators of all time, those who went on to discover the rest of the so-called Polynesian triangle (Tahiti-Hawaii-Easter Island). The farthest Polynesian islands from Tahiti — 900 miles — the Marquesas have long been known as Te Henua Enata (Land of Men). Giant banyan trees cover steep slopes and hide the oldest tikis in French Polynesia, long-preceding their bigger siblings on Easter Island. http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com/

Also hidden beneath the thick overgrowth are stone remnants of houses built on high platforms, stone temples and ceremonial grounds where games were played and sacrifices made. Simultaneously lush, remote and breathtaking, it was these same scenes that lured such famous paradise seekers as Paul Gauguin, Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson and Thor Heyerdahl.

Only six of the 10 Marquesas are populated — Nuku Hiva, Ua Pou, Ua Huku, Hiva Oa, Tahuata and Fatu Hiva. Each is a paradise for hikers, bikers, surfers and canyoneers. Narrow dirt trails crisscross the islands, used mostly by hunters on horseback tracking wild pigs. The only sounds in the jungle are birdcalls and the distant roar of waterfalls, deep in the otherwise quiet, eerie lushness. Sand beaches ring the islands, though few roads lead to them.

The small number of Polynesians who do live here populate the river valleys, leaving the interiors mostly to wild horses, cattle and goats. Bird life is rich; the waters teem with lobsters, small fish and sharks. Hotter and drier than Tahiti, their very remoteness has preserved the Marquesas in a day and age when a few islands in French Polynesia risk being over-visited. A couple of the islands can be reached by Air Tahiti several times a week, a few by cargo boat and passing cruise ships every couple of weeks and increasingly by private sailboats. They are hardly off limits, but you have to want to get there.

Sitting in a wooden deck chair on a recent morning, Gérard Bourgogne, a former concert flutist and part-time computer hacker, and now general manager of the 14-bungalow Hiva-Oa Hanakee Pearl Lodge, thought out loud as we admired the view: “Crossword puzzle champions would find this place perfect. So would adventure caperers. What about advertising it to infertile couples looking for the ultimate romantic hideaway? I can see the advertisement: ‘No better place in the world to truly relax!’ Why not yoga instructors and their classes? They should all come!”

While the lack of people is good for misanthropes like myself, it’s obviously tough on innkeepers.

Thanks to Paul Gauguin’s tempestuous relationship with the island, Hiva Oa may be the best known of the Marquesas. Or maybe now it is Nuka Hiva, thanks to having been host of the fourth season of “Survivor.” It is the biggest of the islands, formed by two volcanoes resting on top of each another, and in 1842 was the first island to be spied from a whaler by Herman Melville, who wrote it was “a country that no description could fit the beauty.”

Several jagged volcanic peaks mark the diamond-shaped Ua Pou, its tiny offshore islets home to millions of seabirds. It is also home to the chain’s most active artist colony, mostly wood carvers and bone necklace makers. Ua Huku is crescent-shaped, home to more goats and wild horses than people (just 575). Fatu Hiva is the southernmost in the chain. Thor Heyerdahl lived here for about a year (1937-38) and wrote a book about his experience; today the local women still make umuhei — aromatic bouquets, which they wear in their hair as aphrodisiacs — and scented necklaces made from sandalwood.

Hiva Oa was once home to 130,000; today fewer than 1,900 people are scattered through the deep valleys and in a half-dozen small villages scattered around its perimeter. Houses are of painted wood and the landscape is as primitive as it was 1,200 years ago. A long, crescent-shaped beach fronts the biggest town of Atuona, which hasn’t changed much since Gauguin built his House of Pleasure in its center.

On a hot, dry morning I follow the beach past Atuona and walk four miles to Taaoa, where a sizable tohua (temple) has been restored. Eight-foot-tall marae and tiki made from basalt still hide in the lush forest, mostly hidden. At one time 12,000 people lived in this valley, thus the elaborate temple and sacrificial grounds. This day the sounds are of crowing cocks and a road crew’s jackhammer. Human sacrifice has been replaced by worship in a mix of Roman Catholic, Protestant, Mormon and Jehovah’s Witness churches.

If one single thing is responsible for French Polynesia’s enduring reputation as paradise, it is the paintings of Gauguin, who moved to Hiva Oa in 1901 after wearing out his welcome on several other Polynesian islands. http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com/2008/03/22/try/
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Louis J. Sheehan
Filled with grace and mystery, they were mostly of an imagined place, a paradise that did not exist, featuring languorous women smiling into the distance, horses grazing in vanilla groves and baskets overflowing with breadfruit and bananas. A short walk from either the beach or the stone temple into the heart of Atuona delivers me to the doorstep of one of history’s most infamous paradise seekers.

The two-story, A-frame house is constructed from woven bamboo. Carved around its wooden door frame are erotic figures and the words “Be Mysterious” and “Be in Love.” The name of the house is carved above its entrance: Maison de Jouir. House of Pleasure, Sexual Pleasure.

A dozen wide steps lead up to the second level, the one big room where Paul Gauguin (locally known as Koke) lived and painted. A large window looks out over an open well; Gauguin kept a bamboo rod with a fishing line nearby, to raise and lower cups of cold water from the well to add to his absinthe. Gone are the pornographic photos he kept on the walls, and his collection of walking sticks with carved phallic heads. It was here he gave grand fetes, fed by cases of wine and bonbons bought from passing cargo boats.

Gauguin is buried on a hillside above the house, in a small field that looks over the ocean. It is a scene depicted in some of his last paintings. To his headstone is chained a copy of one of his carved statues, called Oviri, or Savage. He was not popular here when he died; in fact he was readying to serve a three-month sentence for libeling a local policeman.

Hiva Oa was Gauguin’s last gasp and things did not go well for him here. Never one to win friends easily, during the years he lived here he openly mocked the Catholic missionaries in a remote French colony governed by the church. He died in his House of Pleasure with a bad heart, failing eyes, morphine-addicted, leprous and syphilitic and soon to become one of the world’s greatest and best-known artists. To his ultimate chagrin, the fame part came mostly posthumously.

Two days later, thanks to the modern convenience of small aircraft, I found myself hiking remote trails on Nuka Hiva. Each morning I set out from the center of the main town of Taiohae, having asked directions from various locals the night before. I found it difficult to find a consensus when it came to simple questions like, “How far is it?” For example, the morning I decided to follow a trail to the far side of the island and a small community at Taipivai, I was told it would take all day to reach the white sand beaches at Controller Bay. It takes about four hours.

Outfitters and the government on Nuka Hiva have committed to cutting a trail system across the island in recent years, in part due to the economic kick in the pants the “Survivor” show brought to the island. The trails exist thanks to decades of wild pig, horse and hunter’s traffic; the idea — fomented by a local tour company called Marquises Rando — is to expand them into more accessible walkways without using much modern technology. Why introduce cement and steel when acacia or coconut tree trunks tied together work just as well as bridges, and volcanic rocks are perfect for bordering footpaths? The idea is to open up the mountains to visitors, creating options from six-hour round-trip walks to two-day treks with camps in between.

The diversity of walks is incredible. One morning I hire a small boat to carry me to a trailhead that leads to the Ahuii waterfall, which plunges 1,100 feet from high in the dense jungle. It’s a two-hour walk that involves a couple of thigh-high river crossings and ends with a swim in the eel-laden pool beneath the falls, and passes a handful of crumbling, thousand-year-old stone platforms along the way. On the opposite side of the island, just up from the beach is the Hikokua tohua where a dozen tikis watch over a grass-covered field once used for games and human sacrifices. Near the beach the biggest modern-day landmark is a sizable beige church and a restaurant big enough to feed the one hundred-plus passengers who arrive by cruise boat every few weeks for a lobster feast.

My last hike on Nuka Hiva is up and over a steep, 600-foot-tall pass from the village of Taipivai to a sand beach at Anaho, past stands of wild vanilla and fields of wild horses. The white beach is studded with smooth black boulders, a rare reef slowing the crashing of waves making it perfect for a swim. A solitary man lives in a fishing shack and waves me over to sample some dried fish and coconut milk. http://louis1j1sheehan.blog.ca/
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A half-dozen big dogs lie in the shade of palms, several wooden fishing boats and a plastic kayak sit overturned.

As we talk, hiding from the midday sun, I ask for his definition of paradise. Without pause he says simply: “Wherever I am. And on most days, I am right here!”


Options traders took bullish positions in several potash companies Wednesday after the major producers announced a deal to sell their product, a potassium compound used in fertilizer, to a Chinese company for more than triple last year's price.

Trading in Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan jumped to an all-time high, with market players picking up 67,000 call contracts that allow them to buy the stock and 45,000 put contracts that allow them to sell, according to Track Data.

Several traders took bets that Potash Corp. stock will climb an additional 2% before Friday, when April options expire. They congregated around April $200 calls, which are priced at $2.65 and make money if Potash Corp. goes above $202.65.

Potash Corp. rose 7.5% to $198.26 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading, after making dramatic gains over the past several months. At this time last year, the company's shares were trading around $60.

Options traders also expected more long-term increases in Potash Corp. They picked up large volumes of May $190 calls that are priced at $18.50 and make money if Potash Corp. climbs above $208.50 by next month.

Traders also took big positions in Potash Corp. put contracts, which imply bearish sentiments. Those market players could be "long" on the underlying stock and buying the puts to protect themselves against downward moves, said Paul Foster, a strategist with TheFlyOnTheWall.com. That, or traders think the stock has rallied too high and is poised for a decline.

Potash Corp. and two other companies that produce potash -- a term covering several potassium compounds used in fertilizer -- announced Wednesday that they had struck a deal with China's Sinofert Holdings Ltd. to sell their product for $576 a ton, a $400-a-ton increase over the 2007 price. They secured a higher price as global food demands rise and potash supplies tighten.

"To get a major Chinese importer to agree to a tripling of the price says that these companies are in the catbird seat," said Rebecca Engmann Darst, an equity options analyst with Interactive Brokers. "They're sitting on a product that is richly desired."

Options traders also pounced on Mosaic Co. and Agrium Inc., two other major potash producers.

In Mosaic, they picked up April $135 call contracts that are priced at $3.40 and make money if Mosaic shares rise to $138.40 before Friday. Mosaic ended Wednesday's session at $136.82, up 7.2%.

In Agrium, traders congregated around April $90 calls that are priced at 80 cents and make money if Agrium climbs above $90.80. Agrium closed at $87.12, up 10%.


He was old, aloof and tough. During a brawl with another rabbit, Bongo lost a dime-size piece of his ear. His first home is unknown. His second was an animal shelter in rural Pennsylvania that reached rabbit overload and transferred him to another shelter here called Animal Friends.

Animal Friends takes abused, neglected and unwanted animals and tries to find them families. That can be challenging. Who wants a banged-up old rabbit? Or elderly cats and dogs that have thinning fur, missing teeth, cataracts and arthritic hips?

"A lot of folks aren't willing to adopt an older animal," says Ann Cadman, health and wellness coordinator at the shelter. "I had one woman say, 'Why would I want a used animal?' "

Ms. Cadman, who has adopted several elderly dogs, says they are affectionate and attentive. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com/
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http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.blogspot.com/But she needed a way to persuade other people to adopt old animals, of which there are many at the shelter.

Some have been left by people who move, want a younger pet, or are overwhelmed by age-related maladies. A good number of the older rabbits were bought as Easter bunnies for small children. Months pass. The novelty wears off, and the cuddly little critters turn into rabbits, weighing up to 25 pounds if they are Flemish, that can bite if they don't want to be held. Animal Friends is a no-kill shelter, so once an animal arrives, it stays there or in foster care until it is adopted.

Ms. Cadman had an idea: Form an exclusive society for people who adopt older pets, by which she means dogs more than five years old and cats over six. Rabbits are considered old at three.

Members would get discounts on pet jewelry and apparel at the shelter boutique. They would be honored with a proclamation suitable for framing, and they are invited to coffee klatches.


Ms. Cadman decided to call the group the Red Collar Society, after the well-known Red Hat Society, in which women over 50 glory in being middle-aged. "Both societies see age as something to celebrate," says Ms. Cadman.

Ms. Cadman's Red Collar Society appears to be effective. Since it was formed last April, more than 300 older cats, dogs and rabbits have been adopted from the shelter.

Members say older pets have distinct advantages. They are loving, calm, don't nip or insist on playing fetch. They don't gnaw as much on furniture and are good at visiting hospitals, nursing homes and elementary schools. Children with reading problems, for instance, will read aloud to Jazz, a seven-year-old black poodle, because he listens quietly and uncritically.

Maureen Pfeifer joined the Red Collar Society after adopting Erma, a Dalmatian somewhere between eight and 10 years old. Erma had a cloudy eye, bad teeth, a heart murmur and a tumor. A family had taken her but brought her back because she had too many things wrong with her.

"I always started with puppies and wanted another dog," says Ms. Pfeifer, who also has a seven-year-old dog that is in better health but getting creaky. "I love the idea of not having to house train. Erma knows basic commands already. It's really a lot easier."

Older animals available for adoption are advertised in the shelter newsletter, as well as in other local publications. Featured recently was T-Bone, a white seven-year-old cat originally from Egypt who responds to whistles just like a dog would, and Chester, a five-year-old coonhound who has a pleasing temperament and likes treats.

Wayne Croushore saw a picture of Bongo the rabbit and thought he might be good company for his other rabbit, Perkins, Perky for short. Mr. Croushore, 77 years old, adopted Bongo last year and became a Red Collar Society member. The retired insurance consultant has had pets all his life, including beagle puppies, which are cute but need housebreaking and obedience school. A few years ago, Mr. Croushore discovered rabbits and liked them as pets. "They're kind of like scotch, an acquired taste," he says.


Far more interesting than he imagined, they growl when they are unhappy. Some cry and grind their teeth. Their personalities vary. Perky is just that. Bongo is rakish -- tough, aggressive and independent, like a one-legged pirate, Mr. Croushore says. Buddy, his first rabbit, who has since died, came up the steps at 11 every night to have his ears scratched. Buddy's ashes are in a white ceramic dish on a shelf in Mr. Croushore's basement.

The key to making these relationships work is education. There's a class at Animal Friends on geriatric cats taught by a feline-massage therapist. http://louis0j0sheehan.livejournal.com/15433.html
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Red Collar members can attend monthly programs on bonding and estate planning. Mr. Croushore has arranged for Bongo and Perkins to be taken care of by Animal Friends if they outlive him.

There are downsides. Elderly pets can have expensive medical problems, such as strokes and failing vision. Glaucoma drops can cost $90. Older pets need to be taken out more at night. Aging rabbits need dental work. Geriatric pets need low-impact exercise. Fat and calories need to be watched in their diets. Older animals can become disoriented. An Australian study published in the Journal of Small Animal Practice reported that 28% of cats aged 11 to 14 develop at least one geriatric-onset behavioral problem, such as forgetfulness. This rises to over half of cats 15 years of age and older.


Mary Soukup, a retired teacher, provides foster care to the sickest older animals at Animal Friends, nursing them until they can be adopted. She often cares for dogs showing signs of dementia. She watches for telltale symptoms, such as going into a corner and being unable to get out. She is an unofficial Red Collar Society member because she hasn't officially adopted a pet, but she takes care of many. She currently has two: Bagel the beagle, a 12-year-old with arthritis, and 16-year-old Hercules, a Yorkshire terrier, who is blind.

She and the two dogs attended a recent coffee klatch. Over refreshments, Ms. Soukup and other owners traded tips. A fish-oil tablet, good for the heart and coat, is eagerly gobbled up by dogs if it is wrapped in salami. Pets at the social gathering traded stares and sniffs.

Old pets can learn new tricks, some society members say. Katie Tontala points to her 11-year-old cat, Karma, whom she adopted last year.

Karma is deaf and thus can't hear a can being opened; most cats know that the sound means dinner is served. Ms. Tontala taught Karma sign language. She puts her fingers to her mouth and taps her lips. Karma comes.




The failure of diplomacy to stop Iran’s nuclear program became obvious this week, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed the installation of 6,000 new centrifuges at the country’s main uranium enrichment complex. His announcement was accompanied by the now customary assertion that outsiders can do nothing to stop Iran from fulfilling its nuclear destiny.

Once, not so long ago, this kind of boast would elicit clear American declarations that Iran would never be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. Everything, President Bush would say ominously, is on the table. This time he has been quiet. I wish I believed that it is the quiet before a storm of laser-guided action. It seems more likely that it is the abashed silence of an American president whose bluff has been called in front of the entire world.

Washington’s performance should concern anyone who cares about long-term American influence in the Islamic world. But for Israel (and Israel’s supporters), this is an urgent problem. It is Israel, after all, that has been set by the Iranian leadership as the target for annihilation.

In response to the news from Iran, some supporters of Israel have started to suggest that the failed efforts at prevention be replaced by assured American deterrence: any Iranian nuclear attack on Israel would be treated as an attack on the United States. Charles Krauthammer, a Washington Post columnist, recently referred to this as “the Holocaust doctrine.”

From Israel’s perspective, the thought is tempting — but it’s not realistic.

In 1981, Israeli planes destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. The world’s reaction was harshly critical. Even the Reagan administration, usually a close ally, denounced the operation.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin was undaunted by the fury. At a press conference in Jerusalem he announced that he felt obligated to do anything in his power to stop Israel’s enemies from getting their hands on means of mass killing.

Begin mentioned the Holocaust; it was never far from his mind. But his primary focus was strategic, not historical. Israel was no different from any other country. It would bear the ultimate responsibility for its own security.

Begin was right. Here’s why:

First, in exchange for assistance, Washington would naturally (and rightly) demand a very strong say in Israeli policies. A misstep, after all, could embroil it in a nuclear exchange. Within a very short time, Israel’s sovereignty and autonomy would come to resemble Minnesota’s. http://pub25.bravenet.com/journal/post.php?entryid=23334
http://sheehan.myblogsite.com/
http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com/This is not a bad thing if your country happens to border Iowa. It works less well in Israel’s neighborhood.

I’m not questioning American friendship. But even friendship has practical limits. Presidents change and policies change. George W. Bush, the greatest friend Israel has had in the White House, hasn’t been able to keep a (relatively easier) commitment to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. It is a good thing that Israel didn’t build its deterrence on that commitment.

What’s more, it is fair to say that Israel is not a weak country. It has developed a powerful set of strategic options. In the best case, it would be able to act on its own to degrade and retard the Iranian nuclear program as it did in Iraq (and, more recently, Syria). In a worse case, if the Iranians do get the bomb, Iranian leaders might be deterred by rational considerations. If so, Israel’s own arsenal — and its manifest willingness to respond to a nuclear attack — ought to suffice.

If, on the other hand, the Iranian leadership simply can’t resist the itch to “wipe Israel off the map” — or to make such a thing appear imminent — then it would be up to Israel to make its own calculations. What is the price of 100,000 dead in Tel Aviv? Or twice that? The cost to Iran would certainly be ghastly. It would be wrong for Israel to expect other nations to shoulder this moral and geopolitical responsibility.

Don’t misunderstand. It would be a noble thing for the United States to support Israel’s efforts to stop an Iranian bomb or, if it comes to that, to back Israel’s response to an attack. But no country can rely on the kindness of others.

Next month Israel celebrates its 60th Independence Day. Sovereignty comes with a price. Israel’s willingness to pay it is the only Holocaust doctrine that it can really rely on.



When the idea for a new drug-delivery company called BIND Biosciences Inc. started percolating in a lab here four years ago, venture capitalists quickly offered to invest.

One moneyman, though, had an inside track: Terry McGuire, a partner with nearby Polaris Venture Partners. Mr. McGuire was familiar with BIND's nano-particle technology to treat tumors and heart disease. He's also a friend, and frequent business partner, of Robert Langer, the decorated scientist who runs the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab. That relationship often gives Polaris first dibs on cutting-edge medical technology developed there.

Together, Messrs. McGuire and Langer have launched 13 companies over the past 15 years and become a model for other venture capitalists scrambling to commercialize new drug and medical-device research. Dr. Langer, 59 years old, holds more than 600 patents and supplies the science; Mr. McGuire, 52, fine-tunes the business. Some of Mr. McGuire's work with Mr. Langer was described in a 2005 Harvard Business School case study called, "The Langer Lab: Commercializing Science."

"I don't think either one of them would have been as successful without the other," says Andrey Zarur, a bioscience investor with Kodiak Venture Partners who is familiar with Dr. Langer's lab.

Other serial "academic entrepreneurs" have teamed up with VCs to launch bioscience companies. They include Harvard professor George Whitesides, who helped start biotech giant Genzyme Corp. and drug company Theravance Inc., and Stanford ophthalmologist Mark Blumenkranz, whose research helped launch OptiMedica Corp., which is developing new technology to treat eye disease. Dr. Blumenkranz joined with venture capitalist Brook Byers on OptiMedica, and "we're working on another project together," says Mr. Byers, a partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com/2841488/
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But few venture capitalists have been as successful as Mr. McGuire in cultivating one scientist as a source of deals.

Hooking up with a prolific university inventor is important in bioscience investing because most health-related start-ups, unlike information-technology companies, are born in academia. The technology is complex, and investors say they prefer to work with a longtime partner they can trust.

Mr. McGuire first sought out Dr. Langer, a wiry chemical engineer, in the early 1990s after hearing about his research into drug delivery and "regenerative medicine," or techniques to rebuild human tissue and organs. One early big hit came in 1997, when they co-founded, with another Langer protege, Advanced Inhalation Research Inc. The company, which devised a novel way to deliver large-molecule drugs via the lungs, was sold for $113 million in stock 18 months later; Polaris made nearly 10 times its money, and Dr. Langer profited as a significant shareholder of AIR.

Since then, the two have teamed up on other drug-related start-ups like Pulmatrix Inc., which is developing inhalable aerosols for respiratory disease, and Tempo Pharmaceuticals Inc., which uses nanotechnology to create new drugs. Of the 13 investments, two companies went public and three were acquired.

Dr. Langer has a knack for understanding which lab projects can be commercialized and which are better left to scientific journals, Mr. McGuire says. Researchers who have worked for Dr. Langer say he is a talented manager who hires smart graduate students and gives them leeway to pursue their interests, whether they lie in stem-cell research, tissue generation or drug delivery.

Mr. McGuire, meanwhile, helps the scientist-entrepreneurs in Dr. Langer's lab develop business plans, target potential markets and recruit managers. He also helps them negotiate partnerships with bigger companies and sometimes lends them spare offices at Polaris's headquarters.

Polaris is often the first place Dr. Langer and his researchers turn when they're considering starting a company. Sometimes, "when we end up doing deals, it's a 20-second phone call," Dr. Langer says.

Proteges of the men now collaborate as well. BIND began with research by Omid Farokhzad, a researcher in Dr. Langer's lab who was trying to engineer nano-particles to deliver drugs to specific sites in the body. He sought advice from Amir Nashat, a Polaris partner who had also worked in Dr. Langer's lab. Mr. Nashat met Polaris's Mr. McGuire through Dr. Langer.

Then Mr. McGuire stepped in, helping Mr. Farokhzad negotiate a license for his technology from MIT. Mr. McGuire also helped the company find a lawyer and recruited BIND's chief executive, Glenn Batchelder. "Before there was even a company, we tried to be helpful," Mr. McGuire says.

BIND spurned an investment offer from another venture-capital firm and, last year, took $2.5 million in funding from Polaris and Flagship Ventures, of Cambridge. In November, it raised another $16 million. BIND now has 21 employees, and a partnership with a big pharmaceutical company, which it declined to name.

The policy alternatives in the post-housing-bubble world are painfully unpleasant. In my view, the least bad option is for the Federal Reserve to print money to help stabilize housing prices and financial markets. Yes, use reflation to soften the pain for Main Street and Wall Street. If instead we let housing prices fall another 25%-30% – as predicted by the Case-Shiller Home Price Index – it's almost certain that Washington will end up nationalizing the mortgage business.

So far, the Fed's lending programs have not provided adequate liquidity to financial markets: Reserves supplied to the banking system have grown at a tiny 0.6% annual rate since December. That's because the reserves the Fed is injecting by lending are effectively pulled out or "sterilized" by its sales of Treasury securities. The Fed has been selling these securities to keep the fed funds rate at the level targeted by its Federal Open Market Committee directives.

Congress and the Treasury have proposed voluntary measures to help mortgage borrowers, but the impact on mortgage availability has been nil. As average house prices plummet – declining at a 23% annual rate over the three months ending in January – lenders are sharply curtailing access to mortgage-based, home-equity loans. The 15% of U.S. mortgage holders with negative equity in their homes have no access to credit, and 20% with marginal equity have limited access at best. Overall access to credit is contracting: Ask Americans trying to utilize home-equity lines or arrange student loans.

Meanwhile, the collapse of house prices and the attendant damage to credit markets have become so severe that the Fed has been forced to create new policy measures at a fast clip, including the radical decision to take $30 billion worth of Bear Stearns' risky mortgages onto its own balance sheet, and to open the discount window to investment banks.

The bottom line is this: The Fed could have watched a run on investment banks quickly turn into a run on commercial banks, or protected the creditors of investment banks (like the depositors of commercial banks) at the expense of Bear Stearns' shareholders. The Fed wisely chose the second alternative.

Still, the Fed's intervention has done no more than buy a respite from the crisis in the financial markets. The monetary easing I'm recommending can occur by having the Fed print money to purchase mortgages directly, or purchase Treasury securities directly. The latter is probably more desirable because it adds higher-quality assets to the Fed's balance sheet. The Bank of Japan was also forced to reflate by printing money in 2001, after two years of a zero interest-rate policy failed to lift the economy out of a prolonged recession that had moved Japan to the brink of a deflationary crisis.

Fed reflation – to slow the fall in home prices and alleviate the distress for households and lenders – carries many risks. But the alternative is to struggle with a patchwork of inadequate efforts to shore up mortgage markets, while the Fed sticks to its current tactic of pegging the fed funds rate without increasing the money supply. This, I would submit, is even more risky. It risks a severe recession that will only intensify the drive for reregulation of financial and mortgage markets after the election.

Printing money is a radical step that enables the Fed to stop pegging the federal-funds rate and start increasing market liquidity directly. In any event, there is substantial evidence that the fed funds rate has been well above the equilibrium level. One piece of evidence is the accelerating deterioration in credit markets and the real economy that ensued even while the Fed cut the rate. Even more compelling, consider the sharp widening of the gap between the fed funds rate and the yield on three-month Treasury bills.

That gap, usually close to zero, measures the intensity of demand for riskless assets relative to the Fed's target rate in the interbank market. At the time of the Bear Stearns crisis on March 16, the fed funds rate was an extraordinary 250 basis points above yields on three-month Treasurys. This corresponded to a "10 sigma," or ten-times-the-typical deviation from the mean event. Statistically, 2 or 3 sigma is a very unusual event suggesting, in this case, an unusually strong preference for riskless T-bills. Four or 5 sigma represents a serious risky event, and 10 sigma is an outright panic. Based on this gap criterion, the August 2007 crisis onset was a 5-sigma event, while the October 1998 LTCM crisis and the 1987 stock market crash were each 4-sigma events. This suggests that even at those earlier times of crisis there was less fear as expressed by a run into riskless Treasurys. http://blogs.ebay.com/mytymouse1/home/_W0QQentrysyncidZ526811010
Louis J Sheehan
Ominously, after dipping close to 5 sigma after the Bear Stearns crisis, the gap has crept back above 6 sigma.

The Fed should announce its intention to add to its holding of Treasury securities in order to provide additional liquidity. It should cease pegging the fed funds rate while this policy is in effect. While there is no guarantee, direct injection of money holds some promise of alleviating the worst of the credit crisis. This means that, after the election, Congress will not feel justified in nationalizing mortgage markets.

While there is a substantial risk that inflation may rise for a time – this would be the policy goal – monetization is more easily reversible than nationalization of the mortgage market. Meanwhile, Fed officials concerned about inflation should rethink their view that it is impossible to identify an asset bubble before it bursts.

The postbubble period has yielded some very unattractive policy alternatives. They clearly underscore the rationale for having the Fed target asset prices – in a world where asset markets affect the real economy more than the real economy affects asset markets.


Most discussions about the rising cost of health care emphasize the need to get more people insured. The assumption seems to be that insurance – rather than the service delivered by doctor to patient – is the important commodity.

But perhaps the solution to much of what currently plagues us in health care – rising costs and bureaucracy, diminishing levels of service – rests on a radically different approach: fewer people insured.

You don't need to be an economist to understand that any middleman interposed between seller and buyer raises the price of a given service or product. Some intermediaries justify this by providing benefits, such as salesmanship, advertising or transport. Others offer physical facilities, such as warehouses. A third group, organized crime, utilizes fear and intimidation to muscle its way into the provider-consumer chain, raking in hefty profits and bloating cost, without providing any benefit at all.

The health insurance model is closest to the parasitic relationship imposed by the Mafia and the like. Insurance companies provide nothing other than an ambiguous, shifty notion of "protection." But even the Mafia doesn't stick its nose into the process; once the monthly skim is set, Don Whoever stays out of the picture, but for occasional "cost of doing business" increases. When insurance companies insinuate themselves into the system, their first step is figuring out how to increase the skim by harming the people they are allegedly protecting through reduced service.

Insurance is all about betting against negative consequences and the insurance business model is unique in that profits depend upon goods and services not being provided. Using actuarial tables, insurers place their bets. Sometimes even the canniest MIT grads can't help: Property and casualty insurers have collapsed in the wake of natural disasters. http://louis-j-sheehan.myblogvoice.com/louis-j-sheehan-1023071-205297.htm
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Health insurers have taken steps to avoid that level of surprise: Once they affix themselves to the host – in this case dual hosts, both doctor and patient – they systematically suck the lifeblood out of the supply chain with obstructive strategies. For that reason, the consequences of any insurance-based health-care model, be it privately run, or a government entitlement, are painfully easy to predict. There will be progressively draconian rationing using denial of authorization and steadily rising co-payments on the patient end; massive paperwork and other bureaucratic hurdles, and steadily diminishing fee-recovery on the doctor end.

Some of us are old enough to remember visiting the doctor and paying him/her directly by check or cash. You had a pretty good idea going in what the service was going to cost. And because the doctor had to look you in the eye – and didn't need to share a rising chunk of his profits with an insurer – the cost was likely to be reasonable. The same went for hospitals: no $20 aspirins due to insurance-company delay tactics and other shenanigans. Few physicians became millionaires, but they lived comfortably, took responsibility for their own business model, and enjoyed their work more.

Several years ago, I suffered a sports injury that necessitated an MRI. The "fee" for a 20-minute procedure was over $3,000. My insurance company refused to pay, so I informed the radiologist that I'd be footing the bill myself. Immediately, the "fee" was cut by two thirds. And the doctor was tickled to get it.

A few highly technical and complex procedures that need to amortize the purchase of extremely expensive hardware will be out of reach for any but the wealthiest patient. For that extremely limited category, insurance might work. A small percentage of indigent individuals won't be able to afford even low-cost procedures. For them, government-funded county facilities are the answer, because any decent society takes care of the weakest among us. But a hefty proportion of health-care services – office visits, minor surgeries – would be affordable to most Americans if the slice of the health-care dollar that currently ends up in the coffers of insurance companies was eliminated.

When I was in practice as a psychologist, I discussed fees up front with prospective patients, prior to their initial visit. People appreciated knowing what to expect and my bad debt rate was less than 1%. That allowed me to keep my charges reasonable and, on occasion, to lower them for less fortunate patients. http://www.myface.com/index.php?do=/public/account/submit/add-blog/added_3049/
And I loved my job because I was free to concentrate on what I went to school for: helping people, rather than filling out incomprehensible forms designed to discourage me from filing them in the first place.

Physicians and other providers need to liberate themselves from the Faustian bargain they've cut with the Mephistophelian suits who now run their professional lives. Because many doctors are loath to talk about money, they allowed themselves to perpetuate the fantasy that "insurance is paying." It isn't. There is no free lunch and no free physical exam.

If substantial numbers of health-care providers shook off the insurance monkey on their back, en masse, and the supply of providers was substantially increased by opening more medical schools, the result would be a more honest, cost-effective system benefiting everyone. Except the insurance companies.


On a recent balmy Sunday, John and Cindy McCain hosted the national press corps at their ranch here. Mrs. McCain's touches were evident -- the ceiling fans hung from tree branches, the art of their children displayed on the cabin's walls, the Budweiser beer tap from her family's business. http://louis2j2sheehan.bloggerteam.com/
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Dogs she has adopted ran about.
Cindy McCain regularly introduces her husband at events, but often retreats when her duties are done.

Showing off his barbecue skills, Sen. McCain pulled sizzling ribs off the grill and dispensed them on the sweeping porch. Mrs. McCain, in skinny jeans with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, stood nearby and just smiled.

The 53-year-old wife of Sen. McCain doesn't seek the limelight. While the picture-perfect Mrs. McCain regularly introduces her husband at campaign events, she often retreats after her duties are done, donning her fully loaded iPod and typing away on her silver BlackBerry.

"The campaign gets to be a little too much for me," she said in an interview. "I take some time off occasionally...and then I get back out."

As the wife of the expected Republican nominee, Mrs. McCain will face intensifying scrutiny. Both of Sen. McCain's potential opponents have high-profile spouses who have assumed very public roles in the campaigns -- and have at times undergone fierce criticism and media attention.

The pressure already has begun. Recently, Mrs. McCain faced the press with Sen. McCain to deny news reports that her husband of 28 years had an affair with a lobbyist.

Although she says she wants to be a "traditional" first lady, Mrs. McCain has led a life that by any measure has been untraditional.

She heads one of the nation's largest beer distributorships, an Anheuser-Busch Cos. franchise inherited from her father. She has sported "MS BUD" on her license plate, and from the campaign trail she uses her BlackBerry and cellphone to oversee this region's rollout of Bud Lite Lime and to expand her corporate empire.


Last month, while Sen. McCain was touring Europe and Iraq to show his foreign-policy credentials, Mrs. McCain flew into postwar Kosovo on a mission to clear land mines. It was the latest of several trips she has made in recent years as part of a detonation team. She also supports the charity arranging the trips by serving on its board and making donations.

"Cindy is a private person with her own stresses and commitments -- apart from her public role in John's campaign," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close friend of the McCains. "She juggles bowling balls."

Sen. McCain, 71, calls his wife "a real trooper." After knee-replacement surgery following a fall in a grocery store a few months ago, Mrs. McCain, always meticulously dressed and coiffed even on crutches, quickly hit the trail. "Sometimes when we get in bed at night, I hear her groan" from the pain, the senator said in an interview.

When John McCain met his future wife, Cindy Hensley was a 24-year-old only child on vacation with her parents. In Phoenix, she had been her high school's rodeo queen, sporting a cowboy hat complete with a crown. After earning education degrees at the University of Southern California (which Sen. McCain has called "University of Spoiled Children"), she became a special-needs teacher.

She also got involved in the beer distributorship started by her father. Art Pearce, who worked at his own family's company, a Coors distributor in Phoenix, frequently ran into her at industry events. "You could tell by her air that she was very proud of her family's business," Mr. Pearce said.

Her focus shifted as soon as she met John McCain, a dashing Navy officer in his dress whites, at a cocktail party in Hawaii, where she was vacationing with her parents. They had "instant chemistry," Mrs. McCain has said. She didn't know he had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam for five years. She has said that they both lied about their ages: He said he was four years younger; she said she was three years older.

At the time, Sen. McCain was separated from his first wife, with whom he had a daughter. He had adopted his wife's two sons. After a divorce, he married Cindy Hensley in 1980. http://louisbjbsheehan.blogspot.com/
Having signed a prenuptial agreement that her assets would remain separate, he left the Navy to join her father's business, Hensley & Co., as a public-relations manager for $50,000 a year. His young wife brought home much more from company distributions.

Her family provided some of the funding when he ran for Congress in 1982. After his election, the couple began a commuter marriage, with Mrs. McCain staying in Phoenix to raise their growing family.

"We really feel that one of the smartest things we ever did was have our kids grow up in Arizona," Sen. McCain said recently on the trail. "It's very tough to be a relative of a politician in Washington, because of the fishbowl effect." Although the commuter marriage continues to this day, Sen. McCain said the family took two vacations together every year and Mrs. McCain "is the one that always made that happen."

In 2000, when Mrs. McCain's father died, she inherited the beer distributorship. Hensley's chief executive, Bob Delgado, said he sat down with Mrs. McCain to ask what she wanted to do with the business. He expected her to put it up for sale.

"I want the employees and their families to know that I will take care of them the way my dad has," she recalls telling Mr. Delgado. "I'm not going to sell just because he died." Mrs. McCain said she wanted the company her father built from scratch to go to her children someday, Mr. Delgado said.

Mrs. McCain assumed her father's position as chairman. She began focusing on strategic issues and big-budget items, leaving day-to-day operations to Mr. Delgado and Chief Financial Officer Andy McCain, her stepson.

"I have good people in place...I trust them and I love them," Mrs. McCain said, adding that she speaks to Mr. Delgado almost daily. "I'm the ultimate person who makes the large decisions; major changes, growth decisions."

Since James Hensley's death eight years ago, the distributorship has nearly doubled, holding a significant portion of the Phoenix-area market share. It has 700 employees and annual revenue of about $300 million. Mrs. McCain has approved the buyout of another distributorship, helping bring sales last year to 23 million cases of beer.

Mrs. McCain (who can tell a beer's freshness by tasting it, according to her daughter Meghan) declines to say what percentage of the company she owns or its value. Industry experts estimate her stake at about $100 million.

She owns a private jet, which Sen. McCain's campaign pays to use on the trail. http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com/

She started the Hensley Family Foundation, largely committed to children's causes, to which Sen. McCain donates some of his speaking fees and book proceeds.

In 1991, Sen. McCain became embroiled in the "Keating Five" scandal, in which five senators were probed for ties with a thrift executive. The Arizona lawmaker wasn't charged with any ethics violation.

That same year, Mrs. McCain underwent two back surgeries, and she said she became addicted to painkillers. She resorted to stealing some drugs from a medical charity she had started and using others' names for prescriptions, according to news reports at the time.

"I was trying to be the perfect woman," Mrs. McCain said in interviews at the time. "That was the darkest period of my life."

The Drug Enforcement Administration began an investigation of Mrs. McCain in 1994, but she avoided prosecution by paying a fine, performing community service in a soup kitchen and joining Narcotics Anonymous. She had to close her medical charity.

"Cindy faced up to her addiction," Sen. McCain said.

Since coming clean, "I've never been secretive about it at all, because [talking about addiction] is part of the recovery process," Mrs. McCain said. "It's part of my life; it has made me a better person and certainly made me a better mother."

The past year has been particularly stressful because their 19-year-old son, Jimmy, did a tour of duty in Iraq. Their son Jack also is in the military, attending the Naval Academy, as did his father, grandfather and great grandfather. Meghan, a recent Columbia University graduate, travels and blogs for the campaign, while the younger daughter, Bridget, attends high school.

One day, Mrs. McCain answered her son Jimmy's call from Iraq as the campaign bus pulled up to a town hall where the McCains were scheduled to appear. The phone line suddenly went dead; she grew teary. Two minutes later, she stepped onto the stage and calmly introduced her husband.

In 1991, Mrs. McCain came across a girl in an orphanage in Bangladesh. Mother Teresa implored Mrs. McCain to take the baby with a severe cleft palate; the senator's wife did so without first telling her husband. The couple adopted the girl, named her Bridget, and has seen her through some dozen operations to repair her cleft palate and resolve other medical problems.

When Bridget drops into the campaign, Mrs. McCain goes out of her way to point her out. "I want to make sure everyone knows she's a part of us, too," she said. (The dark-skinned child was the subject of a "dirty trick" during Mr. McCain's presidential run in 2000, when unknown operatives spread the rumor that Bridget was the product of an affair.)

These days, Mrs. McCain is active in charities specializing in war-ravaged and developing countries. This summer, Mrs. McCain will join an overseas mission of Operation Smile, a charity she has long supported that travels the world to perform corrective surgery on children's faces.

Her reticence about the spotlight is why she surprised some friends and advisers recently by wading into a controversy involving Michelle Obama. The wife of Sen. Barack Obama had commented that her husband's run for the presidency made her proud of her country for the first time in her life. Mrs. McCain declared on the stump that she always has been, "and always will be, proud of my country."

"It wasn't planned," Mrs. McCain said. "It wasn't about my stepping out on my own, but I do have opinions." However, she's more likely to keep them to herself.

"My husband's the candidate," she said. "I'm not."

Static in the global TV-set business is forcing some big players to re-tune their game.

On Monday, Philips Electronics NV blamed a profit dip on its floundering TV operations -- just days after saying it would restructure its North American television business. Earlier this month, Sony Corp. replaced its top TV executive following failed efforts to turn around its unprofitable television unit. Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the maker of Panasonic products, recently reorganized a part of its U.S. business to better respond to intensifying price competition.

But one upstart, Irvine, Calif.-based Vizio Inc., has largely surfed past the industry's woes. http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com/
http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/Its single focus: churning out low-priced flat-panel TVs.

Vizio is a fraction the size of Sony and Samsung Electronics Co., both leading brands in the U.S. flat-panel market. Yet Vizio shipped 12.4% of North America's liquid-crystal display, or LCD, TVs in the last quarter of 2007. That's just behind Sony's 12.5% share and Samsung's 14.2%, according to research firm iSuppli Corp. Overall, Vizio's sales have multiplied to just under $2 billion last year, up from $700 million in 2006 and $142 million in 2005, according to the closely held company.

The California company's success illustrates the rise of a new business model in the fast-changing TV industry. Big Korean and Japanese consumer-electronics makers spent huge sums developing and marketing their own technology, creating a high barrier to entry for newcomers. They also built many key components in-house, including the all-important LCD and plasma display panels.

But panel technology is becoming ever more commoditized, meaning big brands aren't the only ones controlling the field. The shift has allowed nimble players like Vizio, which handles the design and marketing, to hook up with contract manufacturers and produce their own cheap TVs. At the same time, discount retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. are increasing their sales in the electronics category, slashing prices in the process.

By late last year -- after a spate of holiday promotions -- the average flat-panel TV cost just $920, down 24% from 2006, according to DisplaySearch.

Vizio chief executive William Wang was prescient. A native of Taiwan and a former marketer of computer monitors, he was struck by a 2002 ad for a $10,000 Philips flat-panel TV. He sensed an opportunity. Rather than sell the sleek sets as luxury items, he figured he could make flat-panel TVs that were affordable to average consumers.


Back then, the computer-monitor business had largely transitioned from clunky cathode-ray tubes to flat panels. Mr. Wang knew many of the parts in flat computer screens were used in flat-panel TVs. Tapping his computer contacts in Taiwan, he calculated he could get enough parts to qualify for a bulk discount and use them to make inexpensive TVs.

To fund the effort, Mr. Wang borrowed money from friends and family. He also mortgaged his home in Newport Beach, Calif., eventually raising $600,000. While he wanted to name the new company "W" after himself, he settled for "V" after learning that a hotel chain had claimed the letter. V launched in October of 2002.


In January 2003, Mr. Wang met with executives at Costco Wholesale Corp. in Issaquah, Wash. He pitched them on a 46-inch plasma flat-panel TV for $3,800 -- half the price of competitors' sets. During the meeting, Mr. Wang said he wanted to become the next Sony in five years, says Tim Farmer, Costco's vice president of merchandising for consumer electronics. The Costco executives laughed, Mr. Farmer recalls.

Nonetheless, the Costco team was impressed enough with V that they decided to give Mr. Wang a chance, says Mr. Farmer. By February 2003, Costco was stocking V's TVs in 10 of its warehouses. A month later, it expanded the line to all 320 of its U.S. warehouses. That store count has since grown to 385. Today, Costco says Vizio is one of its largest TV suppliers.

"Vizio has always supplied my projections, and I've never been shorted product," says Mr. Farmer.

For Gabe Billings, a 33-year-old stay-at-home dad, price was the main concern when he purchased a 37-inch Vizio from Costco this month. Mr. Billings, of Eugene, Ore., says he isn't so brand conscious when it comes to TVs. http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com/
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"I didn't see any point in spending hundreds of dollars more for something I won't be able to tell the difference, once I get home," says Mr. Billings. He says he spent $749 for the Vizio, versus the roughly $1,100 charged for bigger-name models.

Much of Vizio's success stems from the cozy relationship that Mr. Wang has forged with Taipei-based AmTran Technology Co. AmTran is a contract manufacturer that for years built computer monitors and TVs for companies like Sharp Corp. and Sony. Unlike with those customers, however, AmTran owns a 23% stake in Vizio.

The arrangement gets Vizio preferential treatment. AmTran sometimes swallows shipping costs and pushes component suppliers to ensure Vizio's products are high quality and on time. AmTran now gets about 80% of its revenue from Vizio. In turn, Vizio sources as many as 85% of its TVs from AmTran, according to research firm DisplaySearch.

"Unlike many PC companies who try to make their money by trying to squeezing the vendor, we try to work with our vendor," says Mr. Wang, 44 years old. Scottie Chiu, AmTran's chief financial officer, doesn't dispute that his company gives Vizio preferential treatment.

Other TV upstarts are pursuing similar strategies. Syntax-Brillian Corp., the Tempe, Ariz., seller of the low-cost Olevia brand of TVs, works with electronics manufacturer Taiwan Kolin Co., which bought a 12.5% stake in the TV maker in 2006. Flat-panel TV maker Westinghouse Digital Electronics LLC of Santa Fe Springs, Calif., says it works closely with Chi Mei Optoelectronics Corp., Taiwan's second-largest maker of LCD panels.

Sony and others, such as Matsushita, say they aren't fazed by their much smaller rivals. Stan Glasgow, president and chief operating officer for Sony Electronics, says Vizio's lack of in-house manufacturing and development resources will hold the company back. "Vizio doesn't have the kind of resources and money to lock up [flat panel] supply," he says. "I think they're in trouble."

Mr. Wang sees no disadvantage to not owning factories. So far, Vizio has largely made products based on existing technology, although the CEO does have ambitions to dream up new products. "R&D is the key for innovation, not manufacturing," he says.


Born in Taiwan in 1963 and raised in Hawaii, Mr. Wang studied electrical engineering at the University of Southern California. He returned to Taiwan in the 1980s to work for Tatung Co., which made computer monitors for International Business Machines Corp. While at Tatung, Mr. Wang met and befriended Alpha Wu, the future founder of AmTran, who was then a founding executive at a Taiwanese monitor maker.

By 2004, Mr. Wang had changed his six-person company's name to Vizio. He also decided he needed another round of funding, of about $2 million. He targeted manufacturing partners since he wanted to tie suppliers to the success of the brand.

AmTran, the 3,000-employee manufacturer that his friend Mr. Wu founded in 1994, was a natural choice. But AmTran was hurting. The company reported 2004 earnings of $4.1 million on revenue of $428 million and a profit margin of just 0.9%. In 2005, it had a loss.

Mr. Wang suggested to Mr. Wu that AmTran invest in Vizio because its TVs were gaining traction in U.S. retail stores. By then, Vizio was producing $18 million a year in revenue and was profitable, he says. In April 2004, AmTran bought an 8% stake in Vizio for about $1 million, say the companies. (AmTran declined to make Mr. Wu available for comment.) That same month, Mr. Wang sold an additional 8% of Vizio to an affiliate of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., the world's biggest contract manufacturer of electronics.


Vizio's move was both bold and unique, because the company wasn't just outsourcing its manufacturing as many companies do, but it was also creating an equity partnership with a major supplier.
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Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
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AmTran CFO Mr. Chiu says the company hoped the Vizio relationship would blossom into a strategic partnership, but "nobody knew" whether such close cooperation with a customer would work. Suppliers are typically reluctant to do too much business with a single customer, because it risks disaster if the relationship fails.

Vizio soon leveraged its new manufacturing clout to increase its number of television models to five from two. It also broadened its distribution into retailers such as Wal-Mart's Sam's Club division and BJ's Wholesale Club Inc.

In 2006, Vizio says sales of its TVs jumped fivefold, to 700,000 sets from a year earlier. That June, AmTran bought an additional 15% of Vizio's shares from the company's departing CFO, who was moving back to Taiwan, both companies say. They declined to reveal how much the additional stake cost.

The alliance helped AmTran turn a corner. According to the company, revenues last year rose to $2.1 billion, up more than double from $959 million in 2006 and nearly five times its 2005 revenue. Earnings were $31.5 million in 2006, compared with a net loss in 2005. Mr. Chiu, the AmTran CFO, says business is hard to predict this year, given the shaky U.S. economy, but he expects revenue to grow by at least 30%.

The synergies continue to benefit both companies. In a brand-boosting coup, Vizio last July snared National Football League star LaDainian Tomlinson as a pitchman. The San Diego Chargers running back has endorsed Vizio's sets through television ads and appearances on shows such as Dr. Phil.

Last October, a Vizio official showed Seong Ohm, senior vice president of merchandising technology for Sam's Club, some new products. Ms. Ohm says she wanted a TV that female customers could relate to, especially something that could blend into a kitchen scheme. She got a peek at a prototype of a white, 20-inch flat-panel TV. Ms. Ohm liked the design so much, she says she asked Vizio to get 20,000 of the TVs to Sam's Club by early March. The sets have since arrived in the U.S. and are featured in Sam's Club's Spring catalog for $348.78 apiece.


Still, some hurdles loom. Vizio may face a shortage of LCD panels. Neither Vizio nor AmTran produce the flat panels themselves, and the companies that make them may hoard them to sell under their own brands. AmTran's Mr. Chiu says the supply of LCD panels in the midsize range -- 32 inches -- could become "tight" in the second half of 2008 if U.S. demand holds up. But he says AmTran hopes to secure enough supply by leveraging its sizable purchases of large-size panels.

Mr. Wang says Vizio plans to further diversify its product portfolio into TVs made from plasma panels and may also expand into Blu-ray DVD players. But he has tempered his earlier ambitions about quickly becoming the new Sony.

"We still have a long way to go," he says. "Our goal is to be the next Sony in 20 or 30 years."
Switch on a laptop or cellphone and you've used coltan, a mineral imbedded in electronic hardware; most of it is exported from Africa by criminals. Buy a cheap pack of cigarettes on a street corner and you may have fed a mob of black marketeers that stretches into Indian reservations or, in Europe, deep into the bloody misery of the Balkans. Wander outside the normal channels for caviar or tax-free migrant labor and you will have made bands of brigands ever more prosperous. And organized crime is the only winner from drugs, prostitutes and other illicit offerings not to be found at Wal-Mart or Costco.


The funeral of a gunned-down Japanese yakuza mafia boss in 1988. Gang warfare has subsided in recent years

As Misha Glenny shows in "McMafia," a vividly recounted journey through a dozen of the world's most potent gangs, cartels and transnational mafias, there is hardly any society or economic subculture that is not affected by global criminal networks. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com/
Naturally, criminal markets are not new, but in the late 1980s criminal business activity dramatically flourished with the collapse of communism, the loosening of authoritarian controls across the globe and, not least, the advent of anarchy in parts of Russia and the former Eastern bloc. Mr. Glenny's purpose is to describe the rise of this "shadow economy." He estimates that criminal business now amounts to 20% of global GDP.

The book's title, though clever, is misleading: The world's organized criminals are no homogenized franchise in the McDonald's mold. From place to place and region to region, they take all sorts of shapes and serve all sorts of purposes. In the Ukrainian port of Odessa, a "heroic gangster" named Karabas takes a tithe -- literally 10% -- from the local businesses in exchange for protection from outside criminal enterprises, until he's gunned down. ("Any firm, and there were a lot of them, considered it an honor to be under Karabas's protection," one business owner tells Mr. Glenny.) In Japan, yakuza syndicates eschew actual violence ("the credible threat of violence" is preferable, Mr. Glenny observes) as the mafia pursues its interests in everything from trafficking women to operating as "a de facto legal system" in resolving disputes over such matters as bankruptcy declarations, insurance claims and real-estate transactions. In India, gangs merge with sectarian politics -- "the gang wars of Bombay that exploded with renewed violence in the 1990s were in part a proxy conflict between the intelligence agencies of India and Pakistan," Mr. Glenny writes. But such mergers often self-destruct, he observes, in feuds worthy of Jacobean revenge tragedies. Meanwhile in Nigeria, the talented theatricality of Web-savvy fraudsters fuels "advance fee" scams over the Internet -- you probably have a few requests to help get money out of Africa in your inbox right now. A popular Nigerian song lauds such scams with the refrain: "White man! I go chop your dollar."

Nevertheless, common themes emerge. Organized crime usually steps in to replace state failure: It protects businesses and enforces contracts. Many syndicates move on to corner a monopoly in the supply of some illegal or highly taxed product or service. The two most lucrative fields are arms and drugs. Then come diamonds, energy, cigarettes, stolen cars and the trafficking of women. In one particularly harrowing episode, a duped woman from Moldova tells Mr. Glenny how a girlfriend called her up to tell her of a dream job abroad. She had no idea that a gun was being held to her friend's head. After a nightmarish journey that included the murder of a would-be escapee, the woman was forced under the Israeli border fence to work as a slave in the red-light district of Tel Aviv. Brothels throughout the world are supplied with workers in similar fashion.

Organizations follow patterns too. Criminal masterminds are rare, although Mr. Glenny finds one "merchant of death" in South Africa who buys a whole airport to supply arms to the continent's warring militias. Some mafias are based on families, as in Italy, tight-knit but vulnerable to blood feuds. Most are complex, self-perpetuating organisms, nurturing founding myths and forming shifting alliances with one another.

In later stages, some groups internationalize, seeking to launder money in "washing machines" like the Caribbean island of Aruba or the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai. Then comes the purchase of political influence. It is sometimes professionally done. Indeed, mafias like the Colombian cocaine cartels, which can turn a profit of $4 billion to $8 billion a year, begin to look like "good capitalists and entrepreneurs" -- micro-managing, looking into economies of scale, juggling supply and demand, and wielding MBAs.

Individuals in this underworld, Mr. Glenny finds, can be "fascinating characters of great intelligence, vitality, courage, wit and spirit." He tries and fails to avoid warming to a suave former Indian mobster who tells him that blowing the head off a victim makes him feel like a cricketer when he "hits the ball for six." One reason for such routinization of criminality is that people sometimes have no choice when a country or society collapses around them.

Far too often the criminal world overlaps with the one we think of as legal. If the elites in the West are so clean, why don't they shut down offshore banking centers? If Western countries really want to help backward countries mired in drug production, why don't they open up their own unfairly protected agricultural markets? If Americans want to smoke so many hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weed, are the peaceful-sounding Canadians of British Columbia evil to supply a good chunk of it? Or, as Mr. Glenny suggests, is it American drug prohibition itself that is spawning mafias, injustice and harm?

Mr. Glenny hops around the globe, noting everything from "the sewers of Nigeria's kleptocracy" to the "silent cacaphony of virtual chatter" in the parallel webs of Brazilian cybercrime. A book with such a wide scope inevitably raises more questions than it answers. http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com/
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The lack of historical comparisons and sourcing details leaves one wondering whether today's criminality is really, except for scale, much different from that of the past. But complacent foreign-affairs analysts have too long ignored the role of organized crime in guiding politics and perpetuating conflicts.

Mr. Glenny hopes that clearer-headed democracies can turn back the tide, but successes like the fight against "blood diamonds" are rare: It took government sanctions, a plucky NGO and an international publicity campaign to strangle the market for gems extracted in African war zones and sold to buy guns and supplies. The U.S. war on drugs has failed, he argues: Illicit drug prices have halved in the past decade as consumption and production have risen. In turn, he believes, this failure dooms the U.S. war against terrorism, "a primitive, small species" feeding in the same sea of criminality. He does, however, urge all to be brave. "Sharks only move in for the kill," a Russian mobster confides in him, "when they can taste the fear of their victims."


The drug maker Merck drafted dozens of research studies for a best-selling drug, then lined up prestigious doctors to put their names on the reports before publication, according to an article to be published Wednesday in a leading medical journal.

The article, based on documents unearthed in lawsuits over the pain drug Vioxx, provides a rare, detailed look in the industry practice of ghostwriting medical research studies that are then published in academic journals.

The article cited one draft of a Vioxx research study that was still in want of a big-name researcher, identifying the lead writer only as “External author?”

Vioxx was a best-selling drug before Merck took it off the market in 2004 over evidence linking it to heart attacks. Last fall, the company agreed to a $4.85 billion settlement to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits filed by former Vioxx patients or their families.

The lead author of Wednesday’s article, Dr. Joseph S. Ross of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, said a close look at the Merck documents raised broad questions about the validity of much of the drug industry’s published research, because the ghostwriting practice appears to be widespread.

“It almost calls into question all legitimate research that’s been conducted by the pharmaceutical industry with the academic physician,” said Dr. Ross, whose article, written with colleagues, was published Wednesday in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association. and posted Tuesday on the journal’s Web site.

Merck acknowledged on Tuesday that it sometimes hired outside medical writers to draft research reports before handing them over to the doctors whose names eventually appear on the publication. But the company disputed the article’s conclusion that the authors do little of the actual research or analysis. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire2.blogspot.com/
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The final work is the product of the doctor and “accurately reflects his or her opinion,” said a Merck lawyer, James C. Fitzpatrick.

And at least one of the doctors whose published research was questioned in Wednesday’s article, Dr. Steven H. Ferris, a New York University psychiatry professor, said the notion that the article bearing his name was ghostwritten was “simply false.” He said it was “egregious” that Dr. Ross and his colleagues had done no research besides mining the Merck documents and reading the published journal articles.

In an editorial, JAMA said the analysis showed that Merck had apparently manipulated dozens of publications to promote Vioxx.

“It is clear that at least some of the authors played little direct roles in the study or review, yet still allowed themselves to be named as authors,” the editorial said.

The editorial called upon medical journal editors to require each author to report his or her specific contributions to articles. “Journal editors also bear some of the responsibility for enabling companies to manipulate publications,” the editorial said.

JAMA itself published one of the Vioxx studies that was cited in Dr. Ross’s article.

In that case, in 2002, a Merck scientist was listed as the lead author. But Dr. Catherine D. DeAngelis, JAMA’s editor, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that, even so, it was dishonest because the authors did not fully disclose the role of a ghostwriter.

“I consider that being scammed,” Dr. DeAngelis said. “But is that as serious as allowing someone to have a review article written by a for-profit company and solicited and paid for by a for-profit company and asking you to put your name on it after it was all done?”

Although the role of pharmaceutical companies in influencing medical journal articles has been questioned before, the Merck documents provided the most comprehensive look at the practice yet, according to one of the study’s four authors, Dr. David S. Egilman, a clinical associate medical professor at Brown University.

In the Vioxx lawsuits, millions of Merck documents were supplied to plaintiffs. Those documents were available to Dr. Egilman and Dr. Ross because they had served as consultants to plaintiffs’ lawyers in some of those suits.

Combing through the documents, Dr. Ross and his colleagues unearthed internal Merck e-mail messages and documents about 96 journal publications, which included review articles and reports of clinical studies. While the Ross team said it was not necessarily raising questions about all 96 articles, it said that in many cases there was scant evidence that the recruited authors made substantive contributions.

One paper involved a study of Vioxx as a possible deterrent to Alzheimer’s progression.

The draft of the paper, dated August 2003, identified the lead writer as “External author?” But when it was published in 2005 in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, the lead author was listed as Dr. Leon J. Thal, a well-known Alzheimer’s researcher at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Thal was killed in an airplane crash last year.

The second author listed on the published Alzheimer’s paper, whose name had not been on the draft, was Dr. Ferris, the New York University professor. Dr. Ferris, reached by telephone Tuesday, said he had played an active role in the research and he was substantially involved in helping shape the final draft. http://louis2j1sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/

“It’s simply false that we didn’t contribute to the final publication,” Dr. Ferris said.

A third author, also not named on the initial draft, was Dr. Louis Kirby, currently the medical director for the company Provista Life Sciences. In an e-mail message on Tuesday, Dr. Kirby said that as a clinical investigator for the study he had enrolled more patients, 109, than any of the other researchers. He also said he made revisions to the final document.

“The fact that the draft was written by a Merck employee for later discussion by all the authors does not in and of itself constitute ghostwriting,” Dr. Kirby’s e-mail message said.

The current editor of the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, Dr. James H. Meador-Woodruff, the chairman of psychiatry at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, said he was not the editor in 2005 but planned to investigate the accusations. “Currently, we have in place prohibitions against this,” Dr. Meador-Woodruff said.


While most of what is now Niger has been subsumed into the inhospitable Sahara desert in the last two thousand years, five thousand years ago the north of the country was fertile grasslands. Populations of pastoralists have left paintings of abundant wildlife, domesticated animals, chariots, and a complex culture that dates back to at least 10,000 BCE.

One of the first empires in what is now Niger was the Songhai Empire. During recent centuries, the nomadic Tuareg formed large confederations, pushed southward, and, siding with various Hausa states, clashed with the Fulani Empire of Sokoto, which had gained control of much of the Hausa territory in the late 18th century.
The Kaouar escarpment, forming and oasis in the Ténéré desert.
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In the 19th century, contact with the West began when the first European explorers—notably Mungo Park (British) and Heinrich Barth (German)—explored the area, searching for the source of the Niger River. Although French efforts at "pacification" began before 1900, dissident ethnic groups, especially the desert Tuareg, were not fully subdued until 1922, when Niger became a French colony.

Niger's colonial history and development parallel that of other French West African territories. France administered its West African colonies through a governor general in Dakar, Senegal, and governors in the individual territories, including Niger. In addition to conferring French citizenship on the inhabitants of the territories, the 1946 French constitution provided for decentralization of power and limited participation in political life for local advisory assemblies.


A further revision in the organization of overseas territories occurred with the passage of the Overseas Reform Act (Loi Cadre) of July 23, 1956, followed by reorganizing measures enacted by the French Parliament early in 1957. In addition to removing voting inequalities, these laws provided for creation of governmental organs, assuring individual territories a large measure of self-government. After the establishment of the Fifth French Republic on December 4, 1958, Niger became an autonomous state within the French Community. Following full independence on August 3, 1960, however, membership was allowed to lapse.

Niger is a landlocked nation in West Africa located along the border between the Sahara and Sub-Saharan regions. Its geographic coordinates are latitude 16°N and longitude 8°E. Its area is 1,267,000 square kilometres (489,000 sq mi) of which 300 square kilometres (115 sq mi) is water. This makes Niger slightly less than twice the size of the U.S. state of Texas, and the world's twenty-second largest country (after Chad). Niger is comparable in size to Angola.

Niger borders seven countries on all sides and has a total of 5,697 kilometres (3,540 mi) of borders. The longest border is Nigeria to the south (1,497 km; 930 mi). This is followed by Chad to the east, at 1,175 kilometres (730 mi), Algeria to the north-northwest (956 km; 594 mi), and Mali at 821 kilometres (510 mi). Niger also has small borders in its far southwest frontier with Burkina Faso at 628 kilometres (390 mi) and Benin at 266 kilometres (165 mi) and to the north-northeast (Libya at 354 kilometres (220 mi).

Niger's subtropical climate is mainly very hot and dry, with much desert area. In the extreme south there is a tropical climate on the edges of the Niger River basin. The terrain is predominantly desert plains and sand dunes, with flat to rolling savannah in the south and hills in the north.

The lowest point is the Niger River, with an elevation of 200 metres (722 ft). The highest point is Monts Bagzane at 2,022 metres (6,634 ft).

For its first fourteen years as an independent state, Niger was run by a single-party civilian regime under the presidency of Hamani Diori. In 1974, a combination of devastating drought and accusations of rampant corruption resulted in a coup d'état that overthrew the Diori regime. Col. Seyni Kountché and a small military group ruled the country until Kountché's death in 1987. He was succeeded by his Chief of Staff, Col. Ali Saibou, who released political prisoners, liberalized some of Niger's laws and policies, and promulgated a new constitution. However, President Saibou's efforts to control political reforms failed in the face of union and student demands to institute a multi-party democratic system. The Saibou regime acquiesced to these demands by the end of 1990. New political parties and civic associations sprang up, and a national peace conference was convened in July 1991 to prepare the way for the adoption of a new constitution and the holding of free and fair elections. The debate was often contentious and accusatory, but under the leadership of Prof. André Salifou, the conference developed consensus on the modalities of a transition government. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com/
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A transition government was installed in November 1991 to manage the affairs of state until the institutions of the Third Republic were put into place in April 1993. While the economy deteriorated over the course of the transition, certain accomplishments stand out, including the successful conduct of a constitutional referendum; the adoption of key legislation such as the electoral and rural codes; and the holding of several free, fair, and non-violent nationwide elections. Freedom of the press flourished with the appearance of several new independent newspapers.

The results of the January 1995 parliamentary election meant cohabitation between a rival president and prime minister; this led to governmental paralysis, which provided Col. Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara a rationale to overthrow the Third Republic in January 1996. While leading a military authority that ran the government (Conseil de Salut National) during a 6-month transition period, Baré enlisted specialists to draft a new constitution for a Fourth Republic announced in May 1996. Baré organized a presidential election in July 1996. While voting was still going on, he replaced the electoral commission. The new commission declared him the winner after the polls closed. His party won 57% of parliament seats in a flawed legislative election in November 1996. When his efforts to justify his coup and subsequent questionable elections failed to convince donors to restore multilateral and bilateral economic assistance, a desperate Baré ignored an international embargo against Libya and sought Libyan funds to aid Niger's economy. In repeated violations of basic civil liberties by the regime, opposition leaders were imprisoned; journalists often arrested, and deported by an unofficial militia composed of police and military; and independent media offices were looted and burned.

As part of an initiative started under the 1991 national conference, however, the government signed peace accords in April 1995 with all, meaning Tuareg and Toubou groups that had been in rebellion since 1990. The Tuareg claimed they lacked attention and resources from the central government. The government agreed to absorb some former rebels into the military and, with French assistance, help others return to a productive civilian life.
Mamadou Tandja, President of the Republic of Niger.
Mamadou Tandja, President of the Republic of Niger.

On April 9, 1999, Baré was killed in a coup led by Maj. Daouda Malam Wanké, who established a transitional National Reconciliation Council to oversee the drafting of a constitution for a Fifth Republic with a French style semi-presidential system. In votes that international observers found to be generally free and fair, the Nigerien electorate approved the new constitution in July 1999 and held legislative and presidential elections in October and November 1999. Heading a coalition of the National Movement for a Developing Society (MNSD) and the Democratic and Social Convention (CDS), Mamadou Tandja won the election.

Niger's new constitution was approved in July 1999. It restored the semi-presidential system of government of the December 1992 constitution (Third Republic) in which the president of the republic, elected by universal suffrage for a five-year term, and a prime minister named by the president share executive power. As a reflection of Niger's increasing population, the unicameral National Assembly was expanded in 2004 to 113 deputies elected for a 5 year term under a majority system of representation. Political parties must attain at least 5% of the vote in order to gain a seat in the legislature.

The constitution also provides for the popular election of municipal and local officials, and the first-ever successful municipal elections took place on July 24, 2004. The National Assembly passed in June 2002 a series of decentralization bills. As a first step, administrative powers will be distributed among 265 communes (local councils); in later stages, regions and departments will be established as decentralized entities. A new electoral code was adopted to reflect the decentralization context. The country is currently divided into 8 regions, which are subdivided into 36 districts (departments). The chief administrator (Governor) in each department is appointed by the government and functions primarily as the local agent of the central authorities.

The current legislature elected in December 2004 contains seven political parties. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com/
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President Mamadou Tandja was re-elected in December 2004 and reappointed Hama Amadou as Prime Minister. Mahamane Ousmane, the head of the CDS, was re-elected President of the National Assembly (parliament) by his peers. The new second term government of the Fifth Republic took office on December 30, 2002. In August 2002, serious unrest within the military occurred in Niamey, Diffa, and Nguigmi, but the government was able to restore order within several days.

In June 2007, Seyni Oumarou was nominated as the new Prime Minister after Hama Amadou was democratically forced out of office by the National Assembly through a motion of no confidence.

Departments, arrondissements, and communes
Administrative subdivisions of the Republic of Niger, post 1992.
Administrative subdivisions of the Republic of Niger, post 1992.

Main articles: Departments of Niger, Arrondissements of Niger, and Communes of Niger

Niger is divided into 7 departments and one capital district. The departments are subdivided into 36 arrondissements and further subdivided into 129 communes.






Niger pursues a moderate foreign policy and maintains friendly relations with the West and the Islamic world as well as nonaligned countries. It belongs to the United Nations and its main specialized agencies and in 1980-81 served on the UN Security Council. Niger maintains a special relationship with France and enjoys close relations with its West African neighbors. It is a charter member of the African Union and the West African Monetary Union and also belongs to the Niger River and Lake Chad Basin Commissions, the Economic Community of West African States, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The westernmost regions of Niger are joined with contiguous regions Mali and Burkina Faso under the Liptako-Gourma Authority.

The border dispute with Benin, inherited from colonial times and concerning inter alia Lete Island in the River Niger was finally solved by the ICJ in 2005 to Niger's advantage.

The Niger Armed Forces total 12,000 personnel with approximately 3,700 gendarmes, 300 air force, and 6,000 army personnel. The air force has four operational transport aircraft. The armed forces include general staff and battalion task force organizations consisting of two paratroop units, four light armored units, and nine motorized infantry units located in Tahoua, Agadez, Dirkou, Zinder, Nguigmi, N'Gourti, and Madewela. Since January 2003, Niger has deployed a company of troops to Côte d’Ivoire as part of the ECOWAS stabilization force. In 1991, Niger sent four hundred military personnel to join the American-led allied forces against Iraq during the Gulf War.

Niger's defense budget is modest, accounting for about 1.6% of government expenditures. France provides the largest share of military assistance to Niger. Morocco, Algeria, China, and Libya have also provided military assistance. Approximately 15 French military advisers are in Niger. Many Nigerien military personnel receive training in France, and the Nigerien Armed Forces are equipped mainly with material either given by or purchased in France. In the past, U.S. assistance focused on training pilots and aviation support personnel, professional military education for staff officers, and initial specialty training for junior officers. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com/
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A small foreign military assistance program was initiated in 1983. A U.S. Defense Attaché office opened in June 1985 and assumed Security Assistance Office responsibilities in 1987. The office closed in 1996 following a coup d'état. A U.S. Defense Attaché office reopened in July 2000. The United States provided transportation and logistical assistance to Nigerien troops deployed to Cote d’Ivoire in 2003. Additionally, the U.S. provided initial equipment training on vehicles and communications gear to a select contingent of Nigerien soldiers as part of the Department of State Pan Sahel Initiative.

The economy of Niger centers on subsistence crops, livestock, and some of the world's largest uranium deposits. Drought cycles, desertification, a 2.9% population growth rate, and the drop in world demand for uranium have undercut the economy.

Niger shares a common currency, the CFA franc, and a common central bank, the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO), with seven other members of the West African Monetary Union.

In December 2000, Niger qualified for enhanced debt relief under the International Monetary Fund program for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) and concluded an agreement with the Fund for Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF). Debt relief provided under the enhanced HIPC initiative significantly reduces Niger's annual debt service obligations, freeing funds for expenditures on basic health care, primary education, HIV/AIDS prevention, rural infrastructure, and other programs geared at poverty reduction. In December 2005, it was announced that Niger had received 100% multilateral debt relief from the IMF, which translates into the forgiveness of approximately $86 million USD in debts to the IMF, excluding the remaining assistance under HIPC. Nearly half of the government's budget is derived from foreign donor resources. Future growth may be sustained by exploitation of oil, gold, coal, and other mineral resources. Uranium prices have recovered somewhat in the last few years. A drought and locust infestation in 2005 led to food shortages for as many as 2.5 million Nigeriens.

Agriculture
The fertile south of Niger near the Niger river.
The fertile south of Niger near the Niger river.

Niger's agricultural and livestock sectors are the mainstay of all but 18% of the population. Fourteen percent of Niger's GDP is generated by livestock production—camels, goats, sheep, and cattle—said to support 29% of the population. The 15% of Niger's land that is arable is found mainly along its southern borders with Nigeria, Benin and Burkina Faso. Rainfall varies and when insufficient, Niger has difficulty feeding its population and must rely on grain purchases and food aid to meet food requirements. Although the rains in 2000 were not good, the three following years brought relatively plentiful and well-distributed rainfall, resulting in good harvests. Millet, sorghum, and cassava are Niger's principal rain-fed subsistence crops. Cowpeas and onions are grown for commercial export, as are limited quantities of garlic, peppers, gum arabic, and sesame seeds.


Uranium is Niger's largest export. Foreign exchange earnings from livestock, although difficult to quantify, are second. Actual exports far exceed official statistics, which often fail to detect large herds of animals informally crossing into Nigeria. Some hides and skins are exported, and some are transformed into handicrafts.

The persistent uranium price slump has brought lower revenues for Niger's uranium sector, although uranium still provides 72% of national export proceeds. The nation enjoyed substantial export earnings and rapid economic growth during the 1960s and 1970s after the opening of two large uranium mines near the northern town of Arlit. When the uranium-led boom ended in the early 1980s, however, the economy stagnated, and new investment since then has been limited. Niger's two uranium mines—SOMAIR's open pit mine and COMINAK's underground mine—are owned by a French-led consortium and operated by French interests. However, as of 2007, many licences have been given to other companies from countries such as Canada and Australia in order to exploit new deposits.

Exploitable deposits of gold are known to exist in Niger in the region between the Niger River and the border with Burkina Faso. On October 5, 2004, President Tandja announced the official opening of the Samira Hill Gold Mine in the region of Tera and the first Nigerien gold ingot was presented to him. This marked a historical moment for Niger as the Samira Hill Gold Mine represents the first commercial gold production in the country. Samira Hill is owned by a company called SML (Societe des Mines du Liptako) which is a joint venture between a Moroccan company, Societe Semafo, and a Canadian company, Etruscan Resources. Both companies own 80% (40% - 40%) of SML and the Government of Niger 20%. The first year’s production is predicted to be 135,000 troy ounces (4,200 kg; 9,260 lb avoirdupois) of gold at a cash value of USD 177 per ounce ($5.70/g). http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com/
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The mine reserves for the Samira Hill mine total 10,073,626 tons at an average grade of 2.21 grams per ton from which 618,000 troy ounces (19,200 kg; 42,400 lb) will be recovered over a 6 year mine life. SML believes to have a number of significant gold deposits within what is now recognized as the gold belt known as the "Samira Horizon", which is located between Gotheye and Ouallam.

Substantial deposits of phosphates, coal, iron, limestone, and gypsum also have been found in Niger. Niger has oil potential. In 1992, the Djado permit was awarded to Hunt Oil, and in 2003 the Tenere permit was awarded to the China National Petroleum Company. An ExxonMobil-Petronas joint venture now holds the sole rights to the Agadem block, north of Lake Chad, and oil exploration is ongoing. The parastatal SONICHAR (Societe Nigerienne de Charbon) in Tchirozerine (north of Agadez) extracts coal from an open pit and fuels an electricity generating plant that supplies energy to the uranium mines. There are additional coal deposits to the south and west that are of a higher quality and may be exploitable.

The economic competitiveness created by the January 1994 devaluation of the Communaute Financiere Africaine (CFA) franc contributed to an annual average economic growth of 3.5% throughout the mid-1990s. But the economy stagnated due to the sharp reduction in foreign aid in 1999 (which gradually resumed in 2000) and poor rains in 2000. Reflecting the importance of the agricultural sector, the return of good rains was the primary factor underlying economic growth of 5.1% in 2000, 3.1% in 2001, 6.0% in 2002, and 3.0% in 2003.

In recent years, the Government of Niger drafted revisions to the investment code (1997 and 2000), petroleum code (1992), and mining code (1993), all with attractive terms for investors. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com/
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The present government actively seeks foreign private investment and considers it key to restoring economic growth and development. With the assistance of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), it has undertaken a concerted effort to revitalize the private sector.


The importance of external support for Niger's development is demonstrated by the fact that about 45% of the government's FY 2002 budget, including 80% of its capital budget, derived from donor resources. The most important donors in Niger are France, the European Union, the World Bank, the IMF, and UN agencies—UNDP, UNICEF, FAO, WFP, and UNFPA. Other donors include the United States, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, China, Italy, Libya, Egypt, Morocco, Iran, Denmark, Canada, and Saudi Arabia. While the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) does not have an office in Niger, the United States is a major donor, contributing on average $8 million each year to Niger’s development increasing to $12 million in FY 2004. The United States also is a major partner in policy coordination in food security, education, water management and HIV/AIDS sectors.


In January 2000, Niger's newly elected government inherited serious financial and economic problems, including a virtually empty treasury, past-due salaries (11 months of arrears) and scholarship payments, increased debt, reduced revenue performance, and lower public investment. In December 2000, Niger qualified for enhanced debt relief under the International Monetary Fund (IMF) program for Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) and concluded an agreement with the Fund on a Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF). In January 2001, Niger reached its decision point and subsequently reached its completion point in 2004. Total relief from all of Niger's creditors is worth about $890 million, corresponding to about $520 million in net present value (NPV) terms, which is equivalent to 53.5% of Niger’s total debt outstanding as of 2000.

The debt relief provided under the enhanced HIPC initiative significantly reduces Niger's annual debt service obligations, freeing about $40 million per year over the coming years for expenditures on basic health care, primary education, HIV/AIDS prevention, rural infrastructure, and other programs geared at poverty reduction. The overall impact on Niger's budget is substantial. Debt service as a percentage of government revenue will be slashed from nearly 44% in 1999 to 10.9% in 2003 and average 4.3% during 2010-19. The debt relief cuts debt service as a percentage of export revenue from more than 23% to 8.4% in 2003, and decreases it to about 5% in later years.

In addition to strengthening the budgetary process and public finances, the Government of Niger has embarked on an ambitious program to privatize 12 state-owned companies. To date, seven have been fully privatized, including the water and telephone utilities, with the remainder to be privatized in 2005. A newly installed multisectoral regulatory agency will help ensure free and fair competition among the newly privatized companies and their private sector competitors. In its effort to consolidate macroeconomic stability under the PRGF, the government is also taking actions to reduce corruption, and as the result of a participatory process encompassing civil society, has devised a Poverty Reduction Strategy Plan that focuses on improving health, primary education, rural infrastructure, agricultural production, environmental protection, and judicial reform.

Privatization and liberalization have however also been the subject of strong criticism. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, for instance, has noted that privatization affects the poorest and most vulnerable members of Niger's society. See his reports on Niger at http://www.ohchr.org/english/issues/food/visits.htm

Also, the obligations to creditor institutions and governments has locked Niger in to a process of trade liberalization that might be harmful for small farmers and in particular women, as noted by a recent report by 3D → Trade - Human Rights - Equitable Economy, on Agriculture trade liberalization and women's rights

The largest ethnic groups in Niger are the Hausa, who also constitute the major ethnic group in northern Nigeria, the Djerma-Songhai, who also are found in parts of Mali. Both groups, along with the Gourmantche, are sedentary farmers who live in the arable, southern tier of the country. http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com/
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The remainder of Nigeriens are nomadic or semi-nomadic livestock-raising peoples—Fulani, Tuareg, Kanuri, Arabs, and Toubou. With rapidly growing populations and the consequent competition for meager natural resources, lifestyles of agriculturalists and livestock herders have come increasingly into conflict in Niger in recent years.

Niger's high infant mortality rate is comparable to levels recorded in neighboring countries. However, the child mortality rate (deaths among children between the ages of 1 and 4) is exceptionally high (248 per 1,000) due to generally poor health conditions and inadequate nutrition for most of the country's children. According to the organization Save the Children, Niger has the world's highest infant mortality rate [1]. Nonetheless, Niger has the highest fertility rate in the world (7.2 births per woman); this means that nearly half (49%) of the Nigerien population is under age 15. Between 1996 and 2003, primary school attendance was around 30% [2], including 36% of males and only 25% of females. Additional education occurs through madrassas.

The majority of Niger's population practises Islam: 80%[1], while 15% practises Animism, and 5% practise Protestant and Catholic Christianity.


Niger began developing diverse media in the late 1990s. Niamey boasts scores of newspapers and magazines, many of which are fiercely critical of the government.

Radio is the most important medium, as television sets are beyond the buying power of many of the rural poor, and illiteracy prevents print media from becoming a mass medium. In addition to the national and regional radio services of the state broadcaster ORTN, there are four privately owned radio networks which total more than 100 stations. Three of them—the Anfani Group, Sarounia and Tenere—are urban based commercial format FM networks in the major towns. There is also a network of over 80 community radio stations spread across all seven regions of the country, governed by the Comité de Pilotage de Radios de Proximité (CPRP), a civil society organisation. The independent sector radio networks are collectively estimated by CPRP officials to cover some 7.6 million people, or about 73% of the population (2005).

Aside from Nigerien radio stations, the BBC's Hausa service is listened to on FM repeaters across wide parts of the country, particularly in the south, close to the border with Nigeria. Radio France Internationale also rebroadcasts in French through some of the commercial stations, via satellite.

Tenere also runs a national independent television station of the same name.

Despite relative freedom at the national level, Nigerien journalists say they are often pressured by local authorities. The state ORTN network depends financially on the government, partly through an addition to electricity bills and partly through direct subsidy.

The sector is governed by the Conseil Supérieur de Communications, established as an independent body in the late 1990s, headed by Maryam Keita, a former TV presenter at ORTN.

In this aging manufacturing region, where old-line industries like paper factories are falling away, health care has emerged as the employer of last resort.

Between 1998 and 2007, the Bangor metropolitan area (pop. 150,000) lost about 3,700 jobs in manufacturing, but gained 3,500 jobs in health care. For many residents in Bangor, the hospital is replacing the mill as the passport to the middle class. For others, it means lower wages and fewer opportunities to advance.
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This trend extends nationally, and it could help blunt the effects of the faltering U.S. economy. Demand for health care tends to stay strong during recessions. Cash-strapped consumers are more likely to cut back on new appliances or cars than emergency-room visits.

Indeed, while the number of manufacturing jobs nationwide fell by 48,000 in March and by 310,000 over the past 12 months, health-care employment rose by 23,000 last month and is up 363,000 jobs on the year, according to the government's most recent data.

The loss of jobs in manufacturing and the adverse consequences for the middle class are recurring themes in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, especially in the run-up to Pennsylvania's crucial primary on April 22. Both Barack Obama and http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com/
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Hillary Clinton are promising to take steps, including changes to tax and trade policies, to revitalize manufacturing. At a forum on manufacturing in Pittsburgh on Monday, each candidate charged the other with being insufficiently serious about the downsides of a free-trade pact and unsympathetic to the anxieties of American workers.

Yet health care is more likely to be an economic driver in many towns and cities -- especially if a Democrat is elected president. Sens. Obama and Clinton support overhauling the nation's health-care system to cover millions of people who are uninsured -- and that could increase health-care spending, which now accounts for 16% of the gross domestic product.

Growth in health care is fueling local economies across the country, as medical facilities replace factories. In Duluth, Minn., 20% of the jobs are in health care, compared with 14% a decade ago. In the Canton, Ohio, area, which lost the maker of Hoover vacuum cleaners and dozens of other manufacturers, the health-care industry is expanding rapidly. A similar story is unfolding in Anderson, Ind., once a major producer of cars and car parts.

There are downsides to health care's ever-increasing role. A community that relies on health jobs can end up with a weaker economy, one overly dependent on government programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Greater inequality is a risk, too. In health care and other service industries, there tends to be a wider income gap between what the highest- and lowest-paid workers earn than there is in manufacturing. Surgeons can have salaries in the high six figures, while personal-care attendants often make little more than minimum wage.


In the late 1980s, according to calculations by the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, liberal think tanks in Washington, incomes of Maine families in the best-off fifth of earners made 5.4 times as much as those on the bottom, on average. By the mid 2000s, average incomes of the best off were 6.3 times those at the bottom. Most states saw even greater widening of income disparities.

Of course, the U.S. has been moving away from manufacturing and toward a service economy for decades. The country has thrived in this period, with gains in productivity allowing for growth in nonfactory jobs from accountants to massage therapists.

The shift to medicine is evident throughout Bangor. At Eastern Maine Community College, which has long offered classes in such traditional crafts as welding and pipe fitting, the most popular programs these days are nursing and medical radiography. The school now offers six health-related degrees, double the number a decade ago, and many courses are oversubscribed. Last year, the college had 261 applications for the 32 slots in its nursing program.

More health-care workers means more diversity for this almost all-white city. At Thistles, an Argentine restaurant in Bangor, owner Santiago Rave says that 10 or so Latin doctors new to the area regularly patronize his restaurant. Monthly "Tango Tuesdays" are popular events.

In 1990, 16% of the jobs in the Bangor area were in manufacturing, while 12% were in health care. In 2007, 6% of the jobs were in manufacturing and 20% in health care. Without the shift, Bangor's unemployment rate, which averaged 5.1% last year, would almost certainly be higher. There are other benefits: The move from manufacturing has helped cut Maine's on-the-job injury rate in half since 1990.

The health-care boom has also upset the economic balance in this sprawling, largely rural state. When manufacturing drove the economy, well-paying factory jobs were spread throughout Maine's rural and urban counties. But higher-paying health-care jobs are concentrated in urban areas. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com/
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Bangor's Eastern Maine Medical Center, the city's biggest hospital and largest employer, offers sophisticated cancer treatment, open-heart surgery and other specialized care. Jobs are available not only for doctors but also for highly trained nurses, and X-ray and laboratory technicians.

Rural areas have a larger share of lower-paying health-care jobs such as nursing assistants and personal-care attendants. In 2005, the average health-care wage in Maine's rural counties was $26,841 a year, $10,000 less than in the urban counties. Statewide, the average wage for all jobs was $32,393.

"The rural areas have clearly lagged way behind the more urban areas in the number and types of higher-wage health-care jobs," says Charles Colgan, a professor of Public Policy and Management in the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine.


A few months after graduating from high school in 1974, Steve Arsenault, a resident of Millinocket, about 70 miles north of Bangor, followed his father to work at the Great Northern Paper Co. paper mill. "It was such an easy way to make good money that it was like a magnet that reached out and grabbed you," he says.

Mr. Arsenault, now 51 years old, started off as a temporary worker, spending eight-hour days transferring 4-foot logs from a conveyor belt. He worked his way up to better jobs, and by 2001 was making $21 an hour working on a machine that made glossy paper for catalogs.

In the summer of 2002, as the company began laying off workers, Mr. Arsenault says he was told he would soon be out of a job, so he finished the week and quit. A few months later, he started taking classes at the local community college, and eventually became a certified surgical technologist.

Today, Mr. Arsenault works at a hospital in Lincoln, about 50 miles north of Bangor, setting up the operating room and handing instruments to surgeons during surgery. He makes about $16 an hour, $5 less than in his last year at the mill.

"I really don't think I'll ever set foot again in the paper industry again," he says. "The uncertainty of any manufacturing -- I want to be able to know that you're going to have a job."

Bangor, located in south-central Maine, owes its existence to its natural harbor on the Penobscot River. It has been praised for its beauty by writers including Henry David Thoreau. More recently, it helped inspire the fictional town of "Derry" in stories by Stephen King. Today, truckers often stop at Dysart's, just outside of town, for baked beans and grapefruit-size biscuits.

By the mid-1800s, the city billed itself as the lumber capital of the world. "The time may soon arrive when the three great cities of North America -- Bangor, New York, and San Francisco -- shall be representatives of the wealth, population, intelligence, and enterprise of the eastern, central, and western divisions of our country," said Bangor resident Oliver Frost in 1869.

That didn't happen. Maine's timber industry went into decline around the turn of the century, as Americans moved West and started harvesting forests in Oregon and Idaho.

Manufacturing picked up some of the slack. In a 1950 brochure, the city boasted of having 74 different firms that manufactured paper, wood products, textiles and other items. Many of the grand houses that line State Street, across from the Eastern Maine Medical Center, were built by lumber barons. Today, many are owned by doctors.

From its roots as a port and industrial hub, Bangor has grown into northern Maine's retail center, with large retailers including Home Depot and Macy's. Over the past two decades, the medical center has expanded, and several assisted-living facilities have opened.

A battered strip mall near the Bangor International Airport has been transformed into a "medical mall" with dialysis and rehabilitation centers. The Eastern Maine Medical Center says it has secured a small part of the $52 million it needs to build a new cancer center in Brewer across the river. Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems, the umbrella organization that runs the medical center, is one of the three main sponsors of Bangor's annual American Folk Festival.

Some new manufacturers are popping up: The Eastern Fine Paper mill, which was located in Brewer and closed four years ago, has been taken over by Cianbro Corp., based in nearby Pittsfield. That company plans to build ready-to-assemble pieces of oil refineries that will be shipped to Texas. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
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But overall, health care is poised to continue outpacing manufacturing.

One concern about the health-care industry is its heavy reliance on government money. In Maine hospitals, Medicare and Medicaid together accounted for 59% of gross patient revenues in 2006, according to the American Hospital Association. Nationally, those two government programs accounted for 55% of gross patient revenues.

That could leave the state vulnerable as the government and employers try to pare health-care costs. Faced with a budget crunch, Maine legislators cut $46 million out of the state's Medicaid budget for the 2008 and 2009 fiscal years. Because of the cuts, the state will lose an additional $92 million in federal matching funds. The Maine Department of Labor estimates that about 5,000 jobs could be adversely affected by those cuts.

Health care also requires more training in order to advance. Unlike in manufacturing, where workers could start right out of high school and ride a seniority escalator to better wages and benefits, health-care workers primarily move up the ladder through education.

While some former factory workers find new opportunities in health care, the switch doesn't work for everyone. In 1980, just out of high school, Randy Tompkins started working in a shoe factory. A few years later, he switched to Eastern Fine Paper and worked there for 19 years, until the mill shut down.

A new father with a mortgage, Mr. Tompkins was anxious to find work and decided to look for a health-care job. "You can't seem to go around any corner and not see something health-care related: a hospital, a nursing home, a doctor's office," he says.

After six months of classes at Eastern Maine Community College, he became a certified nursing assistant, a job that paid just $7.75 an hour, half of what he was making at the mill, and with no benefits. He eventually was accepted in the school's registered-nursing program, but says he couldn't maintain a C average. Now, Mr. Tompkins is looking for a new career: This fall he plans to start taking classes in computer integrated machining.


Instead of getting through security by submitting to pat downs at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, travelers can now choose a more hands-off approach: walking through a full-body screening machine that can peer right through a person’s outfit.

The device was originally created by engineer Doug McMakin and his team at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as a means of virtually frisking terrorists. The technology uses radio waves to produce 3-D scans of passengers’ bodies, the same way radar captures images of planets’ surfaces. As passengers stand still with their hands up, two rotating antennas send out radio waves. The waves bounce off the skin and are collected by a receiver. http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com/

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Metals, plastics, and liquids between the skin and the receiver show up in images that are sent to security officials in another room.

McMakin’s system has already made a splash with another crowd: clothing retailers. Machines have been placed at Fashion Bug stores and outlets around the country. The screener, named Intellifit, rests inside a virtual dressing room, a seven-foot-diameter circular enclosure placed in the middle of the store. The device allows customers to get instant printouts of their jeans sizes. Before we see more of this technology—in the mall or at security centers—the companies using it may want to alleviate worries from privacy advocates. “Those images reveal not only our private body parts but also intimate medical details like colostomy bags,” Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union says.

McMakin responds that he has no issue with being scanned by the system. He is working on weapons detectors as automatic and accurate as metal detectors. That way, the only thing flashing will be the red and green lights on the screening machine.




Will switching from fossil fuels to biofuels really reduce greenhouse gases? We take a close look at two big, controversial studies that examine carbon emissions from the ecosystems torn down to produce biofuels.

Throughout the Amazonian rain forest and the savanna of Brazil, enormous swaths of land are being converted to farms for growing soybeans and sugarcane—all for use in creating biofuels. The tropical rain forest and peatland of Indonesia and Malaysia and the grasslands of the United States are also being converted to biofuel crops. It is a disturbing trend, says Joseph Fargione, regional science director at the Nature Conservancy, who conducted the first of the two studies examined here. With his colleagues Fargione took a close look at how the areas being transformed into farmland have acted as carbon dioxide storage systems. Trees, grass, and other flora take in the gas, Fargione says, incorporating the carbon into their structures. But when the land is converted for agriculture, the plants are cut down, burned, or processed, and the stored carbon is eventually released back into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases. Using numbers from nearly 50 previous studies, Fargione’s team calculated the amount of carbon stored in these landscapes and the up-front carbon cost for each acre of land converted to produce biofuels.



In the second study, Timothy Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University, looked at a future scenario in which the United States substantially increases its production of corn-based ethanol, a move that would decrease domestic crops for food and feedstock. These feed crops have to be grown somewhere, however, and the worldwide land conversions necessary to make up for lost U.S. crops would release carbon dioxide. To show the effect of such changes, Searchinger and his colleagues simulated the worldwide land-use changes necessary to offset the production of 56 billion liters of ethanol in the United States (the amount of ethanol projected to be processed in 2016, based on current tax credits and conservative estimates of oil prices). http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com/


Louis J. Sheehan
Using an economic model created at Iowa State University, the researchers projected how much land farmers around the world would have to convert to feed-crop production, and where they would do it. From this the researchers were able to estimate the total greenhouse emissions due to land conversion.


Both studies found that changes in land use related to biofuel production would be a significant source of greenhouse gases in the future. Fargione reported that, overall, biofuels would cause higher total emissions for tens to hundreds of years. Some ecosystems had surprisingly high emissions—grasslands in the United States converted to corn farms would increase carbon dioxide for 93 years.

Searchinger’s outlook is bleaker: He estimates that the rise in corn-based ethanol production in the United States would increase greenhouse gases, relative to what our current, fossil-fuel-based economy produces, for 167 years.

“Any biofuel that causes clearing of natural ecosystems is likely to increase global warming,” Fargione says. But not all bio–fuels are alike. For one, sugarcane ethanol, produced in Brazil, stands out to both researchers as the most efficient source studied, in terms of emissions. As long as there is land conversion, though, biofuels do not diminish carbon dioxide emissions. http://louis1j1sheehan.blog.ca/
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• Plants and soils contain almost three times as much carbon as the atmosphere.
• About 20 percent of total current carbon emissions comes from land-use change.
• In 2004, 74 million acres of U.S. land were devoted to corn for livestock feed as well as food crops. By 2016 about 43 percent of that area will be used to harvest corn for ethanol.
• 27 percent of new palm oil plantations in Indonesia are created on land that began as tropical rain forest; 1.5 percent of these lands are being deforested each year.
• In 2006 the United States produced 250 million gallons of biodiesel. Total production capacity is already 1.4 billion gallons a year and is expected to more than double with new plants and expansion of existing ones.
• 2006 ethanol capacity was 4.4 billion gallons, with an expected increase of 2.1 billion gallons with current construction and expansion projects.
• U.S. gasoline consumption is 389 million gallons per day, or about 142 billion gallons per year.

Bruce Dale, a biofuels researcher at Michigan State University, says there is a huge amount of uncertainty when basing predictions on an inherently complex economic model. Additionally, he asserts that the United States should not be responsible for “anything but its own environmental profile” and that to take into account world land changes is unreasonable. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com/
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Nathanael Greene of the Natural Resources Defense Council responds that it is appropriate to incorporate economic models into life-cycle emissions analyses such as these. In contrast to Dale, he says that land-use changes in other nations should not be left out of calculations of biofuel impacts, since such indirect effects are commonly incorporated into environmental regulations.


Using agricultural waste rather than actual agriculture to create biofuels removes the need for land conversion—much of the stuff is just lying around—and produces more fuel than corn:

In the case of corn stover (the leaves and stalks remaining in the field after corn is harvested), 250 million dry tons are produced each year and are rarely utilized, other than to feed grazing cattle immediately after a harvest. Scientists believe that some stover should remain in the field to prevent soil erosion, but that still leaves about 40 to 50 percent to be used in making biofuels. An efficient way to break down cellulose into ethanol is necessary to reduce the cost of processing corn stover on a commercial scale. Last February, the Department of Energy selected six companies to receive funding towards building ethanol plants—scheduled to be operational within the next three years—that will utilize new technology for processing corn stover as well as other types of agricultural waste.

In contrast to corn stover, wood waste has limited potential due to the high cost associated with collection and transportation (in the case of wood left over from timber harvesting) and competing uses (in the case of mill residues, which are currently used for mulch, particle board, and to power other facilities).




Many farms have already developed methods of converting the billions of tons of animal waste produced each year into methane for electrical and heat energy; beginning in March, 1,200 households in California will be powered by cow manure. Still, using animal waste to create biofuels is not yet feasible on the national level because transporting it is unrealistic. It's in areas where there are lots of cattle (and the large amounts of manure they inevitably give back to the world) that companies are best equipped to divert animal waste from contaminating the air (via methane, CO2, and ammonia gases) and water towards fueling ethanol production. http://www.soulcast.com/post/show/117748/move
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One example is Panda Ethanol, which is building the largest biomass plant in the United States in Hereford, Texas, where it will use the waste of 3.5 million grazing cattle to fuel the production of approximately 115 million gallons of ethanol per year. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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In the United States, 96 billion pounds of food is wasted each year and much of it ends up in landfills where it emits greenhouse gases. Through anaerobic digestion—the bacterial breakdown of organic materials—food waste can be converted into biofuel. In California, Onsite Power Systems, Inc. has begun commercial production of an anaerobic digester system that uses a special design to create the optimal environment for bacteria and ultimately more efficient and cost-effective conversion of food waste to biogases (hydrogen and methane). These biogases can be used in cars or to heat homes.

Algae may be the most promising biofuel. Not only does algae use carbon dioxide to grow (and could potentially use CO2 from power plants to create biofuel), but it can grow anywhere and does not require a large area to propagate. Some species are made of up to 50% of their body weight in oil which can be extracted and processed to create biodiesel. Currently, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is collaborating with Chevron to develop more cost-effective processes for growing and harvesting large quantities of the green fuel.


if you're looking for a picture of how the Latin language evolved or a history of Rome with a difference, you should read Ostler's Ad Infinitum - A Biography of Latin. Although there is an immense amount of material in its 382 pages, it is mostly easy to read and you can skip to sections that interest you. Even so, be sure to read the preface and the best section, Part I.

Although you could probably read it without any familiarity with non-English languages, you may find it hard to understand, so my recommendation is that you read it only if you ever studied Latin or the Romance languages.
Pros

* Thorough history of Latin and the Roman Empire
* Copious examples and details
* Provides welcome context for obscure and even somewhat familiar topics/names

Cons

* Sometimes confusing (see next)
* Uses technical linguistic concepts
* Seems to rush through towards the end especially compared with the start
* Requires some Latin, but why would you read it if you had none?

* Nicholas Ostler studied Greek, Latin, and more at Oxford and received his Ph.D. in linguistics at MIT under Noam Chomsky.
* The book is a Western Civ course focusing on the language -- Latin and its daughters.
* Shows the effect of major events/movements, like Christianity, Islam, and the printing press, on Latin's dominance.
* Appendix 1 explains Latin mottoes used as chapter titles. App. 2 lists Etruscan borrowings in Latin. Both are interesting.
* The 3rd appendix, sound change, has good information, but is hard to follow and could use actual modern language examples.

Ad Infinitum - A Biography of Latin, by Nicholas Ostler
Just as Rome came to dominate Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa, so the language of the Romans became universal. As Nicholas Ostler shows in Ad Infinitum - A Biography of Latin, the process was basically the same for politics as for language. Time passed; the originally Asian-based Christianity gained a foothold in the Empire, but still Latin remained dominant. Several factors led to the emergence of the Romance languages out of Latin, but still Latin was the lingua Franca. http://louis0j0sheehan.livejournal.com/15433.html
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Even when it lost out in most areas, it kept a toehold in botany, and even when Latin came to be associated with the oppressive bourgeosie and other elites, Latin endured, coming up in odd places, like the Internet, where there is a Latin version of Wikipedia, and in an even odder place, Finland (host of weekly Latin radio broadcasts), where neither Latin nor any Latinate language was ever the national language.

While this is the survey that Nicholas Ostler presents and embellishes with details from many disciplines, I was unclear about his conclusion. Yes Latin is used in certain limited places, like semantics (referring to categories of relationship and color), the Internet, and Finnish radio, but he also calls it a language that has survived 2500 years and is now a language of the past "sic transit gloria mundi 'so the glory of the world must pass.'" I find this mixed message confusing and/or depressing.

There's no other major item most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal computers. Everybody has questions about them, and we aim to help.

Here are a few questions about computers I've received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.

Q: We are connected to Comcast cable and use no antennas. Will we need one of the government-subsidized converter boxes next February?

A: Not if you are using a cable set-top box, like the vast majority of cable customers. If you are one of the minority of cable households whose TVs use an internal cable tuner, you may need a converter box. To be sure, contact your cable company or TV manufacturer.

Q: In your laptop buying guide last week, you recommended buying a machine equipped for the "n" type Wi-Fi of wireless router. I was under the impression that this has not yet been standardized. Is that wrong?

A: The engineering committee that has been debating the standard for years has not yet completed its work, but the market has simply moved ahead on its own. This new, faster version of Wi-Fi is being built into routers, computers and other devices by nearly every major manufacturer. In my limited tests, I have found no compatibility problems, and it is backwards compatible with the older "g" and "b" standards.

Q: Is the Mac immune to viruses? If not, do you have a recommendation of the type of antivirus software one should procure and load onto a Mac?

A: No personal computer or personal computer operating system of which I am aware is "immune" to viruses, spyware or other malicious software. That includes the Macintosh and its operating system, Mac OS X Leopard. Hackers have demonstrated the ability to invade the Mac. However, there are only a handful of viruses or other malicious programs for the Macintosh that have successfully spread beyond the lab. And these have harmed only a small number of actual users.

Of the well over 100,000 known viruses, spyware programs and other malicious software applications that are about in public, all but this handful are written to run on Microsoft Windows, and cannot operate on the Macintosh OS. For that reason, I don't believe Macintosh owners need security software, unless they install and run Windows on their computers. If they do run Windows, Mac owners are well advised to purchase and install Windows security software to protect the Windows portion of the machine.

Having said that, I do not mean that Mac owners should be blind to security threats that don't involve viruses or spyware. http://pub25.bravenet.com/journal/post.php?entryid=23334
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
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Just like Windows users, Mac users can succumb to what is called "social engineering" -- scams and schemes that operate via email and Web sites that are often authored by crooks but made to look official. So, like Windows users, they must be on their guard.





The Creative Energy Behind ADHD

While many viewers get emotional watching Ty Pennington deliver remodeled homes to deserving families on "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," his mom, Yvonne Pennington, cries for different reasons. After being told years ago that her unruly son was the worst kid in his school, she says, "my tears come from the joy, at how far he has come."

That's because Mr. Pennington has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Some 7.8% of children ages 4 to 17 have been told by a doctor or other health professional that they have or might have ADHD, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. The behavior disorder, which often causes children to struggle mightily in school and in life, can be "impairing," says Mark Wolraich, lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics' clinical guidelines on diagnosing ADHD.

Many frazzled parents of hyperactive kids are looking for the silver lining. Clearly, ADHD didn't cripple such noteworthy sufferers as JetBlue founder David Neeleman or Kinko's founder Paul Orfalea. How can you tell whether all that splintered energy will help your own child succeed? And how can you help channel all that mental voltage productively? As a parent of two children with ADHD, I've often wondered about these things. I asked a few famous ADHD sufferers and their parents for answers.

Look for the creativity. Mr. Neeleman's family refused to regard his hyperactivity as an impairment. "We always thought ADD was a plus," says his father, Gary, a retired media executive. He advises "looking at the kid as somebody who has a different way of looking at things, and maybe a more creative way." Then, "put your arms around them and say, 'Boy, you're sure smart. You can handle this.' "

Parental support couldn't smooth out all the bumps for David. Through school, he says, "I just thought I was stupid." Adolescence was a fog of watching "Gilligan's Island" reruns. But as an adult, he was able to see opportunities others missed. He is credited with inventing electronic airline ticketing, he founded two airlines and is working on a third start-up in Brazil. He still has trouble sustaining a conversation for more than a few minutes, must delegate administrative tasks and ultimately got fired as JetBlue's CEO after service foul-ups. But he continues to focus on new ideas. "If you're doing something you love," he says, "you'll be the best."

Similarly, retailing entrepreneur Cynthia Gerdes, who also has ADHD, was treated by her parents as "the creative one" in her family, she says. Ms. Gerdes was encouraged to express herself as a child. As an adult, she created a Minneapolis toy-store chain, Creative Kidstuff, that grew to $12 million in sales before she sold out last year.

Emphasize the positive. Ty Pennington says the negative messages from school can be overwhelming for a child with ADHD; "You're constantly the one who is sent to the principal's office, constantly in trouble." Yvonne Pennington adds, "I thought I was the worst mother in the world." Asked as a small child to work at his desk, Ty would "wear it" instead, she says, separating the chair from the desk, popping the connecting assembly over his shoulders, and running around the room screaming. "He was h- on wheels," she sighs.

Both say life improved after Yvonne started using behavior-modification techniques to reward Ty when he did something right. Also, Ty says his life turned after he started medication in his teens and gained maturity and the freedom to develop his creativity. Now, as a TV host, he gets paid for the kind of behaviors that got him in trouble in school. And Yvonne, now an Atlanta psychologist, has a busy practice training others in "positive parenting."

Never despair. Mr. Orfalea's mother came home in tears after he was expelled from school for the fourth time; a school official told her he'd do well to become an unskilled laborer, says the Kinko's founder, who also has dyslexia. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com/
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But she didn't allow it to shape her regard for Paul. "My mother had a good saying: 'Look at your five fingers. All five are different for a reason. School wants to make you all the same,' " he says.

Her support instilled his faith in himself. When he got the idea, while waiting in line for a copy machine in college, to start his own copying business, he trusted it in the face of criticism from others. The company he opened in a storefront, named for his kinky red hair, later grew to the 1,200-store giant that was acquired in 2004 by FedEx.


The University of Bristol has a press release out yesterday reporting that a Sumerian clay tablet provides an account of an impact event at Köfels, Austria.

I call bullshit. Here’s why, starting with some background information.

Köfels does not have a crater; it has what looks like a giant landslide, about half a kilometer thick and five kilometers in diameter. In the mid 20th-century, the impact hypothesis was raised to explain the formation. Apparently there is a lot of glass in the formation, which some geologists think could have been formed when rock melted in the landslide, and others think is more plausibly from an impact. There’s no doubt that other impact events have created quite a bit of glass. The age of the Köfels glass has been measured using radiometric methods, so we know the glass was formed between 8,000 years to 16,000 years ago.

Perhaps the strongest evidence for an impact origin of the Köfels structure is the reported presence of planar deformation features in quartz taken from the site. PDFs, as they are called, are microscopic features of silicate (e.g., quartz, feldspar) grains, and they are basically very thin planes of glass arranged in parallel sets that have particular orientations with respect to the containing crystal’s structure. They are utterly diagnostic of impact events - no other geologic event can form them, not even highly energetic volcanic eruptions.

The presence of shocked quartz - quartz with PDFs - means that this quartz, at some time, was in the neighborhood of an impact event. If the big landslide-looking formation at Köfels was formed by impact, then the shocked quartz could have been formed then. Or it could be from an older impact, and was transported by later geologic events, such as huge landslides. The shocked quartz will survive a lot longer than an impact crater, given the way the Earth covers such structures up relatively quickly, so this may well have happened. However the shocked quartz got where it is found today, we know that it was formed when a meteoritic body impacted the ground. Shocked quartz does not form from a meteoritic airburst - a meteorite that explodes before impact - it requires a ground impact.

Science marches on, and the impact hypothesis to explain the origin of the Köfels formation fell out of favor as we discovered more and more about impacts. http://blogs.ebay.com/mytymouse1/home/_W0QQentrysyncidZ526811010
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The main problem was the lack of parallels between the Köfels features and other known astroblemes - namely, there is no crater at Köfels, and there darn well ought to be if there is 8-16 kiloyear-old glass and shocked quartz from an impact event at the site. Here’s a picture of a smaller impact that is five times that age:


Currently, the consensus of scientific opinion is that Köfels is not from an impact. It is not listed in the Earth Impact Database, not even as a possible impact site. Googling “Köfels impact” turns up a zillion outlets parroting the Bristol press release, but there’s almost nothing else about it on the net.

So, where does this Sumerian tablet come in?

The researchers say the tablet dates from 700 BCE, or about 3,000 years ago. They hypothesize it is a copy of an earlier work:

With modern computer programmes that can simulate trajectories and reconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago the researchers have established what the Planisphere tablet refers to. It is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC (Julian calendar).

I happen to have some software that can do that. Starry Night, Skymap Pro, or Stellarium, among numerable others, can do the job. So this isn’t rocket science. Anyone know where I can get a high-quality photograph of the tablet that I can use to test their hypothesis from my own reseources?

But a better question might be:

Assuming that the original source is a “night notebook” of a Sumerian astronomer, why is it being copied by a scribe 2,423 years later? No reason is given for this remarkable act in the press release, at least. Already it sounds a little fishy to me.

The press release continues:

Half the tablet records planet positions and cloud cover, the same as any other night….

Wait a second. Do we really know that half the tablet records conditions “the same as any other night?” Because if we do, that means we have a bunch of other examples of this genre of tablet to compare this tablet to. And if so, that’s fine, but then why does the press release say this:

A cuneiform clay tablet that has puzzled scholars for over 150 years has been translated for the first time.

They can either have their cake, or eat it: Either the tablet was mysterious and untranslated; or we can’t really know that this tablet is a typical nightly astronomical report of sky conditions, just like any other.

The problems continue:

…but the other half of the tablet records an object large enough for its shape to be noted even though it is still in space. The astronomers made an accurate note of its trajectory relative to the stars, which to an error better than one degree is consistent with an impact at Köfels.

Okay, I guess - something 500 kilometers away and 1 kilometer in diameter will be a tenth of a degree across, which is just about big enough to determine shape; and it could have been closer and still been in outside the atmosphere. http://www.myface.com/index.php?do=/public/account/submit/add-blog/added_3049/
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And it is possible to record a trajectory to better than a degree using naked-eye methods.

It is also possible to integrate a bunch of orbits that intersect with Köfels, and it is plausible to believe that some of those orbits might be consistent with the observation of a celestial object that is hypothesized to be recorded in this copy of a hypothesized tablet that existed 5,000 years ago, and it is plausible to believe that some of these orbits would have the object out of Earth’s atmosphere when it was observable over Sumeria.

But really, this is beginning to look a bit like a house of cards, yes? Let’s read on.

The observation suggests the asteroid is over a kilometre in diameter and the original orbit about the Sun was an Aten type, a class of asteroid that orbit close to the earth, that is resonant with the Earth’s orbit.

The bit about the Aten asteroids being resonant is just wrong. Many are resonant, some more strongly than others; but Aten asteroids are defined as those with a semi-major axis of less than one astronomical unit. An AU is, in lay terms, the average distance between the sun and the Earth. A semi-major axis is simply the distance of the long axis of an ellipse, divided by two. Almost all Atens have orbits that cross Earth’s orbit - in other words, most Atens get both closer to the sun than Earth, and farther away from it, depending on what part of its orbit it is in. That’s all - you don’t need the asteroid to be in a resonant orbit to be an Aten.

And a resonant orbit certainly doesn’t lead to a craterless impact, as I initially read the following as claiming:

This trajectory explains why there is no crater at Köfels. The in coming angle was very low (six degrees) and means the asteroid clipped a mountain called Gamskogel above the town of Längenfeld, 11 kilometres from Köfels, and this caused the asteroid to explode before it reached its final impact point. As it travelled down the valley it became a fireball, around five kilometres in diameter (the size of the landslide). When it hit Köfels it created enormous pressures that pulverised the rock and caused the landslide but because it was no longer a solid object it did not create a classic impact crater.

What??

This is just preposterous.

First, you’re going to find plenty of evidence of the impact at Gamskogel if this were true. Any impact significant enough to badly disrupt an asteroid-type impactor, which is what the researchers hypothesize, is going to take out a big chunk of the mountain, cause all sorts of fracturing, landslides, and other highly noticeable effects. The physics of impact are such that, if the impact were truly strong enough to liquify or vaporize a >1 km asteroid, the mountain would have been converted into a crater - much like we see countless times on the moon.

Test of hypothesis number one: Is there a huge crater on the mountain, or has the mountain been obliterated by a huge crater?

The impact of an asteroid with a mountain will result in the classical shock wave in the impact medium and create an ejecta blanket. If the impact hypothesis is true, we should see planar deformation features on the mountain and ejecta more or less symmetrically around it.

Test of hypothesis number two: Is there shocked quartz on the mountain?

Test of hypothesis number three: Is there an ejecta blanket around the mountain?

Next, why would an impactor become a fireball? We all know that meteors in the process of burning up are hot, but they are not, literally, fireballs2. The researchers claim that that an asteroidal-type meteorite, after clipping the mountain, was “not a solid object” - but why? And how? How do you get an asteroidal impactor hitting so solidly that it vaporized it, but so softly that it doesn’t shock quartz or create a crater?

Sorry, but you just can’t.

You don’t solve any problems by breaking up an impactor into a million pieces - it still impacts. So you end up with a bunch of smaller craters - the total energy is the same. http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com/
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Here’s an example of either a binary impactor, or disrupted impactor, on the Earth:

Clearwater Lakes

and an example on the Moon:

Messier

Supposing you can disrupt a 1-km asteroid impactor into pieces no larger than molecular size. What happens then? You still get craters:

Microcrater

That’s a microcrater in glass, too small to be seen by eye.

Maybe the press release is saying that the low angle of impact, supposedly of only six degrees, would not result in the formation of a crater. But that’s wrong too. Highly oblique impacts - thought to be considerably shallower than 6° - produce elongated craters:

Elongate Crater

So, there’s gonna be a crater, or two, or a billion, no matter what you do to the impactor3. Just because the asteroid “clips” a mountaintop on its way to its final resting place doesn’t mean there will be no crater. There will be one, or many, period.

Test of hypothesis number four: Go find the crater(s).

Test of hypothesis number five: Go find fragments of the impactor. There will be some, even if the main impactor vaporizes.

Let’s read on:

Mark Hempsell, discussing the Köfels event, said: “Another conclusion can be made from the trajectory. The back plume from the explosion (the mushroom cloud) would be bent over the Mediterranean Sea re-entering the atmosphere over the Levant, Sinai, and Northern Egypt.

“The ground heating though very short would be enough to ignite any flammable material – including human hair and clothes. It is probable more people died under the plume than in the Alps due to the impact blast.“

Ok, so there’s no crater because the impactor “wasn’t solid,” but there was enough ejecta - which only comes from craters - to kill people, and cover an area thousands of miles around, including northern Egypt and the Levant, where we should be able to go today and find - ummm, ejecta.

Test of hypothesis number six: Let’s go find ejecta, or evidence of widespread burns, in strata that we can date, using, e.g., pottery shards, to around 3100 BC in multiple archaeological digs in both Egypt and in the Levant. The strata should be iridium-enriched compared to terrestrial facies, ought to include shock products if the impact were powerful enough to spread material over that wide an area, and ought contain impact glass.

Ok, we’re done. Just to sum up, here’s why we can be pretty sure this press release promotes a wrong conclusion.

The researchers hypothesize:

* That Sumerians made regular celestial observations (probably true);
* One of them observed a large body very close to Earth before it had entered the atmosphere (very improbable - whereas seeing a very bright meteor is not only probable, but certain, if you keep looking)
* They recorded the trajectory to an accuracy of +/- one degree or less (plausible)
* The tablet they recorded this on was reproduced by a scribe 2,423 years later (possible, but why?)
* Even though apparently no other nights’ observations were similarly copied (why not? There would have been TONS of interesting stuff, and just as correlated with significant happenings on Earth - not by causation, but by coincidence) http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com/
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* And this tablet has never been translated before (I’ll stipulate that this is true even though I don’t really know)
* Two researchers - one a space infrastructure engineer, the other a rocket engine engineer, and neither linguists - translated it (huh? how?)
* And the tablet records an impactor (maybe)
* even though the impact glass found at the site is 8,000 to 16,000 years old (not 5,000 years old as the hypothesis says)
* And the impactor was a >1 km Aten asteroid (seriously, people, it requires several hours or days of precise, modern astronomical observations to determine if an asteroid is an Aten - you need either triangulated observations over a short time, or observations over a longer period of time, to extract that kind of data from the observations they say the Sumerians recorded)
* And that impactor landed at Köfels (maybe, but you need triangulated observations of incoming impactors to really determine where and if a possible impactor landed, because you can’t tell celestial distances or radial velocities - motion toward or away from you - by just looking)
* But not before “clipping” a mountain (oh, come ON! can we say “ad hoc hypothesis?”)
* Which turned it into something other than a solid (I’ve heard of shock melting, but turning an entire 1 km impacting asteroid into a liquid with a glancing blow with a mountain is beyond the pale, and turning it all into gas would be even more ludicrous)
* Which then created no craters when it landed (it still should have)
* But which did distribute ejecta all over the eastern Mediterranean (you don’t get ejecta without a crater)
* Which ejecta has not been found anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean (ouch)

I’ll add one more thing: This “research” hasn’t cleared peer review - the authors are trying to sell a direct-to-paperback book for $25 (USD). The press release says it is being published by Alcin Academics, but I can’t find them on the web and I can’t find any other book they’ve published. A quick look at the Amazon page for the book shows that the real publisher is WritersPrintshop - a self-publishing company. I’m thinking if this were a plausible hypothesis supported in a well-written book, they’d have gotten a real publisher to release it.

I’m not buying it - the book or the zany hypothesis. If anyone wants to change my mind, send me a copy of the book, and I’ll read it and reconsider.

Oh - and one more thing: Shame, shame on you, PhysOrg for credulously running this ridiculous story but ignoring the asteroid names announced last week.

Sources for Köfels background information:

* Graham, Bevan and Hutchison, “Catalogue of Meteorites”, 4th Edition, (1985)
* Kurat, Richter; Meteoritics, vol.4, p.192, 1969
* Störzer et al.; Meteoritics, vol.6, p.319, 1971

Update: I’ve been pointed to some additional references regarding the Köfels formation, which somewhat changes what I’ve written above. First, shocked quartz, with PDFs, have not been found at Köfels as some have claimed; quartz with lamellar deformation features typical of tectonic processes were found instead. Also, the Köfels formation was not a single landslide, but a result of several landslides at different times. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com/
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These are both further blows to the already discredited impact hypothesis for the origins of the Köfels formation, and casts even more doubt onto the conclusions that Sumerians observed a greater than 1 km wide Aten asteroid that impacted at Köfels.




It is a phone call that women dread. Something is not quite right on the mammogram: come back for another one. But don’t worry, the script goes, most repeat tests wind up normal.

Still, most women know someone who has breast cancer, and even the calmest, most rational minds may think the worst when summoned back to the clinic.

At many centers, these nerve-racking calls are on the rise, at least temporarily — the price of progress as more and more radiologists switch from traditional X-ray film to digital mammograms, in which the X-ray images are displayed on a computer monitor.

Problems can arise during the transition period, while doctors learn to interpret digital mammograms and compare them to patients’ previous X-ray films. Comparing past and present to look for changes is an essential part of reading mammograms. But the digital and film versions can sometimes be hard to reconcile, and radiologists who are retraining their eyes and minds may be more likely to play it safe by requesting additional X-rays — and sometimes ultrasound exams and even biopsies — in women who turn out not to have breast cancer.

Digital is growing fast. In the United States, 32 percent of mammography clinics now have at least one digital machine, up from only 10 percent two years ago. Eventually, film will be phased out.

The rush to digital is occurring in part because for certain women — younger ones and others with dense breast tissue — it is better than film at finding tumors. Digital is especially good at picking up tiny calcium deposits, or calcifications, which are sometimes — but by no means always — a sign of cancer. In the long run, radiologists say, digital technology will make mammograms more accurate for many women.

There have been no studies yet to measure what happens during the transition period, but many radiologists say they do find themselves calling more women back. About 35.8 million mammograms a year are done in the United States, including those for screening and follow-ups for problems. The National Cancer Institute recommends mammograms every year or two for most women over 40 (women at high risk may be advised to start earlier). Mammography is not perfect — it can miss tumors — but even its critics say it has helped to lower death rates from breast cancer, which is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women, after lung cancer.

There are about 178,000 new cases of breast cancer each year in the United States, and 40,000 deaths.

Of 10 radiologists interviewed for this article, eight said that during the transition from film to digital, recall rates went up in women who were ultimately found to have nothing wrong. Normally a recall rate of 10 percent or less is considered desirable. http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com/
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But during the transition period at their clinics, the doctors estimated that callbacks of women who turned out to be healthy increased by a few percentage points to as many as 10. Only one radiologist reported no problems: Dr. Etta D. Pisano, a professor of radiology and biomedical engineering at the University of North Carolina.

“I don’t believe it,” Dr. Pisano said. “I question that there’s a problem with the transition.”

But Dr. Mary Mahoney, a professor of radiology and the director of breast imaging at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, said, “I am living through the pain of this transition period on a daily basis.”

Dr. Mahoney’s center recently opened an entirely digital clinic for breast cancer screening.

“Our whole group is kind of pulling our hair out some days,” she said. “You struggle and you struggle. It’s just so much harder. These are really experienced, qualified radiologists who are wringing their hands. It’s where the increase in callbacks and biopsies is coming into play. It happens every day. Many times we’re able to bring the woman back, do additional views and feel comfortable we can follow that area.”

Regarding the higher callback rates, Dr. Mahoney said: “I know it’s not a small thing, the anxiety. Patients are practically in tears because they’re so worried. But I think in the long run it’s going to be to everybody’s benefit.”

Dr. Margarita Zuley, the director of breast imaging at Magee-Women’s Hospital at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said it could take six months to a year to learn to interpret the new images.

Lecturing in Manhattan recently about the transition to digital, Dr. Zuley told an audience of radiologists: “When you first start out, you may feel a little anxious and recall more patients because everything looks like a cancer to you. It’s O.K. Just bring the patients back. It’s part of the learning curve.”

Regarding higher recall rates during the transition, Dr. Zuley said: “Everybody sort of knows it, but it’s anecdotal. There are no numbers.”

Meanwhile, patients or their insurers are paying for the extra tests. Fees for mammograms vary around the country. A clinic in Manhattan recently billed an insurer $387 for a digital mammogram and then $336 for extra images of one breast — needed because of confusion between the old films and the new digital pictures — and was paid about half of those fees. Fees for film-based mammograms are usually $45 to $120 less.

Nancy Liber, a radiologic technologist at Dr. Mahoney’s center, was called back by her own colleagues at the center after her mammogram last month.

“I thought exactly what every woman does,” Ms. Liber said. “Immediately you panic and think, ‘Oh my gosh, what if something is really wrong?’ ”

She found herself worrying about what would happen if she became ill and unable to take care of her children. She did not even tell her husband what had happened until after the second test, which turned out normal. The concerns were due entirely to the difference between film and digital images. http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com/
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http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/Despite the stressful experience, Ms. Liber said that from what she had seen in her work, digital mammograms were the way to go.

“The inconvenience it may cause is worth it,” she said. But, she added, “I definitely know what these women are going through.”

Radiologists say one of digital’s advantages is that it lets them adjust features like contrast and magnification, and see things that were blurry or maybe even invisible on film. In the long run, doctors say, the increased clarity of digital mammograms may lead to fewer callbacks of healthy women — but it takes time to learn the ropes.

Dr. Constance D. Lehman, the director of breast imaging and a professor of radiology at the University of Washington, said she was not sure whether more women were called back during the transition. But describing the two technologies, she said, “In some areas it’s like comparing apples and oranges.”

When looking at a woman’s first digital image, Dr. Lehman said, radiologists must ask themselves whether a seeming change in the breast is truly new, or was it there all along but just not visible with earlier techniques.

Once a woman has had enough digital mammograms, the comparisons should be easier, radiologists say. But the first few may raise questions because when radiologists compare, they often go back to images from two or three years before. And in some clinics that have a mixture of film and digital machines, if a woman is switched between the two types from year to year, ambiguities may crop up again and again.

Many women do not know the difference between film and digital, or notice which is being used, and clinics may or may not inform them of potential problems during the changeover.

Digital mammography got a boost from a large study in 2005 that showed it was better than film at finding tumors in women under 50, or women of any age who had dense breasts, meaning a lot of glandular and connective tissue in proportion to fat.

A buzz grew around digital after the study. Some radiologists use the technology as a selling point, and others feel they must follow suit. Now there is such a demand for digital machines that there is a six-month wait for certain types, Dr. Zuley said, even though they cost $350,000 to $600,000, about three to five times as much as units that use film.

Dr. Leonard M. Glassman, who practices at Washington Radiology Associates, said that his practice in the Washington, D.C., area, which performs 85,000 mammograms a year, converted to digital about two years ago.

“There’s an increase in the rate of things you think are abnormal for about three months, and then you get used to it,” Dr. Glassman said. “You take more extra pictures, of things that six months later you would dismiss. http://louis7j7sheehan.blogspot.com/
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It happened probably 5 to 10 percent of the time right at the beginning, so it’s a significant amount, and then it tails off.”

When questions first arise, Dr. Glassman said, he does not warn women that the imaging may be the culprit because he cannot be sure what the problem is until he sees the second set of X-rays.

“At the end I tell patients, ‘You were a victim of technology,’ ” he said. “They give me a blank stare. I say: ‘Your last one was film; this one was digital. They look different, and we just didn’t know that.’ ”



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Reports of measurements made by Dr. Edison Pettit on photographs of the prominence indicate that a gigantic mass of erupting calcium and hydrogen gas rose nearly vertically from the sun that morning at speeds first of 40 miles per second, then 80 miles per second, and when last noted, 124 miles per second.

two weeks?!?

From the lofty deck of the Hiva Oa Hanakee Pearl Lodge, the only hotel on the remote South Pacific island of Hiva Oa, the view is of lush forest, crashing cobalt sea and, if it is morning, a very misty Mount Temetiu. Below and for miles beyond, nature runs wild: steep cliffs and deep valleys covered with luxuriant tropical vegetation. No reefs surround the island, allowing the sea to pile wildly onto the sandy, rocky shoreline. The only thing missing is ... people. Which is a good thing when you’re contemplating the idea of paradise, which I happened to be doing on a recent morning, my legs dangling in an infinity pool that seemed to spill into Hanakee Bay.

Oddly, the Marquesas were among the first South Pacific islands to be settled, and from their shores departed some of the greatest navigators of all time, those who went on to discover the rest of the so-called Polynesian triangle (Tahiti-Hawaii-Easter Island). The farthest Polynesian islands from Tahiti — 900 miles — the Marquesas have long been known as Te Henua Enata (Land of Men). Giant banyan trees cover steep slopes and hide the oldest tikis in French Polynesia, long-preceding their bigger siblings on Easter Island. http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com/

Also hidden beneath the thick overgrowth are stone remnants of houses built on high platforms, stone temples and ceremonial grounds where games were played and sacrifices made. Simultaneously lush, remote and breathtaking, it was these same scenes that lured such famous paradise seekers as Paul Gauguin, Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson and Thor Heyerdahl.

Only six of the 10 Marquesas are populated — Nuku Hiva, Ua Pou, Ua Huku, Hiva Oa, Tahuata and Fatu Hiva. Each is a paradise for hikers, bikers, surfers and canyoneers. Narrow dirt trails crisscross the islands, used mostly by hunters on horseback tracking wild pigs. The only sounds in the jungle are birdcalls and the distant roar of waterfalls, deep in the otherwise quiet, eerie lushness. Sand beaches ring the islands, though few roads lead to them.

The small number of Polynesians who do live here populate the river valleys, leaving the interiors mostly to wild horses, cattle and goats. Bird life is rich; the waters teem with lobsters, small fish and sharks. Hotter and drier than Tahiti, their very remoteness has preserved the Marquesas in a day and age when a few islands in French Polynesia risk being over-visited. A couple of the islands can be reached by Air Tahiti several times a week, a few by cargo boat and passing cruise ships every couple of weeks and increasingly by private sailboats. They are hardly off limits, but you have to want to get there.

Sitting in a wooden deck chair on a recent morning, Gérard Bourgogne, a former concert flutist and part-time computer hacker, and now general manager of the 14-bungalow Hiva-Oa Hanakee Pearl Lodge, thought out loud as we admired the view: “Crossword puzzle champions would find this place perfect. So would adventure caperers. What about advertising it to infertile couples looking for the ultimate romantic hideaway? I can see the advertisement: ‘No better place in the world to truly relax!’ Why not yoga instructors and their classes? They should all come!”

While the lack of people is good for misanthropes like myself, it’s obviously tough on innkeepers.

Thanks to Paul Gauguin’s tempestuous relationship with the island, Hiva Oa may be the best known of the Marquesas. Or maybe now it is Nuka Hiva, thanks to having been host of the fourth season of “Survivor.” It is the biggest of the islands, formed by two volcanoes resting on top of each another, and in 1842 was the first island to be spied from a whaler by Herman Melville, who wrote it was “a country that no description could fit the beauty.”

Several jagged volcanic peaks mark the diamond-shaped Ua Pou, its tiny offshore islets home to millions of seabirds. It is also home to the chain’s most active artist colony, mostly wood carvers and bone necklace makers. Ua Huku is crescent-shaped, home to more goats and wild horses than people (just 575). Fatu Hiva is the southernmost in the chain. Thor Heyerdahl lived here for about a year (1937-38) and wrote a book about his experience; today the local women still make umuhei — aromatic bouquets, which they wear in their hair as aphrodisiacs — and scented necklaces made from sandalwood.

Hiva Oa was once home to 130,000; today fewer than 1,900 people are scattered through the deep valleys and in a half-dozen small villages scattered around its perimeter. Houses are of painted wood and the landscape is as primitive as it was 1,200 years ago. A long, crescent-shaped beach fronts the biggest town of Atuona, which hasn’t changed much since Gauguin built his House of Pleasure in its center.

On a hot, dry morning I follow the beach past Atuona and walk four miles to Taaoa, where a sizable tohua (temple) has been restored. Eight-foot-tall marae and tiki made from basalt still hide in the lush forest, mostly hidden. At one time 12,000 people lived in this valley, thus the elaborate temple and sacrificial grounds. This day the sounds are of crowing cocks and a road crew’s jackhammer. Human sacrifice has been replaced by worship in a mix of Roman Catholic, Protestant, Mormon and Jehovah’s Witness churches.

If one single thing is responsible for French Polynesia’s enduring reputation as paradise, it is the paintings of Gauguin, who moved to Hiva Oa in 1901 after wearing out his welcome on several other Polynesian islands. http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com/2008/03/22/try/
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Louis J. Sheehan
Filled with grace and mystery, they were mostly of an imagined place, a paradise that did not exist, featuring languorous women smiling into the distance, horses grazing in vanilla groves and baskets overflowing with breadfruit and bananas. A short walk from either the beach or the stone temple into the heart of Atuona delivers me to the doorstep of one of history’s most infamous paradise seekers.

The two-story, A-frame house is constructed from woven bamboo. Carved around its wooden door frame are erotic figures and the words “Be Mysterious” and “Be in Love.” The name of the house is carved above its entrance: Maison de Jouir. House of Pleasure, Sexual Pleasure.

A dozen wide steps lead up to the second level, the one big room where Paul Gauguin (locally known as Koke) lived and painted. A large window looks out over an open well; Gauguin kept a bamboo rod with a fishing line nearby, to raise and lower cups of cold water from the well to add to his absinthe. Gone are the pornographic photos he kept on the walls, and his collection of walking sticks with carved phallic heads. It was here he gave grand fetes, fed by cases of wine and bonbons bought from passing cargo boats.

Gauguin is buried on a hillside above the house, in a small field that looks over the ocean. It is a scene depicted in some of his last paintings. To his headstone is chained a copy of one of his carved statues, called Oviri, or Savage. He was not popular here when he died; in fact he was readying to serve a three-month sentence for libeling a local policeman.

Hiva Oa was Gauguin’s last gasp and things did not go well for him here. Never one to win friends easily, during the years he lived here he openly mocked the Catholic missionaries in a remote French colony governed by the church. He died in his House of Pleasure with a bad heart, failing eyes, morphine-addicted, leprous and syphilitic and soon to become one of the world’s greatest and best-known artists. To his ultimate chagrin, the fame part came mostly posthumously.

Two days later, thanks to the modern convenience of small aircraft, I found myself hiking remote trails on Nuka Hiva. Each morning I set out from the center of the main town of Taiohae, having asked directions from various locals the night before. I found it difficult to find a consensus when it came to simple questions like, “How far is it?” For example, the morning I decided to follow a trail to the far side of the island and a small community at Taipivai, I was told it would take all day to reach the white sand beaches at Controller Bay. It takes about four hours.

Outfitters and the government on Nuka Hiva have committed to cutting a trail system across the island in recent years, in part due to the economic kick in the pants the “Survivor” show brought to the island. The trails exist thanks to decades of wild pig, horse and hunter’s traffic; the idea — fomented by a local tour company called Marquises Rando — is to expand them into more accessible walkways without using much modern technology. Why introduce cement and steel when acacia or coconut tree trunks tied together work just as well as bridges, and volcanic rocks are perfect for bordering footpaths? The idea is to open up the mountains to visitors, creating options from six-hour round-trip walks to two-day treks with camps in between.

The diversity of walks is incredible. One morning I hire a small boat to carry me to a trailhead that leads to the Ahuii waterfall, which plunges 1,100 feet from high in the dense jungle. It’s a two-hour walk that involves a couple of thigh-high river crossings and ends with a swim in the eel-laden pool beneath the falls, and passes a handful of crumbling, thousand-year-old stone platforms along the way. On the opposite side of the island, just up from the beach is the Hikokua tohua where a dozen tikis watch over a grass-covered field once used for games and human sacrifices. Near the beach the biggest modern-day landmark is a sizable beige church and a restaurant big enough to feed the one hundred-plus passengers who arrive by cruise boat every few weeks for a lobster feast.

My last hike on Nuka Hiva is up and over a steep, 600-foot-tall pass from the village of Taipivai to a sand beach at Anaho, past stands of wild vanilla and fields of wild horses. The white beach is studded with smooth black boulders, a rare reef slowing the crashing of waves making it perfect for a swim. A solitary man lives in a fishing shack and waves me over to sample some dried fish and coconut milk. http://louis1j1sheehan.blog.ca/
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A half-dozen big dogs lie in the shade of palms, several wooden fishing boats and a plastic kayak sit overturned.

As we talk, hiding from the midday sun, I ask for his definition of paradise. Without pause he says simply: “Wherever I am. And on most days, I am right here!”


Options traders took bullish positions in several potash companies Wednesday after the major producers announced a deal to sell their product, a potassium compound used in fertilizer, to a Chinese company for more than triple last year's price.

Trading in Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan jumped to an all-time high, with market players picking up 67,000 call contracts that allow them to buy the stock and 45,000 put contracts that allow them to sell, according to Track Data.

Several traders took bets that Potash Corp. stock will climb an additional 2% before Friday, when April options expire. They congregated around April $200 calls, which are priced at $2.65 and make money if Potash Corp. goes above $202.65.

Potash Corp. rose 7.5% to $198.26 at 4 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading, after making dramatic gains over the past several months. At this time last year, the company's shares were trading around $60.

Options traders also expected more long-term increases in Potash Corp. They picked up large volumes of May $190 calls that are priced at $18.50 and make money if Potash Corp. climbs above $208.50 by next month.

Traders also took big positions in Potash Corp. put contracts, which imply bearish sentiments. Those market players could be "long" on the underlying stock and buying the puts to protect themselves against downward moves, said Paul Foster, a strategist with TheFlyOnTheWall.com. That, or traders think the stock has rallied too high and is poised for a decline.

Potash Corp. and two other companies that produce potash -- a term covering several potassium compounds used in fertilizer -- announced Wednesday that they had struck a deal with China's Sinofert Holdings Ltd. to sell their product for $576 a ton, a $400-a-ton increase over the 2007 price. They secured a higher price as global food demands rise and potash supplies tighten.

"To get a major Chinese importer to agree to a tripling of the price says that these companies are in the catbird seat," said Rebecca Engmann Darst, an equity options analyst with Interactive Brokers. "They're sitting on a product that is richly desired."

Options traders also pounced on Mosaic Co. and Agrium Inc., two other major potash producers.

In Mosaic, they picked up April $135 call contracts that are priced at $3.40 and make money if Mosaic shares rise to $138.40 before Friday. Mosaic ended Wednesday's session at $136.82, up 7.2%.

In Agrium, traders congregated around April $90 calls that are priced at 80 cents and make money if Agrium climbs above $90.80. Agrium closed at $87.12, up 10%.


He was old, aloof and tough. During a brawl with another rabbit, Bongo lost a dime-size piece of his ear. His first home is unknown. His second was an animal shelter in rural Pennsylvania that reached rabbit overload and transferred him to another shelter here called Animal Friends.

Animal Friends takes abused, neglected and unwanted animals and tries to find them families. That can be challenging. Who wants a banged-up old rabbit? Or elderly cats and dogs that have thinning fur, missing teeth, cataracts and arthritic hips?

"A lot of folks aren't willing to adopt an older animal," says Ann Cadman, health and wellness coordinator at the shelter. "I had one woman say, 'Why would I want a used animal?' "

Ms. Cadman, who has adopted several elderly dogs, says they are affectionate and attentive. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com/
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http://louis9j9sheehan9esquire.blogspot.com/But she needed a way to persuade other people to adopt old animals, of which there are many at the shelter.

Some have been left by people who move, want a younger pet, or are overwhelmed by age-related maladies. A good number of the older rabbits were bought as Easter bunnies for small children. Months pass. The novelty wears off, and the cuddly little critters turn into rabbits, weighing up to 25 pounds if they are Flemish, that can bite if they don't want to be held. Animal Friends is a no-kill shelter, so once an animal arrives, it stays there or in foster care until it is adopted.

Ms. Cadman had an idea: Form an exclusive society for people who adopt older pets, by which she means dogs more than five years old and cats over six. Rabbits are considered old at three.

Members would get discounts on pet jewelry and apparel at the shelter boutique. They would be honored with a proclamation suitable for framing, and they are invited to coffee klatches.


Ms. Cadman decided to call the group the Red Collar Society, after the well-known Red Hat Society, in which women over 50 glory in being middle-aged. "Both societies see age as something to celebrate," says Ms. Cadman.

Ms. Cadman's Red Collar Society appears to be effective. Since it was formed last April, more than 300 older cats, dogs and rabbits have been adopted from the shelter.

Members say older pets have distinct advantages. They are loving, calm, don't nip or insist on playing fetch. They don't gnaw as much on furniture and are good at visiting hospitals, nursing homes and elementary schools. Children with reading problems, for instance, will read aloud to Jazz, a seven-year-old black poodle, because he listens quietly and uncritically.

Maureen Pfeifer joined the Red Collar Society after adopting Erma, a Dalmatian somewhere between eight and 10 years old. Erma had a cloudy eye, bad teeth, a heart murmur and a tumor. A family had taken her but brought her back because she had too many things wrong with her.

"I always started with puppies and wanted another dog," says Ms. Pfeifer, who also has a seven-year-old dog that is in better health but getting creaky. "I love the idea of not having to house train. Erma knows basic commands already. It's really a lot easier."

Older animals available for adoption are advertised in the shelter newsletter, as well as in other local publications. Featured recently was T-Bone, a white seven-year-old cat originally from Egypt who responds to whistles just like a dog would, and Chester, a five-year-old coonhound who has a pleasing temperament and likes treats.

Wayne Croushore saw a picture of Bongo the rabbit and thought he might be good company for his other rabbit, Perkins, Perky for short. Mr. Croushore, 77 years old, adopted Bongo last year and became a Red Collar Society member. The retired insurance consultant has had pets all his life, including beagle puppies, which are cute but need housebreaking and obedience school. A few years ago, Mr. Croushore discovered rabbits and liked them as pets. "They're kind of like scotch, an acquired taste," he says.


Far more interesting than he imagined, they growl when they are unhappy. Some cry and grind their teeth. Their personalities vary. Perky is just that. Bongo is rakish -- tough, aggressive and independent, like a one-legged pirate, Mr. Croushore says. Buddy, his first rabbit, who has since died, came up the steps at 11 every night to have his ears scratched. Buddy's ashes are in a white ceramic dish on a shelf in Mr. Croushore's basement.

The key to making these relationships work is education. There's a class at Animal Friends on geriatric cats taught by a feline-massage therapist. http://louis0j0sheehan.livejournal.com/15433.html
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Red Collar members can attend monthly programs on bonding and estate planning. Mr. Croushore has arranged for Bongo and Perkins to be taken care of by Animal Friends if they outlive him.

There are downsides. Elderly pets can have expensive medical problems, such as strokes and failing vision. Glaucoma drops can cost $90. Older pets need to be taken out more at night. Aging rabbits need dental work. Geriatric pets need low-impact exercise. Fat and calories need to be watched in their diets. Older animals can become disoriented. An Australian study published in the Journal of Small Animal Practice reported that 28% of cats aged 11 to 14 develop at least one geriatric-onset behavioral problem, such as forgetfulness. This rises to over half of cats 15 years of age and older.


Mary Soukup, a retired teacher, provides foster care to the sickest older animals at Animal Friends, nursing them until they can be adopted. She often cares for dogs showing signs of dementia. She watches for telltale symptoms, such as going into a corner and being unable to get out. She is an unofficial Red Collar Society member because she hasn't officially adopted a pet, but she takes care of many. She currently has two: Bagel the beagle, a 12-year-old with arthritis, and 16-year-old Hercules, a Yorkshire terrier, who is blind.

She and the two dogs attended a recent coffee klatch. Over refreshments, Ms. Soukup and other owners traded tips. A fish-oil tablet, good for the heart and coat, is eagerly gobbled up by dogs if it is wrapped in salami. Pets at the social gathering traded stares and sniffs.

Old pets can learn new tricks, some society members say. Katie Tontala points to her 11-year-old cat, Karma, whom she adopted last year.

Karma is deaf and thus can't hear a can being opened; most cats know that the sound means dinner is served. Ms. Tontala taught Karma sign language. She puts her fingers to her mouth and taps her lips. Karma comes.




The failure of diplomacy to stop Iran’s nuclear program became obvious this week, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad revealed the installation of 6,000 new centrifuges at the country’s main uranium enrichment complex. His announcement was accompanied by the now customary assertion that outsiders can do nothing to stop Iran from fulfilling its nuclear destiny.

Once, not so long ago, this kind of boast would elicit clear American declarations that Iran would never be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. Everything, President Bush would say ominously, is on the table. This time he has been quiet. I wish I believed that it is the quiet before a storm of laser-guided action. It seems more likely that it is the abashed silence of an American president whose bluff has been called in front of the entire world.

Washington’s performance should concern anyone who cares about long-term American influence in the Islamic world. But for Israel (and Israel’s supporters), this is an urgent problem. It is Israel, after all, that has been set by the Iranian leadership as the target for annihilation.

In response to the news from Iran, some supporters of Israel have started to suggest that the failed efforts at prevention be replaced by assured American deterrence: any Iranian nuclear attack on Israel would be treated as an attack on the United States. Charles Krauthammer, a Washington Post columnist, recently referred to this as “the Holocaust doctrine.”

From Israel’s perspective, the thought is tempting — but it’s not realistic.

In 1981, Israeli planes destroyed the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak. The world’s reaction was harshly critical. Even the Reagan administration, usually a close ally, denounced the operation.

Prime Minister Menachem Begin was undaunted by the fury. At a press conference in Jerusalem he announced that he felt obligated to do anything in his power to stop Israel’s enemies from getting their hands on means of mass killing.

Begin mentioned the Holocaust; it was never far from his mind. But his primary focus was strategic, not historical. Israel was no different from any other country. It would bear the ultimate responsibility for its own security.

Begin was right. Here’s why:

First, in exchange for assistance, Washington would naturally (and rightly) demand a very strong say in Israeli policies. A misstep, after all, could embroil it in a nuclear exchange. Within a very short time, Israel’s sovereignty and autonomy would come to resemble Minnesota’s. http://pub25.bravenet.com/journal/post.php?entryid=23334
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http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com/This is not a bad thing if your country happens to border Iowa. It works less well in Israel’s neighborhood.

I’m not questioning American friendship. But even friendship has practical limits. Presidents change and policies change. George W. Bush, the greatest friend Israel has had in the White House, hasn’t been able to keep a (relatively easier) commitment to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. It is a good thing that Israel didn’t build its deterrence on that commitment.

What’s more, it is fair to say that Israel is not a weak country. It has developed a powerful set of strategic options. In the best case, it would be able to act on its own to degrade and retard the Iranian nuclear program as it did in Iraq (and, more recently, Syria). In a worse case, if the Iranians do get the bomb, Iranian leaders might be deterred by rational considerations. If so, Israel’s own arsenal — and its manifest willingness to respond to a nuclear attack — ought to suffice.

If, on the other hand, the Iranian leadership simply can’t resist the itch to “wipe Israel off the map” — or to make such a thing appear imminent — then it would be up to Israel to make its own calculations. What is the price of 100,000 dead in Tel Aviv? Or twice that? The cost to Iran would certainly be ghastly. It would be wrong for Israel to expect other nations to shoulder this moral and geopolitical responsibility.

Don’t misunderstand. It would be a noble thing for the United States to support Israel’s efforts to stop an Iranian bomb or, if it comes to that, to back Israel’s response to an attack. But no country can rely on the kindness of others.

Next month Israel celebrates its 60th Independence Day. Sovereignty comes with a price. Israel’s willingness to pay it is the only Holocaust doctrine that it can really rely on.



When the idea for a new drug-delivery company called BIND Biosciences Inc. started percolating in a lab here four years ago, venture capitalists quickly offered to invest.

One moneyman, though, had an inside track: Terry McGuire, a partner with nearby Polaris Venture Partners. Mr. McGuire was familiar with BIND's nano-particle technology to treat tumors and heart disease. He's also a friend, and frequent business partner, of Robert Langer, the decorated scientist who runs the Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab. That relationship often gives Polaris first dibs on cutting-edge medical technology developed there.

Together, Messrs. McGuire and Langer have launched 13 companies over the past 15 years and become a model for other venture capitalists scrambling to commercialize new drug and medical-device research. Dr. Langer, 59 years old, holds more than 600 patents and supplies the science; Mr. McGuire, 52, fine-tunes the business. Some of Mr. McGuire's work with Mr. Langer was described in a 2005 Harvard Business School case study called, "The Langer Lab: Commercializing Science."

"I don't think either one of them would have been as successful without the other," says Andrey Zarur, a bioscience investor with Kodiak Venture Partners who is familiar with Dr. Langer's lab.

Other serial "academic entrepreneurs" have teamed up with VCs to launch bioscience companies. They include Harvard professor George Whitesides, who helped start biotech giant Genzyme Corp. and drug company Theravance Inc., and Stanford ophthalmologist Mark Blumenkranz, whose research helped launch OptiMedica Corp., which is developing new technology to treat eye disease. Dr. Blumenkranz joined with venture capitalist Brook Byers on OptiMedica, and "we're working on another project together," says Mr. Byers, a partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. http://louis9j9sheehan.blog.com/2841488/
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But few venture capitalists have been as successful as Mr. McGuire in cultivating one scientist as a source of deals.

Hooking up with a prolific university inventor is important in bioscience investing because most health-related start-ups, unlike information-technology companies, are born in academia. The technology is complex, and investors say they prefer to work with a longtime partner they can trust.

Mr. McGuire first sought out Dr. Langer, a wiry chemical engineer, in the early 1990s after hearing about his research into drug delivery and "regenerative medicine," or techniques to rebuild human tissue and organs. One early big hit came in 1997, when they co-founded, with another Langer protege, Advanced Inhalation Research Inc. The company, which devised a novel way to deliver large-molecule drugs via the lungs, was sold for $113 million in stock 18 months later; Polaris made nearly 10 times its money, and Dr. Langer profited as a significant shareholder of AIR.

Since then, the two have teamed up on other drug-related start-ups like Pulmatrix Inc., which is developing inhalable aerosols for respiratory disease, and Tempo Pharmaceuticals Inc., which uses nanotechnology to create new drugs. Of the 13 investments, two companies went public and three were acquired.

Dr. Langer has a knack for understanding which lab projects can be commercialized and which are better left to scientific journals, Mr. McGuire says. Researchers who have worked for Dr. Langer say he is a talented manager who hires smart graduate students and gives them leeway to pursue their interests, whether they lie in stem-cell research, tissue generation or drug delivery.

Mr. McGuire, meanwhile, helps the scientist-entrepreneurs in Dr. Langer's lab develop business plans, target potential markets and recruit managers. He also helps them negotiate partnerships with bigger companies and sometimes lends them spare offices at Polaris's headquarters.

Polaris is often the first place Dr. Langer and his researchers turn when they're considering starting a company. Sometimes, "when we end up doing deals, it's a 20-second phone call," Dr. Langer says.

Proteges of the men now collaborate as well. BIND began with research by Omid Farokhzad, a researcher in Dr. Langer's lab who was trying to engineer nano-particles to deliver drugs to specific sites in the body. He sought advice from Amir Nashat, a Polaris partner who had also worked in Dr. Langer's lab. Mr. Nashat met Polaris's Mr. McGuire through Dr. Langer.

Then Mr. McGuire stepped in, helping Mr. Farokhzad negotiate a license for his technology from MIT. Mr. McGuire also helped the company find a lawyer and recruited BIND's chief executive, Glenn Batchelder. "Before there was even a company, we tried to be helpful," Mr. McGuire says.

BIND spurned an investment offer from another venture-capital firm and, last year, took $2.5 million in funding from Polaris and Flagship Ventures, of Cambridge. In November, it raised another $16 million. BIND now has 21 employees, and a partnership with a big pharmaceutical company, which it declined to name.

The policy alternatives in the post-housing-bubble world are painfully unpleasant. In my view, the least bad option is for the Federal Reserve to print money to help stabilize housing prices and financial markets. Yes, use reflation to soften the pain for Main Street and Wall Street. If instead we let housing prices fall another 25%-30% – as predicted by the Case-Shiller Home Price Index – it's almost certain that Washington will end up nationalizing the mortgage business.

So far, the Fed's lending programs have not provided adequate liquidity to financial markets: Reserves supplied to the banking system have grown at a tiny 0.6% annual rate since December. That's because the reserves the Fed is injecting by lending are effectively pulled out or "sterilized" by its sales of Treasury securities. The Fed has been selling these securities to keep the fed funds rate at the level targeted by its Federal Open Market Committee directives.

Congress and the Treasury have proposed voluntary measures to help mortgage borrowers, but the impact on mortgage availability has been nil. As average house prices plummet – declining at a 23% annual rate over the three months ending in January – lenders are sharply curtailing access to mortgage-based, home-equity loans. The 15% of U.S. mortgage holders with negative equity in their homes have no access to credit, and 20% with marginal equity have limited access at best. Overall access to credit is contracting: Ask Americans trying to utilize home-equity lines or arrange student loans.

Meanwhile, the collapse of house prices and the attendant damage to credit markets have become so severe that the Fed has been forced to create new policy measures at a fast clip, including the radical decision to take $30 billion worth of Bear Stearns' risky mortgages onto its own balance sheet, and to open the discount window to investment banks.

The bottom line is this: The Fed could have watched a run on investment banks quickly turn into a run on commercial banks, or protected the creditors of investment banks (like the depositors of commercial banks) at the expense of Bear Stearns' shareholders. The Fed wisely chose the second alternative.

Still, the Fed's intervention has done no more than buy a respite from the crisis in the financial markets. The monetary easing I'm recommending can occur by having the Fed print money to purchase mortgages directly, or purchase Treasury securities directly. The latter is probably more desirable because it adds higher-quality assets to the Fed's balance sheet. The Bank of Japan was also forced to reflate by printing money in 2001, after two years of a zero interest-rate policy failed to lift the economy out of a prolonged recession that had moved Japan to the brink of a deflationary crisis.

Fed reflation – to slow the fall in home prices and alleviate the distress for households and lenders – carries many risks. But the alternative is to struggle with a patchwork of inadequate efforts to shore up mortgage markets, while the Fed sticks to its current tactic of pegging the fed funds rate without increasing the money supply. This, I would submit, is even more risky. It risks a severe recession that will only intensify the drive for reregulation of financial and mortgage markets after the election.

Printing money is a radical step that enables the Fed to stop pegging the federal-funds rate and start increasing market liquidity directly. In any event, there is substantial evidence that the fed funds rate has been well above the equilibrium level. One piece of evidence is the accelerating deterioration in credit markets and the real economy that ensued even while the Fed cut the rate. Even more compelling, consider the sharp widening of the gap between the fed funds rate and the yield on three-month Treasury bills.

That gap, usually close to zero, measures the intensity of demand for riskless assets relative to the Fed's target rate in the interbank market. At the time of the Bear Stearns crisis on March 16, the fed funds rate was an extraordinary 250 basis points above yields on three-month Treasurys. This corresponded to a "10 sigma," or ten-times-the-typical deviation from the mean event. Statistically, 2 or 3 sigma is a very unusual event suggesting, in this case, an unusually strong preference for riskless T-bills. Four or 5 sigma represents a serious risky event, and 10 sigma is an outright panic. Based on this gap criterion, the August 2007 crisis onset was a 5-sigma event, while the October 1998 LTCM crisis and the 1987 stock market crash were each 4-sigma events. This suggests that even at those earlier times of crisis there was less fear as expressed by a run into riskless Treasurys. http://blogs.ebay.com/mytymouse1/home/_W0QQentrysyncidZ526811010
Louis J Sheehan
Ominously, after dipping close to 5 sigma after the Bear Stearns crisis, the gap has crept back above 6 sigma.

The Fed should announce its intention to add to its holding of Treasury securities in order to provide additional liquidity. It should cease pegging the fed funds rate while this policy is in effect. While there is no guarantee, direct injection of money holds some promise of alleviating the worst of the credit crisis. This means that, after the election, Congress will not feel justified in nationalizing mortgage markets.

While there is a substantial risk that inflation may rise for a time – this would be the policy goal – monetization is more easily reversible than nationalization of the mortgage market. Meanwhile, Fed officials concerned about inflation should rethink their view that it is impossible to identify an asset bubble before it bursts.

The postbubble period has yielded some very unattractive policy alternatives. They clearly underscore the rationale for having the Fed target asset prices – in a world where asset markets affect the real economy more than the real economy affects asset markets.


Most discussions about the rising cost of health care emphasize the need to get more people insured. The assumption seems to be that insurance – rather than the service delivered by doctor to patient – is the important commodity.

But perhaps the solution to much of what currently plagues us in health care – rising costs and bureaucracy, diminishing levels of service – rests on a radically different approach: fewer people insured.

You don't need to be an economist to understand that any middleman interposed between seller and buyer raises the price of a given service or product. Some intermediaries justify this by providing benefits, such as salesmanship, advertising or transport. Others offer physical facilities, such as warehouses. A third group, organized crime, utilizes fear and intimidation to muscle its way into the provider-consumer chain, raking in hefty profits and bloating cost, without providing any benefit at all.

The health insurance model is closest to the parasitic relationship imposed by the Mafia and the like. Insurance companies provide nothing other than an ambiguous, shifty notion of "protection." But even the Mafia doesn't stick its nose into the process; once the monthly skim is set, Don Whoever stays out of the picture, but for occasional "cost of doing business" increases. When insurance companies insinuate themselves into the system, their first step is figuring out how to increase the skim by harming the people they are allegedly protecting through reduced service.

Insurance is all about betting against negative consequences and the insurance business model is unique in that profits depend upon goods and services not being provided. Using actuarial tables, insurers place their bets. Sometimes even the canniest MIT grads can't help: Property and casualty insurers have collapsed in the wake of natural disasters. http://louis-j-sheehan.myblogvoice.com/louis-j-sheehan-1023071-205297.htm
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Health insurers have taken steps to avoid that level of surprise: Once they affix themselves to the host – in this case dual hosts, both doctor and patient – they systematically suck the lifeblood out of the supply chain with obstructive strategies. For that reason, the consequences of any insurance-based health-care model, be it privately run, or a government entitlement, are painfully easy to predict. There will be progressively draconian rationing using denial of authorization and steadily rising co-payments on the patient end; massive paperwork and other bureaucratic hurdles, and steadily diminishing fee-recovery on the doctor end.

Some of us are old enough to remember visiting the doctor and paying him/her directly by check or cash. You had a pretty good idea going in what the service was going to cost. And because the doctor had to look you in the eye – and didn't need to share a rising chunk of his profits with an insurer – the cost was likely to be reasonable. The same went for hospitals: no $20 aspirins due to insurance-company delay tactics and other shenanigans. Few physicians became millionaires, but they lived comfortably, took responsibility for their own business model, and enjoyed their work more.

Several years ago, I suffered a sports injury that necessitated an MRI. The "fee" for a 20-minute procedure was over $3,000. My insurance company refused to pay, so I informed the radiologist that I'd be footing the bill myself. Immediately, the "fee" was cut by two thirds. And the doctor was tickled to get it.

A few highly technical and complex procedures that need to amortize the purchase of extremely expensive hardware will be out of reach for any but the wealthiest patient. For that extremely limited category, insurance might work. A small percentage of indigent individuals won't be able to afford even low-cost procedures. For them, government-funded county facilities are the answer, because any decent society takes care of the weakest among us. But a hefty proportion of health-care services – office visits, minor surgeries – would be affordable to most Americans if the slice of the health-care dollar that currently ends up in the coffers of insurance companies was eliminated.

When I was in practice as a psychologist, I discussed fees up front with prospective patients, prior to their initial visit. People appreciated knowing what to expect and my bad debt rate was less than 1%. That allowed me to keep my charges reasonable and, on occasion, to lower them for less fortunate patients. http://www.myface.com/index.php?do=/public/account/submit/add-blog/added_3049/
And I loved my job because I was free to concentrate on what I went to school for: helping people, rather than filling out incomprehensible forms designed to discourage me from filing them in the first place.

Physicians and other providers need to liberate themselves from the Faustian bargain they've cut with the Mephistophelian suits who now run their professional lives. Because many doctors are loath to talk about money, they allowed themselves to perpetuate the fantasy that "insurance is paying." It isn't. There is no free lunch and no free physical exam.

If substantial numbers of health-care providers shook off the insurance monkey on their back, en masse, and the supply of providers was substantially increased by opening more medical schools, the result would be a more honest, cost-effective system benefiting everyone. Except the insurance companies.


On a recent balmy Sunday, John and Cindy McCain hosted the national press corps at their ranch here. Mrs. McCain's touches were evident -- the ceiling fans hung from tree branches, the art of their children displayed on the cabin's walls, the Budweiser beer tap from her family's business. http://louis2j2sheehan.bloggerteam.com/
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Dogs she has adopted ran about.
Cindy McCain regularly introduces her husband at events, but often retreats when her duties are done.

Showing off his barbecue skills, Sen. McCain pulled sizzling ribs off the grill and dispensed them on the sweeping porch. Mrs. McCain, in skinny jeans with her hair pulled back in a ponytail, stood nearby and just smiled.

The 53-year-old wife of Sen. McCain doesn't seek the limelight. While the picture-perfect Mrs. McCain regularly introduces her husband at campaign events, she often retreats after her duties are done, donning her fully loaded iPod and typing away on her silver BlackBerry.

"The campaign gets to be a little too much for me," she said in an interview. "I take some time off occasionally...and then I get back out."

As the wife of the expected Republican nominee, Mrs. McCain will face intensifying scrutiny. Both of Sen. McCain's potential opponents have high-profile spouses who have assumed very public roles in the campaigns -- and have at times undergone fierce criticism and media attention.

The pressure already has begun. Recently, Mrs. McCain faced the press with Sen. McCain to deny news reports that her husband of 28 years had an affair with a lobbyist.

Although she says she wants to be a "traditional" first lady, Mrs. McCain has led a life that by any measure has been untraditional.

She heads one of the nation's largest beer distributorships, an Anheuser-Busch Cos. franchise inherited from her father. She has sported "MS BUD" on her license plate, and from the campaign trail she uses her BlackBerry and cellphone to oversee this region's rollout of Bud Lite Lime and to expand her corporate empire.


Last month, while Sen. McCain was touring Europe and Iraq to show his foreign-policy credentials, Mrs. McCain flew into postwar Kosovo on a mission to clear land mines. It was the latest of several trips she has made in recent years as part of a detonation team. She also supports the charity arranging the trips by serving on its board and making donations.

"Cindy is a private person with her own stresses and commitments -- apart from her public role in John's campaign," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close friend of the McCains. "She juggles bowling balls."

Sen. McCain, 71, calls his wife "a real trooper." After knee-replacement surgery following a fall in a grocery store a few months ago, Mrs. McCain, always meticulously dressed and coiffed even on crutches, quickly hit the trail. "Sometimes when we get in bed at night, I hear her groan" from the pain, the senator said in an interview.

When John McCain met his future wife, Cindy Hensley was a 24-year-old only child on vacation with her parents. In Phoenix, she had been her high school's rodeo queen, sporting a cowboy hat complete with a crown. After earning education degrees at the University of Southern California (which Sen. McCain has called "University of Spoiled Children"), she became a special-needs teacher.

She also got involved in the beer distributorship started by her father. Art Pearce, who worked at his own family's company, a Coors distributor in Phoenix, frequently ran into her at industry events. "You could tell by her air that she was very proud of her family's business," Mr. Pearce said.

Her focus shifted as soon as she met John McCain, a dashing Navy officer in his dress whites, at a cocktail party in Hawaii, where she was vacationing with her parents. They had "instant chemistry," Mrs. McCain has said. She didn't know he had been a prisoner of war in Vietnam for five years. She has said that they both lied about their ages: He said he was four years younger; she said she was three years older.

At the time, Sen. McCain was separated from his first wife, with whom he had a daughter. He had adopted his wife's two sons. After a divorce, he married Cindy Hensley in 1980. http://louisbjbsheehan.blogspot.com/
Having signed a prenuptial agreement that her assets would remain separate, he left the Navy to join her father's business, Hensley & Co., as a public-relations manager for $50,000 a year. His young wife brought home much more from company distributions.

Her family provided some of the funding when he ran for Congress in 1982. After his election, the couple began a commuter marriage, with Mrs. McCain staying in Phoenix to raise their growing family.

"We really feel that one of the smartest things we ever did was have our kids grow up in Arizona," Sen. McCain said recently on the trail. "It's very tough to be a relative of a politician in Washington, because of the fishbowl effect." Although the commuter marriage continues to this day, Sen. McCain said the family took two vacations together every year and Mrs. McCain "is the one that always made that happen."

In 2000, when Mrs. McCain's father died, she inherited the beer distributorship. Hensley's chief executive, Bob Delgado, said he sat down with Mrs. McCain to ask what she wanted to do with the business. He expected her to put it up for sale.

"I want the employees and their families to know that I will take care of them the way my dad has," she recalls telling Mr. Delgado. "I'm not going to sell just because he died." Mrs. McCain said she wanted the company her father built from scratch to go to her children someday, Mr. Delgado said.

Mrs. McCain assumed her father's position as chairman. She began focusing on strategic issues and big-budget items, leaving day-to-day operations to Mr. Delgado and Chief Financial Officer Andy McCain, her stepson.

"I have good people in place...I trust them and I love them," Mrs. McCain said, adding that she speaks to Mr. Delgado almost daily. "I'm the ultimate person who makes the large decisions; major changes, growth decisions."

Since James Hensley's death eight years ago, the distributorship has nearly doubled, holding a significant portion of the Phoenix-area market share. It has 700 employees and annual revenue of about $300 million. Mrs. McCain has approved the buyout of another distributorship, helping bring sales last year to 23 million cases of beer.

Mrs. McCain (who can tell a beer's freshness by tasting it, according to her daughter Meghan) declines to say what percentage of the company she owns or its value. Industry experts estimate her stake at about $100 million.

She owns a private jet, which Sen. McCain's campaign pays to use on the trail. http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com/

She started the Hensley Family Foundation, largely committed to children's causes, to which Sen. McCain donates some of his speaking fees and book proceeds.

In 1991, Sen. McCain became embroiled in the "Keating Five" scandal, in which five senators were probed for ties with a thrift executive. The Arizona lawmaker wasn't charged with any ethics violation.

That same year, Mrs. McCain underwent two back surgeries, and she said she became addicted to painkillers. She resorted to stealing some drugs from a medical charity she had started and using others' names for prescriptions, according to news reports at the time.

"I was trying to be the perfect woman," Mrs. McCain said in interviews at the time. "That was the darkest period of my life."

The Drug Enforcement Administration began an investigation of Mrs. McCain in 1994, but she avoided prosecution by paying a fine, performing community service in a soup kitchen and joining Narcotics Anonymous. She had to close her medical charity.

"Cindy faced up to her addiction," Sen. McCain said.

Since coming clean, "I've never been secretive about it at all, because [talking about addiction] is part of the recovery process," Mrs. McCain said. "It's part of my life; it has made me a better person and certainly made me a better mother."

The past year has been particularly stressful because their 19-year-old son, Jimmy, did a tour of duty in Iraq. Their son Jack also is in the military, attending the Naval Academy, as did his father, grandfather and great grandfather. Meghan, a recent Columbia University graduate, travels and blogs for the campaign, while the younger daughter, Bridget, attends high school.

One day, Mrs. McCain answered her son Jimmy's call from Iraq as the campaign bus pulled up to a town hall where the McCains were scheduled to appear. The phone line suddenly went dead; she grew teary. Two minutes later, she stepped onto the stage and calmly introduced her husband.

In 1991, Mrs. McCain came across a girl in an orphanage in Bangladesh. Mother Teresa implored Mrs. McCain to take the baby with a severe cleft palate; the senator's wife did so without first telling her husband. The couple adopted the girl, named her Bridget, and has seen her through some dozen operations to repair her cleft palate and resolve other medical problems.

When Bridget drops into the campaign, Mrs. McCain goes out of her way to point her out. "I want to make sure everyone knows she's a part of us, too," she said. (The dark-skinned child was the subject of a "dirty trick" during Mr. McCain's presidential run in 2000, when unknown operatives spread the rumor that Bridget was the product of an affair.)

These days, Mrs. McCain is active in charities specializing in war-ravaged and developing countries. This summer, Mrs. McCain will join an overseas mission of Operation Smile, a charity she has long supported that travels the world to perform corrective surgery on children's faces.

Her reticence about the spotlight is why she surprised some friends and advisers recently by wading into a controversy involving Michelle Obama. The wife of Sen. Barack Obama had commented that her husband's run for the presidency made her proud of her country for the first time in her life. Mrs. McCain declared on the stump that she always has been, "and always will be, proud of my country."

"It wasn't planned," Mrs. McCain said. "It wasn't about my stepping out on my own, but I do have opinions." However, she's more likely to keep them to herself.

"My husband's the candidate," she said. "I'm not."

Static in the global TV-set business is forcing some big players to re-tune their game.

On Monday, Philips Electronics NV blamed a profit dip on its floundering TV operations -- just days after saying it would restructure its North American television business. Earlier this month, Sony Corp. replaced its top TV executive following failed efforts to turn around its unprofitable television unit. Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., the maker of Panasonic products, recently reorganized a part of its U.S. business to better respond to intensifying price competition.

But one upstart, Irvine, Calif.-based Vizio Inc., has largely surfed past the industry's woes. http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com/
http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/Its single focus: churning out low-priced flat-panel TVs.

Vizio is a fraction the size of Sony and Samsung Electronics Co., both leading brands in the U.S. flat-panel market. Yet Vizio shipped 12.4% of North America's liquid-crystal display, or LCD, TVs in the last quarter of 2007. That's just behind Sony's 12.5% share and Samsung's 14.2%, according to research firm iSuppli Corp. Overall, Vizio's sales have multiplied to just under $2 billion last year, up from $700 million in 2006 and $142 million in 2005, according to the closely held company.

The California company's success illustrates the rise of a new business model in the fast-changing TV industry. Big Korean and Japanese consumer-electronics makers spent huge sums developing and marketing their own technology, creating a high barrier to entry for newcomers. They also built many key components in-house, including the all-important LCD and plasma display panels.

But panel technology is becoming ever more commoditized, meaning big brands aren't the only ones controlling the field. The shift has allowed nimble players like Vizio, which handles the design and marketing, to hook up with contract manufacturers and produce their own cheap TVs. At the same time, discount retailers such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc. are increasing their sales in the electronics category, slashing prices in the process.

By late last year -- after a spate of holiday promotions -- the average flat-panel TV cost just $920, down 24% from 2006, according to DisplaySearch.

Vizio chief executive William Wang was prescient. A native of Taiwan and a former marketer of computer monitors, he was struck by a 2002 ad for a $10,000 Philips flat-panel TV. He sensed an opportunity. Rather than sell the sleek sets as luxury items, he figured he could make flat-panel TVs that were affordable to average consumers.


Back then, the computer-monitor business had largely transitioned from clunky cathode-ray tubes to flat panels. Mr. Wang knew many of the parts in flat computer screens were used in flat-panel TVs. Tapping his computer contacts in Taiwan, he calculated he could get enough parts to qualify for a bulk discount and use them to make inexpensive TVs.

To fund the effort, Mr. Wang borrowed money from friends and family. He also mortgaged his home in Newport Beach, Calif., eventually raising $600,000. While he wanted to name the new company "W" after himself, he settled for "V" after learning that a hotel chain had claimed the letter. V launched in October of 2002.


In January 2003, Mr. Wang met with executives at Costco Wholesale Corp. in Issaquah, Wash. He pitched them on a 46-inch plasma flat-panel TV for $3,800 -- half the price of competitors' sets. During the meeting, Mr. Wang said he wanted to become the next Sony in five years, says Tim Farmer, Costco's vice president of merchandising for consumer electronics. The Costco executives laughed, Mr. Farmer recalls.

Nonetheless, the Costco team was impressed enough with V that they decided to give Mr. Wang a chance, says Mr. Farmer. By February 2003, Costco was stocking V's TVs in 10 of its warehouses. A month later, it expanded the line to all 320 of its U.S. warehouses. That store count has since grown to 385. Today, Costco says Vizio is one of its largest TV suppliers.

"Vizio has always supplied my projections, and I've never been shorted product," says Mr. Farmer.

For Gabe Billings, a 33-year-old stay-at-home dad, price was the main concern when he purchased a 37-inch Vizio from Costco this month. Mr. Billings, of Eugene, Ore., says he isn't so brand conscious when it comes to TVs. http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com/
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"I didn't see any point in spending hundreds of dollars more for something I won't be able to tell the difference, once I get home," says Mr. Billings. He says he spent $749 for the Vizio, versus the roughly $1,100 charged for bigger-name models.

Much of Vizio's success stems from the cozy relationship that Mr. Wang has forged with Taipei-based AmTran Technology Co. AmTran is a contract manufacturer that for years built computer monitors and TVs for companies like Sharp Corp. and Sony. Unlike with those customers, however, AmTran owns a 23% stake in Vizio.

The arrangement gets Vizio preferential treatment. AmTran sometimes swallows shipping costs and pushes component suppliers to ensure Vizio's products are high quality and on time. AmTran now gets about 80% of its revenue from Vizio. In turn, Vizio sources as many as 85% of its TVs from AmTran, according to research firm DisplaySearch.

"Unlike many PC companies who try to make their money by trying to squeezing the vendor, we try to work with our vendor," says Mr. Wang, 44 years old. Scottie Chiu, AmTran's chief financial officer, doesn't dispute that his company gives Vizio preferential treatment.

Other TV upstarts are pursuing similar strategies. Syntax-Brillian Corp., the Tempe, Ariz., seller of the low-cost Olevia brand of TVs, works with electronics manufacturer Taiwan Kolin Co., which bought a 12.5% stake in the TV maker in 2006. Flat-panel TV maker Westinghouse Digital Electronics LLC of Santa Fe Springs, Calif., says it works closely with Chi Mei Optoelectronics Corp., Taiwan's second-largest maker of LCD panels.

Sony and others, such as Matsushita, say they aren't fazed by their much smaller rivals. Stan Glasgow, president and chief operating officer for Sony Electronics, says Vizio's lack of in-house manufacturing and development resources will hold the company back. "Vizio doesn't have the kind of resources and money to lock up [flat panel] supply," he says. "I think they're in trouble."

Mr. Wang sees no disadvantage to not owning factories. So far, Vizio has largely made products based on existing technology, although the CEO does have ambitions to dream up new products. "R&D is the key for innovation, not manufacturing," he says.


Born in Taiwan in 1963 and raised in Hawaii, Mr. Wang studied electrical engineering at the University of Southern California. He returned to Taiwan in the 1980s to work for Tatung Co., which made computer monitors for International Business Machines Corp. While at Tatung, Mr. Wang met and befriended Alpha Wu, the future founder of AmTran, who was then a founding executive at a Taiwanese monitor maker.

By 2004, Mr. Wang had changed his six-person company's name to Vizio. He also decided he needed another round of funding, of about $2 million. He targeted manufacturing partners since he wanted to tie suppliers to the success of the brand.

AmTran, the 3,000-employee manufacturer that his friend Mr. Wu founded in 1994, was a natural choice. But AmTran was hurting. The company reported 2004 earnings of $4.1 million on revenue of $428 million and a profit margin of just 0.9%. In 2005, it had a loss.

Mr. Wang suggested to Mr. Wu that AmTran invest in Vizio because its TVs were gaining traction in U.S. retail stores. By then, Vizio was producing $18 million a year in revenue and was profitable, he says. In April 2004, AmTran bought an 8% stake in Vizio for about $1 million, say the companies. (AmTran declined to make Mr. Wu available for comment.) That same month, Mr. Wang sold an additional 8% of Vizio to an affiliate of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., the world's biggest contract manufacturer of electronics.


Vizio's move was both bold and unique, because the company wasn't just outsourcing its manufacturing as many companies do, but it was also creating an equity partnership with a major supplier.
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Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
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AmTran CFO Mr. Chiu says the company hoped the Vizio relationship would blossom into a strategic partnership, but "nobody knew" whether such close cooperation with a customer would work. Suppliers are typically reluctant to do too much business with a single customer, because it risks disaster if the relationship fails.

Vizio soon leveraged its new manufacturing clout to increase its number of television models to five from two. It also broadened its distribution into retailers such as Wal-Mart's Sam's Club division and BJ's Wholesale Club Inc.

In 2006, Vizio says sales of its TVs jumped fivefold, to 700,000 sets from a year earlier. That June, AmTran bought an additional 15% of Vizio's shares from the company's departing CFO, who was moving back to Taiwan, both companies say. They declined to reveal how much the additional stake cost.

The alliance helped AmTran turn a corner. According to the company, revenues last year rose to $2.1 billion, up more than double from $959 million in 2006 and nearly five times its 2005 revenue. Earnings were $31.5 million in 2006, compared with a net loss in 2005. Mr. Chiu, the AmTran CFO, says business is hard to predict this year, given the shaky U.S. economy, but he expects revenue to grow by at least 30%.

The synergies continue to benefit both companies. In a brand-boosting coup, Vizio last July snared National Football League star LaDainian Tomlinson as a pitchman. The San Diego Chargers running back has endorsed Vizio's sets through television ads and appearances on shows such as Dr. Phil.

Last October, a Vizio official showed Seong Ohm, senior vice president of merchandising technology for Sam's Club, some new products. Ms. Ohm says she wanted a TV that female customers could relate to, especially something that could blend into a kitchen scheme. She got a peek at a prototype of a white, 20-inch flat-panel TV. Ms. Ohm liked the design so much, she says she asked Vizio to get 20,000 of the TVs to Sam's Club by early March. The sets have since arrived in the U.S. and are featured in Sam's Club's Spring catalog for $348.78 apiece.


Still, some hurdles loom. Vizio may face a shortage of LCD panels. Neither Vizio nor AmTran produce the flat panels themselves, and the companies that make them may hoard them to sell under their own brands. AmTran's Mr. Chiu says the supply of LCD panels in the midsize range -- 32 inches -- could become "tight" in the second half of 2008 if U.S. demand holds up. But he says AmTran hopes to secure enough supply by leveraging its sizable purchases of large-size panels.

Mr. Wang says Vizio plans to further diversify its product portfolio into TVs made from plasma panels and may also expand into Blu-ray DVD players. But he has tempered his earlier ambitions about quickly becoming the new Sony.

"We still have a long way to go," he says. "Our goal is to be the next Sony in 20 or 30 years."
Switch on a laptop or cellphone and you've used coltan, a mineral imbedded in electronic hardware; most of it is exported from Africa by criminals. Buy a cheap pack of cigarettes on a street corner and you may have fed a mob of black marketeers that stretches into Indian reservations or, in Europe, deep into the bloody misery of the Balkans. Wander outside the normal channels for caviar or tax-free migrant labor and you will have made bands of brigands ever more prosperous. And organized crime is the only winner from drugs, prostitutes and other illicit offerings not to be found at Wal-Mart or Costco.


The funeral of a gunned-down Japanese yakuza mafia boss in 1988. Gang warfare has subsided in recent years

As Misha Glenny shows in "McMafia," a vividly recounted journey through a dozen of the world's most potent gangs, cartels and transnational mafias, there is hardly any society or economic subculture that is not affected by global criminal networks. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com/
Naturally, criminal markets are not new, but in the late 1980s criminal business activity dramatically flourished with the collapse of communism, the loosening of authoritarian controls across the globe and, not least, the advent of anarchy in parts of Russia and the former Eastern bloc. Mr. Glenny's purpose is to describe the rise of this "shadow economy." He estimates that criminal business now amounts to 20% of global GDP.

The book's title, though clever, is misleading: The world's organized criminals are no homogenized franchise in the McDonald's mold. From place to place and region to region, they take all sorts of shapes and serve all sorts of purposes. In the Ukrainian port of Odessa, a "heroic gangster" named Karabas takes a tithe -- literally 10% -- from the local businesses in exchange for protection from outside criminal enterprises, until he's gunned down. ("Any firm, and there were a lot of them, considered it an honor to be under Karabas's protection," one business owner tells Mr. Glenny.) In Japan, yakuza syndicates eschew actual violence ("the credible threat of violence" is preferable, Mr. Glenny observes) as the mafia pursues its interests in everything from trafficking women to operating as "a de facto legal system" in resolving disputes over such matters as bankruptcy declarations, insurance claims and real-estate transactions. In India, gangs merge with sectarian politics -- "the gang wars of Bombay that exploded with renewed violence in the 1990s were in part a proxy conflict between the intelligence agencies of India and Pakistan," Mr. Glenny writes. But such mergers often self-destruct, he observes, in feuds worthy of Jacobean revenge tragedies. Meanwhile in Nigeria, the talented theatricality of Web-savvy fraudsters fuels "advance fee" scams over the Internet -- you probably have a few requests to help get money out of Africa in your inbox right now. A popular Nigerian song lauds such scams with the refrain: "White man! I go chop your dollar."

Nevertheless, common themes emerge. Organized crime usually steps in to replace state failure: It protects businesses and enforces contracts. Many syndicates move on to corner a monopoly in the supply of some illegal or highly taxed product or service. The two most lucrative fields are arms and drugs. Then come diamonds, energy, cigarettes, stolen cars and the trafficking of women. In one particularly harrowing episode, a duped woman from Moldova tells Mr. Glenny how a girlfriend called her up to tell her of a dream job abroad. She had no idea that a gun was being held to her friend's head. After a nightmarish journey that included the murder of a would-be escapee, the woman was forced under the Israeli border fence to work as a slave in the red-light district of Tel Aviv. Brothels throughout the world are supplied with workers in similar fashion.

Organizations follow patterns too. Criminal masterminds are rare, although Mr. Glenny finds one "merchant of death" in South Africa who buys a whole airport to supply arms to the continent's warring militias. Some mafias are based on families, as in Italy, tight-knit but vulnerable to blood feuds. Most are complex, self-perpetuating organisms, nurturing founding myths and forming shifting alliances with one another.

In later stages, some groups internationalize, seeking to launder money in "washing machines" like the Caribbean island of Aruba or the Persian Gulf emirate of Dubai. Then comes the purchase of political influence. It is sometimes professionally done. Indeed, mafias like the Colombian cocaine cartels, which can turn a profit of $4 billion to $8 billion a year, begin to look like "good capitalists and entrepreneurs" -- micro-managing, looking into economies of scale, juggling supply and demand, and wielding MBAs.

Individuals in this underworld, Mr. Glenny finds, can be "fascinating characters of great intelligence, vitality, courage, wit and spirit." He tries and fails to avoid warming to a suave former Indian mobster who tells him that blowing the head off a victim makes him feel like a cricketer when he "hits the ball for six." One reason for such routinization of criminality is that people sometimes have no choice when a country or society collapses around them.

Far too often the criminal world overlaps with the one we think of as legal. If the elites in the West are so clean, why don't they shut down offshore banking centers? If Western countries really want to help backward countries mired in drug production, why don't they open up their own unfairly protected agricultural markets? If Americans want to smoke so many hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weed, are the peaceful-sounding Canadians of British Columbia evil to supply a good chunk of it? Or, as Mr. Glenny suggests, is it American drug prohibition itself that is spawning mafias, injustice and harm?

Mr. Glenny hops around the globe, noting everything from "the sewers of Nigeria's kleptocracy" to the "silent cacaphony of virtual chatter" in the parallel webs of Brazilian cybercrime. A book with such a wide scope inevitably raises more questions than it answers. http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com/
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The lack of historical comparisons and sourcing details leaves one wondering whether today's criminality is really, except for scale, much different from that of the past. But complacent foreign-affairs analysts have too long ignored the role of organized crime in guiding politics and perpetuating conflicts.

Mr. Glenny hopes that clearer-headed democracies can turn back the tide, but successes like the fight against "blood diamonds" are rare: It took government sanctions, a plucky NGO and an international publicity campaign to strangle the market for gems extracted in African war zones and sold to buy guns and supplies. The U.S. war on drugs has failed, he argues: Illicit drug prices have halved in the past decade as consumption and production have risen. In turn, he believes, this failure dooms the U.S. war against terrorism, "a primitive, small species" feeding in the same sea of criminality. He does, however, urge all to be brave. "Sharks only move in for the kill," a Russian mobster confides in him, "when they can taste the fear of their victims."


The drug maker Merck drafted dozens of research studies for a best-selling drug, then lined up prestigious doctors to put their names on the reports before publication, according to an article to be published Wednesday in a leading medical journal.

The article, based on documents unearthed in lawsuits over the pain drug Vioxx, provides a rare, detailed look in the industry practice of ghostwriting medical research studies that are then published in academic journals.

The article cited one draft of a Vioxx research study that was still in want of a big-name researcher, identifying the lead writer only as “External author?”

Vioxx was a best-selling drug before Merck took it off the market in 2004 over evidence linking it to heart attacks. Last fall, the company agreed to a $4.85 billion settlement to resolve tens of thousands of lawsuits filed by former Vioxx patients or their families.

The lead author of Wednesday’s article, Dr. Joseph S. Ross of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, said a close look at the Merck documents raised broad questions about the validity of much of the drug industry’s published research, because the ghostwriting practice appears to be widespread.

“It almost calls into question all legitimate research that’s been conducted by the pharmaceutical industry with the academic physician,” said Dr. Ross, whose article, written with colleagues, was published Wednesday in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association. and posted Tuesday on the journal’s Web site.

Merck acknowledged on Tuesday that it sometimes hired outside medical writers to draft research reports before handing them over to the doctors whose names eventually appear on the publication. But the company disputed the article’s conclusion that the authors do little of the actual research or analysis. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire2.blogspot.com/
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The final work is the product of the doctor and “accurately reflects his or her opinion,” said a Merck lawyer, James C. Fitzpatrick.

And at least one of the doctors whose published research was questioned in Wednesday’s article, Dr. Steven H. Ferris, a New York University psychiatry professor, said the notion that the article bearing his name was ghostwritten was “simply false.” He said it was “egregious” that Dr. Ross and his colleagues had done no research besides mining the Merck documents and reading the published journal articles.

In an editorial, JAMA said the analysis showed that Merck had apparently manipulated dozens of publications to promote Vioxx.

“It is clear that at least some of the authors played little direct roles in the study or review, yet still allowed themselves to be named as authors,” the editorial said.

The editorial called upon medical journal editors to require each author to report his or her specific contributions to articles. “Journal editors also bear some of the responsibility for enabling companies to manipulate publications,” the editorial said.

JAMA itself published one of the Vioxx studies that was cited in Dr. Ross’s article.

In that case, in 2002, a Merck scientist was listed as the lead author. But Dr. Catherine D. DeAngelis, JAMA’s editor, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that, even so, it was dishonest because the authors did not fully disclose the role of a ghostwriter.

“I consider that being scammed,” Dr. DeAngelis said. “But is that as serious as allowing someone to have a review article written by a for-profit company and solicited and paid for by a for-profit company and asking you to put your name on it after it was all done?”

Although the role of pharmaceutical companies in influencing medical journal articles has been questioned before, the Merck documents provided the most comprehensive look at the practice yet, according to one of the study’s four authors, Dr. David S. Egilman, a clinical associate medical professor at Brown University.

In the Vioxx lawsuits, millions of Merck documents were supplied to plaintiffs. Those documents were available to Dr. Egilman and Dr. Ross because they had served as consultants to plaintiffs’ lawyers in some of those suits.

Combing through the documents, Dr. Ross and his colleagues unearthed internal Merck e-mail messages and documents about 96 journal publications, which included review articles and reports of clinical studies. While the Ross team said it was not necessarily raising questions about all 96 articles, it said that in many cases there was scant evidence that the recruited authors made substantive contributions.

One paper involved a study of Vioxx as a possible deterrent to Alzheimer’s progression.

The draft of the paper, dated August 2003, identified the lead writer as “External author?” But when it was published in 2005 in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, the lead author was listed as Dr. Leon J. Thal, a well-known Alzheimer’s researcher at the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Thal was killed in an airplane crash last year.

The second author listed on the published Alzheimer’s paper, whose name had not been on the draft, was Dr. Ferris, the New York University professor. Dr. Ferris, reached by telephone Tuesday, said he had played an active role in the research and he was substantially involved in helping shape the final draft. http://louis2j1sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/

“It’s simply false that we didn’t contribute to the final publication,” Dr. Ferris said.

A third author, also not named on the initial draft, was Dr. Louis Kirby, currently the medical director for the company Provista Life Sciences. In an e-mail message on Tuesday, Dr. Kirby said that as a clinical investigator for the study he had enrolled more patients, 109, than any of the other researchers. He also said he made revisions to the final document.

“The fact that the draft was written by a Merck employee for later discussion by all the authors does not in and of itself constitute ghostwriting,” Dr. Kirby’s e-mail message said.

The current editor of the journal Neuropsychopharmacology, Dr. James H. Meador-Woodruff, the chairman of psychiatry at the University of Alabama, Birmingham, said he was not the editor in 2005 but planned to investigate the accusations. “Currently, we have in place prohibitions against this,” Dr. Meador-Woodruff said.


While most of what is now Niger has been subsumed into the inhospitable Sahara desert in the last two thousand years, five thousand years ago the north of the country was fertile grasslands. Populations of pastoralists have left paintings of abundant wildlife, domesticated animals, chariots, and a complex culture that dates back to at least 10,000 BCE.

One of the first empires in what is now Niger was the Songhai Empire. During recent centuries, the nomadic Tuareg formed large confederations, pushed southward, and, siding with various Hausa states, clashed with the Fulani Empire of Sokoto, which had gained control of much of the Hausa territory in the late 18th century.
The Kaouar escarpment, forming and oasis in the Ténéré desert.
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In the 19th century, contact with the West began when the first European explorers—notably Mungo Park (British) and Heinrich Barth (German)—explored the area, searching for the source of the Niger River. Although French efforts at "pacification" began before 1900, dissident ethnic groups, especially the desert Tuareg, were not fully subdued until 1922, when Niger became a French colony.

Niger's colonial history and development parallel that of other French West African territories. France administered its West African colonies through a governor general in Dakar, Senegal, and governors in the individual territories, including Niger. In addition to conferring French citizenship on the inhabitants of the territories, the 1946 French constitution provided for decentralization of power and limited participation in political life for local advisory assemblies.


A further revision in the organization of overseas territories occurred with the passage of the Overseas Reform Act (Loi Cadre) of July 23, 1956, followed by reorganizing measures enacted by the French Parliament early in 1957. In addition to removing voting inequalities, these laws provided for creation of governmental organs, assuring individual territories a large measure of self-government. After the establishment of the Fifth French Republic on December 4, 1958, Niger became an autonomous state within the French Community. Following full independence on August 3, 1960, however, membership was allowed to lapse.

Niger is a landlocked nation in West Africa located along the border between the Sahara and Sub-Saharan regions. Its geographic coordinates are latitude 16°N and longitude 8°E. Its area is 1,267,000 square kilometres (489,000 sq mi) of which 300 square kilometres (115 sq mi) is water. This makes Niger slightly less than twice the size of the U.S. state of Texas, and the world's twenty-second largest country (after Chad). Niger is comparable in size to Angola.

Niger borders seven countries on all sides and has a total of 5,697 kilometres (3,540 mi) of borders. The longest border is Nigeria to the south (1,497 km; 930 mi). This is followed by Chad to the east, at 1,175 kilometres (730 mi), Algeria to the north-northwest (956 km; 594 mi), and Mali at 821 kilometres (510 mi). Niger also has small borders in its far southwest frontier with Burkina Faso at 628 kilometres (390 mi) and Benin at 266 kilometres (165 mi) and to the north-northeast (Libya at 354 kilometres (220 mi).

Niger's subtropical climate is mainly very hot and dry, with much desert area. In the extreme south there is a tropical climate on the edges of the Niger River basin. The terrain is predominantly desert plains and sand dunes, with flat to rolling savannah in the south and hills in the north.

The lowest point is the Niger River, with an elevation of 200 metres (722 ft). The highest point is Monts Bagzane at 2,022 metres (6,634 ft).

For its first fourteen years as an independent state, Niger was run by a single-party civilian regime under the presidency of Hamani Diori. In 1974, a combination of devastating drought and accusations of rampant corruption resulted in a coup d'état that overthrew the Diori regime. Col. Seyni Kountché and a small military group ruled the country until Kountché's death in 1987. He was succeeded by his Chief of Staff, Col. Ali Saibou, who released political prisoners, liberalized some of Niger's laws and policies, and promulgated a new constitution. However, President Saibou's efforts to control political reforms failed in the face of union and student demands to institute a multi-party democratic system. The Saibou regime acquiesced to these demands by the end of 1990. New political parties and civic associations sprang up, and a national peace conference was convened in July 1991 to prepare the way for the adoption of a new constitution and the holding of free and fair elections. The debate was often contentious and accusatory, but under the leadership of Prof. André Salifou, the conference developed consensus on the modalities of a transition government. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com/
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A transition government was installed in November 1991 to manage the affairs of state until the institutions of the Third Republic were put into place in April 1993. While the economy deteriorated over the course of the transition, certain accomplishments stand out, including the successful conduct of a constitutional referendum; the adoption of key legislation such as the electoral and rural codes; and the holding of several free, fair, and non-violent nationwide elections. Freedom of the press flourished with the appearance of several new independent newspapers.

The results of the January 1995 parliamentary election meant cohabitation between a rival president and prime minister; this led to governmental paralysis, which provided Col. Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara a rationale to overthrow the Third Republic in January 1996. While leading a military authority that ran the government (Conseil de Salut National) during a 6-month transition period, Baré enlisted specialists to draft a new constitution for a Fourth Republic announced in May 1996. Baré organized a presidential election in July 1996. While voting was still going on, he replaced the electoral commission. The new commission declared him the winner after the polls closed. His party won 57% of parliament seats in a flawed legislative election in November 1996. When his efforts to justify his coup and subsequent questionable elections failed to convince donors to restore multilateral and bilateral economic assistance, a desperate Baré ignored an international embargo against Libya and sought Libyan funds to aid Niger's economy. In repeated violations of basic civil liberties by the regime, opposition leaders were imprisoned; journalists often arrested, and deported by an unofficial militia composed of police and military; and independent media offices were looted and burned.

As part of an initiative started under the 1991 national conference, however, the government signed peace accords in April 1995 with all, meaning Tuareg and Toubou groups that had been in rebellion since 1990. The Tuareg claimed they lacked attention and resources from the central government. The government agreed to absorb some former rebels into the military and, with French assistance, help others return to a productive civilian life.
Mamadou Tandja, President of the Republic of Niger.
Mamadou Tandja, President of the Republic of Niger.

On April 9, 1999, Baré was killed in a coup led by Maj. Daouda Malam Wanké, who established a transitional National Reconciliation Council to oversee the drafting of a constitution for a Fifth Republic with a French style semi-presidential system. In votes that international observers found to be generally free and fair, the Nigerien electorate approved the new constitution in July 1999 and held legislative and presidential elections in October and November 1999. Heading a coalition of the National Movement for a Developing Society (MNSD) and the Democratic and Social Convention (CDS), Mamadou Tandja won the election.

Niger's new constitution was approved in July 1999. It restored the semi-presidential system of government of the December 1992 constitution (Third Republic) in which the president of the republic, elected by universal suffrage for a five-year term, and a prime minister named by the president share executive power. As a reflection of Niger's increasing population, the unicameral National Assembly was expanded in 2004 to 113 deputies elected for a 5 year term under a majority system of representation. Political parties must attain at least 5% of the vote in order to gain a seat in the legislature.

The constitution also provides for the popular election of municipal and local officials, and the first-ever successful municipal elections took place on July 24, 2004. The National Assembly passed in June 2002 a series of decentralization bills. As a first step, administrative powers will be distributed among 265 communes (local councils); in later stages, regions and departments will be established as decentralized entities. A new electoral code was adopted to reflect the decentralization context. The country is currently divided into 8 regions, which are subdivided into 36 districts (departments). The chief administrator (Governor) in each department is appointed by the government and functions primarily as the local agent of the central authorities.

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President Mamadou Tandja was re-elected in December 2004 and reappointed Hama Amadou as Prime Minister. Mahamane Ousmane, the head of the CDS, was re-elected President of the National Assembly (parliament) by his peers. The new second term government of the Fifth Republic took office on December 30, 2002. In August 2002, serious unrest within the military occurred in Niamey, Diffa, and Nguigmi, but the government was able to restore order within several days.

In June 2007, Seyni Oumarou was nominated as the new Prime Minister after Hama Amadou was democratically forced out of office by the National Assembly through a motion of no confidence.

Departments, arrondissements, and communes
Administrative subdivisions of the Republic of Niger, post 1992.
Administrative subdivisions of the Republic of Niger, post 1992.

Main articles: Departments of Niger, Arrondissements of Niger, and Communes of Niger

Niger is divided into 7 departments and one capital district. The departments are subdivided into 36 arrondissements and further subdivided into 129 communes.






Niger pursues a moderate foreign policy and maintains friendly relations with the West and the Islamic world as well as nonaligned countries. It belongs to the United Nations and its main specialized agencies and in 1980-81 served on the UN Security Council. Niger maintains a special relationship with France and enjoys close relations with its West African neighbors. It is a charter member of the African Union and the West African Monetary Union and also belongs to the Niger River and Lake Chad Basin Commissions, the Economic Community of West African States, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The westernmost regions of Niger are joined with contiguous regions Mali and Burkina Faso under the Liptako-Gourma Authority.

The border dispute with Benin, inherited from colonial times and concerning inter alia Lete Island in the River Niger was finally solved by the ICJ in 2005 to Niger's advantage.

The Niger Armed Forces total 12,000 personnel with approximately 3,700 gendarmes, 300 air force, and 6,000 army personnel. The air force has four operational transport aircraft. The armed forces include general staff and battalion task force organizations consisting of two paratroop units, four light armored units, and nine motorized infantry units located in Tahoua, Agadez, Dirkou, Zinder, Nguigmi, N'Gourti, and Madewela. Since January 2003, Niger has deployed a company of troops to Côte d’Ivoire as part of the ECOWAS stabilization force. In 1991, Niger sent four hundred military personnel to join the American-led allied forces against Iraq during the Gulf War.

Niger's defense budget is modest, accounting for about 1.6% of government expenditures. France provides the largest share of military assistance to Niger. Morocco, Algeria, China, and Libya have also provided military assistance. Approximately 15 French military advisers are in Niger. Many Nigerien military personnel receive training in France, and the Nigerien Armed Forces are equipped mainly with material either given by or purchased in France. In the past, U.S. assistance focused on training pilots and aviation support personnel, professional military education for staff officers, and initial specialty training for junior officers. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com/
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A small foreign military assistance program was initiated in 1983. A U.S. Defense Attaché office opened in June 1985 and assumed Security Assistance Office responsibilities in 1987. The office closed in 1996 following a coup d'état. A U.S. Defense Attaché office reopened in July 2000. The United States provided transportation and logistical assistance to Nigerien troops deployed to Cote d’Ivoire in 2003. Additionally, the U.S. provided initial equipment training on vehicles and communications gear to a select contingent of Nigerien soldiers as part of the Department of State Pan Sahel Initiative.

The economy of Niger centers on subsistence crops, livestock, and some of the world's largest uranium deposits. Drought cycles, desertification, a 2.9% population growth rate, and the drop in world demand for uranium have undercut the economy.

Niger shares a common currency, the CFA franc, and a common central bank, the Central Bank of West African States (BCEAO), with seven other members of the West African Monetary Union.

In December 2000, Niger qualified for enhanced debt relief under the International Monetary Fund program for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) and concluded an agreement with the Fund for Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF). Debt relief provided under the enhanced HIPC initiative significantly reduces Niger's annual debt service obligations, freeing funds for expenditures on basic health care, primary education, HIV/AIDS prevention, rural infrastructure, and other programs geared at poverty reduction. In December 2005, it was announced that Niger had received 100% multilateral debt relief from the IMF, which translates into the forgiveness of approximately $86 million USD in debts to the IMF, excluding the remaining assistance under HIPC. Nearly half of the government's budget is derived from foreign donor resources. Future growth may be sustained by exploitation of oil, gold, coal, and other mineral resources. Uranium prices have recovered somewhat in the last few years. A drought and locust infestation in 2005 led to food shortages for as many as 2.5 million Nigeriens.

Agriculture
The fertile south of Niger near the Niger river.
The fertile south of Niger near the Niger river.

Niger's agricultural and livestock sectors are the mainstay of all but 18% of the population. Fourteen percent of Niger's GDP is generated by livestock production—camels, goats, sheep, and cattle—said to support 29% of the population. The 15% of Niger's land that is arable is found mainly along its southern borders with Nigeria, Benin and Burkina Faso. Rainfall varies and when insufficient, Niger has difficulty feeding its population and must rely on grain purchases and food aid to meet food requirements. Although the rains in 2000 were not good, the three following years brought relatively plentiful and well-distributed rainfall, resulting in good harvests. Millet, sorghum, and cassava are Niger's principal rain-fed subsistence crops. Cowpeas and onions are grown for commercial export, as are limited quantities of garlic, peppers, gum arabic, and sesame seeds.


Uranium is Niger's largest export. Foreign exchange earnings from livestock, although difficult to quantify, are second. Actual exports far exceed official statistics, which often fail to detect large herds of animals informally crossing into Nigeria. Some hides and skins are exported, and some are transformed into handicrafts.

The persistent uranium price slump has brought lower revenues for Niger's uranium sector, although uranium still provides 72% of national export proceeds. The nation enjoyed substantial export earnings and rapid economic growth during the 1960s and 1970s after the opening of two large uranium mines near the northern town of Arlit. When the uranium-led boom ended in the early 1980s, however, the economy stagnated, and new investment since then has been limited. Niger's two uranium mines—SOMAIR's open pit mine and COMINAK's underground mine—are owned by a French-led consortium and operated by French interests. However, as of 2007, many licences have been given to other companies from countries such as Canada and Australia in order to exploit new deposits.

Exploitable deposits of gold are known to exist in Niger in the region between the Niger River and the border with Burkina Faso. On October 5, 2004, President Tandja announced the official opening of the Samira Hill Gold Mine in the region of Tera and the first Nigerien gold ingot was presented to him. This marked a historical moment for Niger as the Samira Hill Gold Mine represents the first commercial gold production in the country. Samira Hill is owned by a company called SML (Societe des Mines du Liptako) which is a joint venture between a Moroccan company, Societe Semafo, and a Canadian company, Etruscan Resources. Both companies own 80% (40% - 40%) of SML and the Government of Niger 20%. The first year’s production is predicted to be 135,000 troy ounces (4,200 kg; 9,260 lb avoirdupois) of gold at a cash value of USD 177 per ounce ($5.70/g). http://louis8j8sheehan8.blogspot.com/
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The mine reserves for the Samira Hill mine total 10,073,626 tons at an average grade of 2.21 grams per ton from which 618,000 troy ounces (19,200 kg; 42,400 lb) will be recovered over a 6 year mine life. SML believes to have a number of significant gold deposits within what is now recognized as the gold belt known as the "Samira Horizon", which is located between Gotheye and Ouallam.

Substantial deposits of phosphates, coal, iron, limestone, and gypsum also have been found in Niger. Niger has oil potential. In 1992, the Djado permit was awarded to Hunt Oil, and in 2003 the Tenere permit was awarded to the China National Petroleum Company. An ExxonMobil-Petronas joint venture now holds the sole rights to the Agadem block, north of Lake Chad, and oil exploration is ongoing. The parastatal SONICHAR (Societe Nigerienne de Charbon) in Tchirozerine (north of Agadez) extracts coal from an open pit and fuels an electricity generating plant that supplies energy to the uranium mines. There are additional coal deposits to the south and west that are of a higher quality and may be exploitable.

The economic competitiveness created by the January 1994 devaluation of the Communaute Financiere Africaine (CFA) franc contributed to an annual average economic growth of 3.5% throughout the mid-1990s. But the economy stagnated due to the sharp reduction in foreign aid in 1999 (which gradually resumed in 2000) and poor rains in 2000. Reflecting the importance of the agricultural sector, the return of good rains was the primary factor underlying economic growth of 5.1% in 2000, 3.1% in 2001, 6.0% in 2002, and 3.0% in 2003.

In recent years, the Government of Niger drafted revisions to the investment code (1997 and 2000), petroleum code (1992), and mining code (1993), all with attractive terms for investors. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.blogspot.com/
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The present government actively seeks foreign private investment and considers it key to restoring economic growth and development. With the assistance of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), it has undertaken a concerted effort to revitalize the private sector.


The importance of external support for Niger's development is demonstrated by the fact that about 45% of the government's FY 2002 budget, including 80% of its capital budget, derived from donor resources. The most important donors in Niger are France, the European Union, the World Bank, the IMF, and UN agencies—UNDP, UNICEF, FAO, WFP, and UNFPA. Other donors include the United States, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, China, Italy, Libya, Egypt, Morocco, Iran, Denmark, Canada, and Saudi Arabia. While the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) does not have an office in Niger, the United States is a major donor, contributing on average $8 million each year to Niger’s development increasing to $12 million in FY 2004. The United States also is a major partner in policy coordination in food security, education, water management and HIV/AIDS sectors.


In January 2000, Niger's newly elected government inherited serious financial and economic problems, including a virtually empty treasury, past-due salaries (11 months of arrears) and scholarship payments, increased debt, reduced revenue performance, and lower public investment. In December 2000, Niger qualified for enhanced debt relief under the International Monetary Fund (IMF) program for Highly Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) and concluded an agreement with the Fund on a Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility (PRGF). In January 2001, Niger reached its decision point and subsequently reached its completion point in 2004. Total relief from all of Niger's creditors is worth about $890 million, corresponding to about $520 million in net present value (NPV) terms, which is equivalent to 53.5% of Niger’s total debt outstanding as of 2000.

The debt relief provided under the enhanced HIPC initiative significantly reduces Niger's annual debt service obligations, freeing about $40 million per year over the coming years for expenditures on basic health care, primary education, HIV/AIDS prevention, rural infrastructure, and other programs geared at poverty reduction. The overall impact on Niger's budget is substantial. Debt service as a percentage of government revenue will be slashed from nearly 44% in 1999 to 10.9% in 2003 and average 4.3% during 2010-19. The debt relief cuts debt service as a percentage of export revenue from more than 23% to 8.4% in 2003, and decreases it to about 5% in later years.

In addition to strengthening the budgetary process and public finances, the Government of Niger has embarked on an ambitious program to privatize 12 state-owned companies. To date, seven have been fully privatized, including the water and telephone utilities, with the remainder to be privatized in 2005. A newly installed multisectoral regulatory agency will help ensure free and fair competition among the newly privatized companies and their private sector competitors. In its effort to consolidate macroeconomic stability under the PRGF, the government is also taking actions to reduce corruption, and as the result of a participatory process encompassing civil society, has devised a Poverty Reduction Strategy Plan that focuses on improving health, primary education, rural infrastructure, agricultural production, environmental protection, and judicial reform.

Privatization and liberalization have however also been the subject of strong criticism. The UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, for instance, has noted that privatization affects the poorest and most vulnerable members of Niger's society. See his reports on Niger at http://www.ohchr.org/english/issues/food/visits.htm

Also, the obligations to creditor institutions and governments has locked Niger in to a process of trade liberalization that might be harmful for small farmers and in particular women, as noted by a recent report by 3D → Trade - Human Rights - Equitable Economy, on Agriculture trade liberalization and women's rights

The largest ethnic groups in Niger are the Hausa, who also constitute the major ethnic group in northern Nigeria, the Djerma-Songhai, who also are found in parts of Mali. Both groups, along with the Gourmantche, are sedentary farmers who live in the arable, southern tier of the country. http://louisjsheehan.blogspot.com/
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The remainder of Nigeriens are nomadic or semi-nomadic livestock-raising peoples—Fulani, Tuareg, Kanuri, Arabs, and Toubou. With rapidly growing populations and the consequent competition for meager natural resources, lifestyles of agriculturalists and livestock herders have come increasingly into conflict in Niger in recent years.

Niger's high infant mortality rate is comparable to levels recorded in neighboring countries. However, the child mortality rate (deaths among children between the ages of 1 and 4) is exceptionally high (248 per 1,000) due to generally poor health conditions and inadequate nutrition for most of the country's children. According to the organization Save the Children, Niger has the world's highest infant mortality rate [1]. Nonetheless, Niger has the highest fertility rate in the world (7.2 births per woman); this means that nearly half (49%) of the Nigerien population is under age 15. Between 1996 and 2003, primary school attendance was around 30% [2], including 36% of males and only 25% of females. Additional education occurs through madrassas.

The majority of Niger's population practises Islam: 80%[1], while 15% practises Animism, and 5% practise Protestant and Catholic Christianity.


Niger began developing diverse media in the late 1990s. Niamey boasts scores of newspapers and magazines, many of which are fiercely critical of the government.

Radio is the most important medium, as television sets are beyond the buying power of many of the rural poor, and illiteracy prevents print media from becoming a mass medium. In addition to the national and regional radio services of the state broadcaster ORTN, there are four privately owned radio networks which total more than 100 stations. Three of them—the Anfani Group, Sarounia and Tenere—are urban based commercial format FM networks in the major towns. There is also a network of over 80 community radio stations spread across all seven regions of the country, governed by the Comité de Pilotage de Radios de Proximité (CPRP), a civil society organisation. The independent sector radio networks are collectively estimated by CPRP officials to cover some 7.6 million people, or about 73% of the population (2005).

Aside from Nigerien radio stations, the BBC's Hausa service is listened to on FM repeaters across wide parts of the country, particularly in the south, close to the border with Nigeria. Radio France Internationale also rebroadcasts in French through some of the commercial stations, via satellite.

Tenere also runs a national independent television station of the same name.

Despite relative freedom at the national level, Nigerien journalists say they are often pressured by local authorities. The state ORTN network depends financially on the government, partly through an addition to electricity bills and partly through direct subsidy.

The sector is governed by the Conseil Supérieur de Communications, established as an independent body in the late 1990s, headed by Maryam Keita, a former TV presenter at ORTN.

In this aging manufacturing region, where old-line industries like paper factories are falling away, health care has emerged as the employer of last resort.

Between 1998 and 2007, the Bangor metropolitan area (pop. 150,000) lost about 3,700 jobs in manufacturing, but gained 3,500 jobs in health care. For many residents in Bangor, the hospital is replacing the mill as the passport to the middle class. For others, it means lower wages and fewer opportunities to advance.
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This trend extends nationally, and it could help blunt the effects of the faltering U.S. economy. Demand for health care tends to stay strong during recessions. Cash-strapped consumers are more likely to cut back on new appliances or cars than emergency-room visits.

Indeed, while the number of manufacturing jobs nationwide fell by 48,000 in March and by 310,000 over the past 12 months, health-care employment rose by 23,000 last month and is up 363,000 jobs on the year, according to the government's most recent data.

The loss of jobs in manufacturing and the adverse consequences for the middle class are recurring themes in the battle for the Democratic presidential nomination, especially in the run-up to Pennsylvania's crucial primary on April 22. Both Barack Obama and http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com/
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Hillary Clinton are promising to take steps, including changes to tax and trade policies, to revitalize manufacturing. At a forum on manufacturing in Pittsburgh on Monday, each candidate charged the other with being insufficiently serious about the downsides of a free-trade pact and unsympathetic to the anxieties of American workers.

Yet health care is more likely to be an economic driver in many towns and cities -- especially if a Democrat is elected president. Sens. Obama and Clinton support overhauling the nation's health-care system to cover millions of people who are uninsured -- and that could increase health-care spending, which now accounts for 16% of the gross domestic product.

Growth in health care is fueling local economies across the country, as medical facilities replace factories. In Duluth, Minn., 20% of the jobs are in health care, compared with 14% a decade ago. In the Canton, Ohio, area, which lost the maker of Hoover vacuum cleaners and dozens of other manufacturers, the health-care industry is expanding rapidly. A similar story is unfolding in Anderson, Ind., once a major producer of cars and car parts.

There are downsides to health care's ever-increasing role. A community that relies on health jobs can end up with a weaker economy, one overly dependent on government programs like Medicare and Medicaid. Greater inequality is a risk, too. In health care and other service industries, there tends to be a wider income gap between what the highest- and lowest-paid workers earn than there is in manufacturing. Surgeons can have salaries in the high six figures, while personal-care attendants often make little more than minimum wage.


In the late 1980s, according to calculations by the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, liberal think tanks in Washington, incomes of Maine families in the best-off fifth of earners made 5.4 times as much as those on the bottom, on average. By the mid 2000s, average incomes of the best off were 6.3 times those at the bottom. Most states saw even greater widening of income disparities.

Of course, the U.S. has been moving away from manufacturing and toward a service economy for decades. The country has thrived in this period, with gains in productivity allowing for growth in nonfactory jobs from accountants to massage therapists.

The shift to medicine is evident throughout Bangor. At Eastern Maine Community College, which has long offered classes in such traditional crafts as welding and pipe fitting, the most popular programs these days are nursing and medical radiography. The school now offers six health-related degrees, double the number a decade ago, and many courses are oversubscribed. Last year, the college had 261 applications for the 32 slots in its nursing program.

More health-care workers means more diversity for this almost all-white city. At Thistles, an Argentine restaurant in Bangor, owner Santiago Rave says that 10 or so Latin doctors new to the area regularly patronize his restaurant. Monthly "Tango Tuesdays" are popular events.

In 1990, 16% of the jobs in the Bangor area were in manufacturing, while 12% were in health care. In 2007, 6% of the jobs were in manufacturing and 20% in health care. Without the shift, Bangor's unemployment rate, which averaged 5.1% last year, would almost certainly be higher. There are other benefits: The move from manufacturing has helped cut Maine's on-the-job injury rate in half since 1990.

The health-care boom has also upset the economic balance in this sprawling, largely rural state. When manufacturing drove the economy, well-paying factory jobs were spread throughout Maine's rural and urban counties. But higher-paying health-care jobs are concentrated in urban areas. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com/
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Bangor's Eastern Maine Medical Center, the city's biggest hospital and largest employer, offers sophisticated cancer treatment, open-heart surgery and other specialized care. Jobs are available not only for doctors but also for highly trained nurses, and X-ray and laboratory technicians.

Rural areas have a larger share of lower-paying health-care jobs such as nursing assistants and personal-care attendants. In 2005, the average health-care wage in Maine's rural counties was $26,841 a year, $10,000 less than in the urban counties. Statewide, the average wage for all jobs was $32,393.

"The rural areas have clearly lagged way behind the more urban areas in the number and types of higher-wage health-care jobs," says Charles Colgan, a professor of Public Policy and Management in the Muskie School of Public Service at the University of Southern Maine.


A few months after graduating from high school in 1974, Steve Arsenault, a resident of Millinocket, about 70 miles north of Bangor, followed his father to work at the Great Northern Paper Co. paper mill. "It was such an easy way to make good money that it was like a magnet that reached out and grabbed you," he says.

Mr. Arsenault, now 51 years old, started off as a temporary worker, spending eight-hour days transferring 4-foot logs from a conveyor belt. He worked his way up to better jobs, and by 2001 was making $21 an hour working on a machine that made glossy paper for catalogs.

In the summer of 2002, as the company began laying off workers, Mr. Arsenault says he was told he would soon be out of a job, so he finished the week and quit. A few months later, he started taking classes at the local community college, and eventually became a certified surgical technologist.

Today, Mr. Arsenault works at a hospital in Lincoln, about 50 miles north of Bangor, setting up the operating room and handing instruments to surgeons during surgery. He makes about $16 an hour, $5 less than in his last year at the mill.

"I really don't think I'll ever set foot again in the paper industry again," he says. "The uncertainty of any manufacturing -- I want to be able to know that you're going to have a job."

Bangor, located in south-central Maine, owes its existence to its natural harbor on the Penobscot River. It has been praised for its beauty by writers including Henry David Thoreau. More recently, it helped inspire the fictional town of "Derry" in stories by Stephen King. Today, truckers often stop at Dysart's, just outside of town, for baked beans and grapefruit-size biscuits.

By the mid-1800s, the city billed itself as the lumber capital of the world. "The time may soon arrive when the three great cities of North America -- Bangor, New York, and San Francisco -- shall be representatives of the wealth, population, intelligence, and enterprise of the eastern, central, and western divisions of our country," said Bangor resident Oliver Frost in 1869.

That didn't happen. Maine's timber industry went into decline around the turn of the century, as Americans moved West and started harvesting forests in Oregon and Idaho.

Manufacturing picked up some of the slack. In a 1950 brochure, the city boasted of having 74 different firms that manufactured paper, wood products, textiles and other items. Many of the grand houses that line State Street, across from the Eastern Maine Medical Center, were built by lumber barons. Today, many are owned by doctors.

From its roots as a port and industrial hub, Bangor has grown into northern Maine's retail center, with large retailers including Home Depot and Macy's. Over the past two decades, the medical center has expanded, and several assisted-living facilities have opened.

A battered strip mall near the Bangor International Airport has been transformed into a "medical mall" with dialysis and rehabilitation centers. The Eastern Maine Medical Center says it has secured a small part of the $52 million it needs to build a new cancer center in Brewer across the river. Eastern Maine Healthcare Systems, the umbrella organization that runs the medical center, is one of the three main sponsors of Bangor's annual American Folk Festival.

Some new manufacturers are popping up: The Eastern Fine Paper mill, which was located in Brewer and closed four years ago, has been taken over by Cianbro Corp., based in nearby Pittsfield. That company plans to build ready-to-assemble pieces of oil refineries that will be shipped to Texas. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
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But overall, health care is poised to continue outpacing manufacturing.

One concern about the health-care industry is its heavy reliance on government money. In Maine hospitals, Medicare and Medicaid together accounted for 59% of gross patient revenues in 2006, according to the American Hospital Association. Nationally, those two government programs accounted for 55% of gross patient revenues.

That could leave the state vulnerable as the government and employers try to pare health-care costs. Faced with a budget crunch, Maine legislators cut $46 million out of the state's Medicaid budget for the 2008 and 2009 fiscal years. Because of the cuts, the state will lose an additional $92 million in federal matching funds. The Maine Department of Labor estimates that about 5,000 jobs could be adversely affected by those cuts.

Health care also requires more training in order to advance. Unlike in manufacturing, where workers could start right out of high school and ride a seniority escalator to better wages and benefits, health-care workers primarily move up the ladder through education.

While some former factory workers find new opportunities in health care, the switch doesn't work for everyone. In 1980, just out of high school, Randy Tompkins started working in a shoe factory. A few years later, he switched to Eastern Fine Paper and worked there for 19 years, until the mill shut down.

A new father with a mortgage, Mr. Tompkins was anxious to find work and decided to look for a health-care job. "You can't seem to go around any corner and not see something health-care related: a hospital, a nursing home, a doctor's office," he says.

After six months of classes at Eastern Maine Community College, he became a certified nursing assistant, a job that paid just $7.75 an hour, half of what he was making at the mill, and with no benefits. He eventually was accepted in the school's registered-nursing program, but says he couldn't maintain a C average. Now, Mr. Tompkins is looking for a new career: This fall he plans to start taking classes in computer integrated machining.


Instead of getting through security by submitting to pat downs at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, travelers can now choose a more hands-off approach: walking through a full-body screening machine that can peer right through a person’s outfit.

The device was originally created by engineer Doug McMakin and his team at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as a means of virtually frisking terrorists. The technology uses radio waves to produce 3-D scans of passengers’ bodies, the same way radar captures images of planets’ surfaces. As passengers stand still with their hands up, two rotating antennas send out radio waves. The waves bounce off the skin and are collected by a receiver. http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com/

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Metals, plastics, and liquids between the skin and the receiver show up in images that are sent to security officials in another room.

McMakin’s system has already made a splash with another crowd: clothing retailers. Machines have been placed at Fashion Bug stores and outlets around the country. The screener, named Intellifit, rests inside a virtual dressing room, a seven-foot-diameter circular enclosure placed in the middle of the store. The device allows customers to get instant printouts of their jeans sizes. Before we see more of this technology—in the mall or at security centers—the companies using it may want to alleviate worries from privacy advocates. “Those images reveal not only our private body parts but also intimate medical details like colostomy bags,” Barry Steinhardt of the American Civil Liberties Union says.

McMakin responds that he has no issue with being scanned by the system. He is working on weapons detectors as automatic and accurate as metal detectors. That way, the only thing flashing will be the red and green lights on the screening machine.




Will switching from fossil fuels to biofuels really reduce greenhouse gases? We take a close look at two big, controversial studies that examine carbon emissions from the ecosystems torn down to produce biofuels.

Throughout the Amazonian rain forest and the savanna of Brazil, enormous swaths of land are being converted to farms for growing soybeans and sugarcane—all for use in creating biofuels. The tropical rain forest and peatland of Indonesia and Malaysia and the grasslands of the United States are also being converted to biofuel crops. It is a disturbing trend, says Joseph Fargione, regional science director at the Nature Conservancy, who conducted the first of the two studies examined here. With his colleagues Fargione took a close look at how the areas being transformed into farmland have acted as carbon dioxide storage systems. Trees, grass, and other flora take in the gas, Fargione says, incorporating the carbon into their structures. But when the land is converted for agriculture, the plants are cut down, burned, or processed, and the stored carbon is eventually released back into the atmosphere as greenhouse gases. Using numbers from nearly 50 previous studies, Fargione’s team calculated the amount of carbon stored in these landscapes and the up-front carbon cost for each acre of land converted to produce biofuels.



In the second study, Timothy Searchinger, a researcher at Princeton University, looked at a future scenario in which the United States substantially increases its production of corn-based ethanol, a move that would decrease domestic crops for food and feedstock. These feed crops have to be grown somewhere, however, and the worldwide land conversions necessary to make up for lost U.S. crops would release carbon dioxide. To show the effect of such changes, Searchinger and his colleagues simulated the worldwide land-use changes necessary to offset the production of 56 billion liters of ethanol in the United States (the amount of ethanol projected to be processed in 2016, based on current tax credits and conservative estimates of oil prices). http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com/


Louis J. Sheehan
Using an economic model created at Iowa State University, the researchers projected how much land farmers around the world would have to convert to feed-crop production, and where they would do it. From this the researchers were able to estimate the total greenhouse emissions due to land conversion.


Both studies found that changes in land use related to biofuel production would be a significant source of greenhouse gases in the future. Fargione reported that, overall, biofuels would cause higher total emissions for tens to hundreds of years. Some ecosystems had surprisingly high emissions—grasslands in the United States converted to corn farms would increase carbon dioxide for 93 years.

Searchinger’s outlook is bleaker: He estimates that the rise in corn-based ethanol production in the United States would increase greenhouse gases, relative to what our current, fossil-fuel-based economy produces, for 167 years.

“Any biofuel that causes clearing of natural ecosystems is likely to increase global warming,” Fargione says. But not all bio–fuels are alike. For one, sugarcane ethanol, produced in Brazil, stands out to both researchers as the most efficient source studied, in terms of emissions. As long as there is land conversion, though, biofuels do not diminish carbon dioxide emissions. http://louis1j1sheehan.blog.ca/
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• Plants and soils contain almost three times as much carbon as the atmosphere.
• About 20 percent of total current carbon emissions comes from land-use change.
• In 2004, 74 million acres of U.S. land were devoted to corn for livestock feed as well as food crops. By 2016 about 43 percent of that area will be used to harvest corn for ethanol.
• 27 percent of new palm oil plantations in Indonesia are created on land that began as tropical rain forest; 1.5 percent of these lands are being deforested each year.
• In 2006 the United States produced 250 million gallons of biodiesel. Total production capacity is already 1.4 billion gallons a year and is expected to more than double with new plants and expansion of existing ones.
• 2006 ethanol capacity was 4.4 billion gallons, with an expected increase of 2.1 billion gallons with current construction and expansion projects.
• U.S. gasoline consumption is 389 million gallons per day, or about 142 billion gallons per year.

Bruce Dale, a biofuels researcher at Michigan State University, says there is a huge amount of uncertainty when basing predictions on an inherently complex economic model. Additionally, he asserts that the United States should not be responsible for “anything but its own environmental profile” and that to take into account world land changes is unreasonable. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com/
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Nathanael Greene of the Natural Resources Defense Council responds that it is appropriate to incorporate economic models into life-cycle emissions analyses such as these. In contrast to Dale, he says that land-use changes in other nations should not be left out of calculations of biofuel impacts, since such indirect effects are commonly incorporated into environmental regulations.


Using agricultural waste rather than actual agriculture to create biofuels removes the need for land conversion—much of the stuff is just lying around—and produces more fuel than corn:

In the case of corn stover (the leaves and stalks remaining in the field after corn is harvested), 250 million dry tons are produced each year and are rarely utilized, other than to feed grazing cattle immediately after a harvest. Scientists believe that some stover should remain in the field to prevent soil erosion, but that still leaves about 40 to 50 percent to be used in making biofuels. An efficient way to break down cellulose into ethanol is necessary to reduce the cost of processing corn stover on a commercial scale. Last February, the Department of Energy selected six companies to receive funding towards building ethanol plants—scheduled to be operational within the next three years—that will utilize new technology for processing corn stover as well as other types of agricultural waste.

In contrast to corn stover, wood waste has limited potential due to the high cost associated with collection and transportation (in the case of wood left over from timber harvesting) and competing uses (in the case of mill residues, which are currently used for mulch, particle board, and to power other facilities).




Many farms have already developed methods of converting the billions of tons of animal waste produced each year into methane for electrical and heat energy; beginning in March, 1,200 households in California will be powered by cow manure. Still, using animal waste to create biofuels is not yet feasible on the national level because transporting it is unrealistic. It's in areas where there are lots of cattle (and the large amounts of manure they inevitably give back to the world) that companies are best equipped to divert animal waste from contaminating the air (via methane, CO2, and ammonia gases) and water towards fueling ethanol production. http://www.soulcast.com/post/show/117748/move
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One example is Panda Ethanol, which is building the largest biomass plant in the United States in Hereford, Texas, where it will use the waste of 3.5 million grazing cattle to fuel the production of approximately 115 million gallons of ethanol per year. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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In the United States, 96 billion pounds of food is wasted each year and much of it ends up in landfills where it emits greenhouse gases. Through anaerobic digestion—the bacterial breakdown of organic materials—food waste can be converted into biofuel. In California, Onsite Power Systems, Inc. has begun commercial production of an anaerobic digester system that uses a special design to create the optimal environment for bacteria and ultimately more efficient and cost-effective conversion of food waste to biogases (hydrogen and methane). These biogases can be used in cars or to heat homes.

Algae may be the most promising biofuel. Not only does algae use carbon dioxide to grow (and could potentially use CO2 from power plants to create biofuel), but it can grow anywhere and does not require a large area to propagate. Some species are made of up to 50% of their body weight in oil which can be extracted and processed to create biodiesel. Currently, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is collaborating with Chevron to develop more cost-effective processes for growing and harvesting large quantities of the green fuel.


if you're looking for a picture of how the Latin language evolved or a history of Rome with a difference, you should read Ostler's Ad Infinitum - A Biography of Latin. Although there is an immense amount of material in its 382 pages, it is mostly easy to read and you can skip to sections that interest you. Even so, be sure to read the preface and the best section, Part I.

Although you could probably read it without any familiarity with non-English languages, you may find it hard to understand, so my recommendation is that you read it only if you ever studied Latin or the Romance languages.
Pros

* Thorough history of Latin and the Roman Empire
* Copious examples and details
* Provides welcome context for obscure and even somewhat familiar topics/names

Cons

* Sometimes confusing (see next)
* Uses technical linguistic concepts
* Seems to rush through towards the end especially compared with the start
* Requires some Latin, but why would you read it if you had none?

* Nicholas Ostler studied Greek, Latin, and more at Oxford and received his Ph.D. in linguistics at MIT under Noam Chomsky.
* The book is a Western Civ course focusing on the language -- Latin and its daughters.
* Shows the effect of major events/movements, like Christianity, Islam, and the printing press, on Latin's dominance.
* Appendix 1 explains Latin mottoes used as chapter titles. App. 2 lists Etruscan borrowings in Latin. Both are interesting.
* The 3rd appendix, sound change, has good information, but is hard to follow and could use actual modern language examples.

Ad Infinitum - A Biography of Latin, by Nicholas Ostler
Just as Rome came to dominate Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa, so the language of the Romans became universal. As Nicholas Ostler shows in Ad Infinitum - A Biography of Latin, the process was basically the same for politics as for language. Time passed; the originally Asian-based Christianity gained a foothold in the Empire, but still Latin remained dominant. Several factors led to the emergence of the Romance languages out of Latin, but still Latin was the lingua Franca. http://louis0j0sheehan.livejournal.com/15433.html
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Even when it lost out in most areas, it kept a toehold in botany, and even when Latin came to be associated with the oppressive bourgeosie and other elites, Latin endured, coming up in odd places, like the Internet, where there is a Latin version of Wikipedia, and in an even odder place, Finland (host of weekly Latin radio broadcasts), where neither Latin nor any Latinate language was ever the national language.

While this is the survey that Nicholas Ostler presents and embellishes with details from many disciplines, I was unclear about his conclusion. Yes Latin is used in certain limited places, like semantics (referring to categories of relationship and color), the Internet, and Finnish radio, but he also calls it a language that has survived 2500 years and is now a language of the past "sic transit gloria mundi 'so the glory of the world must pass.'" I find this mixed message confusing and/or depressing.

There's no other major item most of us own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal computers. Everybody has questions about them, and we aim to help.

Here are a few questions about computers I've received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.

Q: We are connected to Comcast cable and use no antennas. Will we need one of the government-subsidized converter boxes next February?

A: Not if you are using a cable set-top box, like the vast majority of cable customers. If you are one of the minority of cable households whose TVs use an internal cable tuner, you may need a converter box. To be sure, contact your cable company or TV manufacturer.

Q: In your laptop buying guide last week, you recommended buying a machine equipped for the "n" type Wi-Fi of wireless router. I was under the impression that this has not yet been standardized. Is that wrong?

A: The engineering committee that has been debating the standard for years has not yet completed its work, but the market has simply moved ahead on its own. This new, faster version of Wi-Fi is being built into routers, computers and other devices by nearly every major manufacturer. In my limited tests, I have found no compatibility problems, and it is backwards compatible with the older "g" and "b" standards.

Q: Is the Mac immune to viruses? If not, do you have a recommendation of the type of antivirus software one should procure and load onto a Mac?

A: No personal computer or personal computer operating system of which I am aware is "immune" to viruses, spyware or other malicious software. That includes the Macintosh and its operating system, Mac OS X Leopard. Hackers have demonstrated the ability to invade the Mac. However, there are only a handful of viruses or other malicious programs for the Macintosh that have successfully spread beyond the lab. And these have harmed only a small number of actual users.

Of the well over 100,000 known viruses, spyware programs and other malicious software applications that are about in public, all but this handful are written to run on Microsoft Windows, and cannot operate on the Macintosh OS. For that reason, I don't believe Macintosh owners need security software, unless they install and run Windows on their computers. If they do run Windows, Mac owners are well advised to purchase and install Windows security software to protect the Windows portion of the machine.

Having said that, I do not mean that Mac owners should be blind to security threats that don't involve viruses or spyware. http://pub25.bravenet.com/journal/post.php?entryid=23334
Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
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Just like Windows users, Mac users can succumb to what is called "social engineering" -- scams and schemes that operate via email and Web sites that are often authored by crooks but made to look official. So, like Windows users, they must be on their guard.





The Creative Energy Behind ADHD

While many viewers get emotional watching Ty Pennington deliver remodeled homes to deserving families on "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," his mom, Yvonne Pennington, cries for different reasons. After being told years ago that her unruly son was the worst kid in his school, she says, "my tears come from the joy, at how far he has come."

That's because Mr. Pennington has attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Some 7.8% of children ages 4 to 17 have been told by a doctor or other health professional that they have or might have ADHD, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says. The behavior disorder, which often causes children to struggle mightily in school and in life, can be "impairing," says Mark Wolraich, lead author of the American Academy of Pediatrics' clinical guidelines on diagnosing ADHD.

Many frazzled parents of hyperactive kids are looking for the silver lining. Clearly, ADHD didn't cripple such noteworthy sufferers as JetBlue founder David Neeleman or Kinko's founder Paul Orfalea. How can you tell whether all that splintered energy will help your own child succeed? And how can you help channel all that mental voltage productively? As a parent of two children with ADHD, I've often wondered about these things. I asked a few famous ADHD sufferers and their parents for answers.

Look for the creativity. Mr. Neeleman's family refused to regard his hyperactivity as an impairment. "We always thought ADD was a plus," says his father, Gary, a retired media executive. He advises "looking at the kid as somebody who has a different way of looking at things, and maybe a more creative way." Then, "put your arms around them and say, 'Boy, you're sure smart. You can handle this.' "

Parental support couldn't smooth out all the bumps for David. Through school, he says, "I just thought I was stupid." Adolescence was a fog of watching "Gilligan's Island" reruns. But as an adult, he was able to see opportunities others missed. He is credited with inventing electronic airline ticketing, he founded two airlines and is working on a third start-up in Brazil. He still has trouble sustaining a conversation for more than a few minutes, must delegate administrative tasks and ultimately got fired as JetBlue's CEO after service foul-ups. But he continues to focus on new ideas. "If you're doing something you love," he says, "you'll be the best."

Similarly, retailing entrepreneur Cynthia Gerdes, who also has ADHD, was treated by her parents as "the creative one" in her family, she says. Ms. Gerdes was encouraged to express herself as a child. As an adult, she created a Minneapolis toy-store chain, Creative Kidstuff, that grew to $12 million in sales before she sold out last year.

Emphasize the positive. Ty Pennington says the negative messages from school can be overwhelming for a child with ADHD; "You're constantly the one who is sent to the principal's office, constantly in trouble." Yvonne Pennington adds, "I thought I was the worst mother in the world." Asked as a small child to work at his desk, Ty would "wear it" instead, she says, separating the chair from the desk, popping the connecting assembly over his shoulders, and running around the room screaming. "He was h- on wheels," she sighs.

Both say life improved after Yvonne started using behavior-modification techniques to reward Ty when he did something right. Also, Ty says his life turned after he started medication in his teens and gained maturity and the freedom to develop his creativity. Now, as a TV host, he gets paid for the kind of behaviors that got him in trouble in school. And Yvonne, now an Atlanta psychologist, has a busy practice training others in "positive parenting."

Never despair. Mr. Orfalea's mother came home in tears after he was expelled from school for the fourth time; a school official told her he'd do well to become an unskilled laborer, says the Kinko's founder, who also has dyslexia. http://sheehan.myblogsite.com/
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But she didn't allow it to shape her regard for Paul. "My mother had a good saying: 'Look at your five fingers. All five are different for a reason. School wants to make you all the same,' " he says.

Her support instilled his faith in himself. When he got the idea, while waiting in line for a copy machine in college, to start his own copying business, he trusted it in the face of criticism from others. The company he opened in a storefront, named for his kinky red hair, later grew to the 1,200-store giant that was acquired in 2004 by FedEx.


The University of Bristol has a press release out yesterday reporting that a Sumerian clay tablet provides an account of an impact event at Köfels, Austria.

I call bullshit. Here’s why, starting with some background information.

Köfels does not have a crater; it has what looks like a giant landslide, about half a kilometer thick and five kilometers in diameter. In the mid 20th-century, the impact hypothesis was raised to explain the formation. Apparently there is a lot of glass in the formation, which some geologists think could have been formed when rock melted in the landslide, and others think is more plausibly from an impact. There’s no doubt that other impact events have created quite a bit of glass. The age of the Köfels glass has been measured using radiometric methods, so we know the glass was formed between 8,000 years to 16,000 years ago.

Perhaps the strongest evidence for an impact origin of the Köfels structure is the reported presence of planar deformation features in quartz taken from the site. PDFs, as they are called, are microscopic features of silicate (e.g., quartz, feldspar) grains, and they are basically very thin planes of glass arranged in parallel sets that have particular orientations with respect to the containing crystal’s structure. They are utterly diagnostic of impact events - no other geologic event can form them, not even highly energetic volcanic eruptions.

The presence of shocked quartz - quartz with PDFs - means that this quartz, at some time, was in the neighborhood of an impact event. If the big landslide-looking formation at Köfels was formed by impact, then the shocked quartz could have been formed then. Or it could be from an older impact, and was transported by later geologic events, such as huge landslides. The shocked quartz will survive a lot longer than an impact crater, given the way the Earth covers such structures up relatively quickly, so this may well have happened. However the shocked quartz got where it is found today, we know that it was formed when a meteoritic body impacted the ground. Shocked quartz does not form from a meteoritic airburst - a meteorite that explodes before impact - it requires a ground impact.

Science marches on, and the impact hypothesis to explain the origin of the Köfels formation fell out of favor as we discovered more and more about impacts. http://blogs.ebay.com/mytymouse1/home/_W0QQentrysyncidZ526811010
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The main problem was the lack of parallels between the Köfels features and other known astroblemes - namely, there is no crater at Köfels, and there darn well ought to be if there is 8-16 kiloyear-old glass and shocked quartz from an impact event at the site. Here’s a picture of a smaller impact that is five times that age:


Currently, the consensus of scientific opinion is that Köfels is not from an impact. It is not listed in the Earth Impact Database, not even as a possible impact site. Googling “Köfels impact” turns up a zillion outlets parroting the Bristol press release, but there’s almost nothing else about it on the net.

So, where does this Sumerian tablet come in?

The researchers say the tablet dates from 700 BCE, or about 3,000 years ago. They hypothesize it is a copy of an earlier work:

With modern computer programmes that can simulate trajectories and reconstruct the night sky thousands of years ago the researchers have established what the Planisphere tablet refers to. It is a copy of the night notebook of a Sumerian astronomer as he records the events in the sky before dawn on the 29 June 3123 BC (Julian calendar).

I happen to have some software that can do that. Starry Night, Skymap Pro, or Stellarium, among numerable others, can do the job. So this isn’t rocket science. Anyone know where I can get a high-quality photograph of the tablet that I can use to test their hypothesis from my own reseources?

But a better question might be:

Assuming that the original source is a “night notebook” of a Sumerian astronomer, why is it being copied by a scribe 2,423 years later? No reason is given for this remarkable act in the press release, at least. Already it sounds a little fishy to me.

The press release continues:

Half the tablet records planet positions and cloud cover, the same as any other night….

Wait a second. Do we really know that half the tablet records conditions “the same as any other night?” Because if we do, that means we have a bunch of other examples of this genre of tablet to compare this tablet to. And if so, that’s fine, but then why does the press release say this:

A cuneiform clay tablet that has puzzled scholars for over 150 years has been translated for the first time.

They can either have their cake, or eat it: Either the tablet was mysterious and untranslated; or we can’t really know that this tablet is a typical nightly astronomical report of sky conditions, just like any other.

The problems continue:

…but the other half of the tablet records an object large enough for its shape to be noted even though it is still in space. The astronomers made an accurate note of its trajectory relative to the stars, which to an error better than one degree is consistent with an impact at Köfels.

Okay, I guess - something 500 kilometers away and 1 kilometer in diameter will be a tenth of a degree across, which is just about big enough to determine shape; and it could have been closer and still been in outside the atmosphere. http://www.myface.com/index.php?do=/public/account/submit/add-blog/added_3049/
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And it is possible to record a trajectory to better than a degree using naked-eye methods.

It is also possible to integrate a bunch of orbits that intersect with Köfels, and it is plausible to believe that some of those orbits might be consistent with the observation of a celestial object that is hypothesized to be recorded in this copy of a hypothesized tablet that existed 5,000 years ago, and it is plausible to believe that some of these orbits would have the object out of Earth’s atmosphere when it was observable over Sumeria.

But really, this is beginning to look a bit like a house of cards, yes? Let’s read on.

The observation suggests the asteroid is over a kilometre in diameter and the original orbit about the Sun was an Aten type, a class of asteroid that orbit close to the earth, that is resonant with the Earth’s orbit.

The bit about the Aten asteroids being resonant is just wrong. Many are resonant, some more strongly than others; but Aten asteroids are defined as those with a semi-major axis of less than one astronomical unit. An AU is, in lay terms, the average distance between the sun and the Earth. A semi-major axis is simply the distance of the long axis of an ellipse, divided by two. Almost all Atens have orbits that cross Earth’s orbit - in other words, most Atens get both closer to the sun than Earth, and farther away from it, depending on what part of its orbit it is in. That’s all - you don’t need the asteroid to be in a resonant orbit to be an Aten.

And a resonant orbit certainly doesn’t lead to a craterless impact, as I initially read the following as claiming:

This trajectory explains why there is no crater at Köfels. The in coming angle was very low (six degrees) and means the asteroid clipped a mountain called Gamskogel above the town of Längenfeld, 11 kilometres from Köfels, and this caused the asteroid to explode before it reached its final impact point. As it travelled down the valley it became a fireball, around five kilometres in diameter (the size of the landslide). When it hit Köfels it created enormous pressures that pulverised the rock and caused the landslide but because it was no longer a solid object it did not create a classic impact crater.

What??

This is just preposterous.

First, you’re going to find plenty of evidence of the impact at Gamskogel if this were true. Any impact significant enough to badly disrupt an asteroid-type impactor, which is what the researchers hypothesize, is going to take out a big chunk of the mountain, cause all sorts of fracturing, landslides, and other highly noticeable effects. The physics of impact are such that, if the impact were truly strong enough to liquify or vaporize a >1 km asteroid, the mountain would have been converted into a crater - much like we see countless times on the moon.

Test of hypothesis number one: Is there a huge crater on the mountain, or has the mountain been obliterated by a huge crater?

The impact of an asteroid with a mountain will result in the classical shock wave in the impact medium and create an ejecta blanket. If the impact hypothesis is true, we should see planar deformation features on the mountain and ejecta more or less symmetrically around it.

Test of hypothesis number two: Is there shocked quartz on the mountain?

Test of hypothesis number three: Is there an ejecta blanket around the mountain?

Next, why would an impactor become a fireball? We all know that meteors in the process of burning up are hot, but they are not, literally, fireballs2. The researchers claim that that an asteroidal-type meteorite, after clipping the mountain, was “not a solid object” - but why? And how? How do you get an asteroidal impactor hitting so solidly that it vaporized it, but so softly that it doesn’t shock quartz or create a crater?

Sorry, but you just can’t.

You don’t solve any problems by breaking up an impactor into a million pieces - it still impacts. So you end up with a bunch of smaller craters - the total energy is the same. http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com/
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Here’s an example of either a binary impactor, or disrupted impactor, on the Earth:

Clearwater Lakes

and an example on the Moon:

Messier

Supposing you can disrupt a 1-km asteroid impactor into pieces no larger than molecular size. What happens then? You still get craters:

Microcrater

That’s a microcrater in glass, too small to be seen by eye.

Maybe the press release is saying that the low angle of impact, supposedly of only six degrees, would not result in the formation of a crater. But that’s wrong too. Highly oblique impacts - thought to be considerably shallower than 6° - produce elongated craters:

Elongate Crater

So, there’s gonna be a crater, or two, or a billion, no matter what you do to the impactor3. Just because the asteroid “clips” a mountaintop on its way to its final resting place doesn’t mean there will be no crater. There will be one, or many, period.

Test of hypothesis number four: Go find the crater(s).

Test of hypothesis number five: Go find fragments of the impactor. There will be some, even if the main impactor vaporizes.

Let’s read on:

Mark Hempsell, discussing the Köfels event, said: “Another conclusion can be made from the trajectory. The back plume from the explosion (the mushroom cloud) would be bent over the Mediterranean Sea re-entering the atmosphere over the Levant, Sinai, and Northern Egypt.

“The ground heating though very short would be enough to ignite any flammable material – including human hair and clothes. It is probable more people died under the plume than in the Alps due to the impact blast.“

Ok, so there’s no crater because the impactor “wasn’t solid,” but there was enough ejecta - which only comes from craters - to kill people, and cover an area thousands of miles around, including northern Egypt and the Levant, where we should be able to go today and find - ummm, ejecta.

Test of hypothesis number six: Let’s go find ejecta, or evidence of widespread burns, in strata that we can date, using, e.g., pottery shards, to around 3100 BC in multiple archaeological digs in both Egypt and in the Levant. The strata should be iridium-enriched compared to terrestrial facies, ought to include shock products if the impact were powerful enough to spread material over that wide an area, and ought contain impact glass.

Ok, we’re done. Just to sum up, here’s why we can be pretty sure this press release promotes a wrong conclusion.

The researchers hypothesize:

* That Sumerians made regular celestial observations (probably true);
* One of them observed a large body very close to Earth before it had entered the atmosphere (very improbable - whereas seeing a very bright meteor is not only probable, but certain, if you keep looking)
* They recorded the trajectory to an accuracy of +/- one degree or less (plausible)
* The tablet they recorded this on was reproduced by a scribe 2,423 years later (possible, but why?)
* Even though apparently no other nights’ observations were similarly copied (why not? There would have been TONS of interesting stuff, and just as correlated with significant happenings on Earth - not by causation, but by coincidence) http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com/
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* And this tablet has never been translated before (I’ll stipulate that this is true even though I don’t really know)
* Two researchers - one a space infrastructure engineer, the other a rocket engine engineer, and neither linguists - translated it (huh? how?)
* And the tablet records an impactor (maybe)
* even though the impact glass found at the site is 8,000 to 16,000 years old (not 5,000 years old as the hypothesis says)
* And the impactor was a >1 km Aten asteroid (seriously, people, it requires several hours or days of precise, modern astronomical observations to determine if an asteroid is an Aten - you need either triangulated observations over a short time, or observations over a longer period of time, to extract that kind of data from the observations they say the Sumerians recorded)
* And that impactor landed at Köfels (maybe, but you need triangulated observations of incoming impactors to really determine where and if a possible impactor landed, because you can’t tell celestial distances or radial velocities - motion toward or away from you - by just looking)
* But not before “clipping” a mountain (oh, come ON! can we say “ad hoc hypothesis?”)
* Which turned it into something other than a solid (I’ve heard of shock melting, but turning an entire 1 km impacting asteroid into a liquid with a glancing blow with a mountain is beyond the pale, and turning it all into gas would be even more ludicrous)
* Which then created no craters when it landed (it still should have)
* But which did distribute ejecta all over the eastern Mediterranean (you don’t get ejecta without a crater)
* Which ejecta has not been found anywhere in the eastern Mediterranean (ouch)

I’ll add one more thing: This “research” hasn’t cleared peer review - the authors are trying to sell a direct-to-paperback book for $25 (USD). The press release says it is being published by Alcin Academics, but I can’t find them on the web and I can’t find any other book they’ve published. A quick look at the Amazon page for the book shows that the real publisher is WritersPrintshop - a self-publishing company. I’m thinking if this were a plausible hypothesis supported in a well-written book, they’d have gotten a real publisher to release it.

I’m not buying it - the book or the zany hypothesis. If anyone wants to change my mind, send me a copy of the book, and I’ll read it and reconsider.

Oh - and one more thing: Shame, shame on you, PhysOrg for credulously running this ridiculous story but ignoring the asteroid names announced last week.

Sources for Köfels background information:

* Graham, Bevan and Hutchison, “Catalogue of Meteorites”, 4th Edition, (1985)
* Kurat, Richter; Meteoritics, vol.4, p.192, 1969
* Störzer et al.; Meteoritics, vol.6, p.319, 1971

Update: I’ve been pointed to some additional references regarding the Köfels formation, which somewhat changes what I’ve written above. First, shocked quartz, with PDFs, have not been found at Köfels as some have claimed; quartz with lamellar deformation features typical of tectonic processes were found instead. Also, the Köfels formation was not a single landslide, but a result of several landslides at different times. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com/
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These are both further blows to the already discredited impact hypothesis for the origins of the Köfels formation, and casts even more doubt onto the conclusions that Sumerians observed a greater than 1 km wide Aten asteroid that impacted at Köfels.




It is a phone call that women dread. Something is not quite right on the mammogram: come back for another one. But don’t worry, the script goes, most repeat tests wind up normal.

Still, most women know someone who has breast cancer, and even the calmest, most rational minds may think the worst when summoned back to the clinic.

At many centers, these nerve-racking calls are on the rise, at least temporarily — the price of progress as more and more radiologists switch from traditional X-ray film to digital mammograms, in which the X-ray images are displayed on a computer monitor.

Problems can arise during the transition period, while doctors learn to interpret digital mammograms and compare them to patients’ previous X-ray films. Comparing past and present to look for changes is an essential part of reading mammograms. But the digital and film versions can sometimes be hard to reconcile, and radiologists who are retraining their eyes and minds may be more likely to play it safe by requesting additional X-rays — and sometimes ultrasound exams and even biopsies — in women who turn out not to have breast cancer.

Digital is growing fast. In the United States, 32 percent of mammography clinics now have at least one digital machine, up from only 10 percent two years ago. Eventually, film will be phased out.

The rush to digital is occurring in part because for certain women — younger ones and others with dense breast tissue — it is better than film at finding tumors. Digital is especially good at picking up tiny calcium deposits, or calcifications, which are sometimes — but by no means always — a sign of cancer. In the long run, radiologists say, digital technology will make mammograms more accurate for many women.

There have been no studies yet to measure what happens during the transition period, but many radiologists say they do find themselves calling more women back. About 35.8 million mammograms a year are done in the United States, including those for screening and follow-ups for problems. The National Cancer Institute recommends mammograms every year or two for most women over 40 (women at high risk may be advised to start earlier). Mammography is not perfect — it can miss tumors — but even its critics say it has helped to lower death rates from breast cancer, which is the second leading cause of cancer deaths in women, after lung cancer.

There are about 178,000 new cases of breast cancer each year in the United States, and 40,000 deaths.

Of 10 radiologists interviewed for this article, eight said that during the transition from film to digital, recall rates went up in women who were ultimately found to have nothing wrong. Normally a recall rate of 10 percent or less is considered desirable. http://louis0j0sheehan0esquire.blogspot.com/
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But during the transition period at their clinics, the doctors estimated that callbacks of women who turned out to be healthy increased by a few percentage points to as many as 10. Only one radiologist reported no problems: Dr. Etta D. Pisano, a professor of radiology and biomedical engineering at the University of North Carolina.

“I don’t believe it,” Dr. Pisano said. “I question that there’s a problem with the transition.”

But Dr. Mary Mahoney, a professor of radiology and the director of breast imaging at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, said, “I am living through the pain of this transition period on a daily basis.”

Dr. Mahoney’s center recently opened an entirely digital clinic for breast cancer screening.

“Our whole group is kind of pulling our hair out some days,” she said. “You struggle and you struggle. It’s just so much harder. These are really experienced, qualified radiologists who are wringing their hands. It’s where the increase in callbacks and biopsies is coming into play. It happens every day. Many times we’re able to bring the woman back, do additional views and feel comfortable we can follow that area.”

Regarding the higher callback rates, Dr. Mahoney said: “I know it’s not a small thing, the anxiety. Patients are practically in tears because they’re so worried. But I think in the long run it’s going to be to everybody’s benefit.”

Dr. Margarita Zuley, the director of breast imaging at Magee-Women’s Hospital at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, said it could take six months to a year to learn to interpret the new images.

Lecturing in Manhattan recently about the transition to digital, Dr. Zuley told an audience of radiologists: “When you first start out, you may feel a little anxious and recall more patients because everything looks like a cancer to you. It’s O.K. Just bring the patients back. It’s part of the learning curve.”

Regarding higher recall rates during the transition, Dr. Zuley said: “Everybody sort of knows it, but it’s anecdotal. There are no numbers.”

Meanwhile, patients or their insurers are paying for the extra tests. Fees for mammograms vary around the country. A clinic in Manhattan recently billed an insurer $387 for a digital mammogram and then $336 for extra images of one breast — needed because of confusion between the old films and the new digital pictures — and was paid about half of those fees. Fees for film-based mammograms are usually $45 to $120 less.

Nancy Liber, a radiologic technologist at Dr. Mahoney’s center, was called back by her own colleagues at the center after her mammogram last month.

“I thought exactly what every woman does,” Ms. Liber said. “Immediately you panic and think, ‘Oh my gosh, what if something is really wrong?’ ”

She found herself worrying about what would happen if she became ill and unable to take care of her children. She did not even tell her husband what had happened until after the second test, which turned out normal. The concerns were due entirely to the difference between film and digital images. http://louis4j4sheehan4.blogspot.com/
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http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/Despite the stressful experience, Ms. Liber said that from what she had seen in her work, digital mammograms were the way to go.

“The inconvenience it may cause is worth it,” she said. But, she added, “I definitely know what these women are going through.”

Radiologists say one of digital’s advantages is that it lets them adjust features like contrast and magnification, and see things that were blurry or maybe even invisible on film. In the long run, doctors say, the increased clarity of digital mammograms may lead to fewer callbacks of healthy women — but it takes time to learn the ropes.

Dr. Constance D. Lehman, the director of breast imaging and a professor of radiology at the University of Washington, said she was not sure whether more women were called back during the transition. But describing the two technologies, she said, “In some areas it’s like comparing apples and oranges.”

When looking at a woman’s first digital image, Dr. Lehman said, radiologists must ask themselves whether a seeming change in the breast is truly new, or was it there all along but just not visible with earlier techniques.

Once a woman has had enough digital mammograms, the comparisons should be easier, radiologists say. But the first few may raise questions because when radiologists compare, they often go back to images from two or three years before. And in some clinics that have a mixture of film and digital machines, if a woman is switched between the two types from year to year, ambiguities may crop up again and again.

Many women do not know the difference between film and digital, or notice which is being used, and clinics may or may not inform them of potential problems during the changeover.

Digital mammography got a boost from a large study in 2005 that showed it was better than film at finding tumors in women under 50, or women of any age who had dense breasts, meaning a lot of glandular and connective tissue in proportion to fat.

A buzz grew around digital after the study. Some radiologists use the technology as a selling point, and others feel they must follow suit. Now there is such a demand for digital machines that there is a six-month wait for certain types, Dr. Zuley said, even though they cost $350,000 to $600,000, about three to five times as much as units that use film.

Dr. Leonard M. Glassman, who practices at Washington Radiology Associates, said that his practice in the Washington, D.C., area, which performs 85,000 mammograms a year, converted to digital about two years ago.

“There’s an increase in the rate of things you think are abnormal for about three months, and then you get used to it,” Dr. Glassman said. “You take more extra pictures, of things that six months later you would dismiss. http://louis7j7sheehan.blogspot.com/
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It happened probably 5 to 10 percent of the time right at the beginning, so it’s a significant amount, and then it tails off.”

When questions first arise, Dr. Glassman said, he does not warn women that the imaging may be the culprit because he cannot be sure what the problem is until he sees the second set of X-rays.

“At the end I tell patients, ‘You were a victim of technology,’ ” he said. “They give me a blank stare. I say: ‘Your last one was film; this one was digital. They look different, and we just didn’t know that.’ ”



Rising a million miles from the surface of the sun, the highest solar prominence ever recorded was observed by Mt. Wilson Observatory scientists on March 20, the Carnegie Institution of Washington has announced. http://louis4j4sheehan.blogspot.com/
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Reports of measurements made by Dr. Edison Pettit on photographs of the prominence indicate that a gigantic mass of erupting calcium and hydrogen gas rose nearly vertically from the sun that morning at speeds first of 40 miles per second, then 80 miles per second, and when last noted, 124 miles per second.

eve

Women with M.B.A.s are twice as likely to get divorced or separated as their male counterparts. The picture isn't much rosier for women with law or medical degrees.

That is the finding in a soon-to-be-published study by Washington & Lee University School of Law Prof. Robin Fretwell Wilson. Using a National Science Foundation survey of more than 100,000 professionals, Prof. Wilson analyzed data on newly minted professionals in business, law and medicine. Her conclusion: For women, a professional degree is often hazardous to marital health.

"It's like the Virginia Slims ad -- we've come so far -- but, man, we haven't come so far," says Prof. Wilson, herself a divorcée. "In a lot of ways women aren't getting the same deal as men." Unlike men, she says, "women can't have it all because there is a social stigma to having or being a stay-at-home spouse."

Much has been written about the growing "opt-out revolution" in which female professionals, buffeted by crosscurrents at work and at home, are exiting the workplace in droves. And the topic of female success and marital status has been explored by others. In 2001, for instance, economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett collected data on high-achieving women, defined as being both high-earners and "super-credentialed" -- with graduate degrees, for example -- and found that the more women earned, the more likely they were to be single and without children.

What Prof. Wilson's study highlights is the large number of professionals -- particularly women -- who remain in the workplace but "opt out" of having families.

Women with M.B.A.s described themselves as divorced or separated more often than women with only bachelor's degrees (12% of female M.B.A.s compared with 11% of women with only bachelor's degrees) and more than twice as often as men with M.B.A.s (5% of whom reported being divorced or separated), according to Prof. Wilson's study. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
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The study will be published next week by the Witherspoon Institute as a chapter in a book to which Prof. Wilson contributed, "Rethinking Business Management."

According to Prof. Wilson's study, women with law or medical degrees divorce less often than those with only bachelor's degrees, but are still more likely to divorce or separate than their male counterparts (10% of women with law degrees and 9% of women with medical degrees, compared with 7% of male lawyers and 5.1% of male doctors).

Prof. Wilson also found that female professionals abstain from marriage at double and sometimes nearly triple the rate of men.

Ms. Hewlett believes more is at play than just a prevailing image that high-earning women are a threat to men. Suggesting that highly successful women are attracted to similarly successful men, she put forward the idea that such women "can't summon up the TLC and support that high-earning men need."

Her advice? Well-educated, highly compensated women should be targeting particularly loving and supportive men.




A few years ago, my sister called to tell me my mother had just been diagnosed with leukemia. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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After we hung up and I prepared to call my mom, I realized I had absolutely no idea what to say to her. It took me four hours to make the call.

I learned a lasting lesson that day: There isn't anything correct to say to someone reeling from the shock of a cancer diagnosis. But in helping my mom through her illness, I also discovered that some ways of showing support are better than others. And while there's no right approach, there may indeed be wrong things to say or do.
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Cancer survivors explain how support from friends and family was critical to fighting the disease.

Even as the medical community has gotten better at detecting and treating cancer early -- allowing many patients to live longer -- people are understandably overwhelmed by the devastating news of a diagnosis. So family and friends grapple with how to best offer comfort.

Not every cancer patient wants the same type of support. Some want to talk about their illness and accept help willingly. Others struggle to preserve their independence and behave, at least outwardly, as if nothing is wrong.

So how do you know how best to offer assistance to someone struggling with a serious illness? I posed this question to oncologists, psychologists and patients.

"Loved ones don't know what to do, and they don't want to make a terrible error," says Marisa Weiss, an oncologist and founder of Breastcancer.org, a nonprofit organization. "This fear keeps people from doing anything."
SUPPORTING ROLES

More help for patients and caregivers:
• www.breastcancer.org has message boards for patients and families.
• www.lotsahelpinghands.com emphasizes patients' practical needs.
• www.talkingaboutcancer.com deals with the emotional impact of cancer.
• www.carepages.com allows families to set up sites to share information about the person who is sick.

While that's the worst mistake you can make, experts say, there are a number of other slip-ups. Well-meaning friends and family members often ask inappropriate questions, such as the patient's prognosis. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
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They offer theories on why their loved one got sick, give unsolicited advice or insist that "everything is going to be just fine."

When Lori Hope was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2002, she says many people asked her if she had been a smoker. Some told her of people they knew who had died of cancer. One friend asked why she was going on vacation since she would probably worry the whole time. "People tend to rush in without thinking," she says.

In response, Ms. Hope wrote a book, "Help Me Live: 20 Things People with Cancer Want You to Know." Her advice: Admit you don't know what to say. Apologize in advance for doing or saying anything upsetting. Then be sure to tell your friend you will be there for her.

"Bumbling is OK," says Susan Brace, a psychologist in Evergreen, Colo., whose specialty is treating terminally ill patients. "You're in a situation you've never been in before, so you make up the rules as you go along."

In general, experts say, you should take your lead from the person who is sick. If she wants to talk about her illness, then listen. Don't be afraid of emotions. "Being there, listening and being supportive is a powerful role," Dr. Weiss says. "If the person feels comfortable crying in front of you, be honored, because you fulfilled a really important need."

What do you say to a loved one suffering from a potentially terminal illness? Beyond words, what can you do to show you care? Discuss

It's critical not to treat your friend just as a patient. So remember to ask about other aspects of her life, such as her children. Ask her permission before you share news of her illness with others. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
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Don't recommend books or treatments without first inquiring if she'd like to hear about them.

You should also ask exactly what type of help your loved one needs. You can offer to pick up groceries, provide transportation or return phone calls. And don't be deterred if your offer of help is declined. People who are diagnosed with a major illness often don't know what they will need at first. In addition, accepting help can be frightening for people accustomed to being independent. Keep offering help.

And if your friend, co-worker or family member isn't returning calls, don't take it personally. She may not have the energy or time to call you back. Stay in touch anyway.

As cancer awareness has grown in recent years, so have the resources to help people offer support to patients. Web sites for the American Cancer Society (www.cancer.org) and the National Cancer Institute (www.cancer.gov) offer information for caregivers, family and friends. There are books, too: "Help Me Live," by Ms. Hope; "What Can I Do to Help," by Deborah Hutton; "Cancer Etiquette," by Rosanne Kalick; "The Etiquette of Illness," by Susan P. Halpern.

In short, there is help for people who want to help their friends and loved ones. "You should be there for your friends," says Howard Leventhal, professor of psychology at Rutgers University and director of the Center for the Study of Health Beliefs and Behavior. "And being there doesn't require much more than enduring their pain and trying to be useful."



Medical-device makers, venture capitalists and surgeons are racing to turn a once-controversial weight-loss procedure into the next big thing in elective surgery.

Once dismissed by some surgeons as a gimmick, gastric banding -- in which a silicone band is wrapped around the upper stomach to restrict food intake -- is now the focus of a fierce competition pitting consumer-products giant Johnson & Johnson against Botox maker Allergan Inc. Venture-capital-backed outpatient centers are popping up to implant the bands. Growing ranks of surgeons are touting the procedure at free public seminars. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
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All see a vast market in a country where diet and exercise programs have failed to slow an obesity epidemic.


• What's New: Once dismissed as a gimmick, gastric banding is now seen by some in the medical industry as the next big thing in elective surgery.
• The Players: Industry giants Johnson & Johnson and Allergan, as well as venture-capital firms that are backing outpatient centers.
• Patient Concerns: The silicone device can shift after surgery, causing it to lose effectiveness. And patients may eventually need another surgery to replace or remove it.

Like any major surgery, gastric banding carries risks of infection and even death. The silicone device can shift after surgery, causing it to lose effectiveness. No one knows how long it will last inside the body, so patients may eventually need another surgery to replace or remove it. And some surgeons say the weight loss achieved through banding isn't as much as other weight-loss procedures. "There's no question that advertising and the commercialization of the band is what's driving it," says J.K. Champion, a bariatric surgeon in Atlanta. Bariatric is a medical term derived from the Greek word "baros" meaning "weight."

Weight-loss surgery remains rare, despite the fact that about a third of adult Americans are obese -- and despite evidence that the procedures improve overall health. Only an estimated 1% of the nation's 15 million morbidly obese people, typically those who are 100 pounds or more overweight, have undergone surgery. That may be partly due to the fact that the most popular weight-loss surgery to date has been gastric bypass, a more invasive procedure. Louis J Sheehan

A number of recent studies suggest that gastric banding is safer than gastric bypass, and some data suggest comparable, if slower, weight-loss results. Improvements in surgical techniques and follow-up care have helped gastric banding become the dominant weight-loss operation in Europe and Australia. Credit Suisse analyst Marc Goodman predicts that gastric banding will account for half of all weight-loss surgeries by 2010, up from about 30% today.

Treatment for Diabetes

And banding is emerging as a treatment for diabetes: It effectively cured the disease in 73% of treated adults who were lighter than people who typically undergo weight-loss surgery, according to an Australian study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in January. Diabetes remission closely tracks weight loss.

Some parts of the country are already bombarded with gastric-banding ads. In one television spot airing in Texas for True Results, a Dallas-based chain of six outpatient centers, a young woman says, "I'm going to be around much longer for my family," after losing 178 pounds. Unlike the band makers, physicians and clinics can make advertising claims that aren't subject to the strict rules imposed by the Food and Drug Administration.
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"We see patients come into our office at the Cleveland Clinic who have heard about the band," says Philip Schauer, director of the Ohio-based Cleveland Clinic's bariatric and metabolic institute. He adds that the ads exert a powerful influence. "You don't see commercials for gastric bypass," he says.

In gastric bypass, the surgeon reroutes the gastrointestinal system. But gastric bands don't alter the body's basic plumbing. Tiny incisions are made in the abdomen, and a camera is passed through one of them so the surgeon can view the operation site on a video monitor. A band made of silicone is fastened around the upper stomach to create a small pouch that limits food intake.

Periodic Adjustments

After the band is installed, doctors make periodic adjustments depending on the patient's weight loss, food cravings and physical reactions to the band. Patients typically need four to six adjustments in the first year, and two or three in each of the next couple of years. If the band is removed, the patient may revert to old eating habits.

Not all surgeons have jumped on the bandwagon. Some believe gastric bypass is better for the super obese, who may be more than 200 pounds overweight. "We're finding patients have different demands," says Dr. Schauer.

What's more, the duration of weight loss for either procedure is still unknown. The possible complications of banding include slippage of the device or erosion into the stomach. Many health insurers are still reluctant to cover the procedures -- leaving patients to pay, or borrow, the $15,000 to $40,000 to finance the surgery.

But some patients are storming ahead anyway. "It's the best thing I've ever done for myself," says Patricia Zeolla, a 59-year-old teacher in New York City, who learned of the procedure via a Web site.

Concluding that gastric bypass is too "scary," Ms. Zeolla opted for gastric banding instead at New York's Lenox Hill Hospital; her insurer, initially resistant, eventually agreed to foot the bill after her surgeon intervened. In one year, Ms. Zeolla whittled her weight down to 166 pounds from 286 pounds.

The first adjustable gastric bands were implanted in Europe and Australia in the early 1990s. The procedure had many early detractors. A high rate of surgical complications made surgeons wary. Inamed Corp., the company pitching the Lap-Band, was better known for its breast implants and had a poor reputation with bariatric surgeons eager to distance themselves from cosmetic surgeons.

"There was a mind-set that gastric bypass was better," says Paul O'Brien, an author of the recent Australian diabetes study and director of the Centre for Obesity Research and Education at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Dr. O'Brien did his first Lap-Band surgery in 1994 in Australia. Since then, he and his colleagues have studied thousands of patients.

Gastric banding exploded after 2006, when Inamed was acquired by Allergan, best known for the antiwrinkle drug Botox. Allergan bought Inamed for its portfolio of cosmetic medical devices, but "we quickly realized the real jewel was Lap-Band," David E.I. Pyott, chief executive officer, said recently at Allergan's offices in Irvine, Calif.

In November 2006, Allergan began advertising the Lap-Band directly to consumers, an unusual tactic for a surgical device. The company aired a television commercial featuring a distressed woman trying to "tame" a roaring lion pulling her to the refrigerator.

The campaign was an immediate success: Within a week, visits to Allergan's Lap-Band Web site had increased nearly fivefold. Sales of Lap-Band and other obesity-intervention devices soared 50% last year to $270 million, making them Allergan's fastest-growing product line.

Enter Johnson & Johnson. Last September, J&J's Ethicon Endo-Surgical unit received FDA marketing approval to sell its band, dubbed Realize. In recent months, J&J has been bringing obesity surgeons to weekend training sessions to teach them how to implant the device. Bariatric surgeons such as Alan Wittgrove of La Jolla, Calif., who once pooh-poohed banding, say that J&J's efforts are validating banding as an option.

Quiet Launch

In January, J&J quietly launched a snazzy Web site that has surgeons buzzing. The site, www.realizemysuccess.net, provides patients with a suite of customizable online tools. After receiving a personal code, a patient can create an image of himself or herself by answering a series of questions, then adjust the images to see how they would look 25 or 35 or 50 pounds lighter. Patients can send daily alerts to their cellphones at set times to remind themselves to avoid the office candy dish.

Patients can even see what they might look like in a new wardrobe, for instance, just as shoppers can when visiting retailer Lands' End's site. The site also helps surgeons track patients' weight-loss progress. Surgeons receive alerts if a patient doesn't come in for follow-up care, or begins gaining weight.

J&J says it spent nearly two years developing the site, which draws on ideas from other consumer businesses. The site's customizable options are intended to keep patients on track, since studies show that long-term success at weight loss is driven by what happens to change behavior after surgery, says Tom O'Brien, Ethicon's director of marketing. J&J adds that a media launch touting its Realize band is on the drawing board.

Despite Allergan's head start, Credit Suisse's Mr. Goodman expects J&J to grab a chunk of the market almost immediately. Although both companies charge roughly the same amount -- about $3,000 -- for their bands, J&J has a small army of specialized salespeople selling other bariatric surgery supplies and instruments.

Adapting Strategies

Allergan isn't backing down. Adapting strategies that built Botox into an iconic brand, Allergan is rolling out a new multimillion-dollar Lap-Band campaign. "If I lost the weight...I could stop taking so many medications," says one heavyset woman in a television spot that started airing in March. Shown on ABC, CBS and cable stations, the spot targets female audiences of daytime soap operas. Allergan has also revamped its Lap-Band Web site with a support program for patients before and after surgery.

In a bid to neutralize its disadvantages in the surgical market, Allergan recently signed a co-marketing pact with Covidien Ltd., J&J's largest competitor in the bariatric-surgery field. Covidien's sales force will scout out general surgeons interested in the banding business.

"We threw [J&J] a curveball with Covidien," Allergan's Mr. Pyott boasts. The arrangement also puts a third large company behind the push toward gastric banding, raising its profile, he adds. Mr. Pyott says he is focused on growing the overall market for banding, rather than defending Allergan's share vis-à-vis J&J.

Gastric banding is also being promoted by a growing number of outpatient banding centers. Backed by venture capitalists, the clinics buy specially designed waiting-room furniture, operating tables and scales to accommodate large people. Facilities are located a few steps from parking spaces to make access easier for outsized patients. The centers spend liberally on marketing to lure cash-paying customers. Banding typically costs $17,000, versus $25,000 for gastric-bypass surgery, though surgeons sometimes charge much more.

The American Institute of Gastric Banding, which operates the True Results clinics, says it has performed more than 11,000 surgeries since 2001. In Texas, "we basically took the Lasik playbook and ran it for banding," says founder Peter Gottlieb, referring to the popular eyesight-correction surgery. Closely held oBand Surgery Centers Inc., with surgery centers in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and Orange, Calif., has a billboard on a busy boulevard in Los Angeles and is running commercials on the "Dr. Phil" and "Oprah Winfrey" television shows.

Then there is the growing number of surgeons who are joining the fray. Unlike gastric bypass, gastric banding is a relatively simple procedure, making it easy for surgeons to pick up.

Now, scores of surgeons across the country are touting weight-loss surgery at free seminars. Patients find them on Web sites sponsored by Allergan and J&J, as well as the Web sites of individual surgeons, hospitals and outpatient centers. The sites invite users to punch in a zip code to find seminars in their geographic area. JourneyLite, a network managed by closely held Bariatric Partners Inc., recently directed prospective patients to such a meeting in Ventura, Calif.


About 50 people, mostly middle-aged women, gathered in a nondescript room in the office suite of a local bariatric surgeon. Dressed in blue surgical scrubs, Helmuth Billy chatted for three hours about everything from the benefits of losing weight to the calories in a Starbuck's caramel macchiato coffee. The "personal cost of obesity" adds up to $15,568 a year, including medications and food, according to a slide Dr. Billy showed, which was provided by Allergan. The total turned out to be close to what the surgeon charges for surgery, including follow-up visits.

One of his patients, a dark-haired woman in her 50s, stood up. "My name is Sandi and I weighed 424 pounds in May 2004, before losing 250 pounds," said Sandi Henderson, who adds that she swims every morning and has tossed out her old medications. "I put my food-addiction money toward shopping and exercise," she laughed. Since her insurance specifically excluded bariatric surgery, Ms. Henderson says she used some of her retirement savings to pay for the procedure.

The band makers are hoping to change insurers' minds. While Inamed had employed only five people in its reimbursement department, Allergan has 100 people in that job today, and "we are monitoring how we're moving the needle," says Mr. Pyott. This year, the team is targeting major employers who make their own decisions about coverage.

Insurers are slowly loosening their purse strings. The federal agency that oversees the Medicare program instituted coverage for bariatric surgery in early 2006. That was followed by a favorable assessment on gastric banding last year from the BlueCross BlueShield Association, whose member health plans look to it for guidance. In September, the federal Tricare program, which provides coverage for 9.2 million active and retired U.S. military personnel, as well as their families, said it would cover gastric banding, retroactive to February 2007.

Allergan is also working to expand Lap-Band applications to younger and lighter patients. It is sponsoring human tests in teens between the ages of 14 and 17 as well as adults who aren't as heavy as most bariatric surgery candidates. To make the band adjustments easier, the company is developing a remote-control system that would allow surgeons to loosen or tighten the devices telemetrically.


Canis Major dwarf galaxy is located in the same part of the sky as the constellation of Canis Major. The galaxy contains a relatively high percentage of red giant stars, and is thought to contain an estimated one billion stars in all.

The Canis Major dwarf galaxy is classified as an irregular galaxy and is now thought to be the closest neighbouring galaxy to our location in the Milky Way, being located about 25,000 light-years away from our Solar System and 42,000 light-years from the Galactic Center. It has a roughly elliptical shape and is thought to contain as many stars as the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, the previous contender for closest galaxy to our location in the Milky Way.

The galaxy was first discovered in November 2003 by an international team of French, Italian, British and Australian astronomers. Although closer to the Earth than the centre of the galaxy itself, the Canis Major Dwarf galaxy was difficult to detect as it is located behind the plane of the Milky Way, where concentrations of stars, gas and dust are densest. This, along with its small size, explains why it was not discovered sooner.

The team of astronomers that discovered it were collaborating on analysis of data from the Two-Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), a comprehensive survey of the sky in infrared light, which is not blocked by gas and dust as severely as visible light. Because of this technique, scientists were able to detect a very significant over-density of class M giant stars in a part of the sky occupied by the Canis Major constellation, along with several other related structures composed of this type of star, two of which form broad, faint arcs.

Astronomers believe that the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy is in the process of being pulled apart by the gravitational field of the more massive Milky Way galaxy. The main body of the galaxy is extremely degraded. Tidal disruption causes a long filament of stars to trail behind it as it orbits the Milky Way, forming a complex ringlike structure sometimes referred to as the Monoceros Ring which wraps around our galaxy three times. The stream of stars was first discovered in the early 21st century by astronomers conducting the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. It was in the course of investigating this ring of stars, and a closely spaced group of globular clusters similar to those associated with the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy, that the Canis Major dwarf galaxy was discovered.

Globular clusters thought to be associated with the Canis Major Dwarf galaxy include NGC 1851, NGC 1904, NGC 2298 and NGC 2808, all of which are likely to be a remnant of the galaxy's globular cluster system before its accretion, or swallowing, into the Milky Way. NGC 1261 is another nearby cluster, but its velocity is different enough from that of the others to make its relation to the system unclear. http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com/

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The Canis Major Dwarf galaxy may also have associated open clusters, including Dol 25 and H18, and possibly AM-2. It is thought that the open clusters may have formed due to the dwarf galaxy's gravity perturbing material in the galactic disk and stimulating star formation.

The discovery of the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy and subsequent analysis of the stars associated with it has provided some support for the current theory that galaxies may grow in size by swallowing their smaller neighbors. Martin et al. believe that the preponderance of evidence points to the accretion of a small satellite galaxy of the Milky Way which was orbiting roughly in the plane of the galactic disk.

A new study by Yazan Momany using 2MASS data casts doubts on the nature of the dwarf galaxy. The data suggests that the trail of stars is actually part of the warped galactic disc. This conclusion, however, is still being challenged and the true nature of the overdensity in Canis Major remains unknown.






NGC 5128 is a lenticular galaxy about 14 million light-years away in the constellation Centaurus. It is one of the closest radio galaxies to Earth, so its active galactic nucleus has been extensively studied by professional astronomers. The galaxy is also the fifth brightest in the sky, making it an ideal amateur astronomy target, although the galaxy is only visible from low northern latitudes and the southern hemisphere.

A relativistic jet which extracts energy from the vicinity of what is believed to be a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy is responsible for emissions in the X-ray and radio wavelengths. http://louisjsheehanesquire.blogsavy.com/2008/03/22/try/
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By taking radio observations of the jet separated by a decade, astronomers have determined that the inner parts of the jet are moving at about one half of the speed of light. X-rays are produced farther out as the jet collides with surrounding gases resulting in the creation of highly energetic particles.

As observed in other starburst galaxies, a collision is responsible for the intense burst of star formation. Using the Spitzer Space Telescope scientists confirm that Centaurus A is going through a galaxy collision by devouring a spiral galaxy.

Centaurus A may be described as having a peculiar morphology. As seen from Earth, the galaxy looks like a lenticular or elliptical galaxy with a superimposed dust lane. The peculiarity of this galaxy was first identified in 1847 by John Herschel, and the galaxy was included in the Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies (published in 1966) as one of the best examples of a "disturbed" galaxy with dust absorption]. The galaxy's strange morphology is generally recognized as the result of a merger between two smaller galaxies.

The bulge of this galaxy is comprised mainly of evolved red stars. The dusty disk, however, has been the site of more recent star formation; over 100 star formation regions have been identified in the disk.




One supernova has been detected in Centaurus A[9]. The supernova, named SN 1986G, was discovered within the dark dust lane of Centaurus A by R. Evans in 1986[10]. The supernovae was later identified as a type IA supernova[11]. A type Ia supernova forms when a white dwarf's mass supersedes the maximum mass where it can support itself gravitationally, as may happen when a white dwarf in a binary star system strips gas away from the other star in the system. The white dwarf then collapses, the collapse triggers runaway fusion processes throughout the star, and the star explodes. SN 1986G was used to demonstrate that the spectra of type Ia supernovae are not all identical and that type Ia supernovae may differ in the way that they change in brightness over time[.





Centaurus A is at the center of one of two subgroups within the Centaurus A/M83 Group, a nearby group of galaxies. Messier 83 (the Southern Pinwheel Galaxy) is at the center of the other subgroup.
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http://louis0j0sheehan.livejournal.com/15433.htmlThese two groups are sometimes identified as one group and sometimes identified as two groups. However, the galaxies around Centaurus A and the galaxies around M83 are physically close to each other, and both subgroups appear not to be moving relative to each other.

Centaurus A is located approximately 4° north of Omega Centauri (a globular cluster visible with the naked eye). Because the galaxy has a high surface brightness and relatively large angular size, it is an ideal target for amateur astronomy observations. The bright central bulge and dark dust lane are visible even in finderscopes and large binoculars, and additional structure may be seen in larger telescopes.





M104/NGC 4594 is an unbarred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo. It has a bright nucleus, an unusually large central bulge, and a prominent dust lane in its inclined disk. The dark dust lane and the bulge give this galaxy the appearance of a sombrero. The galaxy has an apparent magnitude of 9.0, making it a galaxy that can easily be seen with amateur telescopes. The large bulge, the central supermassive black hole, and the dust lane all attract the attention of professional astronomers.

The Sombrero Galaxy was discovered in May 1781 by Pierre Méchain, who described the object in a May 1783 letter to J. Bernoulli that was later published in the Berliner Astronomisches Jahrbuch. Charles Messier made a hand-written note about this and five other objects (now collectively recognized as M104 - M109) to his personal list of objects now known as the Messier Catalogue, but it was not "officially" included until 1921. William Herschel independently discovered the object in 1784 and additionally noted the presence of a "dark stratum" in the galaxy's disk, what is now called a dust lane. Later astronomers were able to connect Méchain's and Herschel's observations.

In 1921, Camille Flammarion found Messier's personal list of the Messier objects including the hand-written notes about the Sombrero Galaxy. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com/
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This was identified with object 4594 in the New General Catalogue, and Flammarion declared that it should be included in the Messier Catalogue. Since this time, the Sombrero Galaxy has been known as M104.



In the 1910s, Vesto Slipher discovered that the spectra of several galaxies, including the Sombrero Galaxy, are redshifted. The average velocity calculated from these redshifts was 400 km/s. The redshift for the Sombrero Galaxy itself was calculated to be 1100 km/s. Slipher's spectra were among the first observations of the expansion of the universe, one of the key pieces of evidence for the Big Bang Theory.

Slipher also detected rotation within the spectra of the Sombrero Galaxy. http://louisjsheehan.blogstream.com/
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His observations of galaxy rotation are among the first ever performed.

As noted above, this galaxy's most striking feature is the dust lane that crosses in front of the bulge of the galaxy. This dust lane is actually a symmetric ring that encloses the bulge of the galaxy.[8] Most of the cold atomic hydrogen gas[9] and the dust[8] lies within this ring. The ring might also contain most of the Sombrero Galaxy's cold molecular gas,[8] although this is an inference based on observations with low resolution and weak detections.[10][11] Additional observations are needed to confirm that the Sombrero galaxy's molecular gas is constrained to the ring. Based on infrared spectroscopy, the dust ring is the primary site of star formation within this galaxy.[8]


The nucleus of the Sombrero galaxy is classified as a low ionization nuclear emission region. These are nuclear regions where ionized gas is present, but the ions are only weakly ionized (i.e. the atoms are missing relatively few electrons). The source of energy for ionizing the gas in LINERs has been debated extensively. Some LINER nuclei may be powered by hot, young stars found in star formation regions, whereas other LINER nuclei may be powered by active galactic nuclei (highly energetic regions that contain supermassive black holes). Infrared spectroscopy observations have demonstrated that the nucleus of the Sombrero Galaxy is probably devoid of any significant star formation activity. However, a supermassive black hole has been identified in the nucleus (as discussed in the subsection below), so this active galactic nucleus is probably the energy source that weakly ionizes the gas in the Sombrero Galaxy.


In the 1990s, a research group led by John Kormendy demonstrated that a supermassive black hole is present within the Sombrero Galaxy. Using spectroscopy data from both the CFHT and the Hubble Space Telescope, the group showed that the speed of rotation of the stars within the center of the galaxy could not be maintained unless a mass 1 billion times the mass of the Sun, or 109M☉, is present in the center. This is among the most massive black holes measured in any nearby galaxies.


At radio and X-ray wavelengths, the nucleus is a strong source of synchrotron emission. Synchrotron emission is produced when high velocity electrons oscillate as they pass through regions with strong magnetic fields. This emission is actually quite common for active galactic nuclei. Although radio synchrotron emission may vary over time for some active galactic nuclei, the luminosity of the radio emission from the Sombrero Galaxy only varies 10-20%.


In 2006, two groups published measurements of the submillimeter radiation from the nucleus of the Sombrero Galaxy at a wavelength of 850 micrometres. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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This submillimeter emission was found not to originate from the thermal emission from dust (which is commonly seen at infrared and submillimeter wavelengths), synchrotron emission (which is commonly seen at radio wavelengths), bremsstrahlung emission from hot gas (which is uncommonly seen at millimeter wavelengths), or molecular gas (which commonly produces submillimeter spectral lines). http://louis-j-sheehan.info/page1.aspx
The source of the submillimeter emission remains unidentified.


The Sombrero Galaxy has a relatively large number of globular clusters. Observational studies of globular clusters in the Sombrero Galaxy have produced estimates of the population in the range of 1200 to 2000. The ratio of the number of globular clusters to the total luminosity of the galaxy is high compared to the Milky Way and similar galaxies with small bulges, but the ratio is comparable to other galaxies with large bulges. These results have been repeatedly used to demonstrate that the number of globular clusters in galaxies is thought to be related to the size of the galaxies' bulges. The surface density of the globular clusters generally follows the light profile of the bulge except for near the center of the galaxy.


At least two methods have been used to measure the distance to the Sombrero Galaxy.

The first method relies on comparing the measured fluxes from planetary nebulae in the Sombrero Galaxy to the known luminosities of planetary nebulae in the Milky Way. This method gave the distance to the Sombrero Galaxy as 29.0 ± 2.0 Mly (8.9 ± 0.6 Mpc).

The other method used is the surface brightness fluctuations method. This method uses the grainy appearance of the galaxy's bulge to estimate the distance to it. Nearby galaxy bulges will appear very grainy, while more distant bulges will appear smooth. Early measurements using this technique gave distances of 30.6 ± 1.3 Mly (9.4 ± 0.4 Mpc).Later, after some refinement of the technique, a distance of 32 ± 3 Mly (9.8 ± 0.8 Mpc) was measured.[26] This was even further refined in 2003 to be 29.6 ± 2.5 Mly (9.1 ± 0.8 Mpc).

The average distance measured through these two techniques is 29.3 Mly (9.0 Mpc) with an uncertainty of 1.6 Mly (0.5 Mpc).[a]

The Sombrero Galaxy lies within a complex, filament-like cloud of galaxies that extends to the south of the Virgo Cluster.However, it is unclear as to whether the Sombrero Galaxy is part of a formal galaxy group. Hierarchical methods for identifying groups, which determine group membership by considering whether individual galaxies belong to a larger aggregate of galaxies, typically produce results showing that the Sombrero Galaxy is part of a group that includes NGC 4487, NGC 4504, NGC 4802, UGCA 289, and possibly a few other galaxies. However, results that rely on the percolation method (i.e. the "friends-of-friends" method), which links individual galaxies together to determine group membership, indicate that either the Sombrero Galaxy is not in a group or that it may only be part of a galaxy pair with UGCA 287.

The Sombrero Galaxy is located 11.5° west of Spica and 5.5° northeast of Eta Corvi.Although the galaxy is visible with 7x35 binoculars or a 4 inch amateur telescope an 8 inch telescope is needed to distinguish the bulge from the disk,and a 10 or 12 inch telescope is needed to see the dark dust lane.










The M51 Group is located to the southeast of the M101 Group and the NGC 5866 Group. The distances to these three groups (as determined from the distances to the individual member galaxies) are similar, which suggests that the M51 Group, the M101 Group, and the NGC 5866 Group are actually part of a large, loose, elongated structure. However, most group identification methods (including those used by the references cited above) identify these three groups as separate entities.




Blue stragglers (BSS) are stars in open or globular clusters that are hotter and bluer than other cluster stars having the same luminosity. Thus, they are separate from other stars on the cluster's Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. Blue straggler stars appear to violate standard theories of stellar evolution, in which all stars born at the same time should lie on a clearly defined curve in the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, with their positions on that curve determined solely by their initial mass. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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Since blue stragglers often lie well off this curve, they may undergo abnormal stellar evolution.


The cause of this is not yet clearly known, but the leading hypothesis is that they are current or former binary stars that are in the process of merging or have already done so. The merger of two stars would create a single star with larger mass, making it hotter and more luminous than stars of a similar age. If this theory is correct, then blue stragglers would no longer cause a problem for stellar evolution theory; the resulting star would have more hydrogen in its core making it behave like a much younger star. There is evidence in favor of this view, notably that blue straggler stars appear to be much more common in dense regions of clusters, especially in the cores of globular clusters. Since there are more stars per unit volume, collisions and close-encounters are far more likely in clusters than among field stars.

One way to test this hypothesis is to study the pulsations of variable blue straggler stars. The asteroseismological properties of merged stars may be measurably different from those of normal pulsating variables of similar mass and luminosity. However, the measurement of pulsations is very difficult, given the scarcity of variable blue stragglers, the small photometric amplitudes of their pulsations, and the crowded fields these stars are often found in.

Blue stragglers rapidly rotate at a rate of 75 times that of the Sun's rotation. They appear to be two to three times the mass of the other cluster stars present. The most recent research reveals that nearby stars to blue stragglers have significantly less carbon and oxygen than their neighbors. This suggested that one star becomes hotter and bluer by pulling material from an orbiting star. The star that has had material stolen from it has deep regions exposed that show areas where the star’s original carbon had fused into heavier elements. It will later die.




When it comes to "energy independence," American politics has discovered a new spirit of bipartisanship. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain all call for it, in one form or another -- in the name of fighting global terrorism, global warming or merely global price spikes at the pump. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
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And of course the phrase is a cliché outside the world of politics, too, showing up in earnest op-eds and green-shaded pronouncements. Well, Robert Bryce is having none of it.

In "Gusher of Lies," Mr. Bryce declares that "energy independence is hogwash." There is not a chance in the world, he says, that we're going to kick our "oil addiction." Our economy runs on oil and will continue to do so for a long time to come. There are no "Manhattan Projects" on the horizon. Not even the big bad oil companies are "energy independent" anymore. Mr. Bryce notes that oil companies now own only 10% of the world's oil reserves. Everything else is claimed by national governments.

And trends don't favor an American version of energy independence anyway. As U.S. onshore production has slowly played out, the western Gulf of Mexico has been punctured like a pincushion. And yet the eastern Gulf (i.e., Florida) and the East and West coasts won't let drilling rigs anywhere near their waters. And don't even mention the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, still untouchable.

No, the gushers are elsewhere these days. America's oil production peaked in 1970; non-OPEC oil production peaked about five years ago. Oil power is shifting even more toward the Persian Gulf. Jubail (a port in Saudi Arabia) and Dubai (in the United Arab Emirates) are fast becoming industrial and financial centers on a scale to defy the Western imagination. Halliburton moved its top executives to Dubai in 2007, and little wonder.

What about the imperatives that are so often evoked on behalf of "energy independence"? On global warming, Mr. Bryce is an agnostic, but he notes that, with China adding the equivalent of France to its electrical grid every year -- 90% of it in coal -- talk about reducing global carbon emissions is just prattle. As for the geopolitical aspect of energy independence -- starving bad regimes into reform -- Mr. Bryce believes it to be wishful thinking. We're never going to isolate Iran, he argues. The Iranians are building pipelines to Pakistan and India and signing multibillion-dollar natural-gas deals with China. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
"The one being isolated on the energy front isn't Iran," he argues; "it's the U.S." If by some miracle oil prices were to plunge dramatically (the result of energy independence and a drop in demand), "there's no evidence -- none -- to support the assertion," Mr. Bryce claims, "that an oil price crash will lead to reform" in troublesome Islamic countries.

Instead we should be thinking of energy "interdependence" in a world where we, quite properly, export what we have in abundance and import what we can't produce for ourselves. The search for "alternative" fuels is, in Mr. Bryce's view, a costly byway. He saves particular scorn for ethanol, "the largest scam in our nation's history," assembling 50 pages of evidence to show that, if anything, the energy-intensive effort to distill ethanol out of the nation's corn crop diminishes our energy supply. Yet ethanol production has become entangled with that other impossible-to-repeal boondoggle, agricultural subsidies.

For all his confidence and expertise, Mr. Bryce can be a little weak in some areas. He rightly notes that both American and Canadian natural-gas production has peaked, but then he talks casually about importing vast quantities from Russia and Iran. Bringing this gas across the oceans, however, will involve liquefying it, adding a huge price premium -- if we ever get the receiving terminals built in the first place. Even with "energy interdependence," natural gas is going to be much more expensive in the future. On nuclear energy, Mr. Bryce is even weaker. At one point he refers to uranium as a "fossil fuel"; and he doesn't seem to grasp nuclear's greater-by-orders-of-magnitude energy potential.

Mr. Bryce's ultimate counsel -- that we should forget about what Arab countries are doing with their petrodollars and learn to get along -- is also hard to accept. It ignores all those stories about the third cousins of oil sheiks showing up in al Qaeda training camps with suitcases full of cash. But it's hard to ignore Mr. Bryce's main point -- that politicians and pundits are woefully uninformed about energy. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
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When you hear a presidential candidate or a TV talking head calling for energy independence, or claiming that we can reduce carbon emissions by 60% or 70%, or pointing to windmills, ethanol and solar panels as the energy future of the American economy, you can be fairly certain that they are wasting their own energy on false promises and futile schemes.

Brown dwarfs, a term coined by Jill Tarter in 1975, were originally called black dwarfs, a classification for dark substellar objects floating freely in space which were too low in mass to sustain stable hydrogen fusion (the term black dwarf currently refers to a white dwarf that has cooled down so that it no longer emits heat or light). Alternative names have been proposed, including Planetar and Substar.

Early theories concerning the nature of the lowest mass stars and the hydrogen burning limit suggested that objects with a mass less than 0.07 solar masses for Population I objects or objects with a mass less than 0.09 solar masses for Population II objects would never go through normal stellar evolution and would become a completely degenerate star (Kumar 1963). The role of deuterium-burning down to 0.012 solar masses and the impact of dust formation in the cool outer atmospheres of brown dwarfs was understood by the late eighties. They would however be hard to find in the sky, as they would emit almost no light. Their strongest emissions would be in the infrared (IR) spectrum, and ground-based IR detectors were too imprecise at that time to readily identify any brown dwarfs.

Since those earlier times, numerous searches involving various methods have been conducted to find these objects. Some of those methods included multi-color imaging surveys around field stars, imaging surveys for faint companions to main sequence dwarfs and white dwarfs, surveys of young star clusters and radial velocity monitoring for close companions.

For many years, efforts to discover brown dwarfs were frustrating and searches to find them seemed fruitless. In 1988, however, University of California at Los Angeles professors Eric Becklin and Ben Zuckerman identified a faint companion to GD 165 in an infrared search of white dwarfs. The spectrum of GD 165B was very red and enigmatic, showing none of the features expected of a low-mass red dwarf star. It became clear that GD 165B would need to be classified as a much cooler object than the latest M dwarfs then known. GD 165B remained unique for almost a decade until the advent of the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) when Davy Kirkpatrick, out of the California Institute of Technology, and others discovered many objects with similar colors and spectral features.

Today, GD 165B is recognized as the prototype of a class of objects now called "L dwarfs". While the discovery of the coolest dwarf was highly significant at the time, it was debated whether GD 165B would be classified as a brown dwarf or simply a very low mass star, since observationally, it is very difficult to distinguish between the two.

Interestingly, soon after the discovery of GD 165B other brown dwarf candidates were reported. Most failed to live up to their candidacy however, and with further checks for substellar nature, such as the lithium test, many turned out to be stellar objects and not true brown dwarfs. When young (up to a gigayear old), brown dwarfs can have temperatures and luminosities similar to some stars, so other distinguishing characteristics are necessary, such as the presence of lithium. Stars will burn lithium in a little over 100 Myr, at most, while most brown dwarfs will never acquire high enough core temperatures to do so. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/
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Thus, the detection of lithium in the atmosphere of a candidate object ensures its status as a brown dwarf.

In 1995 the study of brown dwarfs changed dramatically with the discovery of three incontrovertible substellar objects, some of which were identified by the presence of the 6708 Li line. The most notable of these objects was Gliese 229B which was found to have a temperature and luminosity well below the stellar range. Remarkably, its near-infrared spectrum clearly exhibited a methane absorption band at 2 micrometres, a feature that had previously only been observed in gas giant atmospheres and the atmosphere of Saturn's moon, Titan. Methane absorption is not expected at the temperatures of main-sequence stars. This discovery helped to establish yet another spectral class even cooler than L dwarfs known as "T dwarfs" for which Gl 229B is the prototype.

Since 1995, when the first brown dwarf was confirmed, hundreds have been identified. Brown dwarfs close to Earth include Epsilon Indi Ba and Bb, a pair of dwarfs gravitationally bound to a sunlike star, around 12 light-years from the Sun.


The standard mechanism for star birth is through the gravitational collapse of a cold interstellar cloud of gas and dust. As the cloud contracts it heats up. The release of gravitational potential energy is the source of this heat. Early in the process the contracting gas quickly radiates away much of the energy, allowing the collapse to continue. Eventually, the central region becomes sufficiently dense to trap radiation. Consequently, the central temperature and density of the collapsed cloud increases dramatically with time, slowing the contraction, until the conditions are hot and dense enough for thermonuclear reactions to occur in the core of the protostar. For most stars, gas and radiation pressure generated by the thermonuclear fusion reactions within the core of the star will support it against any further gravitational contraction. Hydrostatic equilibrium is reached and the star will spend most of its lifetime fusing hydrogen into helium as a main-sequence star.

If, however, the mass of the protostar is less than about 0.08 solar mass, normal hydrogen thermonuclear fusion reactions will not ignite in the core. Gravitational contraction does not heat the small protostar very effectively, and before the temperature in the core can increase enough to trigger fusion, the density reaches the point where electrons become closely packed enough to create quantum electron degeneracy pressure. According to the brown dwarf interior models, typical conditions in the core for density, temperature and pressure are expected to be the following:

\rho_c \sim 10 - 10^3 g/cm^3
T_c \lesssim 3 \times 10^6 K
P_c \sim 10^5 Mbar

Further gravitational contraction is prevented and the result is a "failed star", or brown dwarf that simply cools off by radiating away its internal thermal energy.

Lithium: Lithium is generally present in brown dwarfs and not in low-mass stars. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/page1.aspx
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Stars, which achieve the high temperature necessary for fusing hydrogen, rapidly deplete their lithium. This occurs by a collision of Lithium-7 and a proton producing two Helium-4 nuclei. The temperature necessary for this reaction is just below the temperature necessary for hydrogen fusion. Convection in low-mass stars ensures that lithium in the whole volume of the star is depleted. Therefore, the presence of the lithium line in a candidate brown dwarf's spectrum is a strong indicator that it is indeed substellar. The use of lithium to distinguish candidate brown dwarfs from low-mass stars is commonly referred to as the lithium test, and was pioneered by Rafael Rebolo and colleagues.

* However, lithium is also seen in very young stars, which have not yet had a chance to burn it off. Heavier stars like our sun can retain lithium in their outer atmospheres, which never get hot enough for lithium depletion, but those are distinguishable from brown dwarfs by their size.
* Contrariwise, brown dwarfs at the high end of their mass range can be hot enough to deplete their lithium when they are young. Dwarfs of mass greater than 65 MJ can burn off their lithium by the time they are half a billion years old[Kulkarni], thus this test is not perfect.

Methane: Unlike stars, older brown dwarfs are sometimes cool enough that over very long periods of time their atmospheres can gather observable quantities of methane. Dwarfs confirmed in this fashion include Gliese 229B.

Luminosity: Main sequence stars cool, but eventually reach a minimum luminosity which they can sustain through steady fusion. This varies from star to star, but is generally at least 0.01% the luminosity of our Sun. Brown dwarfs cool and darken steadily over their lifetimes: sufficiently old brown dwarfs will be too faint to be detectable.


A remarkable property of brown dwarfs is that they are all roughly the same radius, more or less the radius of Jupiter. At the high end of their mass range (60-90 Jupiter masses), the volume of a brown dwarf is governed primarily by electron degeneracy pressure[2], as it is in white dwarfs; at the low end of the range (1-10 Jupiter masses), their volume is governed primarily by Coulomb pressure, as it is in planets. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
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The net result is that the radii of brown dwarfs vary by only 10-15% over the range of possible masses. This can make distinguishing them from planets difficult.

In addition, many brown dwarfs undergo no fusion; those at the low end of the mass range (under 13 Jupiter masses) are never hot enough to fuse even deuterium, and even those at the high end of the mass range (over 60 Jupiter masses) cool quickly enough that they no longer undergo fusion after some time on the order of 10 million years. However, there are other ways to distinguish dwarfs from planets:

Density is a clear giveaway. Brown dwarfs are all about the same radius; so anything that size with over 10 Jupiter masses is unlikely to be a planet.

X-ray and infrared spectra are telltale signs. Some brown dwarfs emit X-rays; and all "warm" dwarfs continue to glow tellingly in the red and infrared spectra until they cool to planet like temperatures (under 1000 K).

Some astronomers believe that there is in fact no actual black-and-white line separating light brown dwarfs from heavy planets, and that rather there is a continuum. For example, Jupiter and Saturn are both made out of primarily hydrogen and helium, like the Sun. Saturn is nearly as large as Jupiter, despite having only 30% the mass. Three of the giants in our solar system (Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune) emit more heat than they receive from the Sun. And all four giant planets have their own "planetary systems" -- their moons. In addition, it has been found that both planets and brown dwarfs can have eccentric orbits.

Currently, the International Astronomical Union considers objects with masses above the limiting mass for thermonuclear fusion of deuterium (currently calculated to be 13 Jupiter masses for objects of solar metallicity) to be a brown dwarf, whereas those objects under that mass (and orbiting stars or stellar remnants) are considered planets.



The defining characteristic of spectral class M, the coolest type in the long-standing classical stellar sequence, is an optical spectrum dominated by absorption bands of titanium oxide (TiO) and vanadium oxide (VO) molecules. However, GD 165B, the cool companion to the white dwarf GD 165 had none of the hallmark TiO features of M dwarfs. The subsequent identification of many field counterparts to GD 165B ultimately led Kirkpatrick and others to the definition of a new spectral class, the L dwarfs, defined in the red optical region not by weakening metal-oxide bands (TiO, VO), but strong metal hydride bands (FeH, CrH, MgH, CaH) and prominent alkali lines (Na I, K I, Cs I, Rb I). As of April 2005, over 400 L dwarfs have been identified (see link in references section below), most by wide-field surveys: the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS), the Deep Near Infrared Survey of the Southern Sky (DENIS), and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

As GD 165B is the prototype of the L dwarfs, Gliese 229B is the prototype of a second new spectral class, the T dwarfs. Whereas near-infrared (NIR) spectra of L dwarfs show strong absorption bands of H2O and carbon monoxide (CO), the NIR spectrum of Gliese 229B is dominated by absorption bands from methane (CH4), features that were only found in the giant planets of the solar system and Titan. CH4, H2O, and molecular hydrogen (H2) collision-induced absorption (CIA) give Gliese 229B blue near-infrared colors. Its steeply sloped red optical spectrum also lacks the FeH and CrH bands that characterize L dwarfs and instead is influenced by exceptionally broad absorption features from the alkali metals Na and K. These differences led Kirkpatrick to propose the T spectral class for objects exhibiting H- and K-band CH4 absorption. As of April 2005, 58 T dwarfs are now known. NIR classification schemes for T dwarfs have recently been developed by Adam Burgasser and Tom Geballe. Theory suggests that L dwarfs are a mixture of very low-mass stars and sub-stellar objects (brown dwarfs), whereas the T dwarf class is composed entirely of brown dwarfs.

The majority of flux emitted by L and T dwarfs is in the 1 to 2.5 micrometre near-infrared range. Low and decreasing temperatures through the late M, L, and T dwarf sequence result in a rich near-infrared spectrum containing a wide variety of features, from relatively narrow lines of neutral atomic species to broad molecular bands, all of which have different dependencies on temperature, gravity, and metallicity. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/Blog/Blogger.aspx
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Furthermore, these low temperature conditions favor condensation out of the gas state and the formation of grains.

Typical atmospheres of known brown dwarfs range in temperature from 2200 down to 750 K (Burrows et al. 2001). Compared to stars, which warm themselves with steady internal fusion, brown dwarfs cool quickly over time; more massive dwarfs cool more slowly than less massive ones.

Coronagraphs have recently been used to detect faint objects orbiting bright visible stars, including Gliese 229B.
Sensitive telescopes equipped with charge-coupled devices (CCDs) have been used to search distant star clusters for faint objects, including Teide 1.
Wide-field searches have identified individual faint objects, such as Kelu-1 (30 ly away)

Recent observations of known brown dwarf candidates have revealed a pattern of brightening and dimming of infrared emissions that suggests relatively cool, opaque cloud patterns obscuring a hot interior that is stirred by extreme winds. The weather on such bodies is thought to be extremely violent, comparable to but far exceeding Jupiter's famous storms.

X-ray flares detected from brown dwarfs since late 1999 suggest changing magnetic fields within them, similar to those in very low-mass stars.

A brown dwarf Cha 110913-773444 located 500 light years away in the constellation Chamaeleon may be in the process of forming a mini solar system. Astronomers from Pennsylvania State University have detected what they believe to be a disk of gas and dust similar to the one hypothesized to have formed our own solar system. Cha 110913-773444 is the smallest brown dwarf found to date (8 Jupiter masses) and if it formed a solar system it would be the smallest known object to have one. Their findings were published in the Dec. 10 issue of the Astrophysical Journal

Modern life is loud. The jolting buzz of an alarm clock awakens the ears to a daily din of trucks idling, sirens blaring, televisions droning, computers pinging and phones ringing — not to mention refrigerators humming and air-conditioners thrumming. But for the 12 million Americans who suffer from severe tinnitus, the phantom tones inside their head are louder than anything else.
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Often caused by prolonged or sudden exposure to loud noises, tinnitus (pronounced tin-NIGHT-us or TIN-nit-us) is becoming an increasingly common complaint, particularly among soldiers returning from combat, users of portable music players, and aging baby boomers reared on rock ’n’ roll. (Other causes include stress, some kinds of chemotherapy, head and neck trauma, sinus infections, and multiple sclerosis.)

Although there is no cure, researchers say they have never had a better understanding of the cascade of physiological and psychological mechanisms responsible for tinnitus. As a result, new treatments under investigation — some of them already on the market — show promise in helping patients manage the ringing, pinging and hissing that otherwise drives them to distraction.

The most promising therapies, experts say, are based on discoveries made in the last five years about the brain activity of people with tinnitus. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com/
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With brain-scanning equipment like functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers in the United States and Europe have independently discovered that the brain areas responsible for interpreting sound and producing fearful emotions are exceptionally active in people who complain of tinnitus.

“We’ve discovered that tinnitus is not so much ringing in the ears as ringing in the brain,” said Thomas J. Brozoski, a tinnitus researcher at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine in Springfield.

Indeed, tinnitus can be intense in people with hearing loss and even those whose auditory nerves have been completely severed. In the absence of normal auditory stimulation, the brain is like a driver trying to tune in to a radio station that is out of range. It turns up the volume trying but gets only annoying static. Richard Salvi, director of the Center for Hearing and Deafness at the State University of New York at Buffalo, said the static could be “neural noise” — the sound of nerves firing. Or, he said, it could be a leftover sound memory.

Adam Edwards, a 34-year-old co-owner of a wheel repair shop in Dallas, said he developed tinnitus four years ago after target shooting with a pistol. “I had all the risk factors,” he said. “I grew up hunting, I played drums in a band, I went to loud concerts, I have a loud work environment — everything but living next to a missile launch site.” His tinnitus, which he described as a “computer beeping” sound, was so intense and persistent that he needed sedatives to sleep at night.

Mr. Edwards says he has gotten relief from a device developed by an Australian audiologist, which became widely available in the United States last year. Manufactured by Neuromonics Inc. of Bethlehem, Pa., it looks like an MP3 player and delivers sound spanning the full auditory spectrum, digitally embedded in soothing music.

Similar to white noise, the broadband sound, tailored to each patient’s hearing ability, masks the tinnitus. (The music is intended to ease the anxiety that often accompanies the disorder.) Patients wear the $5,000 device, which is usually not covered by health insurance, for a minimum of two hours a day for six months. Since completing the treatment regimen last year, Mr. Edwards said his tinnitus had “become sort of like Muzak at a department store — you hear it if you think about it, but otherwise you don’t really notice.”

A small, company-financed study in the journal Ear & Hearing in April 2007 indicated that the Neuromonics method was 90 percent successful at reducing tinnitus. A larger study is under way to determine its long-term effectiveness.

Anne Howell, an audiologist at the Callier Center for Communication Disorders at the University of Texas at Dallas, said the Neuromonics device was a big improvement over older sound therapies that required wearing something that looked like a hearing aid all the time and took 18 to 24 months.

“The length of time was discouraging for many patients,” she said. “And a lot of them told me that wearing something that looks like a hearing aid would cause a problem in their professional life.”

Other treatments showing promise include surgically implanted electrodes and noninvasive magnetic stimulation, both intended to disrupt and possibly reset the faulty brain signals responsible for tinnitus. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com/
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Using functional M.R.I. to guide them, neurosurgeons in Belgium have performed the implant procedure on several patients in the last year and say it has suppressed tinnitus entirely.

But the treatment is controversial. “It’s a radical option and not proven yet,” said Jennifer R. Melcher, an assistant professor of otology and laryngology at Harvard Medical School.

The magnetic therapy, similar to treatments used for depression and chronic pain, involves holding a magnet in the shape of a figure eight over the skull. Clinicians use functional M.R.I. to aim the magnetic pulses so they reach regions of the brain responsible for interpreting sound. Patients receive a pulse every second for about 20 minutes. “It works for some people but not for others,” said Anthony Cacace, professor of communication science and nerve disorders at Wayne State University in Detroit. Since tinnitus has so many causes, Dr. Cacace said, the challenge now is to find out which “subsets of patients benefit from this treatment.”

Researchers in Brazil have published a study indicating that a treatment called cranial-sacral trigger point therapy can relieve tinnitus in some head and neck trauma cases by releasing muscles that constrict hearing and neural pathways.

And drugs intended to treat alcoholism, epilepsy, Alzheimer’s and depression that alter levels of various neurotransmitters in the brain like serotonin, dopamine and gamma-aminobutyric acid have quieted tinnitus in some published animal and human studies.

“We’ve never been so hopeful,” said Dr. Salvi, of SUNY Buffalo, “of finding treatments for a disorder that haunts people and follows them everywhere they go.”









Archimedes said he could move the Earth if given a place to stand.

That galley slave would have known that the rowing stations in the middle of the ship were best, although he might not have known why. That took scholars to figure out. “Think of the oar as a lever,” Prof. Mark Schiefsky of the Harvard classics department said. “Think of the oarlock as a fulcrum, and think of the sea as the weight.”

The longer the lever arm on the rower’s side of the fulcrum, the easier to move the weight. In the middle of the ship, as the rowers knew, the distance from hands to oarlock was longest.

This explanation is given in Problem 4 of the classical Greek treatise “Mechanical Problems,” from the third century B.C., the first known text on the science of mechanics and the first to explain how a lever works. It preceded, by at least a generation, Archimedes’ “On the Equilibrium of Plane Figures,” which presented the first formal proof of the law of the lever.

Dr. Schiefsky teaches Greek and Latin as his day job and reads Thucydides and Sophocles in ancient Greek for fun. http://louis8j8sheehan8esquire.blogspot.com/
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He also majored in astronomy as an undergraduate, and about nine years ago, feeling science-deprived, he joined a multinational research endeavor called the Archimedes Project, based at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

The Archimedes team studies the history of mechanics, how people thought about simple machines like the lever, the wheel and axle, the balance, the pulley, the wedge and the screw and how they turned their thoughts into theories and principles.

The textual record begins with “Mechanical Problems,” moves to Rome and then through the medieval Islamic world to the Renaissance. It ends, finally, with Newton, who described many of the basic laws of mechanics in the 18th century.

There are a surprising number of old, and extremely old, scientific texts that have survived the ravages of time in one form or another. The Archimedes Web site lists far more than 100, including Euclid’s geometry, Hero of Alexandria’s Roman-era technical manual on crossbows and catapults, medieval treatises on algebra and mechanics by Jordanus de Nemore and Galileo’s 17th-century defense of a heliocentric solar system.

The nice thing for Dr. Schiefsky is that hardly anyone reads the stuff. Scientists generally are not into ancient Greek or Latin, let alone Arabic, and most of Dr. Schiefsky’s colleagues work on literature, philosophy, philology or archaeology. In fact, Dr. Schiefsky suggests “about 100 people” worldwide work on both science and the classics.

By following the historical record, the Archimedes researchers have discovered that the evolution of physics — or, at least, mechanics — is based on an interplay between practice and theory. The practical use comes first, theory second. Artisans build machines and use them but do not think about why they work. Theorists explain the machines and then derive principles that can be used to construct more complex machines.

The Archimedes researchers say that by studying this dialectic they can better understand what people knew about the natural world at a given time and how that knowledge may have affected their lives.

“What do you do when you want to weigh a 100-pound piece of meat and you don’t have a 100-pound counterweight?” Dr. Schiefsky asked. “You use an unequal-armed balance, with a small weight on the long arm and the meat on the short arm.”

The uneven balance, known as a steelyard, is a kind of lever, and Dr. Schiefsky notes that it has a cameo in Aristophanes’ “Peace,” a comic fantasy about ending the Peloponnesian War. When a furious arms dealer cannot figure out what to do with a surplus war trumpet, Trygaeus, the central character, suggests pouring lead in the bell to make a steelyard.

Referring to the mouthpiece, Trygaeus says, “Attach at this end a scale-pan hung on cords, and you’ll have the very thing to weigh out figs to your servants out in the country.”


Natural-gas producers are swarming into Pennsylvania to chase what many are betting could be the next big thing: a thick wedge of gas-bearing rock called the Marcellus Shale.

The recent surge in interest was triggered by disclosures in the fall from producer Range Resources Corp. of Fort Worth, Texas, that it had drilled a well there producing more than three million cubic feet of natural gas a day, proving that Marcellus Shale wells can be profitable. http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com/

Since then, Range has reported wells that produce even more gas.

• Rising Interest: Natural-gas producers are swarming to the state to drill in a potentially hot production area.
• Difficult Area: Lack of equipment and manpower has impeded some efforts.
• The Risk: The area hasn't yet shown that producers will find major gas deposits.

The result is a land rush unmatched anywhere else in North America as companies try to snap up drilling acreage on a giant swath of rock stretching from West Virginia across Pennsylvania to the northeast corner of the state, 90 miles from New York City.

Range Resources plans to spend $426 million in Appalachia this year. Other out-of-state companies, such as EOG Resources Inc., Chesapeake Energy Corp. and Anadarko Petroleum Corp., have either begun drilling or are planning to drill wells targeting the Marcellus Shale.

Wall Street has recently awakened to the potential earnings power of these Pennsylvania wells, but analysts contend they still could be undervalued. "Even though these stocks have done well, to say the market has fully captured the potential is laughable," says Subash Chandra, an energy analyst with Jefferies & Co. Range Resources' shares were at $64.31 apiece as of 4 p.m. New York Stock Exchange composite trading, up from $34.01 a year earlier.

A relatively clean-burning fuel, natural gas is in growing demand. About half of U.S. homes use natural gas, and it generates about a fifth of the nation's electricity. Meanwhile, natural-gas prices have gone above $6 per million British thermal units for the past three years, triple their historical average. Prices recently topped $10 per million BTUs before falling back and ended Tuesday at $9.72 on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Estimates of the Marcellus Shale's supplies vary widely. In 2002, the U.S. Geological Survey estimated there may be 1.9 trillion cubic feet. Earlier this year, Terry Engelder, a Pennsylvania State University geosciences professor, made what he called a conservative estimate of 168 trillion cubic feet. http://louisbjbsheehan.blogspot.com/
http://louis2j2sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com/His estimate has yet to be confirmed. By comparison, the U.S. consumed 23.05 trillion cubic feet last year, according to the Energy Information Administration, or about 63.2 billion cubic feet a day.

Still, there have been relatively few completed Marcellus Shale wells, and it isn't clear whether the rock will produce prolific wells across the state or only in certain pockets. Companies could be spending a lot of money leasing acres and drilling wells in counties where there won't be enough gas for the wells to offer a reasonable return.

Information about the potential of the Marcellus gas field has emerged slowly because of Pennsylvania rules that allow companies to keep well-production data and drilling logs confidential for five years, compared with about 60 days in Texas. While Range has told Wall Street analysts about its wells, it hasn't disclosed where the wells are.

"Why would we educate anybody else?" says Ray Walker, Range's head of Appalachian shale production. The best way to protect shareholders, he says, "is to keep information close at hand." In the fall, after Range personnel caught someone snooping around their wellhead reading the production meter, Mr. Walker padlocked covers on well-production meters.

The technique for drilling into shale rock to harvest natural gas was pioneered outside Fort Worth about six years ago. Since then, the Texas Barnett Shale has gone from obscurity to the most prolific domestic gas field in the continental U.S. That one field produces about 3.5 billion cubic feet a day, or about eight times more than all of Pennsylvania in 2006, which is the latest data available.

Gas producers hope they can do the same for the Marcellus, but development in Pennsylvania has been slowed by a lack of equipment. Drilling rigs capable of penetrating deep into the complex rock formations needed to be imported from Texas, Wyoming and other active energy regions. Experienced crews capable of fracturing the dense shale in order to coax out the gas also had to be brought in.

Now, oil-field services firms are slowly expanding operations in the region, raising another obstacle. Jefferies analyst Mr. Chandra says development of the shale could be slowed by a culture clash generated by hard-charging Texas and Oklahoma energy companies "doing business in a way that hasn't been done before" in Pennsylvania.

Pennsylvania has had an oil and gas industry for more than a century, but it's been dominated by small companies that tend to drill low-cost, low-risk wells that produce a fraction of the gas that companies believe they can coax from a Marcellus Shale well. But these small, local companies long ago locked up most of the drillable acreage.

To gain access, out-of-state companies are opening up their checkbooks to sign deals with local companies sitting on large swathes of acreage. http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com/
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"We've never seen this kind of money around here," says Terry Jacobs, president of family-owned Penneco Oil Co. He cut a deal last year to allow Range to drill wells on leases he holds.

It isn't uncommon to find drilling crews filled with Texans and Oklahomans. On a recent morning, Jared Griffith, a third-generation Texas oil hand, sat with his crew inside an oil-field office trailer. Almost all were Texans. "I never thought I'd be north of the Mason-Dixon line," says Mr. Griffith, an operations manager for Frac Tech Services Ltd., a drilling-services firm based in Cisco, Texas.

Leasing prices for land still available for drilling has skyrocketed along with the out-of-state influx. Near Williamsport, Pa., a drilling lease that fetched $5 an acre in 2003 now can fetch $2,000 an acre, local residents say. Those kind of prices are "unheard of in our part of the world," says Rich Weber, president of Atlas Energy Resources LLC, based in Moon Township, Pa.

Range's Mr. Walker has worked to smooth over relations with local landowners. The company contributed $35,000 so Hickory, Pa., could buy a bronze statue of a farmer to commemorate the region's agricultural history. At last year's local Washington County Youth Livestock Show, Range bought the champion steer for $12,285. "I thought it was cheap," Mr. Walker says.













Now available in the family planning sections of Rite Aid stores throughout the midstate: A DNA-based paternity test kit.

Though it's not admissible in court, the kit's maker hopes it can offer peace of mind.

But some authorities said paternity is more complex than mere biology, and the results could leave families struggling for answers.

DNA tests have been sold online and through mail order for years, but the Identigene DNA Paternity Test Kit might be the first available over a drugstore counter.

Rite Aid, based in East Pennsboro Twp., and Identigene, of Salt Lake City, Utah, began test-marketing the kits in California, Washington and Oregon in November.

"We thought that if each store could sell at least one unit per month with minimal ads and do consistently well for two to three months, we would consider that successful for the new product launch," said Doug Fogg, Identigene's chief operating officer. Some stores sold more than one a month, he said.

Rite Aid decided to sell the kits in its 3,463 stores in 30 states because "it's our goal to be the first to market innovative health care products, and it makes this technology available in an affordable manner," said Cheryl Slavinsky, a Rite Aid spokeswoman.

The kits, which sell for $19.99, contain cotton swabs to collect cheek cells from the alleged father, child and mother. http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com/
The buyer then returns the individually marked DNA samples to Identigene, which charges $120 to determine if man and child are related.

Such "self-collection" or "private" DNA tests are not admissible in Pennsylvania courts, said Stacy Witalec, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Public Welfare, which administers county domestic relations.

Legally admissible tests, which Identigene also can provide, require a certified third party to collect DNA samples and verify the participants' identify, Fogg said.

Rite Aid does not train its pharmacists to answer customers' questions about home-test kits, including paternity, pregnancy, diabetes and drug tests, Slavinsky said.

"There is a detailed instruction booklet with the Identigene kit with frequently asked questions that are pretty clear," Slavinsky said. "And there is also a toll-free number where the Identigene DNA test consultants are available."

Buyers who don't get help interpreting the findings is a concern for Michael J. Green, a bioethics teacher and researcher at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.

"It's hard to tell what the consequences of these sorts of things are going to be, and it's important for people to understand that what it takes to be a family is not merely genetic," Green said. "It's social as well as genetic. Somebody is a father because they take care of and raise and nurture and care for a person, not just because they happen to share the same genetic material."

For the DNA Paternity Test, Identigene requires consent from all participants or a child's parent or guardian, Fogg said, although the company cannot always weed out forged signatures.

Without informed consent, Green worried whether "people will have full understanding of the implications of such things."

"Children, especially if they're young, are unable to give consent, and chances are, if you're talking about this sort of testing, there may be some contention or disharmony in the family unit," he said.

Fogg said that pregnancy tests also created a stir when they become available over the counter.

"Similar to an early pregnancy test, this is a test that essentially gives confirmation to something that people already know anyway," he said.

Dauphin County's domestic relations office has not dealt with anyone who tried to use a private test to prove a paternity case, spokeswoman Diane McNaughton said. http://louisgjgsheehan.blogspot.com/
County judges order paternity tests based on the child's interest, and a subcontractor performs the tests, she said.

"While court officials acknowledge that this kit is probably the wave of the future, important safeguards must be in place," she said. "The Rite Aid kits may lead to more challenges of paternity, but the county will continue to rely on reputable DNA testers and determine, through a petition and/or a hearing, whether the test is in the best interests of the child."






Purity of Essence

TF 121




The Phoenicians, especially those from the city of Tyre, are most famously credited with discovering how to manufacture a dye extracted from of the sea mollusk or murex. This secretion made clothing purple or reddish-purple. It was a very expensive and unusually durable dye in the Mediterranean region, sold from at least the 14th century B.C. Recent scholars point to evidence that Minoans discovered the dye in the 18th century B.C. The highest quality purple dye soon became the color of only the wealthiest, like kings. It was also used on ceremonial garments.

In antiquity, as is still true today, different statuses are associated with specific colors. At a funeral in the West, mourners expect the widow to wear black or some other dark, somber hue.


A virginal bride in the U.S. is expected to wear white and if someone obviously not a virgin wears a white gown, it occasionally leads to snickering. In Greek artwork about the Trojan War, a certain type of conical cap, which we call a Phrygian cap, identifies its wearer as Trojan. In Republican Rome, freed slaves had red Phrygian caps. Also in Republican Rome, after a great military victory, a general's troops might proclaim the leader imperator, and so help him on his way to the granting of a triumph. The cloak that identified the imperator was purple.

During the period of the Roman Empire, the title imperator came to be used for the one-man ruler or princeps. We call him emperor. Assuming the purple meant putting on the purple cloak of the imperator. This signalled the fact that the person so doing had become emperor.

Here's another passage about assuming the purple, from an abridgment of Eutropius Roman History. Book IX

Gallienus, who was made emperor when quite a young man, exercised his power at first happily, afterwards fairly, and at last mischievously. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com/
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In his youth he performed many gallant acts in Gaul and Illyricum, killing Ingenuus, who had assumed the purple, at Mursa, and Regalianus










Constantinene, emperors wore diadems in imitation of the Persian kings. Today we speak of the crowning of kings. The crowning of a king is very much like the emperor assuming the purple.




A few weeks ago, I received a dreaded phone call at 8:30 a.m. telling me he wasn't going to make it. The "he" in this case was my car, and the bearer of bad news was my mechanic. My 1994 Saab bit the dust when its timing belt broke, and after discussions about the cost of the repair versus the value of the car, I accepted the fact that I'd need to start looking at buying another vehicle.

I headed online to start researching (I was looking for a used car) but was overwhelmed by an avalanche of information. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com/
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Everyone seemed to have something to say about cars, whether in blogs, community forums, editorial reviews, Kelley Blue Book values, Carfax reports or local dealer sites. As I discussed my findings with friends and family, more people than not were surprised to hear about the variety of research and price comparisons available online.

This week's column is an overview of sites that may help you or someone you know browse for a new or used car on the Web. I used sites ranging from trusted resources like ConsumerReports.org to search engine tools like Yahoo Autos. This column can't possibly mention every car-searching resource on the Web; rather, it's just a taste of what's available.

Edmunds.com and ConsumerReports.org both feature informative data on a number of new and used vehicles. Edmunds is a free site specifically geared toward cars, including an online magazine for enthusiasts called Inside Line and a Web forum for discussions about automobiles called CarSpace. I used various tools on Edmunds.com, including one that estimates the true cost to own a specific car over time. I especially enjoyed reading an article titled "Confessions of a Car Salesman," which proved uncanny in predicting a range of tricks and techniques the salespeople used when I first visited a car dealership.

Edmunds offers a four-step pricing system, which includes getting quotes from dealers, and a payment calculator, which estimates monthly payments. Edmunds teams up with AutoTrader.com to help perform searches for certified pre-owned or used cars online.

Consumer Reports covers products as well as cars but keeps much of its most useful data behind a Web-site subscription, which costs $26 annually or $5.95 monthly (magazine subscribers can pay a discounted price of $19 a year). You need this subscription to access CR's respected ratings and certain sections of its Web forums. These ratings were helpful to me, as they assessed numerous aspects of specific car models, including trouble spots by year, performance, safety and fuel economy.

CR also offers valuable lists such as "All Recommended Cars," "Best and Worst Used Cars" and "Reliable Used Cars by Price." A car-buying calculator is an asset to this site that helps you decide whether it would be smarter to buy or lease a vehicle.

Google, Yahoo and AOL all present special search-results pages when you search for a specific car for sale, using drop-down menus and various ways to sort results. Google Base for automobiles, found by selecting "Vehicles" from www.google.com/base, is a list of data submitted to Google. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com/
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Drop-down menus help broaden or narrow results by sorting the data according to certain attributes, such as make or price. Vehicle-search results can be viewed in one of three formats: List View, Table View or Map View -- an illustration of each car's location in relationship to a Zip Code. I found Table View most useful because it organized data in smart, spreadsheet-like displays so I could quickly skim through columns listing price, color, amenities and mileage.

But not all car searches within Google Base returned the same drop-down-menu options for sorting. In a few instances, I couldn't sort my search results by model year. Google Base does show the date on which each car was listed.

Yahoo Autos, found at www.autos.yahoo.com, teamed up with Cars.com to offer richer content, including a Car Finder feature that helps people narrow down what type of new car they might like according to price, driving style and fuel (type and economy). Yahoo even tries to answer car questions with its Yahoo Answers Q&A tool, which lets people submit questions. I found user reviews on this site, as well as expert reviews provided by NewCarTestDrive.com, an auto-review site.

The used-car section in Yahoo Autos reminded me of Google with its drop-down menus and results that displayed in list or map views. List view shows plenty of information in one glance, including an image of the car for sale and the number of additional available photos. From this list, users can link directly to view or order Carfax reports or email the dealer, saving time wasted on excess mouse clicks and browsing.

AOL Autos, found at http://autos.aol.com, does a nice job of integrating Web 2.0 features such as pop-up menus that appear within a page rather than in an entirely new Web page. Vehicle-search results are found by entering a few criteria for a new or used car, and used-car results can be further narrowed by adding or subtracting desired specifics listed on the far left of the screen. Some specs include model type, engine, year or extras like heated seats or a sunroof.

This site can also condense numerous used-car listings into one graph that illustrates car prices in relationship to mileage or year. Selecting any point on the graph reveals a short description of a vehicle's location, price and mileage. For new cars, AOL Autos offers lengthy expert reviews from NewCarTestDrive.com, as well as user reviews.

Both Yahoo Autos and AOL Autos walk users through steps to get price quotes from dealers for new cars.

Carfax.com provides car-history reports using vehicle-identification numbers, or VINs. For a $30 fee, used-car buyers can use Carfax.com for 30 days. This report shows a vehicle's history such as if it was a rental or not, how many different owners it had, how long each owner possessed the vehicle and where it came from.

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Tips pop up within these reports, including one that warned me about "curbstoning," a term that describes an individual without a dealer's license looking to sell a number of cars by posing as a private seller.

As can be expected, many newspaper Web sites offer automobile sections that display digitized classified ads, so be sure to check your local paper's Web site.

At the end of the day, test-driving a car will be a true test as to whether or not you like it -- no matter how much research you've done online. But knowing your stuff before you visit a dealership can save money and time.








The U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday, hearing arguments over a Washington, D.C., ban on handguns, appeared ready to affirm a constitutional right for individual gun ownership.

But it was less clear how and to what extent the high court might invalidate the D.C. law, which is the strictest set of gun regulations in the country.

Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court's key swing vote, stated his position on the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution early in the arguments, giving gun rights supporters on the high court a likely majority on a divided court.


"In my view it supplements it, saying there is a general right to bear arms," Justice Kennedy said, explaining he believes the Second Amendment covers both the right of states to form militias and the rights of individuals to own guns.

The Supreme Court hasn't ruled directly on the Second Amendment in almost 70 years. It also over time has offered little guidance on the extent to which the amendment covers individual gun ownership for self-defense, hunting and recreational shooting. In taking up the D.C. handgun ban, the court said it would decide whether a federal appeals court properly concluded the city's laws violated the Second Amendment because it bars individuals from owning handguns.

The court allotted extra time beyond the usual hour it gives for oral arguments in appeals. http://louis-j-sheehan.myblogvoice.com/louis-j-sheehan-1023071-205297.htm
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Walter Dellinger, a veteran advocate before the court, appeared in support of D.C. and argued the Second Amendment refers to military needs and doesn't extend to rights for individuals. "The second clause -- to keep and bear arms -- is referred to in a military context," Mr. Dellinger said.


A pro-gun advocate holds up a sign outside the Supreme Court, as the court heard arguments in an attempt to overturn D.C.'s firearms ban.

Early in his presentation, Mr. Dellinger encountered critical questioning from conservatives on the court. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Antonin Scalia in particular challenged Mr. Dellinger's reading of the Second Amendment.

U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement, arguing on the side of challengers to the D.C. laws, said they violate the Constitution. "The Second Amendment as it is written guarantees an individual right," Mr. Clement said. He urged the Supreme Court to find a broad right for individual gun ownership that he said may even extend to machine guns, because those guns are routinely issued to military personnel.

Alan Gura, an Alexandria, Va., attorney representing the law's challengers, urged the justices to reject the entire set of D.C. gun regulations. "We have here a ban on all guns for all people in all homes at all times," Mr. Gura said. "That is too broad and too sweeping under any review."

Moderate and liberal members of the court made it clear they didn't see a broad individual gun ownership right. Justice John Paul Stevens several times turned to the political context in which the Second Amendment was written, noting that language in Pennsylvania and Vermont constitutions that covered self-defense rights were rejected during development of the Second Amendment.

It wasn't clear, however, whether the case would split 5-4 with Justice Kennedy voting on the conservative side. Justice Stephen Breyer asked several hypothetical questions that assumed an individual right but focused closely on whether the D.C. gun ban is reasonable given the level of criminal violence the city has faced.

The Supreme Court could affirm a lower court ruling that declared the D.C. handgun ban unconstitutional and it could outline guidelines for what is allowed and not allowed in the law.

The D.C. law, on the books since 1976, bans handgun registration, bars concealed weapons possession and require shotguns and rifles to be registered and then kept unloaded and disassembled or locked.

The law was challenged by six D.C. residents who said they wanted to legally possess handguns in their homes for self-protection. A U.S. District Court threw out the challenge, but a panel of the Washington-based U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals revived one of the claims and ruled a special police officer, the now-retired Dick Heller, was wrongly denied a handgun permit.

The D.C. Circuit added the city can't ban handguns in the home or require that residents keep their guns dismantled or equipped with a trigger lock.

A decision in the case, D.C. v. Heller, is expected by July.

In its only ruling of the day, the Supreme Court upheld Washington's open primary election system. By a 7-2 vote, the court said the state may use a primary system that allows the top two vote-getters to advance to the general election, even if they are from the same party.

Tuesday's decision is the second of two this year on the rights of political parties. http://members.greenpeace.org/blog/purposeforporpoise
Washington never held a primary under the new system because of legal challenges.



Athletes who take human growth hormone may not be getting the boost they expected.

While growth hormone adds some muscle, it doesn't appear to improve strength or exercise capacity, according to a review of studies that tested the hormone in mostly athletic young men.

"It doesn't look like it helps, and there's a hint of evidence it may worsen athletic performance," said Hau Liu, of Santa Clara Valley Medical Center in San Jose, Calif., who was lead author of the review.

Growth hormone, or HGH, is among the performance enhancers baseball stars Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte were accused of taking in Sen. George Mitchell's report. Mr. Clemens denies using the hormone, while Mr. Pettitte admits using it.

The new research has some limitations and sheds no light on long-term use of HGH. The scientists note their analysis included few studies that measured performance. The tests also probably don't reflect the dose and frequency practiced by athletes illegally using the hormone.

Dr. Liu and his colleagues at Stanford University sought to find out if growth hormone could improve performance. They looked for the best published tests, those comparing participants who got the hormone to those who didn't get the treatment.
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They analyzed 27 studies involving 440 participants. The results were released yesterday by the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Researchers found that those who got the hormone put on about five pounds more of muscle and lost about two pounds more of fat, although the fat loss wasn't statistically different. The researchers said some of the extra body mass could be fluid buildup.

There was no difference found in strength or exercise stamina between the two groups, but there were only two strength studies and eight that measured exercise.