The shrinking G.I. Bill

The Post World War II G.I. Bill paid 100% of tuition for veterans. Plus other benefits. Now it maxes out at $800 month. As U.S. Senators Jim Webb and Chuck argued in “A Post-Iraq G.I. Bill,”The New York Times, November 8, 2007: “[i]t is hardly enough to allow a veteran to attend man community colleges.

“In terms of providing true opportunity, the World War II G.I. Bill was one of the most important pieces of legislation in our history. It paid college tuition and fees, bought textbooks and provided a monthly stipend for eight million of the 16 million who served. Many of our colleagues in the Senate who before the war could never have dreamed of college found themselves at some of the nation’s finest educational institutions.

Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey went to Columbia on the G.I. bill; John Warner of Virginia to Washington and Lee and the University of Virginia Law School; Daniel Inouye of Hawaii to the University of Hawaii and the George Washington University Law School; and Ted Stevens of Alaska to the University of California, Los Angeles, and Harvard Law School.

College costs have skyrocketed, and a full G.I. Bill for those who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan would be expensive. But Congress has recently appropriated $19 billion next year for federal education grants purely on the basis of financial need. A G.I. Bill for those who have given so much to our country, often including repeated combat tours, should be viewed as an obligation.

We must put together the right formula that will demonstrate our respect for those who have stepped forward to serve in these difficult times. First-class service to country deserves first-class appreciation.

Senators Jim Webb and Chuck Hagel, A Post-Iraq G.I. Bill

, The New York Times, November 9, 2007.

Stove for the Developing World’s Health – Amanda Leigh Haag, The New York Times

There are two sets of problems associated with indoor cooking in less-affluent countries: toxicity from the burning process, and access to fuel. (The third set of problems would be fire risk, which we won’t address here). Amanda Leigh Haag’s piece, Stove for the Developing World’s Health, discusses some approaches to the problem.

When Kurt Hoffman visited Tanzania in the 1970s as a young product-development researcher, he could hardly bear to enter village huts to ask questions.

Some 30 years later, when Mr. Hoffman returned to the field in his position as director of the Shell Foundation, a charity in Britain established by the Shell Group, not much had changed.

“To find that it still exists,” he said, “I was appalled by it. I said to myself, ‘There has to be a better way.’”

And there may be. The foundation has partnered with Envirofit International at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, to introduce the first market-based model for clean-burning wood stove technology to the developing world.

This year, the team plans to begin distributing 10 million stoves, focusing first on India, Brazil, Kenya and Uganda at a variety of prices over five years. Mr. Hoffman played a leading role in the development of the Shell Foundation’s ‘Breathing Space’ program, founded in 2002, one of the first to focus on the problem of indoor air pollution.

Half of the world population and 80 percent of rural households in developing countries cook with solid fuels like wood, coal, crop residues and dung. In many instances, women cook around open fires, typically with a pot atop three large stones and a wood fire in the middle.

No comprehensive worldwide censuses exist to provide hard numbers.Indoor air pollution, including smoke and other products of incomplete combustion like carbon monoxide, is a major environmental risk factor, usually ranking behind lack of clean water, poor sanitation and malnutrition. The problem does not only afflict the poorest populations. Many affluent households cook on traditional biomass stoves or open fires by choice or because they live in rural areas without electricity or access to modern fuels.

The World Health Organization estimates that 1.6 million people a year die of health effects resulting from toxic indoor air. The problem disproportionately falls on women and children who spend hours each day around the hearth.

Of that 1.6 million, one million children die of pneumonia, and 600,000 women die prematurely of chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases like bronchitis and emphysema. In China, epidemiologic studies indicate that 420,000 people a year die because of indoor air pollution, 40 percent more than the premature deaths attributed to outdoor air hazards in the pollution-choked urban areas there.

Envirofit was formed in 2003 as a result of two senior undergraduate research projects at the Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory of Colorado State. It develops engineering and technology solutions.

The Shell Foundation estimates that it has invested $10 million in Envirofit’s effort to produce 300,000 stoves on a pilot scale and plans to invest $25 million more to sponsor the stove effort.

For decades, numerous small-scale efforts to introduce improved stoves in countries like China, India and Nepal have achieved modest gains.

“You can design something that looks great in the laboratory,” Kirk R. Smith, an environmental health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, said. “But you get it out in the households, and five years later, you can’t even find it, let alone see that it’s actually achieving.”

Dr. Smith, who is not involved with the Shell-Envirofit partnership and who will be an independent reviewer of the program, has researched health effects of air pollution in the developing world since the early 1980s. He said one challenge had been the lack of randomized research trials that can show cause and effect, rather than just correlations.

“It’s been shown that children living in houses using open fires with solid fuels will have more pneumonia than children living in houses that are using cleaner fuels,” Dr. Smith said. “But those houses are different in other ways, too. They tend to be richer, have better education and may have better nutrition. So the effect may not be due to just the pollution.”

Dr. Smith and his colleagues have recently completed a five-year study of Guatemalans cooking on open fires versus improved stoves, the first such randomized trial, they say. The research, the team says, combined with studies in Asia, suggests additional health problems from indoor air pollution, including higher frequency of cataracts, partial blindness, tuberculosis, low birth weights and high blood pressure. The researchers found that cleaner stoves had larger effects than reducing salt in the diet on lowering blood pressure in women, results published last July in Environmental Health Perspectives.

Scientists measure air pollutants by the concentration of small particles considered safe to inhale. The W.H.O. target is an annual average of 10 to 35 micrograms of particles in a cubic meter of air per year. The Environmental Protection Agency calls for 15.

Yet houses that rely on traditional stoves or open fires typically register in the hundreds or, in some cases, thousands, Dr. Smith said.

At Envirofit headquarters in the old Fort Collins power plant, researchers and engineers are designing and testing clean-burning stoves that they say will significantly improve air quality and require less wood fuel. An important feature will be the ability to control carefully the air pulled in, said Bryan Willson, a mechanical engineer who founded the Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory and was a co-founder of Envirofit.

Too much intake cools the process, leading to incomplete combustion. In a modern gas stove, nearly 100 percent of the carbon is burned to carbon dioxide. With traditional stoves in the developing world, 90 percent is fully converted to CO2. The remainder forms a toxic cocktail of byproducts like benzene, carbon monoxide and formaldehyde that billow out in soot and smoke. Envirofit’s stoves will be designed with an insulated chamber that cuts down on energy loss and maintains heat inside the chamber walls.

Envirofit has plans not only to engineer the stoves, but also to market them. The hundreds of prior stove projects, Dr. Willson said, were not “guided by a real strategic vision of what it means to understand who the customer is, what they need and how to get it produced.”

Envirofit has been visiting rural areas to study factors like the ergonomics of cooking habits and preferred color schemes. In India, women tend to squat while cooking, making height an important consideration.

Envirofit will offer a variety of sleek ceramic stoves from single to multipot, with and without chimneys, and with colors like apple red, baby blue and gold. The cost is to start at $10 to $20 and run to $150 to $200.

“The women and the families that are buying them are no different from us,” the Envirofit program coordinator, Jaime Whitlock, said. “They want to buy something they’re proud of.”

Amanda Leigh Haag, Stove for the Developing World’s Health – New York Times.

NYT: “Blood Thinner Linked to China and 19 deaths Had a Contaminant, F.D.A. Says”

According to Gardiner Harris and Wald Bogdanich of the Times,

  • The FDA has received reports of 785 serious  injuries and forty-six (46) deaths associated with Heparin;
  • But the FDA has taken the position that only 19 of the 46 deaths are in fact, related to Heparin;
  • Baxter International says it’s only four deaths.

Harris and Bogdanich also make it clear how difficult it can be to investigate these typpes of cases after the fact:

Federal drug regulators said Wednesday that a critical blood thinner that had been linked to at least 19 deaths and whose raw components were produced in China contained a possibly counterfeit ingredient that mimicked the real drug. (emphasis added)

Routine tests failed to distinguish the contaminant from the drug, heparin. Only sophisticated magnetic resonance imaging tests uncovered that as much as 20 percent of the product’s active ingredient was a heparin mimic blended in with the real thing. Federal officials said they did not know what the contaminant was.

In their piece the following day, Harris and Bogdanich reported that:

Food and Drug Administration officials announced that they were asking all companies in the United States that produce heparin to test it with two new procedures.

The complex tests, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy and capillary electrophoresis, are the only ones that can uncover whether the drug contains a possibly counterfeit ingredient.

“German Authorities Report Problems With Blood Thinner,” March 7, 2008.

The Times has been  on top of this story: a search for “blood thinner China” on the Times website yielded at least eight articles on the subject in the last five weeks.

Perhaps it’s time to think about making our drugs at home – rather than becoming dependent on  a country without real regulation to produce medication,  a commodity for which quality control is asolutely critical. One wonders what the those who are rosy-eyed about free-trade think about this. (We’ll keep an eye out to see if The Times’s Thomas Friedman weighs in on this).

James McKinley in the Times: memory sticks are Samizdat technology in Cuba

James C. McKinley, Jr.’s  report from Havana last Thursday describes Cuban government attempts to control information flow, including Internet access. Cubans have extremely limited web access, but they use memory stick and flash drives to store and distribute information:

A growing underground network of young people armed with computer memory sticks, digital cameras and clandestine Internet hookups has been mounting some challenges to the Cuban government in recent months, spreading news that the official state media try to suppress.Last month, students at a prestigious computer science university videotaped an ugly confrontation they had with Ricardo Alarcón, the president of the National Assembly.

Mr. Alarcón seemed flummoxed when students grilled him on why they could not travel abroad, stay at hotels, earn better wages or use search engines like Google. The video spread like wildfire through Havana, passed from person to person, and seriously damaged Mr. Alarcón’s reputation in some circles.

Something similar happened in late January when officials tried to impose a tax on the tips and wages of employees of foreign companies. Workers erupted in jeers and shouts when told about the new tax, a moment caught on a cellphone camera and passed along by memory sticks.

“It passes from flash drive to flash drive,” said Ariel, 33, a computer programmer, who, like almost everyone else interviewed for this article, asked that his last name not be used for fear of political persecution. “This is going to get out of the government’s hands because the technology is moving so rapidly.”

Cuban officials have long limited the public’s access to the Internet and digital videos, tearing down unauthorized satellite dishes and keeping down the number of Internet cafes open to Cubans. Only one Internet cafe remains open in Old Havana, down from three a few years ago.

Hidden in a small room in the depths of the Capitol building, the state-owned cafe charges a third of the average Cuban’s monthly salary – about $5 – to use a computer for an hour. The other two former Internet cafes in central Havana have been converted into “postal services” that let Cubans send e-mail messages over a closed network on the island with no links to the Internet.

 Because Ms. Sánchez, like most Cubans, can get online for only a few minutes at a time, she writes almost all her essays beforehand, then goes to the one Internet cafe, signs on, updates her Web site, copies some key pages that interest her and walks out with everything on a memory stick. Friends copy the information, and it passes from hand to hand. “It’s a solid underground,” she said. “The government cannot control the information.”

It is spread by readers like Ricardo, 28, a philosophy student at the University of Havana who sells memory sticks to other students. European friends buy blank flash drives, and others carry them into Cuba, where the drives available through normal channels are very expensive and scarce.

Like many young Cubans, Ricardo plays a game of cat and mouse with the authorities. He doubts that the government will ever let ordinary citizens have access to the Internet in their homes. “That’s far too dangerous,” he said. “Daddy State doesn’t want you to get informed, so it preventively keeps you from surfing.”

James McKinley, “Cyber-Rebels in Cuba Defy State’s Limits,” The New York Times, March 6, 2008.

Doesn’t this make a good case for relaxing

the United States trade embargo on Cuba? With the limited access to information, the government’s control of information flowing is weakening. An influx of visitors from the United States would probably leadto more phone and data lines – and the more connections there are, the harder they’ll be to control. The more visitors, and the more luggage the bring, the more flash drives will be left behind.

See also:

Jad Mouawad – NYT: Wary of Protests, Exxon Plans Natural Gas Terminal in the Atlantic – New York Times

Exxon is going to build a natural-gas processing facility in a large”boatlike structure” 20 miles off the Jersey coast. According to Times reporter Jad Mouawad, this is “a move meant to deflect safety and environmental concerns aboutproximity to populated areas. [photopress:2007_exxon_offshore_NJ_map.jpg,full,alignleft]

Perceptions aside, which is more likely (probability of occurrence) to occur, or a leak/accident/fire n on-shore facility? What’s to preclude a system failure which causes failure both in populated areas and in the Atlantic. From Mouawad’s piece about the pipeline, which will be connectedto the Buckeye NY/NJ pipes. Exxon wants to:

build a $1 billion floating terminal for liquefied natural gas about 20 miles off the coast of New Jersey, a move meant to deflect safety and environmental concerns about proximity to populated areas.

The company plans to anchor a boatlike structure in the Atlantic Ocean to process natural gas imported by cargo ships from faraway suppliers in the Middle East, Europe and Africa.

The terminal, if approved, would connect through an underwater pipeline to an existing network that feeds New York and New Jersey, two of the top consumer markets in North America.

Exxon’s project is the latest of several dozen gas terminals that have been proposed in recent years in the United States. Energy specialists say more natural gas supplies will be needed to meet the growth in consumption and to make up for an expected drop in imports from Canada.

In many cases, energy companies have faced stiff opposition in finding sites for large new terminals. This has become one of the thorniest energy issues, especially since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, raised security concerns about cargo ships carrying liquefied gas near big cities.

Still, companies are slowly moving forward with their plans. Since 2002, federal and state authorities have approved 18 new liquefied gas terminals around the country, including 4 offshore, though most analysts do not expect all of them to be built.

While most of the projects are planned along the Gulf Coast, the northeastern corner of the country is attracting attention because of its reliance on natural gas and its large populations. Two terminals to be built off Massachusetts gained approval last year. For Exxon, going so far offshore is an effort to duck the vociferous opposition that has dogged projects on both coasts. Its project, called BlueOcean Energy, would be able to supply 1.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas a day, about 2 percent of the nation’s gas consumption — and enough to meet the needs of five million residential customers.

Exxon’s project is the third offshore terminal proposed for the greater New York region in recent years.

One proposal, to build a gas terminal in the middle of Long Island Sound, has aroused concern since its announcement in 2004 because of the impact it might have on fishing and boating; it is strongly opposed by shore communities and politicians.

That opposition could intensify in coming months as the project, which is known as Broadwater and is a joint venture by Royal Dutch Shell and TransCanada, is expected to receive notice about federal and state permits.

Another company, the Atlantic Sea Island Group, plans to build a terminal for liquefied natural gas on an artificial island about 14 miles south of Long Island, a project called Safe Harbor Energy.

Opponents of natural gas terminals have cited the potential for leaks, fires, explosions or terrorist bombings. The industry has generally argued that the terminals are secure and accidents are rare, but it has also started looking for ways to build them as far as possible from population centers.

Jad Mouawad, “Wary of Protests, Exxon Plans Natural Gas Terminal in the Atlantic, The New York Times,December 12, 2007.

Archive of Mouawad’s pieces – he’s one of the Times’ in-house experts, I think.

McKinsey Report: U.S. could cut 40% of greenhouse gases with “negative” costs

McKinsey & Company released a report in November called “Reducing Greenhouse Gases: How Much at What Cost?“

From the executive summary, available here:

  • Almost 40 percent of abatement could be achieved at “negative” marginal costs, meaning that investing in these options would generate positive economic returns over their lifecycle. The cumulative savings created by these negative-cost options could substantially offset (on a societal basis) the additional spending required for the options with positive marginal costs.

McKinsey is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a bunch of sandal-wearing, left-wing treehuggers. In fact, this particular study was funded by a number of energy companies. Nonetheless, they’ve come to these conclusions, and a quick look at their prominently website features progressive energy policy. For example, “The Case For Investing in Energy Productivity.”

Perhaps this represents a shift of the political center of gravity among American corporations. If so, a welcome change.

Thanks to David Roberts of Grist.org; see his piece “It Can Be Done” for more details, as well as Mathew Wald’s “Study Details How U.S. Could Cut 28% of Greenhouse Gases.“

New York City receives larger DHS grant for subway security

Jen Chung at Gothamist and Al Baker of the Times have good coverage of the new, much-increased Department of Homeland Security grant to provide security for New York City subways, including the 16 underwater tunnels that link the boroughs to each other, and to the mainland (the Bronx, of course, is actually on the mainland). From Gothamist:

Continue reading →

The Lede on current ricin incident(s)

The New York Times’ blog about news coverage, The Lede, has a good piece by Patrick J. Lyons about the current Las Vegas ricin incident. “Scary Stuff That Won’t Stay in Vegas

” updates the story concisely, and provides some context:

After all, nobody is known to have been hurt so far, though seven people — the room’s occupant, three workers at the motel and three cops — have been sent to hospitals for observation, just in case they might have been exposed to the chemical in question, which was found in a package in the room. Update: The occupant of the room is in critical condition and has been hospitalized for several weeks; it now appears that it was a friend or relative who went to the room on Thursday to retrieve his belongings who found the package and reported it.. The authorities are saying they have no reason to think the episode has anything to do with terrorism.

But this wasn’t just any nasty industrial byproduct, it was ricin — the stuff of mystery novels and cloak-and-dagger schemes. And that makes everybody’s ears prick up.

Continue reading →

“I don’t like the word investigation”

Lakhdar Brahimi is Chair of the Independent Panel on Safety and Security of UN Personnel and Premises. That is “a new panel that will look into attacks on United Nations offices,” prompted by the bombing of a United Nations facility last December, which killed 17 staff members. Warren Hoge, in his Times account notes that

In a letter to Mr. Ban, the staff union complained that it had played no role in setting up the panel, despite concerns that it had repeatedly voiced about protecting personnel, dating from the bombing of United Nations headquarters in Baghdad in August 2003. That blast killed 22 staff members, including the chief of the mission, Sergio Vieira de Mello.

The union said it was concerned that the Brahimi panel would not examine the circumstances behind the Algiers bombing “but rather be a global examination of security threats.”

It said, “We believe that without accountability, there is impunity,” and urged Mr. Ban “not to be complicit in a cover-up of what happened.”

The United Nations’ transcript of Brahimi’s press conference

contains three references to Sherlock Holmes, in each case Brahimi stressing that he doesn’t intend to place blame, that he’s not a policeman. The Algerians, according to Hoge, protested when the Secretary General formed the panel.

Perhaps it would also have been useful for him to emphasize another difference: that Sherlock Holmes was fictional and that he, and the panel, are not fictional.

See also “UN Staff Council calls on secretary-general to withdraw all UN staff from Iraq ,” IHT, August 7, 2007.

It appears – from our brief research – that, but for the United Nations itself mentioning it publicly, the staff union’s (formally known as the United Nations Staff Council

) position and letter might not have been made public. There’s no mention of it on their website.

If it’s possible to mollify Algeria – perhaps “appease” is the better word for a country which objects to scrutiny when diplomats are killed on its own soil – and to make United Nations employees feel that their safety is a real concern – that would be ideal. But if there’s a choice between the two? Without its staff, the United Nations is just a nice idea with some really nice buildings. It’s only a fraction of the staff operating in hazardous areas, but those assignments and their outcomes are critical, and doubtless have an effect on the UN’s credibility.

Comcast admits paying attendees at FCC hearing | Philadelphia Inquirer | 02/28/2008

Probably not illegal; but it doesn’t quite seem right, either. According to Bob Fernandez of The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Comcast Corp. admitted yesterday that it paid people to attend a government hearing. Company critics say the freelance attendees were there to crowd them out; Comcast says they were merely saving seats for employees.

The five-hour hearing Monday at Harvard University was organized by the Federal Communications Commission to address the issue of net neutrality, a hot-button topic for those who think there should be minimal restrictions on Internet traffic.

The topic has drawn wide interest from college students, media-reform groups, and Internet companies.

An official at Free Press, a nonprofit advocacy group that has criticized Comcast for limiting the amount of data some of its customers send over its network, accused the cable company of “stacking the deck” at the hearing with the 30 to 40 “seat-warmers.” An official at Harvard said dozens of real participants were left standing outside the auditorium with placards.

“They were taking seats away from other citizens who had a right to be there,” said Catherine Bracy, administrative manager for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at the Harvard Law School. “It was a PR thing. [Comcast] wanted more people in the room who were sympathetic.”

Comcast feared a loud and critical crowd at the hearing where executive vice president David Cohen was scheduled to testify. Comcast, which offers high-speed Internet to 48 million homes, has said it needs to manage Internet use so that a small number of customers transmitting very large video files do not clog the network for everyone.

Comcast admits paying attendees at FCC hearing | Philadelphia Inquirer | 02/28/2008

Via Daring Fireball.

Russia Threatens Further Gas Cuts to Ukraine – New York Times

One of our principal aims at Popular Logistics is to persuade or remind our readers how unpalatable we’d find any sudden interruption in power supply. Accidental or otherwise. Here’s an example of “energy extortion:” Gazprom (read: Russia qua Gazprom) holds Ukraine hostage:

Russia’s natural gas monopoly Gazprom on Tuesday threatened to further cut gas to Ukraine within hours unless agreement was reached on a debt dispute and contracts for future deliveries. Continue reading →

Chinese government hasn’t been tracking drug manufacturers

Chinese government hasn’t been tracking drug manufacturers, much less regulating them, or ensuring drug safety. This arises out the investigation of (at least) four deaths linked to heparin sold in the United States by Baxter International, which contained ingredients made by a firm called Changzhou SPL, which is in China but whose majority ownership is held by the American company Scientific Protein Laboratories.

Excellent recent account (from which most of the details above were obtained can be found in Blood Thinner Might Be Tied to More Deaths," by Walt Bogdanich, and "China Didn’t Check Drug Supplier, Files Show ," by Bogdanich and Jake Hooker, both of The New York Times .

Since getting drug companies to behave themselves responsibly is often so difficult – and setting up regulatory schemes is difficult even in the absence of an industry determined to resist regulation – we’d like to propose an interim solution: require that all pharmaceuticals which contain any ingredients, packaging, or in any other way have been produced in China, be explicitly and brightly labeled. The text might be only "Some components may have been made in the People’s Republic of China." As an interim measure, this might allow the market to assist in reducing the risks associated with taking medication.

New York Observer plans network of 50 state political websites

Politicker

– Inside Politics for Political Insider – has been started by Jared Kushner, the publisher of The New York Observer

. At present they’ve got about a dozen sites up, includings PoliticsNJ.com, (Now PolitickerNJ.com ) which was acquired, rather than being built by the Observer group. To the extent that it creates more detailed coverage of statehouses – and perhaps some competition to provide richer news streams, and more transparency, this could be a very good thing. The plan seems to be to use two or three full-timers in each state, and a much larger number of “editors” – who will come from the ranks of political insiders. Perhaps if the recruitment is sufficiently heterogeneous, biases will be overcome or at least clearly stated. Since New York isn’t one of the states that’s up yet, it’s difficult for us to judge – but the New Jersey site looks pretty good.

Before the canonization proceedings begin

His charm notwithstanding, let’s remember some of the things William F. Buckley stood for:

“The central question that emerges…is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas where it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes-the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”
-William F. Buckley, National Review, August 24, 1957

ViaMaking Light

.

Here’s the opening graf of the Times obituary :

William F. Buckley Jr., who marshaled polysyllabic exuberance, famously arched eyebrows and a refined, perspicacious mind to elevate conservatism to the center of American political discourse, died Wednesday at his home in Stamford, Conn. He was 82.

We thought that the notion of “advanced race” put one at the edge, rather than the center, of American politics. Perhaps this is part of an editorial policy of being polite. But it does reek of inaccuracy and timidity.