Sunday, March 8, 2009
Speculation to mount on AIG bailout cash.....
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Where, oh where, did AIG's bailout billions go? That question may reverberate even louder through the halls of U.S. government in the week ahead now that a partial list of beneficiaries has been published. The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday that about $50 billion (35.4 billion pounds) of more than $173 billion that the U.S. government has poured into American International Group Inc since last fall has been paid to at least two dozen U.S. and foreign financial institutions. The newspaper reported that some of the banks paid by AIG since the insurer started getting taxpayer funds were: Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Deutsche Bank AG, Merrill Lynch, Societe Generale, Calyon, Barclays Plc, Rabobank, Danske, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Banco Santander, Morgan Stanley, Wachovia, Bank of America, and Lloyds Banking Group....Link
Rep. Conyers wants science to be secret.......
There are some things science needs to survive, and to thrive: eager, hardworking scientists; a grasp of reality and a desire to understand it; and an open and clear atmosphere to communicate and discuss results. That last bit there seems to be having a problem. Communication is key to science; without it you are some nerd tinkering in your basement. With it, the world can learn about your work and build on it. Recently, government-sponsored agencies like NIH have moved toward open access of scientific findings. That is, the results are published where anyone can see them, and in fact (for the NIH) after 12 months the papers must be publicly accessible. This is, in my opinion (and that of a lot of others, including a pile of Nobel laureates) a good thing. Astronomers, for example, almost always post their papers on Astro-ph, a place where journal-accepted papers can be accessed before they are published. John Conyers (D-MI) apparently has a problem with this. He is pushing a bill through Congress that will literally ban the open access of these papers, forcing scientists to only publish in journals. This may not sound like a big deal, but journals are very expensive. They can cost a fortune: The Astrophysical Journal costs over $2000/year, and they charge scientists to publish in them! So this bill would force scientists to spend money to publish, and force you to spend money to read them....Link
America: an apathetic union?
On Tuesday night former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor appeared on Comedy Central's "The Today Show with Jon Stewart," to discuss her recent work. Since leaving the Supreme Court in 2006, O'Connor has dedicated her time to encouraging American youths to study civics. But it was about a minute and a half into the interview that O'Connor revealed the scary state of apathy that currently plagues our nation. "I thought that perhaps a lot of Americans had stopped understanding the three branches of government," the 78-year-old former justice told Stewart. "Actually, the Annenberg Foundation took some polls: only a third of Americans can even name the three branches of government, much less say what they do." One-third, that is roughly 103 million of 305 million Americans that can simply name the three branches of government: judicial, legislative and executive for those of you keeping score.
The Colonnade staff is shocked....Link
The Colonnade staff is shocked....Link
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