Nathra Nader on Capitalism and Socialism

"Capitalism will always survive in the United States as long as the government is willing to use socialism to bail it out."
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Nader's 10-Point Plan to Recover from Financial Crisis

Immediate Changes Required for Any Bailout

1. No bailouts without conditions and reciprocity in the form of stock warrants

2. No more lobbying for any company that is bailed out

3. No golden parachutes and get out of jail free cards for guilty executives

4. No bailouts without public hearings

Changes to Housing Market

5. Reduce the moral hazard in U.S. mortgage markets by introducing covered bonds for the majority of mortgage products as they do in Western Europe. That gives institutions that finance mortgages an incentive to be prudent, because they cannot just unload them and wipe their hands clean of the liability, but are instead on the hook if the homeowner defaults.

6. Maintain neighborhood stability and housing security by passing a law with a sunset clause allowing below median-value homeowners facing foreclosure the right to rent-to-own their homes at fair market value rates.

7. Avoid future housing bubbles by removing implicit government guarantees for new mortgages that exceed thresholds of greater than 15-20 times the annual fair market rent value of the home.

Structural Changes to Financial Markets

8. Make the Federal Reserve a Cabinet Position, so it is accountable to Congress, as well as making sure all Federal Reserve Bank presidents are appointed by the President and answerable to congress.

9. Reduce conflicts of interest by taking away power for auditor and rating agency selection from companies and placing it in the hands of the SEC to be administered on random assignment.

10. Implement a securities speculation tax, starting with derivatives to deter casino-style capitalism.

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First Obama-McCain debate, sep 26, 08

Those who want to watch the full debate, can find it here

S Palin on the bail out

Anyone who is interested in the views of S. Palin on the bail out (or the total lack of it) should listen to her interview on CBS.

About Berkeley Bowl

As most veteran customers know, it takes a pretty thick skin to successfully navigate the Berkeley Bowl, this strident city's most popular grocery store.

Outside, petitioners seeking signatures for ballot measures have come to blows with opinionated residents. In the tiny parking lot, nicknamed the Berkeley Brawl, frustrated motorists have been known to ram one another's cars. At the checkout, people have thrown punches and unripened avocados at suspected line-cutters...

the full story

How women decide to vote

I found this post and I liked it it!

There have been many studies about how men and women decide how to vote, and what influences them. Well! It's actually quite simple. I normally hate kids, but when I saw this photo—taken in Farmington Hills, Michigan—I suddenly wanted to have Obama's post-racial children. I can't even think right now! I just want to cast a million votes and populate the earth with beautiful mixed-race kiddies, because they are our future. This photo is likecrack for ladies.

Amazon and One Laptop

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organisation has signed a deal with Amazon to sell its low cost laptops.
The online retailer will help with its next Give 1 Get 1 (G1G1) programme that is due to begin in late November.Under this scheme people can buy one of the XO laptops for themselves and donate the other to a school child in a developing nation.It is hoped the deal with Amazon will iron out the problems OLPC encountered when it ran the G1G1 programme itself.
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The mayor of Detroit

The strategy of eliminating (politically) Democratic hopefuls works well.

The mayor of the US city of Detroit is to step down after pleading guilty to two charges of obstructing justice.
Kwame Kilpatrick had been charged with misconduct, obstruction of justice and lying under oath to try to cover up an affair with his former chief-of-staff.
Mr Kilpatrick's plea deal means he will spend 120 days in jail and will pay $1m in restitution to the city. He has also agreed that he will not run for office for five years.
In Wayne County court, Mr Kilpatrick read out a statement in which he admitted to two counts of lying under oath during a police whistle-blower trial in 2007.
He had faced up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
A prominent African-American politician who was elected mayor at the age of 31, Mr Kilpatrick had been considered one of the rising stars of the Democratic Party.
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Aids and the Roman Empire

The spread of the Roman Empire through Europe could help explain why those living in its former colonies are more vulnerable to HIV.
The claim, by French researchers, is that people once ruled by Rome are less likely to have a gene variant which protects against HIV.
This includes England, France, Greece and Spain, New Scientist reports. Others argue the difference is linked to a far larger event, such as the spread of bubonic plague or smallpox.
The idea that something carried by the occupying Romans could have a widespread influence on the genes of modern Europeans comes from researchers at the University of Provence.
They say that the frequency of the variant corresponds closely with the shifting boundaries of the thousand-year empire.In countries inside the borders of the empire for longer periods, such as Spain, Italy and Greece, the frequency of the CCR5-delta32 gene, which offers some protection against HIV, is between 0% and 6%.Countries at the fringe of the empire, such as Germany, and modern England, the rate is between 8% and 11.8%, while in countries never conquered by Rome, the rate is greater than this.
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Top McCain Aide: ’08 Election “Not About Issues”

It is the first time I have seen the truth spoken so blandly by a high ranking politician!

McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, has been quoted saying the candidates’ public image will matter more than issues in deciding the election. In an interview with the Washington Post, Davis said, “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”

Palin's achievements

Palin's mother in law: "I don't see what else she brings into the ticket other than she is a woman and a conservative"

Pepsi Center

Isn't ironic that these two words are spoken more often than Barack Obama during the DNC? It doesn't go down well (even with Pepsi!).

Joe Biden and plagiarism

A negative story:
...He also ran for presidency in 1988 but withdrew after he admitted plagiarising a speech by the then leader of the British Labour Party, Neil Kinnock.

Bill Clinton John Edwards, sex and morality

What bothered me most about the "Edwards affair" was the following comment Edwards made in 1999 abut Bill Clinton when his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky surfaced.
"I think this president has shown a remarkable disrespect for his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter," he said. "It is breathtaking to me the level to which that disrespect has risen.".
The morality of the statement is much worse than the problem of the affair itself.

Libya vs Switzerland

When international politics and the (Swiss) law collide...

Libya's state shipping company says it has halted oil shipments to Switzerland in protest at the brief arrest of leader Muammar Gaddafi's youngest son. It threatened further action if the Swiss did not apologise for the arrest. Geneva police held Hannibal Gaddafi for two days after he and his pregnant wife allegedly hit two of their staff. The couple face charges of bodily harm, threatening behaviour and coercion. They have denied any wrongdoing over the alleged incident on 15 July.
The stopping of oil shipments comes a day after the Swiss foreign ministry complained of Libya taking "retaliatory measures", such as forcing Swiss firms to close Libyan offices.
In a joint statement with the national port authority, the company said ships sailing under the Swiss flag had been banned from entering Libyan ports. Switzerland imports at least half its crude oil from Libya but Libya owns a large oil refinery in Switzerland.
Libya's influential people's committees have also called for Libya to withdraw its deposits from Swiss banks if an apology for the arrest is not forthcoming.
The Swiss foreign ministry said on Wednesday that Libya had "taken a number of worrying retaliatory measures" for Mr Gaddafi's arrest since he was released on bail on 17 July. It said Swiss companies ABB and Nestle had been ordered to close their Libya offices and that Swiss staff there had been arrested.
Flights between Libya and Switzerland had been reduced, Libya had stopped issuing visas to Swiss citizens and Tripoli had recalled some of its diplomats from Bern, the Swiss foreign ministry said. The ministry also said it had sent a delegation to Libya to explain Mr Gaddafi's arrest. It has advised Swiss citizens not to travel to Libya until further notice.
It is not Hannibal Gaddafi's first brush with the law. In 2005 he was convicted by a court in France of assaulting his girlfriend.

A scientific comparison of diets

The controversial Atkins diet is just as effective and safe as a conventional low-fat diet, a two-year study has found.Researchers found that overweight volunteers shed more pounds on the low carbohydrate regime than they did on an orthodox calorie-controlled diet.A Mediterranean diet with plenty of vegetables, fibre, white meat and fish was equally effective - and just as safe, they found.
The findings come from an experiment involving 322 overweight volunteers carried out by a team of Israeli, America and German scientists.
Lead researcher Dr Iris Shai, from the department of epidemiology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel, said: 'Clearly there is not one diet that is ideal for everyone.
'We believe that this study will open clinical medicine to considering low-carb and Mediterranean diets as safe, effective alternatives for patients, based on personal preference and the medical goals set out for such intervention.'
Atkin's was the biggest dieting phenomenon in years.
Devised by US heart doctor Robert Atkins, it involves eating plenty of protein while virtually eliminating carbohydrates like sugar, bread, rice and pasta. Controversially, it was high in fat - attracting the ire of doctors.
The diet involves no calorie counting and at its height was particularly popular with men. However, it fell out of favour after concerns that it could increase the risk of heart disease and kidney problems.
By contrast a Mediterranean diet includes a high intake of vegetables and fruits, fish and unsaturated fats like olive oil.
The volunteers in the study, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, were assigned to one of three diets - a low fat calorie-restricted diet; a Mediterranean calorie-restricted diet high in fibre and low in red meat, and a low-carbohydrate diet where volunteers had no limit on calories.
Those on the conventional low-fat diet lost an average of 6.5 pounds in weight over the two years - compared to 10 pounds for those on the Mediterranean diet and 10.3 pounds on the low carb diet.
Most of the weight was lost in the first six months of the trial.
The low-carb diet was best for reducing levels of bad cholesterol, while all three diets had the same beneficial effect on liver and inflammation function, the researchers said.
In the first year, just five per cent of the volunteers dropped out of the study. By the end of the second year, 85 per cent of the volunteers were still on the diet.
The experiment was carried out at the Nuclear Research Centre in Israel where the staff canteen provided suitable dishes for each of the three diets.
Lunch is typically the main meal of the day in Israel. The researchers also gave advice to the families of the volunteers on how to stick to the diets at home.
The researchers concede that the study has some flaws. Around 85 per cent of the volunteers were men - and the effects could be different for women, they say.

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Cancer survival rate in the world

There is a huge variation in cancer survival rates across the world, a global study shows.
The US, Australia, Canada, France and Japan had the highest five-year survival rates, while Algeria had the worst, Lancet Oncology reported.Spending on health care was a major factor, the study of 31 countries said.Researchers said higher spending often meant quicker access to tests and treatment.
The research was carried out by more than 100 scientists across the world led by Professor Michel Coleman, of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It involved analysing data on more than two million cancer patients who were diagnosed and treated during the 1990s.
The study showed the US had the highest five-year survival rates for breast cancer at 83.9% and prostate cancer at 91.9%. Japan came out best for male colon and rectal cancers, at 63% and 58.2% respectively, while France faired best for women with those cancers at 60.1% and 63.9%. The UK had 69.7% survival for breast cancer, just above 40% for colon and rectal cancer for both men and women and 51.1% for prostate cancer.
There were also large regional variations within the UK, which were linked to differences in access to care and ability of patients to navigate the local health services. Both are directly linked to deprivation. Algeria, the only African country involved, came bottom in all types of cancer. SurvivalIt meant an American man was four times more likely to survive prostate cancer than an Algerian, while a Japanese man was six times more likely to survive colon cancer. Poland, Slovenia, Brazil and Estonia had survival rates half as good as the best performers.
The results closely mirrored the amount each country was spending on health during the period. While the US led the way with more than 13% of gross domestic product spent on health, Canada, Australia and the best-performing European nations were all spending about 9% to 10%. The UK was spending just over 7% but that figure has now been increased following record rises in the NHS budget to bring it much closer to the likes of France and Germany. Algeria was spending around 4%.The importance of money was further illustrated by an ethnic breakdown of outcomes in the US.
White Americans, who are on the whole wealthier and therefore more able to afford the insurance which underpins the US system, were up to 14% more likely than others to survive cancer.
Professor Coleman said some of the differences could be attributed to variations in "access to diagnostic and treatment services"."This, of course, is associated with the amount of investment in technology such as CT scanners."
Dr Lesley Walker, Cancer Research UK's director of cancer information, added: "The report is the first major study to compare cancer survival across five continents and has highlighted the stark differences in survival between poor and wealthy countries."
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Ancient Greek in the world

A very interesting article in the latest issue of the Economist.

ATROPOS is the Fate who cuts the lifeline once your time is up; she would seem to have her shears out for the study of classical (Ancient) Greek. Once, with Latin, the staple of a civilised education, it is now flickering on the sidelines.

At first sight, the statistics are positively wine-dark. As part of school education, countries may maintain it in theory but rarely in practice. Portuguese pupils have it as an option in their final year; in Sweden fewer than 100 schoolchildren study it, in Belgium around 800. In Britain, of a mere 241 entrants for Greek A-level (typically taken at 18) in 2007, fully 226 were from independent (private) schools.

The problem for Greek is that snobbery does not trounce pragmatism. Latin, once seemingly moribund, is on the rise again in Britain and America. It is not just useful: in a competitive system, it sends a coded message about the nature of the school, and the kind of pupils it attracts. But finding the time and teachers to teach even one dead language properly is hard enough. A second imposes near-intolerable strains on the timetable.

Yet mingle with the 300-plus participants from Britain, Europe, America, Hong Kong and elsewhere indulging in frantic pedagogy at the Hellenists’ version of Woodstock (an annual summer school at Bryanston in southern England) and a different picture emerges. Monopod classicists add Greek to their existing Latin, covering a semester’s-worth of study in a fortnight. For relaxation, they can listen to the world’s academic authorities disputing the pronunciation of Homer and illuminating the knotty wordplay of Plato’s “Republic”.

The rosy fingers are touching universities too. Though some classics departments in the United States have had to close or merge, the number of students enrolled in Greek has been going up since the 1990s. In 2006 fully 22,849 took some Greek (32,191 studied Latin). Applications for classics courses at top British universities are healthy too.

Logos and Theos

Christianity, rather than the glories of Athens and the horrors of Sparta, may be proving the biggest draw. Though some fundamentalists appear to believe that the Bible was written in English, for the more thoughtful (or pious) Christian, serious study of the New Testament or the early Christian church is impossible without first knowing alpha from omega. In America, Greek and Hebrew are standard parts of a Master of Divinity degree—necessary to become a minister in most respectable Protestant denominations. That does not match the now fast-reviving use of Latin in the Roman Catholic liturgy. But it helps. While the koineGreek current in the eastern Mediterranean in the 1st century AD is different from the Attic, Ionian or Homeric dialects used in the greatest works of classical literature, it is also considerably easier. (For the austere classicists of St Paul’s Girls’ School in London, a touch of koine is regarded as a “Christmas treat”.)

In practice, few classes bond quite as tightly as the six students featured in Donna Tartt’s bestselling novel “The Secret History” (in a pastiche of Euripides’s “Bacchae”, they commit and conceal two vicious murders). But such references highlight the subject as something exotic and therefore desirable, at least to those with time and brainpower to engage in it. The cryptic difficulties of Greek (alphabet, accents, moods, particles and tenses) repel Οί Πολλοί (hoi polloi) but attract devotees. Intellectual elitism, as much as an appreciation of Aristophanes’s bawdy humour, is the glue that binds Hellenists together—stoked, in some schools, by a feeling of official neglect or hostility from peers.

The real threat is not modernity, but globalisation. Europe’s glorious past is one of many: when those seeking to understand China start studying Confucius’s “Analects” with the same attention that past generations have paid to Pericles, the intricacies of the aorist optative may finally lose their charms. But not just yet.

Mc Cain's economic policies

I have read an interesting article on the subject in Fortune magazine.

Many political commentators chose the remarks of his chief strategist Charlie Black who connected the issue of national security to the success of the candidate. An rightly so. Although judging political events, even tragic, from the point of view of their political fortunes is customary to politicians, this one went a bit too far, especially having been made in public. 

And what did Charlie Black say? "The assassination of Benazir Bhutto in December was an "unfortunate event," says Black. "But his knowledge and ability to talk about it reemphasized that this is the guy who's ready to be Commander-in-Chief. And it helped us." As would, Black concedes with startling candor after we raise the issue, another terrorist attack on U.S. soil. "Certainly it would be a big advantage to him," says Black.

But this is not just the opinion of his adviser. Mc Cain himself,  in reply to the first question of the interview "Senator, what do you see as the gravest long-term threat to the U.S. economy?",  at first says nothing. .. Nine seconds of silence, ten seconds, 11. Finally he says, "Well, I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we're in against radical Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence. Another successful attack on the United States of America could have devastating consequences."

Will the American people support this approach? We will now in November.

Tsvangirai quits election race

Zimbabwe's opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai says he is pulling out of Friday's presidential run-off, handing victory to President Robert Mugabe.

Zimbabwe's Information Minister Sikhanyiso Ndlovu told the BBC that Mr Tsvangirai pulled out the vote because he faced "humiliation and defeat" at the hands of President Mugabe, who he said would win "resoundingly"."Unfortunately," he said, the opposition leader's decision was "depriving the people of Zimbabwe of a vote".

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The Irish referendum

Update (19.20GMT)  The Lisbon Treaty has been rejected by Irish voters sparking a crisis for plans to reform European Union structures. A total of 53.4% voted to reject the treaty, while 46.6% voted in favour. All but 10 constituencies rejected the treaty, with a total of 752,451 voting in favour of Lisbon and 862,415 votes against. Turnout was 53.1%.

update (17.20 GMT) only five of 43 constituencies left to declare a result, the No vote is leading by 53.7 per cent to 46.3 per cent. All but seven constituencies have rejected the treaty, with a national running total of 656,228 voting in favour of Lisbon and 761,207 votes against.

update (14.20 GMT)  With 29 of 43 constituencies declared, the No vote is leading by 53.5 per cent to 46.5 per cent. All but six constituencies have rejected the treaty, with a national running total of 527,591 voting in favour of Lisbon and 608,156 votes against.

update (13.50 GMT) With 19 of 43 constituencies declared, the No vote is leading by 54.7 per cent to 45.3 per cent. 

All but two constituencies, Dublin South and Dublin North, have rejected the treaty.

In Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny's Mayo constituency, the treaty has been rejected by a large 61.7 per cent of voters. Mr Kenny and the party’s MEP Jim Higgins conceding earlier today that the No campaign had won in Mayo.

update (13.03 GMT) With nine of 43 constituencies having declared results, the No vote is leading by 57.6 per cent to 42.4 per cent.

update (12.17 GMT)  Six of 43 constituencies having declared results the No vote is leading by 55 per cent to 45 per cent.Waterford, Sligo-North Leitrim, Tipperary North and South, Kerry North and South have all rejected the treaty.

update (11.39 GMT) Waterford has rejected the treaty by 54 per cent to 46 per cent

Tallies in the Lisbon Treaty referendum indicate a strong Yes vote in County Dublin but a No victory in city constituencies and around the rest of the country. 

The tallies indicate there has been a strong No showing in rural areas and in working-class urban areas, while there appears to be less support for the treaty in middle-class urban areas than had been expected.The combined vote in Dublin city and county appears to leaning towards a No vote. However, according to tallies, Dun Laoghaire is two to one in favour of the treaty, as is Dublin South with Dublin South East 60/40 in favour.
Dublin North East, North West and South Central are being called as two to one against the treaty.Dublin Central is 57 per cent against and 43 per cent in favour, according to tallies. Dublin West is 55 per cent No and 45 per cent Yes. Dublin South West is thought to be heading towards a similar margin against, while there has been no tallies done in Dublin North.In Mayo, the vote appears to be 60-40 per cent in favour of the No camp with the majority of boxes counted. There was a 52 per cent turnout. Fine Gael leader Enda Kenny and the party’s MEP Jim Higgins are conceding that the No campaign have won in Mayo.In Galway West, with all boxes counted, tallies indicate 53.95 per cent No to 46.05 per cent Yes. There was a significant No vote in rural areas, including 84 per cent voting No in parts of Connemara, such as Carna and Cliften.Minister for Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs Éamon Ó Cuív is conceding defeat for the treaty in the constituency.In Galway East constituency, the trend from tallies also appears to be against the treaty by a narrow margin with most of the 149 boxes opened. In Tuam, the heartland of Libertas founder Declan Ganley, the No votes were two to one ahead.Finalised tallies in Cork North Central indicate a two to one vote against the treaty. Cork South Central also appears to be leaning towards a No vote but by a smaller margin.A strong No vote has been reported in Minister for Education Batt O’Keefe’s home town of Ballincollig.In neighbouring Kerry, tallies are pointing toward a substantial 60 per cent vote against the treaty.In Dublin South-West, there is a report 60 per cent - 40 per cent split in favour of the No side, and this 60:40 tally is repeated in Dublin North-West, Dublin Central, and Dublin North-East.Elsewhere in the country, tallies from Limerick West indicate a 59 per cent No vote and a 41 Yes vote.Tipperary South tallies show 50.3 per cent Yes and 49.7 per cent No vote, while Tipperary North tallies indicate a 50:50 split.Initial tally figures from Sligo-Leitrim suggest a 66 per cent No vote, Roscommon-South Leitrim indicates a 55 per cent No vote, while Donegal South-West (55 per cent No) and Donegal North-East (63 per cent No) are also showing an anti-Lisbon trend.In Louth, the tally split was reported to be a 57 per cent - 43 per cent in favour of No. In Meath West and East, the split shows a 60-40 percentage advantage to the No side.Both Kildare constituencies appear to be bucking the trend, however, with early tallies indicating a 57 per cent - 43 per cent vote in favour of Lisbon.Turnout was reported at about 40 per cent by 9pm, up from 20 per cent in some constituencies by mid-afternoon. In general, turnout was reported to be higher in city areas than in rural areas. By the time polls closed at 10pm last night, around 50 per cent of the three million people registered to vote were understood to have cast their ballots.

There is concern in other EU countries about the impact of the decision by Irish voters, and the French and German governments are expected to make a joint statement later today once the Irish result is known.

Ireland was the only country to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.

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Imperial College to set-up its own exams

it looks as though, another "myth" of the UK educational system is about to collapse.

According to the Guardian, one of Britain's most successful universities is developing its own entrance exam because it believes "grade inflation" has rendered A-levels useless as a means of selecting the best undergraduates.  

Sir Richard Sykes, the rector of Imperial College London, yesterday warned that the state education system was failing the country's most gifted children and called for radical action to "save" bright students. 

Sykes said: "Top institutions have great difficulty separating out the best students. Even if you interview all the students, you still have a problem." 

The new entrance exam will assess candidates' general intelligence and creativity. It could be brought in from 2010. 

"We are doing this not because we don't believe in A-level but we cannot use A-levels any more as a discriminatory factor," he said. "They have all got four or five A-levels. "[This] hopefully would become a national system if it was seen to be successful." 

He said it was frightening that 40% of his students came from private schools, which teach just 7% of pupils in the UK. 

Schools minister Lord Adonis insisted that educational standards are being maintained. "To further underpin the quality of the qualifications system we have established the new independent regulator, Ofqual."

Texas sect children return home

The triumph of logic (and justice).

More than 400 children who were seized from a polygamist sect in Texas have begun returning home.

A judge in Texas signed an order allowing parents to take the children, who were removed from the sect's ranch by state authorities in April.

Officials had accused members of the sect of forcing young girls into under-age sex.But last week the Texas Supreme Court said officials had failed to prove the children faced immediate danger.

Following Monday's ruling the first parents had emotional reunions with their children, the Associated Press news agency reported."It's just a great day," said Nancy Dockstader, as she embraced one of five children taken by authorities.

On Monday, 129 children were returned to their parents, AP reported.

It was expected to take several days for all the families to be reunited, as some siblings were separated at facilities hundreds of miles apart.

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Australia pulls out from Iraq

It is reported today (e.g. here), that Australia has started pulling out the 500 soldiers stationed in Iraq. 

This means that the Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is fulfilling his election promise.

The Portuguese language updated

From the BBC.
Portugal's parliament has voted to introduce contentious changes to the Portuguese language in order to spell hundreds of words the Brazilian way.
The agreement standardises numerous spellings and adds three letters - k, w and y - to the alphabet. A large majority of lawmakers backed government proposals to phase in the changes during the next six years. But a petition against the move was signed by 33,000 people who argue it is a capitulation to Brazilian influence. Proponents counter the move will make the language more uniform globally, making such things as internet searches and legal documents easier to understand.
The agreement will standardise spelling by removing silent consonants in order for words to be spelt more phonetically, turning, for example "optimo" (great) into "otimo". Friday's vote came after a unified form of the Portuguese language was originally agreed with seven Portuguese-speaking countries in 1991.
The official language of more than 230m people worldwide, Portuguese is spoken in Brazil, Angola, Mozambique, East Timor, Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, and Sao Tome and Principe, as well as Portugal. Portugal's President Anibal Cavaco Silva is now expected to ratify the accord.

Harvard's Endowment

From the NYT.

The top five college and university endowments reported a combined value of over $100 billion at the end of 2007. Not a nickel in tax.
Harvard University, which has the largest endowment in the country, has a total of $34.6 billion. To put into perspective just how much money that is, consider that the largest charitable foundation in the world, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has a total endowment of $37.3 billion.
Harvard had a 23% rate of return on their money last year.
If you project Harvard's endowment out using their historical rate of return they would have over half a TRILLION dollars in 20 years.
Schools with large endowments (at least $500 million) reported spending an average of 4.4 percent of their stockpiles in 2007. Meanwhile, those same schools made an average of over 19 percent on their money.
For what's been estimated to be about $300 million a year (less than 1 percent of their endowment's value) Harvard could completely waive tuition, room and board for every single one of their students. Instead, they announced an increase in those fees of about 3.5 percent for next year. Being a student at Harvard will now cost a staggering $47,215 a year.
Some politicians in Massachusetts have proposed a new tax on large university endowments. Under their proposal, all endowments over a billion dollars would be taxed at 2.5 percent, a rate any wealthy individual or corporation would salivate over. The tax would net the state over $1.4 billion a year. (Boston currently receives about $1.8 million a year from the school).

California Supreme Court approves gay marriages

Gays and lesbians have a constitutional right to marry in California, the state Supreme Court said today in a historic ruling that could be repudiated by the voters in November.
In a 4-3 decision, the justices said the state's ban on same-sex marriage violates the "fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship." The ruling is likely to flood county courthouses with applications from couples newly eligible to marry when the decision takes effect in 30 days.
"The California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples," Chief Justice Ronald George wrote in the majority opinion.
Allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry "will not deprive opposite-sex couples of any rights and will not alter the legal framework of the institution of marriage," George said.
In addition, he said, the current state law, enacted in 1977 and reaffirmed by the voters in 2000, discriminates against same-sex couples on the basis of their sexual orientation - discrimination that the court, for the first time, put in the same legal category as racial or gender bias.
Massachusetts is the only other state whose high court has ruled in favor of same-sex marriage. Federal law denies federal benefits, such as joint income tax filing and Social Security survivors' rights, to same-sex couples who can legally marry in their states, and allows other states to deny recognition to those marriages.
Today's ruling set off a celebration at San Francisco City Hall, where nearly 4,000 same-sex weddings were performed in 2004 before the state high court put a halt to the marriages while challenges to the California law worked their way through the courts. The decision today has no effect on those annulments.
The celebration could turn out to be short-lived, however. The court's decision could be overturned in November, when Californians are likely to vote on a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriages. Conservative religious organizations have submitted more than 1.1 million signatures on initiative petitions, and officials are working to determine if at least 694,354 of them are valid.
If the measure qualifies for the ballot and voters approve it, it will supersede today's ruling. The initiative does not say whether it would apply retroactively to annul marriages performed before November, an omission that would wind up before the courts.
Chief Justice George was joined in the majority by Justices Joyce Kennard, Kathryn Mickle Werdegar and Carlos Moreno. Justices Marvin Baxter, Ming Chin and Carol Corrigan dissented - though Corrigan, writing separately, said she personally believes "Californians should allow our gay and lesbian neighbors to call their unions marriages."
Baxter, writing for himself and Chin, accused the court majority of substituting "by judicial fiat its own social policy views for those expressed by the people."
Both he and Corrigan noted the 2000 ballot initiative in which California voters reaffirmed the state's ban on same-sex marriage.
The court "does not have the right to erase, then recast, the age-old definition of marriage, as virtually all societies have understood it, in order to satisfy its own contemporary notions of equality and justice," Baxter said.
But George, in a 121-page opinion, said California has already recognized, in its laws and public policy, that gays and lesbians are entitled to equal treatment in every legal area except marriage. He also noted that state laws and traditions banned interracial marriage until the California Supreme Court, in 1948, became the first court in the nation to overturn such a law.
"Even the most familiar and generally accepted of social policies and traditions often mask an unfairness and inequality that frequently is not recognized or appreciated by those not directly harmed," the chief justice wrote.
The legal case dates back to February 2004, when Newsom ordered the city clerk to start issuing marriage licenses to couples regardless of their gender, saying he doubted the constitutionality of the state marriage law.
The state's high court ordered a halt a month later, after the nearly 4,000 same-sex weddings had been performed at City Hall. The court annulled the marriages in August 2004, ruling that Newsom lacked authority to defy the state law. But it did not rule on the validity of the law itself and said it would await proceedings in lower courts.
Some of the couples immediately sued in Superior Court and were joined by the city of San Francisco, which said it had a stake in ensuring equality for its residents. The case that ultimately reached the state Supreme Court consolidated four suits, one by the city and three by 23 same-sex couples in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Superior Court Judge Richard Kramer, ruling in the San Francisco cases, declared the ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional in March 2005. He said the law violates the "basic human right to marry a person of one's choice," a right declared by California's high court in the 1948 ruling.
Kramer said the law also constituted sex discrimination - prohibited by another groundbreaking California Supreme Court ruling in 1971 - because it is based on the gender of one's partner.
But a state appeals court upheld the law in October 2006, ruling that California was entitled to preserve the historic definition of marriage and that the state's voters and legislators, not the courts, were best equipped "to define marriage in our democratic society."
The appeals court also said California is not discriminating against same-sex couples, citing state laws that give registered domestic partners the same rights as spouses. Those laws provide such rights as child support and custody, joint property ownership, inheritance and hospital visitation, and access to divorce court.
The suits challenging the marriage law relied on the California Constitution, which state courts have long interpreted as being more protective of individual rights than the U.S. Constitution. The initiative that California voters are likely to consider in November would write a ban on same-sex marriage into the state Constitution, a step already taken by voters in half the states.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has twice vetoed same-sex marriage bills, citing the 2000 ballot measure that reaffirmed California's opposite-sex-only marriage law. That initiative was not a constitutional amendment.
The governor issued a statement today saying, "I respect the court's decision and as governor, I will uphold its ruling." He also reiterated his opposition to the constitutional amendment that is likely to be on the November ballot.
The California case is In re Marriage Cases, S147999. The ruling is available at www.courtinfo.ca.gov/opinions.

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Berkeley's initiative to pay authors' open-access charges

It's one thing to say you support open-access publishing. It's another to provide authors with a pot of money to actually pay for it. That's what's happening at the University of California Berkeley.

In January, the university launched the Berkeley Research Impact Initiative, a pilot program co-sponsored by the University Librarian and the Vice Chancellor for Research to cover publication charges for open-access journals.

Faculty, post-doc and graduate students can apply for up to $3,000 to cover the cost of publishing an article in an open-access publication. The fund also gives up to $1,500 for the cost of so-called hybrid publications’ paid access fees, where information is freely available but the journal limits the right to redistribute. The pilot program will last 18 months or until the initial $125,000 fund runs out. The hope – and challenge – is to find a permanent funding source.
more

Wolfgang Doeblin

From MSRI

*The sealed letter*
**
In May 2000, at the Academy of Sciences in Paris,a sealed letter with the number 11 668 is opened.
The letter, sent 60 years before to the Academy by the mathematician Wolfgang Doeblin, contains a
mathematical manuscript called "On Kolmogorov`s equation". On being deciphered, the manuscript
causes a sensation among mathematicians. It proves that as early as 1940, Wolfgang Doeblin
developed a formula to calculate the role of chance in continuous random processes, comparable
with the formula the Japanese mathematician Kiyoshi Itô developed some years later as the
basis of his famous Itô-calculus.

*Wolfgang Doeblin*
**
Wolfgang Doeblin was born in Berlin in 1915 as the son of the famous German writer Alfred
Döblin. In 1933 the family flees from Berlin and takes refuge in Paris. Wolfgang starts his study
in mathematics and proves to be a brilliant probabilist. In the winter of 1939/40 he is
stationed as a simple soldier in the Vosges near the French/German border. During this time
Wolfgang writes his manuscript "On Kolmogorov's equation" and sends it as a sealed letter to the
Academy of Sciences. A few months later, faced with the threat of capture by the German
Wehrmacht, he commits suicide.

Korean youth and Ivy League universities

...This spring, as in previous years, all but a few of the 133 graduates from Daewon Foreign Language High School in Seoul who applied to selective American universities won admission.

“Going to U.S. universities has become like a huge fad in Korean society, and the Ivy League names — Harvard, Yale, Princeton — have really struck a nerve,” said Victoria Kim, who attended Daewon and graduated from Harvard last June.

Daewon has one major Korean rival, the Minjok Leadership Academy, three hours’ drive east of Seoul, which also has a spectacular record of admission to Ivy League colleges.

How do they do it? Their formula is relatively simple. They take South Korea’s top-scoring middle school students, put those who aspire to an American university in English-language classes, taught by Korean and highly paid American and other foreign teachers, emphasize composition and other skills crucial to success on the SATs and college admissions essays, and — especially this — urge them on to unceasing study.

Both schools seem to be rethinking their grueling regimen, at least a bit. Minjok, a boarding school, has turned off dormitory surveillance cameras previously used to ensure that students did not doze in late-night study sessions. Daewon is ending its school day earlier for freshmen. Its founder, Lee Won-hee, worried in an interview that while Daewon was turning out high-scoring students, it might be falling short in educating them as responsible citizens.

Still, the schools are highly rigorous. Both supplement South Korea’s required, lecture-based national curriculum with Western-style discussion classes. Their academic year is more than a month longer than at American high schools. Daewon, which costs about $5,000 per year to attend, requires two foreign languages besides English. Minjok, where tuition, board and other expenses top $15,000, offers Advanced Placement courses and research projects.

And, oh yes. Both schools suppress teenage romance as a waste of time.

“What are you doing holding hands?” a Daewon administrator scolded an adolescent couple recently, according to his aides. “You should be studying!”

Students do not seem to complain. Park Yeshong, one of Kim Hyun-kyung’s classmates, said attractions tended to fade during hundreds of hours of close-quarters study. “We know each other too well to fall in love,” she said. Many American educators would kill to have such disciplined pupils.

Both schools reserve admission for highly motivated students; the application process resembles that at many American colleges, where students are judged on their grade-point averages, as well as their performance on special tests and in interviews.

“Even my worst students are great,” said Joseph Foster, a Williams College graduate who teaches writing at Daewon. “They’re professionals; if I teach them, they’ll learn it. I get e-mails at 2 a.m. I’ll respond and go to bed. When I get up, I’ll find a follow-up question mailed at 5 a.m.”

South Korea is not the only country sending more students to the United States, but it seems to be a special case. Some 103,000 Korean students study at American schools of all levels, more than from any other country, according to American government statistics. In higher education, only India and China, with populations more than 20 times that of South Korea’s, send more students.

“Preparing to get to the best American universities has become something of a national obsession in Korea,” said Alexander Vershbow, the American ambassador to South Korea.

Korean applications to Harvard alone have tripled, to 213 this spring, up from 66 in 2003, said William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions. Harvard has 37 Korean undergraduates, more than from any foreign country except Canada and Britain. Harvard, Yale and Princeton have a total of 103 Korean undergraduates; 34 graduated from Daewon or Minjok.

This year, Daewon and Minjok graduates are heading to universities like Stanford, Chicago, Duke and seven of the eight Ivy League universities — but not to Harvard. Instead, Harvard accepted four Korean students from three other prep schools.

South Korea’s academic year starts in March, so the 2008 class of Daewon’s Global Leadership Program, which prepares students for study at foreign universities, graduated in February.

One graduate was Kim Soo-yeon, 19, who was accepted by Princeton this month. Daewon parents tend to be wealthy doctors, lawyers or university professors. Ms. Kim’s father is a top official in the Korean Olympic Committee.

Ms. Kim developed fierce study habits early, watching her mother scold her older sister for receiving any score less than 100 on tests. Even a 98 or a 99 brought a tongue-lashing.

“Most Korean mothers want their children to get 100 on all the tests in all the subjects,” Ms. Kim’s mother said.

Even while at Daewon, Ms. Kim, like thousands of Korean students, took weekend classes in English, physics and other subjects at private academies, raising her SAT scores by hundreds of points. “I just love to do well on the tests,” she said.

Their average combined SAT score was 2203 out of 2400. By comparison, the average combined score at Phillips Exeter, the New Hampshire boarding school, is 2085. Sixty-seven Daewon graduates had perfect 800 math scores.

Kim Hyun-kyung, 17, scored perfect 800s on the SAT verbal and math tests, and 790 in writing. She is scheduled to take nine Advanced Placement tests next month, in calculus, physics, chemistry, European history and five other subjects. One challenge: she has taken none of these courses. Instead, she is teaching herself in between classes at Daewon, buying and devouring textbooks.

So she is busy. She rises at 6 a.m. and heads for her school bus at 6:50. Arriving at Daewon, she grabs a broom to help classmates clean her classroom. Between 8 and noon, she hears Korean instructors teach supply and demand in economics, Korean soils in geography and classical poets in Korean literature.

At lunch she joins other raucous students, all, like her, wearing blue blazers, in a chow line serving beans and rice, fried dumpling and pickled turnip, which she eats with girlfriends. Boys, who sit elsewhere, wolf their food and race to a dirt lot for a 10-minute pickup soccer game before afternoon classes.

Kim Hyun-kyung joins other girls at a hallway sink to brush her teeth before reporting to French literature, French culture and English grammar classes, taught by Korean instructors. At 3:20, her English language classes begin. This day, they include English literature, taught by Mani Tadayon, a polyglot graduate of the University of California at Berkeley who was born in Iran, and government and politics, taught by Hugh Quigley, a former Wall Street lawyer.

Evening study hall begins at 7:45. She piles up textbooks on an adjoining desk, where they glare at her like a to-do list. Classmates sling backpacks over seats, prop a window open and start cramming. Three hours later, the floor is littered with empty juice cartons and water bottles. One girl has nodded out, head on desk. At 10:50 a tone sounds, and Ms. Kim heads for a bus that will wend its way through Seoul’s towering high-rise canyons to her home, south of the Han River.

“I feel proud that I’ve endured another day,” she said.

The schedule at the Minjok academy, on a rural campus of tile-roofed buildings in forested hills, appears even more daunting. Students rise at 6 for martial arts, and thereafter, wearing full-sleeved, gray-and-black robes, plunge into a day of relentless study that ends just before midnight, when they may sleep.

But most keep cramming until 2 a.m., when dorm lights are switched off, said Gang Min-ho, a senior. Even then some students turn on lanterns and keep going, Mr. Gang said. “Basically we lead very tired lives,” he said.

Students sometimes report for classes so exhausted that Alexander Ganse, a German who teaches European history, said he asked, “Did you go to bed at all last night?”

“But we’re not only nerds!” interrupted Choi Jung-yun, who grew up in San Diego. Minjok students play sports, take part in many clubs and even have a rock band, she said. Ambassador Vershbow, who plays the drums, confirmed that with photographs that showed him jamming with Minjok’s rockers during a visit to the school last year.

There are other hints of slackening. A banner once hung on a Minjok building. “This school is a paradise for those who want to study and a hell for those who do not,” it read. But it was taken down after faculty members deemed it too harsh, said Son Eun-ju, director of counseling.

the full story

sexual abstinence until marriage in the US

US lawmakers are investigating whether to cut government funding for health education programmes that promote sexual abstinence until marriage.
The move follows a report earlier this year from America's leading health agency, the Center for Disease Control, which revealed one in four teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease.
Planned Parenthood estimates that two thirds of teenagers will have experienced sexual intercourse by the time they leave school.
And with some 750,000 teenage pregnancies a year, America has one of the highest teen birth rates in the developed world.
"This national programme which has wasted $1.5bn (£750m) of tax money is a failure and our teens are paying the price," says Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood.
State governments receive federal money they must match to fund abstinence programmes.
At least 17 states have opted out of the system and others have suspended funding while Congress investigates whether such programmes work.
Critics say there is no evidence that they delay sexual activity and teenagers who have taken a vow of virginity are less likely to use protection if they break their promise.

The row over abstinence education is part of a much wider debate in the US about "family values".
Many conservatives are concerned that "American values" are being eroded.
But their opponents believe that the conservatives have an overly influential political voice, particularly within the current Bush administration.
For liberals, the campaign to roll back the abstinence programmes is part of a broader struggle against what they regard as reactionary elements in the US government.
If Congress does decide to cut government funding for abstinence programmes, they will still continue. Many enjoy public support and will likely find money elsewhere.

the full sory

Humans on earth

Human beings may have had a brush with extinction 70,000 years ago, an extensive genetic study suggests.
The human population at that time was reduced to small isolated groups in Africa, apparently because of drought, according to an analysis released Thursday. The report notes that a separate study by researchers at Stanford University estimated the number of early humans may have shrunk as low as 2,000 before numbers began to expand again in the early Stone Age. "This study illustrates the extraordinary power of genetics to reveal insights into some of the key events in our species' history," Spencer Wells, National Geographic Society explorer in residence, said in a statement. "Tiny bands of early humans, forced apart by harsh environmental conditions, coming back from the brink to reunite and populate the world. Truly an epic drama, written in our DNA." The report was published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.

Previous studies using mitochondrial DNA -- which is passed down through mothers -- have traced modern humans to a single "mitochondrial Eve," who lived in Africa about 200,000 years ago. The migrations of humans out of africa" to populate the rest of the world appear to have begun about 60,000 years ago, but little has been known about humans between Eve and that dispersal.

The new study looks at the mitochondrial DNA of the Khoi and San people in South Africa, who appear to have diverged from other people between 90,000 and 150,000 years ago.

The researchers led by Doron Behar of Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel, and Saharon Rosset of IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, and Tel Aviv University concluded that humans separated into small populations before the Stone Age, when they came back together and began to increase in numbers and spread to other areas.

Eastern Africa experienced a series of severe droughts between 135,000 and 90,000 years ago, and researchers said this climatological shift may have contributed to the population changes, dividing into small, isolated groups that developed independently.

Paleontologist Meave Leakey, a Genographic adviser, said: "Who would have thought that as recently as 70,000 years ago, extremes of climate had reduced our population to such small numbers that we were on the very edge of extinction?"

Today, more than 6.6 billion people inhabit the globe, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The full story.

Boy or girl?

There are various theories on how to influence the sex of a baby. Here is a link.

What I found amazing was the following:
...No matter how silly some of these techniques seem, spare a thought for the French in the 18th century. It was widely believed that if a man tied off his left testicle, a boy would be more likely. The theory was based on the mistaken belief that sperm from each testicle were sex-specific.

A course on Facebook at Stanford

A group of students at Stanford University in the heart of Silicon Valley have turned their attention towards a unique course that blends popular culture with the more time-worn principles of psychology.
The Psychology of Facebook is the brainchild of Professor B J Fogg, a pioneering persuasion psychologist who founded the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford. He says: "When Facebook came along I was one of the developers at the launch and what struck me was how there was this new form of persuasion. This mass interpersonal persuasion." Professor Fogg says the pivotal moment came when he watched an application on the site go from "literally zero to more than a million users in a week".
He recalls that it was to do with music sharing and buying tickets and that that was when he had his "oh my gosh moment". It was quickly followed by a light bulb moment.
It's Thursday afternoon and the sun is splitting the sky above the adobe-coloured Cordura Hall, the venue for Professor Fogg's Psychology of Facebook course. Outside there's a rag tag collection of people dodging the searing heat.
As we wait for the technology to click into place that allows another 700 students to tune in online, Professor Fogg declares that his goal is to help everyone to become a world class expert on the psychology of Facebook. But this is no one trick pony according to the Professor. "What we learn here isn't just relevant to Facebook. The psychology that drives Facebook relates to other online success stories, including those blockbusters yet to be invented." "There is something enduring about what we are studying," he declares, "whereas if you are learning how to programme a Facebook application, that then could change in 30 days from now. In fact it probably will; so that knowledge breaks."
Today the focus is on the use of profile pictures, the photograph on the front page of every Facebook entry.
The other strand to Professor Fogg's persuasion theory has to do with motivation and outcomes, questioning why users post a certain type of picture and why they constantly change them or not.
To illustrate his point he conducts a class experiment asking people to write out how they want to be regarded based purely on their profile mugshot. The findings are revealing: "Fun, outgoing, nature loving."
Professor Fogg says this random sample proves that behind even the innocent act of posting a profile picture, the psychology of persuasion in managing your image or the impression you give off is at play. And he stresses that albeit unconsciously, Facebook's unbridled success lies in getting users to to do the work for them with friends persuading friends to post pictures, comments, or upload applications. "I would say they were lucky and have been responsive to users but I don't think they are persuasion masterminds."
"Facebook right now stands out from the crowd. Can they continue? So far with its fifty million plus users they're doing a pretty good job."

The full story

Lugo is elected president of Paraguay

It is the first time if my lifetime that there is a change of the governing party in Paraguay.

Former Roman Catholic bishop Fernando Lugo has won Paraguay's presidential election, ending more than six decades of rule by the Colorado Party.
With results declared in most polling stations, Mr Lugo has 41% of the vote. His main rival, Blanca Ovelar of the Colorado Party, has 31% and former army chief Lino Oviedo 22%.
Mr Lugo brought together leftist unions, indigenous people and poor farmers into a coalition to form the centre-left Patriotic Alliance for Change.
Mr Lugo's victory brings to an end one of the longest periods of continuous rule by any party in the world - the Colorado Party has been in power since 1947. Inequality and corruption are persistent problems and poverty remains widespread, particularly in the rural areas, with many are forced to leave the country in search of work.
The switch in power is also the latest in a series of election triumphs by leftist, or centre-left, leaders in South America.


the full story

Avoiding painful memories

Low doses of a commonly-used anaesthetic could prevent the formation of painful memories, say researchers. The University of California scientists found that sevoflurane gas stopped patients remembering "emotive" images, New Scientist magazine reported. Scans showed it interfered with signals between two key areas of the brain.

It is hoped the work could eventually help eradicate rare instances of anaesthetised patients remembering the full horrors of their surgery. While anaesthetic drugs are mainly used to make patients fall unconscious before operations, their effects on the body are frequently far more complex.
The Californian researchers, writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, were investigating the outcome of much lower doses of the gas than those used prior to surgery. They treated their volunteers either with the anaesthetic, or a placebo gas, and then showed them a series of photographs. Some of these had everyday content, such as a cup of coffee, while others had images designed to provoke a far more powerful emotional response, such as a bloody severed human hand. One week later, the volunteers were asked to recall as many of the images as they could. Those given the dummy gas remembered approximately 29% of the powerful images, and 12% of the others. However, those who had received sevoflurane could remember just 5% of the "emotive" images and 10% of the others.

Brain scans revealed that the gas appeared to interfere with impulses between the amygdala and hippocampus, areas of the brain known for their involvement in the processing of emotion and memory. "This study reports the discovery of an agent and method for blocking human emotional memory," the researchers wrote. They added that understanding how drugs could stop this happening might provide clues to "intraoperative awareness" - rare instances in which the memory-disrupting qualities of anaesthetic drugs fail and patients can recall the experience of undergoing surgery. While this suggested that the gas could prevent the acquisition of new memories following painful events, it does not point to any effect on pre-existing memories, good or bad.

Dr Anthony Absalom, from Cambridge University, said that other anaesthetic drugs had been found to interfere with memory formation. "If a patient is having an uncomfortable or distressing procedure but not a general anaesthetic, sedative drugs not only make them more relaxed, but help them not to remember it afterwards. "The same is true in intensive care settings, where patients can spend long periods with tubes into their lungs." He said that it was unlikely that anaesthetic drugs could interfere with memories that had already been formed. However, he agreed that it could improve understanding of what happens when patients claim to remember operations even though they have been fully asleep. "Approximately one in 5,000 patients reports remembering details of operations, and it's a struggle to understand why - but this kind of research might help," he said.
The full story

Numerology

Why is it that intelligent people believe in such things?

Clinton's people

A very useful -and didactic- comment about Hillary's campaign, from the Daily Koss site (Bolds are mine).

The post-mortems of the Clinton campaign, if they are to be useful, will have to explain why Hillary Clinton allowed Mark Penn to become her Svengali (or Rasputin?). Furthermore, a full explanation of Bill and Hillary will need to explain why on her two signature executive endeavors—the Clinton health care effort and her Presidential campaign—they allowed people totally unsuited to the task to become Hillary's Svengalis.

As some will remember, the Clinton health care plan was headed up by business consulting guru Ira Magaziner. Brad DeLong had this to say about Magaziner's contribution to the Clinton health care debacle:

His second flaw was that he thought like a management consultant. A management consultant's principal goal is to win a debate in front of his employer, the senior decision maker, the "Principal." You win a debate by making intellectual arguments, controlling the flow of information to the senior decision maker, walling-off potential adversaries from the process, and winning the confidence of the Principal by telling him things that he likes to hear: that he is smart, that his goals can be achieved, that the nay-sayers just don't grasp the issues. But that's not how you develop a policy.

It's also not how you win an election. As a candidate or an office holder, you need people around you who can and will tell you what you don't want to hear, and to whom you'll listen when you don't like what you're hearing. She has tremendous talents, but based on her two biggest leadership challenges, it looks like Hillary Clinton is too susceptible to the charms of people who tell her what she wants to hear rather than what she needs to hear.

Axelrod and Penn

Yesterday's resignation of Clinton's chief strategist Mark Penn should raise questions as to what kind of activities of those who do polling are compatible with their polling work and which are the ones that create conflict of interest. I hope that this discussin will take place.

An interesting piece on Axelrod and Penn (chief strategists of Obama and Clinton), appeared on March 16 in the NYT.

...Axelrod's essential insight — the idea that has made him successful where others might have failed — is that the modern campaign really isn't about the policy arcana or the candidate's record; it's about a more visceral, more personal narrative.

Mr. Penn, on the other hand, is a pollster, and pollsters tend to look at campaigns as a series of dissectible data points that either attract voters or drive them away. Mrs. Clinton's relentless focus on pragmatism and specificity, as well as her willingness to shift slogans, are not simply a result of her own personality but also of Mr. Penn's strategic outlook, which values testable ideas and phrases over more sweeping imagery and themes.

Stanford Undergraduate Admissions 2008

The Office of Undergraduate Admission announced that 2,400 students have been selected for admission to Stanford University's Class of 2012. Of that total, 738 were admitted in December through the university's restrictive early action program.
The students were selected from 25,298 candidates, the largest applicant pool in Stanford's history.
"The competition for admission to Stanford this year was unprecedented," said Richard Shaw, dean of admission and financial aid. "Because of the large number of applicants, we were able to admit just 9.5 percent, the lowest admission rate in Stanford's 117-year history. As expected, the academic strengths, talent and impact outside the classroom of this group is astonishing. They are distinguished on a global scale."

A visit to Berkeley

As seen by the NYT.

By JOSHUA KURLANTZICK

Published: March 30, 2008

ANYONE who thinks that Berkeley is just a hotbed of political radicalism is in for a surprise. College Avenue, the town’s main drag, is packed with more hipsters with BlackBerrys than hippies with beards. The city’s revamped shops can compete label-to-label with SoHo’s sophisticated boutiques, and its restaurants match its bigger neighbor across San Francisco Bay. But the spirit of 1969 hasn’t completely gone away. Walk down Telegraph Avenue and along one block you’ll find activists for Free Tibet, patchouli-scented advocates of homeopathic medicine, and crusty purple-haired free-love followers, still eager to convert you to their cause.

Friday, 5 p.m.
1) BOOKMARK THIS
Old and new Berkeley, activists and high-tech workers, all head to Moe’s Books (2476 Telegraph Avenue; 510-849-2087; www.moesbooks.com). Founded in 1959 and piled high with used books, Moe’s is a reminder that Amazon can’t shut down all the little folks. You can wander its upper floors for hours, flipping through out-of-print tomes on everything from 1950s African history to kabbalah manuals. The store also has frequent in-store readings; check its Web site for coming dates.

8 p.m.
2) COMFORT SOBA
Berkeley’s food scene has blossomed well beyond student hangouts. Take, for example, the local favorite O Chamé (1830 Fourth Street; 510-841-8783). Its classy Japanese fusion fare is decidedly un-college-town, but the slightly beaten-up tables and unpretentious crowd make you feel like you’re eating in someone’s home. And dishes like onion pancakes, soba platters and grilled eel are as satisfying as Japanese comfort food gets. Reservations suggested. Dinner for two about $70.

10 p.m.
3) CINEMA PARADISE
The Pacific Film Archive (2625 Durant Avenue; 510-642-0808; www.bampfa.berkeley.edu), at the Berkeley Art Museum, offers one of the most eclectic moviegoing experiences in the Bay Area. At the archive’s theater across the street from the museum, you might find a French New Wave festival, followed by a collection of shorts from West Africa. The archive is particularly strong on Japanese cinema — and grungy-looking grad students.

Saturday, 8 a.m.
4) INTO THE WILD
This is California, so you’ll need to get up early to have prime walking paths to yourself. Wander through the main U.C. Berkeley campus, quiet at this time, and into the lush Berkeley hills overlooking the university. You’ll pass sprawling mansions that resemble Mexican estates, families walking tiny, manicured poodles, and students running off hangovers along the steep hills. It’s easy to get lost, so bring a map; Berkeley Path Wanderers Association (www.berkeleypaths.org) offers one of the best. If you want a longer walk, try nearby Tilden Park, a 2,000-acre preserve that includes several peaks and numerous trails open for mountain biking. Or head to the University of California Botanical Garden (200 Centennial Drive; 510-643-2755; botanicalgarden.berkeley.edu), which has more than 12,000 species of plants, including some rare flora.

Noon
5) VEGGIE BOUNTY
It’s tough choosing from the many farmers’ markets in the Bay Area, but for the real deal, head to the Saturday Berkeley Farmers’ Market (Center Street at Martin Luther King Way; open from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.). The Berkeley market is run by actual farmers and has a workingman’s vibe. Afterward, stop by the Berkeley Bowl Marketplace (2020 Oregon Street; 510-843-6929; www.berkeleybowl.com) for a comparison. A veritable fruit-and-vegetable heaven, the Bowl offers a staggering array of peaches, apples and rows of heirloom tomatoes — pudgy, lumpy, flavorful. Grab a roasted chicken and fresh beet salad at the deli counter, and snack on it while arguing with the various activists who congregate outside the Bowl’s doors.

3:30 p.m.
6) SNAKE PIT
Skip the Berkeley Art Museum, which has only a middling collection, and head instead to the East Bay Vivarium (1827-C Fifth Street; 510-841-1400; www.eastbayvivarium.com), perhaps the city’s strangest attraction. But don’t come with a fear of snakes: the massive gallery and store, which specializes in reptiles, amphibians and arachnids, is like a living nightmare. Strolling through the Vivarium, you’ll pass gargantuan boas and more scorpion species than you’d ever imagined.

5 p.m.
7) ROCK OUT
The best views on campus aren’t from the 10-story Evans Hall, but from Indian Rock Park. Wedged in a residential neighborhood along the city’s northeast, the park has large rock outcroppings that offer 360-degree views across Berkeley and Oakland, and over the Bay into San Francisco. For more spectacular sunset views, bring some rope and carabiners: the main outcropping, Indian Rock, is a practice site for rock climbers.

8 p.m.
8) GLOBAL STEW
International Boulevard in Oakland, 15 minutes south of Berkeley, certainly lives up to its name. In just a few blocks, you’ll pass Salvadoran wedding shops, taco trucks that could have driven from Mexico City, and vendors selling fresh pineapple covered in salt. There’s no end to the Mexican restaurants, but El Huarache Azteca (3842 International Boulevard; 510-533-2395) ranks among the most authentic. Specialties include moles, marinated cactus, tortas and even huitlacoche, a kind of mushroom that grows on ears of corn. A feast for two will come to less than $35.

11 p.m.
9) PUNK’D
Blakes on Telegraph (2367 Telegraph Avenue; (510) 848-0886; www.blakesontelegraph.com) was founded in 1940, when Berkeley was still known for jazz, not acid rock. The venerable nightclub is still kicking. And the live music performances are as eclectic as ever, with genres as diverse as punk and ska, to the jazz that got it all started. But first, make sure it’s not sorority or fraternity night, unless your idea of fun is watching college kids pound shots and scream at the top of their lungs.

Sunday 9 a.m.
10) BOOKISH BARISTAS
Like many college towns, Berkeley consumes caffeine and alcohol with equal gusto, so rest assured, Cole Coffee (6255 College Avenue in Oakland; 510-985-1958; www.colecoffee.com) takes its java very seriously. Besides having one of the largest coffee selections in the Bay Area — you can order up to 25 different types — its baristas talk about the latest Italian roast or African blend as if it were a Sonoma red. A warning: their attitude sometimes crosses the line from knowledgeable to know-it-all.

11 a.m.
11) FOURTH AND LONG

Fourth Street is not far from Telegraph, but it’s miles away in style. This trendy shopping district has become a chic, open-air mall with funky home décor, local art and designer fashions. Visit the Stained Glass Garden (1800 Fourth Street; 510-841-2200; www.stainedglassgarden.com) for elegantly curved glassware, funky dangly jewelry that resembles Calder mobiles, and kaleidoscope-like lampshades, with many products made by local artisans. After blowing too much money, reward yourself again with a double scoop of chocolate ice cream at nearby Sketch (1809A Fourth Street; 510-665-5650; www.sketchicecream.com) — ranked by many local foodies as the best dessert shop in the Bay Area.

THE BASICS
The closest airport to Berkeley is Oakland, about 16 miles away. JetBlue flies nonstop from Kennedy Airport to Oakland, with fares starting at about $359 for travel in April, according to a recent online search. More flights are available to San Francisco International Airport, roughly 25 miles away. Public transportation in the Berkeley area is limited, so rent a car.
The Claremont Resort and Spa (41 Tunnel Road; 510-843-3000; www.claremontresort.com) is by far the fanciest hotel in the area. Built in 1915 in the manner of an English estate, the hotel has a full-service spa, a lap pool and 279 rooms starting at $189.
For a historical alternative, stay at the Berkeley City Club (2315 Durant Avnue, 510-848-7800; www.berkeleycityclub.com), a social club built in 1927 and designed by Julia Morgan, the same architect who built the Hearst Castle. Rooms start at $125.
Cheaper rates can be found at the Rose Garden Inn (2740 Telegraph Avenue; 510-549-2145; www.rosegardeninn.com), housed in five buildings and decorated with every tchotchke imaginable. Rooms start at $129.
For coming campus activities to see (like concerts and speakers) or events to avoid (like parents’ weekend), visit U.C. Berkeley’s online calendar at www.berkeley.edu. For other activities, check The Daily Californian (www.dailycal.org), the university student paper, or The East Bay Express (www.eastbayexpress.com), a free weekly.