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"The Best Art In The World"
Joana Vasconcelos, Garden of Eden, 2010
Mixed Media
Courtesy of the artist and Haunch of Venison
Joana Vasconcelos: I Will Survive
Haunch of Venison, London
6 Burlington Gardens
London W1S 3ET
21 July through 25 September, 2010
There is something particularly good about coming out of a gallery and "feeling physically better" about life. Your head is lighter, a strange sense of euphoria pervades your limbs and your eyes feel like they have seen just about enough for the day. This is how I felt coming out of Joana Vasconcelos' exhibition at Haunch of Venison in London. I have to admit that I did not go to see the show with great expectations. The artist became popular on the back of the 2005 piece A Novia, a five-meter high sculpture of a chandelier made entirely out of tampons. Imposing, but not my favorite. However, the offering at Haunch of Venison is substantially different and so extremely varied as to dispel any doubt that Vasconcelos may be a flash in the pan. The opposite is indeed true. The exhibition feels like a retrospective of a mature and consumed artist who has traveled the art world far and wide.
There are two main factors that make Vasconcelos' exhibition engaging and exciting. One is the technical skill involved in her magical enveloping of cotton crochet, the other, is the eclectic taste for different materials: from fabric to ceramic, to plastic, tiles and rubber. Vasconcelos seems to be able to make convincing art out of any materials, and to do so with equal conviction and effectiveness almost every time.
The use of crochet in Vasconcelos' work is at once ironic, mesmerizing and disturbing. Crochet is the epitome of traditional femininity. Not only it is a craft that requires dexterity, ability, endurance and patience; crochet is a silent and contemplative practice that metaphorically signified "thinking". Anyone who has observed someone working with crochet must have noticed that through the speed of repetitional movements performed by the hands, the mind find space for wandering through a cathartic state. Also, let's not forget that crochet is implicitly un-cool. Or so it was before Vasconcelos claimed it from the hands of grandma in order to overlay it to her artistic context. How many teenagers have you recently seen on the train working their ways through the intricacies of the most complex crochet patterns? Probably none yet. It is therefore interesting to note that though Vasconcelos is not even 40, her dexterity in the crocheting is second to none.
Joana Vasconcelos, Reptila, 2010
Mixed Media
Courtesy of the artist and Haunch of Venison
Upon entering the main room at Haunch of Venison we encounter a baby-grand piano, deliciously covered by white cotton crochet. Everything is here overlaid by the threads and patterns; every little detail. You can check the edges, the underside, the hidden corners and nowhere you will find an uncovered surface or a messy and rough one. Vasconcelos' weave is smooth and homogeneous in quality, perfectly patterned and elastically stretched around the piano and its stool. Enveloping the object represents knowledge creation. Similarly to somebody's gaze, which could not otherwise be visually represented. The crochet threads draw trajectories that overlap those of the viewers' eye. The message is clear: viewing and knowledge are intertwined and the observed object does not effectively exist prior to the creation of knowledge of such object. The crochet is knowledge: knowledge of time and knowledge of space. The piano represents a play on virtuosism; covered in crochet it becomes unplayable, muted, but the complexity and intricacy of form of the threads equals those of a piano performance.
Vasconcelos casts her crochet on a range of manufactured objects to make a specific point. In another room she has crocheted a series of ceramic animals created by Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro. Here the creation of knowledge refers to nature and the world as a "real entity", however, like crochet, these animals are man-made and not real bodies, further questioning this knowledge creation. Her work challenges authorship by incorporating manufactured objects which are effectively imbedded in her own hand-made skillful and personal artifact. Where does her work start and that of someone else's begins? What may be created in a relatively short time (the manufactured object) and with the use of molds and machinery is juxtaposed with what is crafted by hand in a slower and more intimate way.
The artist also likes to create gigantic poliform objects made of fabric, that usually hang from the ceiling. In I Will Survive we are offered two different variants on this theme. One, titled Mary Poppins is made of different fabrics from around the world which have been stitched together in multicultural hybridity. The other, Victoria is a gothic looking hybrid of wasp, snake and woman which consistently changes shapes depending from what angle you look.
Joana Vasconcelos, Passerelle (Catwalk), 2010
Mixed Media
Courtesy of the artist and Haunch of Venison
In Passerelle (Catwalk) Vasconcelos uses ornamental ceramic dogs in order to address multiple concerns about our relationship with animals. The ceramic dogs in question belong to the family of kitsch objects that in Europe can be purchased in gardening centres as well as at refreshment stores in gas stations. Upon entering the gallery space, these dogs become symbols of our relationship with pure bred canines, referencing the manufacturing of perfect forms. The dogs hang from a mechanical overhead conveyor summoning the chilling echo of slaughterhouse processes. The conveyor lies still until a viewer pushes a foot pedal connected to the structure; as the machine is activated, the ceramic bodies begin to swing and hit each other. Noise of crashing ceramic invades the space; some bodies shatter, creating a field of dead animal fragments and shards on the floor underneath. I can't help but stand bemused in front of the result, puzzled by the divergence of the emotional responses that the vision provokes. What brings us to push the pedal? As the carousel stops, would we want to see more and push it again?
The show stealer is Garden of Eden a vast installation work which sees hundreds of fibre-optic kitsch flowers glowing in a deeply darkened room. The effect is breathtaking as it is simple. Suddenly we are in a magical garden in the middle of the night. The glow of the electric flowers guides the way, as the sound of the motors that make the fibre optic change in colour resembles that of crickets.
Of course not everything is excellent in this show and some of Vasconcelos experiments with different materials are not as successful and convincing as others. Most notably, an abstract panting titled Hyperconsumption is covered with plastic packaging in order to comment on our cultural reliance on surface in opposition to substance. In comparison to the complexity presented by its companions, this simplicity stands out, but not in a positive way. There are however only a handful of these 'too direct pieces' and all the others that do not fall in this category are quite memorable – and I do not use this word very often!
Giovanni Aloi is an art historian in modern and contemporary art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Sotheby's Institute of Art New York and London, and Tate Galleries. He has curated art projects involving photography and the moving image is a BBC radio contributor, and his work has been translated into many languages. Aloi is Editor in Chief of Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture www.antennae.org.uk.view all articles from this author


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What is the FoodASC Directory?
Thank you for stopping by the FoodASC Directory. We're so excited to have you!
If you have food allergies and sensitivities or know someone who does, we understand how frustrating it can be to find that safe bakery or accommodating restaurant. We know how helpless it can feel when you have a child with unique dietary needs, but helpful and available resources are few and far between.
The FoodASC Directory was created to fill that void. It's a place where you can find not only great products and services but also a supportive community to help you on this journey. FoodASC strives to empower parents so they can, in turn, empower their children.
Would you like to list your business or service with FoodASC? CLICK HERE
Our Founder
Dr. Donna DeCosta, FoodASC founder, is a wife and the mother of two sons with life-threatening food allergies. Even as a physician specializing in radiology, she knows the fear, uncertainty, and stress that can be associated with having loved ones with food allergies and other allergic diseases.
She knows the difficulty in navigating classroom events, birthday parties and holidays with family and friends while trying to keep your children safe and included. She knows the hesitation in dining out or trying different foods. She knows the difficulty of looking for helpful new products or safe and tasty recipes for her family.
In addition to her personal experience, she has spoken with numerous people as a FARE support group leader for over 16 years, blogger under Food Allergy Mom Doc since 2011 and while interviewing over 40 people for her book A Little bit CAN Hurt: The Shocking Truth About Food Allergies, Why We Should Care and What We Can Do.
Collectively, her experiences have taught her the importance of education, being prepared and being proactive.
FoodASC was Born
The idea for FoodASC came when Donna asked a mother of a child with food allergies what she most needed to help her family. She told Donna that she would like "a site like Angie's List" that had helpful products for her family with ratings and reviews from people like herself.
Shortly thereafter, FoodASC was born. FoodASC includes not only resources for people with food allergies but also with conditions that are often associated or possibly coexisting in the same household.
While this journey can be unpredictable at times, Donna realizes that she is not alone and neither are you. There are many people, resources, and services that can help improve the lives of people, like yourself and your loved ones living with food allergies and sensitivities, asthma, eczema and celiac disease.
Our Mission
The mission of FoodASC is to improve lives through valuable resources that empower and connect the food allergy and sensitivity communities.
Our vision is a world where food allergic and sensitive individuals lead unrestricted lives.
How to use the FoodASC Site
- Ask Food ASC:
If you are looking for a specific product, you can enter the name and click on "search" found on the home page. You may also click on "All categories" to view the categories and subcategories.
2. Browse by category:
If you'd like to discover and connect with great businesses, there are 9 main categories to search containing multiple listings. Click on the photos below and start exploring!
- Recipes:
Find delicious allergy-friendly and gluten-free recipes on the home page or if you prefer, filter by exclusion using the recipe button on the navigation bar. In both places, you will find exciting new recipes with print ready cards, like these. Click recipes below to start.
- Articles and Tips:
In Blog Posts & Articles, you will find pertinent articles to help inform you as a parent so that you can address your children's needs as well as guest blog posts, expert posts and spotlight posts of FoodASC members.
Click on posts below to get started.
5. FoodASC Inner Circle:
We invite you to join the FoodASC Inner Circle which is free and designed to promote connection and community. Be part of a larger supportive community and enjoy member benefits such as:
Exclusive deals from companies
Notification about blogs and articles
Timely information via newsletter publication
Ability to rate and review products
Access to our Private FB group
6. Connect on Social Media:
We are on Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and Pinterest (where we have lots of allergen and gluten free recipes boards as well as infographics, video and "Our favorite things" boards).
Do you have a business or blog?
Let us showcase your business or blog on the site and share with members who will benefit.
Click here to learn "How it works" and list your product or service today!
Enjoy browsing the site and discovering new recipes, restaurants, or research centers. Looking for medication carriers, food allergy, and gluten free bloggers or the newest APPS? You've come to the right place.
Get connected, join the community and enjoy your new discoveries!

subset: commoncrawl


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By Guy Mastrion
The consumer is not an idiot she is our medium.
We have a lot to learn from social media. The new and powerful insights gleaned from this environment offer us fresh perspectives on what matters most to the communities we serve, and what does and does not work for them.
Social media is democracy in action. If you spend even a few minutes on Flickr, and search diabetes, you will quickly realize that there is a community of highly engaged patients pouring out their hearts about everything from how hard they find it to be successfully compliant with their meds and glucose meters. We could not write better or more engaging dialogue and we shouldnt try.
A couple of things you will notice immediately: there is tremendous support for each other among this group of patients; and good products get lots of attention while the products that do not perform as expected quickly become minimized. What this means for marketers: good products will survive, but great products will thrive, and word spreads at lightning speed. It also means that advertising had best be truthful and not hyperbolic because patients have an Internet-based resource for information about a product or service beyond your company Web site, TV, and other promotions, with content that speaks from the heart.
Lets imagine a world in which we embrace social media for its heartfelt content and not fret over the desire to control and codify all communications related to a product or service; what we have is an on-going data feed about how any given product is really performing. This does a couple of important things for marketers and the FDA: first, it makes their jobs easier concerning observing real-world performance; and second, it extends their reach by enlisting the help of social media in the reporting of issues.
For more on social media and the reporting of adverse events see the Nielsen online paper:
Listening to Consumers in a Highly Regulated Environment
How Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Can LeverageConsumer-Generated Media
Assuming that a product is safe and delivers an approvable level of efficacy, it will live and die in the market on its ability to perform in the real world. The big difference now is that well have almost immediate feedback from consumers to doctors to pharmacists to marketers, and of course the FDA. There is no place left to hide and creative selling will not save a product that does not deliver.
Patients are at the heart of this prescription
Patients benefit from this level of discourse. Armed with feedback from other patients, they are better prepared for more meaningful dialogue with physicians and caregivers, their expectations are more in-line with reality, and they have a support group that is just a few clicks away. Doctors and other healthcare providers, marketers, and the FDA can drop in on these conversations and possibly even sponsor them. Listening carefully and being cautious not to overstep the boundaries of social media,we will learn first-hand what is and is not working.
Social media is emotional media
Compared to traditional advertising and marketing of consumer products like automobiles and packaged goods, pharma marketing has always been slightly veiled. A products total efficacy and resulting level of success has only been available to a relatively small number of people and the level of information and access to that information has been limited. DTC advertising began to change that and we all found ourselves suddenly aware of things, such as side effects, but the deep information was still hard to reach. The Internet and Web sites opened up more of that information to consumers, but it was mostly technical and promotional information and an onslaught of fair balance info that taught most of us to stop listening.
How many of you remember the Yugo, the little car with the big promises from Yugoslavia? This car was going to help rescue America from earlier economic disasters of fuel shortages and a down economy. The Yugo launched in America with great fanfare, a fantastic PR campaign built expectations, and a really wonderful ad campaign created a great personality for this little car. Many Americans could not wait to get their hands on it; and, once they did, those same Americans were furious to learn the hard way that the car was a complete disaster on wheels. Because this was a product of massive consumer potential and the auto plays so heavily in the lives of most Americans, the true news of how bad this car performed spread rapidly through the media. Within weeks of launch, the little Yugo was dead in the American market. Great marketing will not save a bad product. A brand is a promise and when the promise of that brand is not fulfilled in the market, trust is lost and consumers turn their backs.
Social media has the potential to be the leveler of pharmaceutical products and healthcare services. Even though the relative market size for any given therapy may pale by comparison to the automobile market, we now have a media that treats the news about the quality of these products as equal in importance, with a global reach at the speed of light. For smart marketers with good products, the emotive power of social media will be a positive force of change.
Trust has always been at the heart of all effective advertising, it is no different today
In their first book, Trust Agents, Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, give us powerful insights and strong building blocks to begin our own process of harnessing social media and digital technologies to establish trust for our brands.
Social media offers us the opportunity to weave together, for our industry and our brands, a powerful network of trust built on real emotion and insight. This will not simply help us do a better job as marketers, but will hold the potential to help us be betterpartners with healthcare practitioners and their patients, and maybe, just maybe, improve patient outcomes through a greater sense of trust and shared responsibility.
What do you think? Do you see the potential in social media to help improve healthcare?


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Visa information USA
Please note, you need to apply through one of the 16 designated US aupair agencies https://j1visa.state.gov/participants/how-to-apply/sponsor-search/?program=Au%20Pair if you wish to become an au pair in the USA! Furthermore, you need to be prepared to stay with your host family for at least 12 months. This minimum stay is defined by the J-1 VISA Exchange Visitor Programme for au pairs.
In order to legally work as an au pair in the USA, you will need this J-1 visa. You can only apply for this visa through one of the designated agencies mentioned above. These agencies (sometimes also called sponsors) charge au pairs varying amounts of money for their services in obtaining the visa and meeting the other official requirements of the the US au pair program.
Firstly use Almondbury au pair & nanny agency to find a suitable host family
Agree on one of the https://j1visa.state.gov/participants/how-to-apply/sponsor-search/?program=Au%20Pair with your host family.
Together with your host family, contact the agency which you have selected together and present yourselves as a so-called "pre-match". The agency will then be responsible for the subsequent legal and official matters of the au pair placement.
You will then need to process your application with your own agency to fulfil the visa requirements.
This typically involves a number of steps that are mandated by the J-1 visa requirements for au pairs. The designated agency conducts a personal interview and checks at least three written references from non-family sources which you will have to provide. You will also be asked to submit a medical report showing that you can successfully participate in the au pair program. Furthermore, the agency will check if you have any sort of criminal record and also will have you take a psychometric test to determine your psychological fitness to be an au pair in the USA.
You or the agency you and your host family are working with will send your visa application to the U.S. embassy or consulate in your home country. Before your visa is granted you will need to have an interview at the embassy or consulate. Your visa will only be granted once you have a definite au pair placement through your agency.
Your au pair stay in the U.S. will begin with a five-day orientation program conducted by the agency that is sponsoring you. At the end of the orientation you will meet your host family.
More information here All regulations defined by the U.S. Department of State on the au pair programme in the USA


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Tribute to Women 2013
The 21st Tribute to Women of Achievement of Orange County was held on Wednesday, May 8, 2013 at Anthony's Pier 9 in New Windsor, NY.Read More
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Last updated at Mon, 28 Oct 2019 17:44:09 GMT
We primarily hear the term "secondary effects" after natural disasters: "an earthquake causes a gas line to rupture and a fire ensues" or "a volcano erupts and the sulfur cloud shuts down all flights across the Atlantic", but there are a lot of positive secondary effects out there. If developed properly, cloud applications bring with them secondary effects of singular events to benefit the customer community.
Since I work for a security company, I cannot write a blog post about cloud applications without addressing the obvious concern so many people have.
Cloud Security
The first question that every security professional needs to ask a vendor when considering a cloud application is "how have you secured your cloud?" because it is just proper due diligence. The first step that Rapid7 took when building a security product in Amazon Web Services (AWS) was to lay out the strategy to make it secure and scalable, so we did a great deal of research and recognized that if you go to the necessary lengths (as we did), a cloud application can be just as secure as an on-premise app. Despite this forethought, I still run into a great deal of security pros that would prefer to have the data reside on one of their servers so they can truly control it. This is a natural feeling that we have in the security industry because we have been taught to be paranoid and trust no one, but I liken it to why people feel safer driving a car than flying on a plane controlled by someone else, despite the fact that a pilot specializes and agonizes over flying the way that we do over securing your data. The next time you discover that a rogue server was set up in your organization without informing the security team, remember that security is the primary focus of our InsightIDR development team. Please always ask your vendors to walk you through the steps they have taken to secure your data in the cloud, so that you can take advantage of the secondary effects I will describe below.
Secondary Effect #1 - Quick reaction to change
One of the most common pains that I hear from incident response teams (internal or MSSP) is keeping the data flowing into their SIEM. The SIEM vendors are not to blame here; whether you are talking about firewalls, VPNs, or whatever other devices containing valuable information, the export formats vary widely and change without notice. The worst possible scenario here is that a concerning event occurs and the investigation warrants a look at firewall logs to quickly learn what happened, but those logs have not been reaching the SIEM since the last firewall software update (silently) changed the logging format.
Now, InsightIDR does not have the Nostradamus-like power to predict which vendor will change formats without notice, but it can take your team out of the silo that makes every team feel the same pain. Let me explain: once a single InsightIDR customer has set up, say, a Fortinet Fortigate firewall as an event source, the parser and collection method are there for all new customers to simply choose from a drop-down list and connect in seconds via syslog, a shared folder, or otherwise. This means that your team does not have to remember how they set up parsing of Fortinet logs at their last organizations or ever even see the logs in raw form. This helps in initial setup time, but it really helps when the firewall data suddenly stops reaching the InsightIDR cloud because the parsing rules have changed. One of Rapid7's customers will get a notification that data has stopped flowing, but the quick reaction of the InsightIDR team to update the parsing logic for this event source means that we will typically support the new format before other IR teams end up with a gap in data. The more organizations in the community, the lower the likelihood that your team even notices that log formats have changed.
Secondary Effect #2 - Detection that learns faster than any single person
Though it is not a pain as frequently voiced as changing log formats, I have heard a great deal of security leaders describe the challenge to find seasoned incident response experts. Typically, it comes in statements like "I worked at company X when they were breached and helped the team build detection for the techniques used there" or "I have a fantastic ArcSight guy and I don't know what I would do without him". Neither of these statements is a bad thing, but not every organization with security concerns can make those claims. In fact, I consistently hear that it is challenging for CSOs to fill the openings that are already approved.
This is where InsightIDR's customer base gets the benefit of what I call a collective mind. We generate a lot of our detection capabilities with our customers, whether it is simply a customer saying "I ran X with WCE and didn't get an alert" or Rapid7 creating a new alert and finding a few customers that want to test it out and make sure it brings value. If attackers used a certain trick to stay hidden in 2011, we will build a way to detect that, but more importantly, if they use a new technique in 2014 and a single person (Rapid7 employee, a customer, or even a friend) learns of it, the entire InsightIDR customer base will get the benefit of detecting that action in the future. Attackers are sharing techniques with one another, so our only possible way to keep up is to do the same in our detection.
Secondary Effect #3 - User behavior analytics across a larger dataset
There are a lot of "security analytics" companies emerging these days, so I feel it important to point out the biggest challenge you will have with the on-premise solutions: they only analyze the data in the silos I mentioned above. Reducing noise and correlating the right disparate data for detection across various sources grows slowly when there is no collective mind on which research and proactive analysis can be performed. It assumes that a security analytics solution already knows what data is important before install and it is not important to rapidly learn new use cases and adapt. This is why we believe it was necessary to build in the cloud, despite the natural resistance that some security teams still have.
If you want to take advantage of the secondary effects at your organization, please start the process and request a demo. We will happily step through the way by which we have secured our cloud.


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Olefins-selective asymmetric carbon molecular sieve hollow fiber membranes for hybrid membrane-distillation processes for olefin/paraffin separations
AuthorsXu, Liren
Rungta, Meha
Brayden, Mark K.
Martinez, Marcos V.
Stears, Brien A.
Barbay, Gregory A.
Koros, William J.
Permanent link to this recordhttp://hdl.handle.net/10754/599031
MetadataShow full item record
AbstractIn this paper, the development of asymmetric carbon molecular sieve (CMS) hollow fiber membranes and advanced processes for olefin/paraffin separations based on the CMS membranes are reported. Membrane-based olefin/paraffin separations have been pursued extensively over the past decades. CMS membranes are promising to exceed the performance upper bound of polymer materials and have demonstrated excellent stability for gas separations. Previously, a substructure collapse phenomenon was found in Matrimid ® precursor derived CMS fiber. To overcome the permeance loss due to the increased separation layer thickness, 6FDA-DAM and 6FDA/BPDA-DAM precursors were selected as potential new precursors for carbon membrane formation. Defect-free asymmetric 6FDA-DAM and 6FDA/BPDA-DAM hollow fibers were successfully fabricated from a dry-jet/wet-quench spinning process. Polymer rigidity, glass-rubber transition and asymmetric morphology were correlated. CMS hollow fiber membranes produced from 6FDA-polymer precursors showed significant improvement in permeance for ethylene/ethane and propylene/propane separations. Further studies revealed that the CMS membranes are olefins-selective, which means the membranes are able to effectively separate olefins (ethylene and propylene) from paraffins (ethane and propane). This unique feature of CMS materials enables advanced hybrid membrane-distillation process designs. By using the olefins-selective membranes, these new processes may provide advantages over previously proposed retrofitting concepts. Further applications of the membranes are explored for hydrocarbons processes. Significant energy savings and even reduced footprint may be achieved in olefins production units. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.
CitationXu L, Rungta M, Brayden MK, Martinez MV, Stears BA, et al. (2012) Olefins-selective asymmetric carbon molecular sieve hollow fiber membranes for hybrid membrane-distillation processes for olefin/paraffin separations. Journal of Membrane Science 423-424: 314–323. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.memsci.2012.08.028.
SponsorsThe authors gratefully thank The Dow Chemical Company for providing funds and technical supports. The authors also acknowledge the additional support provided by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). The authors also thank Dr. Junqiang Liu for help in measuring the butane isomers transport properties in 6FDA-DAM polymer hollow fiber membranes.
PublisherElsevier BV
JournalJournal of Membrane Science


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Welcome 2016! Its hard to believe its here because I hardly had time to reflect on this past year. We were visiting family all last week. Here's our first week . . .
My nephew was determined to arrive in 2015. He was due in Feburary but my sister went into labor on December 27th. Carson was born on the 30th – 6 weeks early. He is doing well and so is his mom.
My littlest had his first helping of Grandma's spaghetti (and his second and his third).
Grandpa always has fun with the boys.
We ate lots of sweets. I am now paying for it.
Brooks found a pelt of a fox at my cousin's house. I think he was pretending to be a cowboy or he was trying to scare his brother with it.
Loaded in the car. We were still happy to be together at this point.
The older boys went to a basketball with their Grandpa.
Capitol in route to see my nephew.
All the cousins. Silas was crying in this picture because he was cold but if you glance quickly you don't even notice.
Happy New Year! Here's hoping I continue my weekly blogging.


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Ryan Tracy is a doctoral candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. He has published fiction at KGB Bar Lit, poetry in California Quarterly, Calliope, and CafeMo.com, and criticism in The American Reader, The New York Press, Performa Magazine and The Brooklyn Rail. He has also completed an unpublished first novel, Passing Affliction. Unpublished poetry includes the collections Pastelograms and Tender Bottoms. Ryan holds degrees in Gender Studies and Music Composition. Originally from rural Oregon and northern California, Ryan has lived in New York City since 2000, and now shares his time between NYC and upstate NY.
Mercy, ingenuity, nuance, complex truths, guts and honor still matter! Join us in proclaiming so by purchasing, or giving the gift of, The New Engagement in print.
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive."
~ James Baldwin
Help us spread the ethos of compassion and understanding by joining our social media networks and sharing generously!
Flash Fiction Contest
On May 1st, we announced the winners of our Flash Fiction Contest: Thomas Garcia (1st), Rick Krizman (2nd), and Rios de la Luz (3rd). Read more.
The James Baldwin Literature Prize
It is with great pleasure that we announce the winner of The James Baldwin Literature Prize of $1,000 to Hafsa Musa. Read more.
The New Engagement endeavors a novel approach to discovering, introducing, and showcasing writers, artists, and filmmakers, by providing them digital and print platforms, while encouraging and supporting their social-consciousness.


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New Business Owners: What to Include on Your Security Checklist
As a business owner, there's an unfortunate truth you have to face – crime is a reality. This means you have to remain on guard and vigilant about security for your commercial property, your employees and your office. If you have recently become a business owner, there are an overwhelming number of things you have […] Read more


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Mostly Economics wishes all its visitors a very happy new year. May 2010 bring all prosperity and success.
Keep visiting the site, sending your suggestions and posting comments.
Mostly Economics wishes all its visitors a very happy new year. May 2010 bring all prosperity and success.
Keep visiting the site, sending your suggestions and posting comments.
I had posted about this rich reading list on financial crisis compiled by Menzie Chinn.
In Chinn's reading list, I would suggest one shoulld see this short note by Mark Jickling. It is a nice summary of most of the the causes of the financial crisis. It lists the causes, their explanations, rebuttals for the explained causes and references.
Very useful. Can be used by students for presentations on the crisis.
Laurence Kotlikoff of Boston Univ wrote this paper in 2006.
Is the U.S. bankrupt? Or to paraphrase the Oxford English Dictionary States at the end of its resources, exhausted, stripped bear, destitute, bereft, wanting in property, or wrecked in consequence of failure to pay its creditors?
Many would scoff at this notion. They'd point out that the country has never defaulted on its debt; that its debt-to-GDP (gross domestic product) ratio is substantially lower than that of Japan and other developed countries; that its long-term nominal interest rates are historically low; that the dollar is the world's reserve currency; and that China, Japan, and other countries have an insatiable demand for U.S. Treasuries.
Others would argue that the official debt reflects nomenclature, not fiscal fundamentals; that the sum total of official and unofficial liabilities is massive; that federal discretionary spending and medical expenditures are exploding; that the United States has a history of defaulting on its official debt via inflation; that the government has cut taxes well below the bone; that countries holding U.S. bonds can sell them in a nanosecond; that the financial markets have a long and impressive record of mispricing securities; and that financial implosion is just around the corner.
This paper explores these views from both partial and general equilibrium perspectives.
The findings:
The third section turns to economic measures of national insolvency, namely, measures of the fiscal gap and generational imbalance. This partial-equilibrium analysis strongly suggests that the U.S. government is, indeed, bankrupt, insofar as it will be unable to pay its creditors, who, in this context, are current and future generations to whom it has explicitly or implicitly promised future net payments of various kinds.
The world, of course, is full of uncertainty. The fourth section considers how uncertainty changes one's perspective on national insolvency and methods of measuring a country's long-term fiscal condition. The fifth section asks whether immigration or productivity improvements arising deepening can ameliorate the U.S. fiscal condition. While immigration shows little promise, productivity improvements can help, provided the government uses higher productivity growth as an opportunity to outgrow its fiscal problems rather than perpetuate them by effectively indexing expenditure levels to the level of productivity.
He suggests reforms in 3 areas:
The final section offers three radical policies to eliminate the nation's enormous fiscal gap and avert bankruptcy. These policies would replace the current tax system with a retail sales tax, personalize Social Security, and move to a globally budgeted universal healthcare system implemented via individual-specific health-insurance vouchers. The radical stance of these proposals reflects the critical nature of our time. Unless the United States moves quickly to fundamentally change and restrain its fiscal behavior, its bankruptcy will become a foregone conclusion.
A good radical read on state of US public finances. He estimates the total fiscal gap to be USD 65.9 trillion including social security, medicaid etc payments. This was in 2006. I am sure the fiscal gap has increased much more because of the current crisis. There have been many studies lately on US public debt but I don't really know whether they estimate all possible costs of US government.
Waiting for an update from Kotlikoff on the same.
WSJ Blog has interviews of 2 econs on future of American capitalism:
There is one common question on state of US brand of capitalism and both agree that it is going to be discredited.
Has the decade of the 2000s — with the downfall of Enron, the bursting of the Internet bubble and the Great Panic — discredited the U.S. model of capitalism?
Raghuram Rajan: The rhetoric has changed considerably. People don't say that the U.S. is the place to emulate any more. The U.S. used to be pretty good at giving lectures in the past, so now of course other countries are taking the chance to thumb their nose at them.
Some people are concluding that capitalism doesn't work. The problem is that they don't have anything reasonable to replace it with. To say that we needed more regulation is not to say that markets don't work.
Jeremy Stein: The risk is that the U.S. model will be discredited more broadly than it ought to be. The lesson that we learn is that we need to do certain things to reform financial markets, but we don't want to throw out the whole model. Our labor markets are less constrained than European labor markets, we have more IPOs per capita than most other countries. A lot of that stuff remains a strength of the United States.
What is the next best alternative? There are no answers. This crisis is making us rethink on nearly everything in economics…
Deepak Parikh yet again. He is perhaps the only one who talks about the unfair practices in housing market in India. Mint has an interview of the HDFC Chairman.
I didn't know how to summarise this paper in the title of the post.
I just finished reading this paper from Niall Fergusson. It is such an amazing paper and a must read. He begins the paper saying:
We are living through a paradox—or so it seems. Since September 11, 2001, according to a number of neo-conservative commentators, America has been fighting World War III (or IV, if you like to give the Cold War a number). For more than six years, these commentators have repeatedly drawn parallels between the "War on Terror" that is said to have begun in September 2001 and World War II. Immediately after 9/11, Al Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups were branded "Islamofascists". Their attack on the World Trade Center was said to be our generation's Pearl Harbor. In addition to coveting weapons of mass destruction and covertly sponsoring terrorism, Saddam Hussein was denounced as an Arab Hitler. The fall of Baghdad was supposed to be like the liberation of Paris. Anyone who opposed the policy of pre-emption was an appeaser. And so on.
Yet throughout this period of heightened terrorist threats and overseas military interventions, financial markets have displayed a remarkable insouciance. The U.S. stock market was affected only momentarily by the attacks of 9/11. True, between September 10 and September 21, 2001, the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined by as much as 14 per cent. Within just over two months, however, the Dow had regained its pre-9/11 level.
He says it is amazing how financial markets discount geopolitical events and don't anticipate it. It is only when war events turn true and sour, do markets start chickening out.
History suggests that financial markets do not always anticipate major geopolitical crises. Part II of this paper shows how the majority of investors in London, then the world's biggest capital market, were caught unawares by the escalation of the conflict in the Balkans in July 1914—so much so that there was a disastrous liquidity crisis in most financial centers even before war had broken out.
However, the markets learn the lessons with certain conditions:
Part III shows how the origins of the First World War have been revealed only with the benefit of hindsight; at the time, they were largely invisible. The same, however, cannot be said of the Second World War. Investors learned from the searing experiences of 1914-23, which saw a wide range of European currencies and securities drastically reduced in value as a result of inflation and outright default. They therefore sought to adjust their portfolios defensively as soon as they saw a renewed risk of world war. Indeed, to judge by securities price data, the City of London (like other markets, notably those in Scandinavia) began positioning itself for another major conflict some years before it actually began. If 1914 was a bolt from the blue, 1939 seemed long overdue.
What are the lessons?
The first point is that it is as hard for investors as for generals to learn lessons from a previous war. Knowing what had happened to various asset classes after 1914 did not make it easier to know when to sell those that had lost out or buy those that had fared well. Nor was there any guarantee that the next war would have the same financial impact as the previous war, because of changes in military technology and government regulation.
As part V argues, these same problems arose again for investors after 1945. Simply because the Cold War never became truly "hot" does not mean that the probability of a nuclear war between the superpowers was always zero. Investors once again tried to learn from history when the Korean War broke out, acting on the assumption that it might have similar effects to World War II (for example on commodity prices).
Twelve years later, by contrast, financial markets evinced only short-lived and mild anxiety at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, reflecting a realization on the part of investors that a world war in the age of the hydrogen bomb would have incalculable consequences against which it would be futile to hedge. In the remaining three decades of the Cold War, the superpowers' consistent success in settling their disputes by diplomatic means (or proxy conventional wars) reassured investors that their rivalry would not erupt into a hot war, so that markets became progressively less sensitive to international crises.
If financial market data and commentary are reliable guides, then, this is roughly how expectations of war are formed: retrospectively more than prospectively, though with some allowance for changes in the nature of warfare. Excellent stuff. The linkages of war with financial markets is something I hve never read before. What amazing lessons
Super stuff from Ferguson. What insights on thinking about geopolitical risks and impact on financial markets.
What are the risks in current times?
A period such as our own, of sporadic terrorism and small conventional wars, might therefore be expected to encourage the belief that future wars will also be small, with inconsequential financial effects.
The seeming indifference of today's financial markets to political risk should therefore be regarded not as evidence that the world will likely avoid a major conflict in the foreseeable future, but merely as evidence that the world has avoided a major conflict in the recent past. Given the relative youth of most employees in the financial sector, and the relative shortness of most senior executives' careers, "recent" may be taken to mean approximately the past twenty-five years.
A major conflict would strike this generation of bankers and fund managers much as the war of 1914 struck their predecessors: like "a bolt from the blue".
Well, well, well…..
Read the whole thing. Very rich…Is a nice revision of World War History as well.
On reading the paper, I just recalled this previous post where I wondered whether financial markets see the emerging risks in the Indian political system as well? We can see the similarity in Indian situation as well. If you read any India based newspaper politics section would suggest huge risks but financial section would suggest "All is well". Things in political only look worse going from hereon and still nothing seems to matter financial markets. Can this continue? Will something hit Indian financial markets – a bolt from the blue? I hope not but the possibility cannot be ignored. Atleast Fergusson's paper tells you why it cannot be ignored.
Prospect Magazine has named the 25 brains who have contributed to the public conversation in this financial crisis. Let me give away the winner right away- Simon Johnson.
Who has contributed best to the "public conversation" during these turbulent times?
The financial crisis has destroyed both wealth and received wisdom. The idea that prices are always right and markets self-correct is fatally challenged. Even Alan Greenspan admits that the "whole intellectual edifice" of the efficient market hypothesis collapsed in the summer of 2008. The financial establishment is in a state of deep confusion. As the FT's Gillian Tett put it in September's Prospect: it is like "a priest who has lost faith in the Bible, but still has to go to church." But this is not a bad thing, for it has opened up new ways of thinking about markets, institutions and the all-important cause of financial reform.
Unfamiliar voices have come to prominence, aided by a new wave of financial bloggers eager to push fresh ideas. But who has made the most impact? Prospect assembled a panel of experts to draw up a list of leading "public intellectuals" of the financial crisis in 2009 and then decide on the most important. Our criteria were simple. Anyone who had made an impact on policy with their ideas, or who had changed the "public conversation" was a candidate.
The panel sifted hundreds of names, with an unavoidable bias towards Britain and the US, but felt the most important contributions had been in financial reform—those trying to work out what to do next. The crisis has laid a staggering financial burden on the world, with some $14 trillion propping up US and EU banks. We cannot afford another one. Moreover, we urgently need a new regulatory philosophy. Are liquid markets always good? Is complexity in financial services harmful? Can finance firms stop "herding," creating wild booms and busts?
After considering so many names, came the final list.
We considered all of this, and gradually whittled the names down to a shortlist of just 25 (see facing page), and then a top three. In reverse order, the bronze medal went to Adair Turner, chairman of Britain's Financial Services Authority, who bravely questioned the social usefulness of some financial activity, and called for regulators to force banks to hold more capital against risky trades, cutting their profitability. Next, silver went to Avinash Persaud, a respected analyst who spotted nine years ago the dangerous interaction between firms "herding" and new risk management techniques. During 2009 he has been arguing for new "macro-prudential" regulation to stop what he discovered a decade ago.
But there was a clear winner. He is Simon Johnson, an economist at the prestigious Peterson Institute in Washington, DC, who has been leading the argument against overmighty banking. His ideas are well grounded in theory, but he has also done more than any academic to popularise his case: writing articles, a must-read blog, and appearing tirelessly on television.
This is thoroughly deserved. I think Simon Johnson will come tops in most of such lists. I just took a relook at FP's top 100 thinkers list and am surprised not to find Johnson's name there at all.
His write up on financial oligarchy has changed the way we think about financial sector completely. He has followed the article with numerous write-ups and follow-ups on how things are only getting worse and unless we reform it, more crisis are going to follow. This coming from a ex-Chief economist of IMF is itself quite revolutionary and has goven it the necessary weight.
BIS Economists Blaise Gadanecz and Kaushik Jayaram have written a superb literature survey on measures of financial stability.
This paper is a modest contribution to review the work done towards developing quantitative measures of financial stability and their use in published FSRs. The paper is structured as follows. In Section I, we look at definitions of financial stability and what they mean for identifying key variables, which we discuss in Section II. In Section III, we review how these individual variables might be combined into composite indicators for the purposes of monitoring key sectors of the economy and assigning critical values. In Section IV, we provide a comparative view of the main variables and indicators used in selected FSRs. In Section V we discuss recent attempts to construct a single aggregate measure of financial stability. The final section concludes.
Very useful primer on financial stability measures. Not surprisingly, lots of issues still remain despite loads of work. The concept of financial stability itself is in unstable stages.
I had mentioned previously what a rich resource was NBER Reporter, a NBER publication.
The Dec-09 Reporter carries a very useful summary of the research done in NBER's Corporate Finance Program. It is written by Raghuram Rajan who directs the program. Usually, the reporter carries a survey of the program but Rajan prefers to focus on the papers that help us understand the current crisis.
The NBER's Program on Corporate Finance was founded in 1991, and has initiated some very promising avenues of research since then. Narrowly interpreted, corporate finance is the study of the investment and financing policies of corporations. Because firms are at the center of economic activity, and almost any topic of concern to economists –from microeconomic issues like incentives and risk sharing to macroeconomic issues such as currency crises — affects corporate financing and investment, it is however increasingly difficult to draw precise boundaries around the field.
The range of subjects that Corporate Finance Program members have addressed in their research reflects this broad scope. Rather than offering a broad brush survey of all the work currently being done, however, I thought it would be most useful to focus on what our researchers have contributed to the analysis of the ongoing financial crisis. Even here, I have had to be selective, given the large number of papers on this subject in the last two years. I should also note that even prior to the crisis, Corporate Finance Program members had done important work on such topics as credit booms, illiquidity, bank runs, and credit crunches. This work laid much of the foundation for the more recent analyses. In the interests of space, though, I will not survey that earlier work.
He says there is some consensus on causes of the crisis:
A number of papers offer an overview of the crisis (Brunnermeier, 14612; Diamond and Rajan, 14739; Gorton, 14398). There is some consensus on its proximate causes: 1) the U.S. financial sector financed low-income borrowers who wanted to buy houses, and it raised money for such lending through the issuance of exotic new financial instruments; 2) banks seemed very willing to take risks during this time, and a significant portion of these instruments found their way, directly or indirectly, into commercial and investment bank balance sheets; 3) these investments were largely financed with short-term debt. But what were the more fundamental reasons for these proximate causes?
He then explores papers which look at these causes. He covers papers in 7 broad heads:
Very good literature survey from Rajan. I mean you have all the major papers that are cited to explain the crisis in one place. And then you know what each paper attempts to say.
Highly recommended reading.
Ross Gittins, Herald's Economics Editor, has written a very nice article on principles of economics (HT: Greg Mankiw). He says there are 10 broad principles of economics:
Here's a never-to-be-repeated holiday special: all you need to know about economics in 10 easy steps. They come courtesy of the best-selling introductory economics textbook by Gregory Mankiw of Harvard University (with Joshua Gans and Stephen King co-authors of the Australian edition).
Economics is the study of how society manages its scarce resources, where "scarce" means there are fewer resources than we'd like to be able to use.
The 10 principles are divided into 3 sections. Here is a further summary of the 10 principles:
Notice how principles move from 'within individual' to 'between individuals' to 'country level economics'.
Very useful summary of principles of economics.
I first learnt of Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI) via a Barry Eichengreen paper.
Wikipedia offers some light:
The Chiang Mai Initiative (CMI) is an initiative under the ASEAN+3 framework which aims for creation of a network of Bilateral Swap Arrangements (BSAs) among ASEAN+3 countries. After 1997 Asian Financial Crisis member countries started this initiative to manage regional short-term liquidity problems and to facilitate the work of other international financial arrangements and organizations like IMF.
John Taylor has a super post on the topic. He says:
People ask how I think introductory economics teaching should change as a result of the financial crisis. It's an important question. At the upcoming American Economic Association Annual Meetings, my colleague Bob Hall, next AEA President and Program Director, has included on panel on the topic.
Clearly we need to include more on financial markets, but based on my experience teaching in the two-term introductory course at Stanford, I think the single most important change would be to stop splitting microeconomics and macroeconomics into two separate terms. The split has been common in economics teaching since the first edition of Paul Samuelson's textbook, which put macro first. Many courses now have micro in the first term and then macro in the second.
But regardless of the order now used, I think a reform that integrates micro and macro throughout is worth considering. There were arguments for doing this before the crisis, including the fact that in research and graduate teaching the tools of micro have now been integrated into macro.
I have always found the distinction between macro and micro very confusing.
Prof Taylor further explains:
The financial crisis clinches the case for full integration in my view. The crisis is the biggest economic event in decades and it can only be understood with a mix of micro and macro. To understand the crisis one must know about supply and demand for housing (micro), interest rates that may have been too low for too long (macro), moral hazard (micro), a stimulus package (macro) aimed at such things as health care (micro), a new type of monetary policy (macro) that focuses on specific sectors (micro), debates about the size of the multiplier (macro), excessive risk taking (micro), a great recession (macro), and so on. It you look at the 22 items that the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission has been charged by the Congress to examine, you'll see that it is a mix of micro and macro. Defining the first term as micro and the second term as macro, or visa versa, is no longer the best way to allocate topics.
This is precisely the problem with teaching finance without much attention to economics. They are not mutually exclusive subjects!
Prof Taylor is already trying to usher changes this time at Stanford. He also points to challenges that text-books are still carry micro-macro distinction. But it is not hard to mix and match. Read the post for details.
I just noticed RBI's website on its left side informs of two upcoming research conferences.
The Reserve Bank of India which commenced its operations on April 1, 1935 has entered 75th year of establishment. In the Platinum Jubilee Year, the Reserve Bank is organising a series of knowledge-sharing events such as seminars, special memorial lectures, 'Down the Memory Lane' meetings as well as various 'Outreach' programmes. These initiatives are aimed at making the Reserve Bank a more responsive, relevant, professional and effective public institution. The foremost in these events is the inauguration of a new series of biennial International Research Conferences to be organised by the Bank regularly.
The Conference on "Challenges to Central Banking in the Context of Financial Crisis" is the first in the series and is topical as the global economy braves an extraordinary challenge today. The current global recession, a fall-out of the unprecedented financial crisis, is the most serious economic crisis that the world has faced since the Great Depression of the 1930s. While green shoots of revival are evident and the recovery may well strengthen in due course, the role of central banks in managing the crisis and minimising the pains of adjustment has been remarkable.
The programmme details are here. It has some very big names coming over- Michael Spence, Charles Bean ( of Bank of England), Willam Poole (ex-President of St Louis Fed), Willam White (ex- BIS Chief Econ), Benjamin Friedman (of Harvard), Lars Svensson, Jaime Caruana (BIS chief), Stephen Roach etc etc. Looks very very exciting.
The Deposit Insurance and Credit Guarantee Corporation is hosting the 8th Annual Meeting of IADI Asia Regional Committee and International Conference at Goa, India during January 18-20, 2010.
The delegates of the IADI Asia Regional Committee (Bangladesh, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Korea, Malaysia, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam) as also guests from IADI and some other IADI member countries will participate in the Conference. There will also be participants from the Reserve Bank of India.
The theme of the International Conference is "Funding of Deposit Insurance Systems". The discussions will cover a wide range of issues including funding mechanism, management of deposit insurance funds and different perspectives on funding of deposit insurance systems. A session is also devoted to Guidelines for Effective Deposit Insurance Systems, including the guidance on funding.
Great initiatives from RBI. RBI does not have any such conferences happening on a regular basis. To see the first international conference becoming a biennial event is a great thing. It should put RBI conference as a place for infusing new ideas in economics.
Though I knew it was coming but was not aware that it has already been set up. John Taylor in his blog points that first public hearing of the commission is slated to be held on 13 January 2010.
That public hearings are about to start is excellent news. Without such an investigation, followed by a clear explanation to the American people of what went wrong, the Congress is unlikely to enact financial reforms that actually fix the problem. To repeat a phrase from the Chairman of the Brady Commission on the 1987 crash (their report took only 4 months to complete), "You cannot fix what you cannot explain."
Though not part of its Congressional mandate, I recommend that the FCIC follow the approach of the Brady Commission and the 911 Commission and make some recommendations. It could then even issue a report card on how the recommendations are implemented. Such a Report Card was issued by the 911 Commission and it proved quite useful.
The Commission was created by section 5 of the Fraud Enforcement and Recovery Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-21), signed into law by President Barack Obama on May 20, 2009
It also has the objectives of the Commission and has 26 of them. The 10 members names are:
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada each made three appointments, while House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky each made two appointments:
The resumes of 10 members of the commission are here.
Let's see if the commission throws some more exciting insights of the crisis.
Menzie Chinn who coauthors the superblog econbrowser is teaching a new course in Fall 2009 – Policy Responses to the Great Recession. The course details are here:
This course will examine the hypotheses underlying the origins and propagation of the Great Recession of 2007, and the policy responses that have occurred along a variety of dimensions. The candidate causes include lax monetary policy, the "saving glut", deregulation, securitization and the widespread use of derivatives, the activities of the Government Sponsored Enterprises ("Fannie Mae" and "Freddie Mac"), among others.
The discussion of responses will include the conduct of monetary policy and fiscal policy, the appropriateness of financial regulatory policy, the harmonization of international financial policy and trade policy. Other policies not typically thought to be related to the workings of the macro economy (housing, energy, sectoral/industrial policy, e.g., automobiles) will also be examined.
Chinn has provided links to the key papers/presentations for this course. It is a linkfest on the crisis.
Matthew Kahn is an environment economist and teaches at UCLA. There is a very good interview of Kahn in Cleveland Fed publication. I liked the interview quite a bit.
Richter: We will start with your work on green cities. To begin with, what types of cities would you say have boomed over the past 35 years?
Kahn: Let me point to three big facts. In the United States, urban economists have noted—and everyone else has as well —that people seek out warm-weather cities. This is behind the boom of Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Dallas. Warm weather is one exogenous factor that people want. Second is a coastal city. Jordan Rappaport and Jeffrey Sachs have done some nice work documenting that the U.S. population wants to be on the coast rather than in "flyover" country. I was born in Chicago and I guess that's part of the country they're flying over. And finally, booming cities have been the skilled cities, those having more educated residents. Skill is usually measured by what percentage of adults are college graduates, and those cities with a lot of college graduates have greater wage growth and population growth than other cities.
Richter: And how do so-called green cities fare? How would you even define green cities?
Kahn: An example of a green city would be San Francisco, where a large chunk of its livability is from its climate. No government policy can get rid of humidity or cold winter temperatures. What goes right in San Francisco is that it has a feel of new urbanism, of having a walkable, outdoor life.
On local environmental criteria, San Francisco has clean air, clean water, no public health outbreaks. And then on global environmental criteria, while the United States has the largest carbon footprint per capita of any nation, San Francisco is one of our greener cities in terms of carbon dioxide per capita because people don't use a lot of air conditioning there. The electricity they use is generated from natural gas-powered plants, which are cleaner than coal-fired plants. And people do use public transit there more than in other cities. So to finally answer your question, a green city scores high on local and global environmental criteria. But a mayor would really only care about the local criteria in terms of pleasing his or her constituents.
That said, green cities are not a free lunch. What happens in many cases, such as in Marin County in San Francisco, with open space initiatives—you're taking that land out of the housing supply. So from a simple supply and demand angle, you're going to get higher home prices in these communities. That's because the community has become more desirable and also you're making it harder to build on this chunk of desirable land. Homeowners become richer but renters (and minority households are often renters) get punished by gentrification and may not be able to afford to live in their old community. Some urban economists are studying this churning—getting priced out of your own neighborhood. This has been documented in Harlem as crime has fallen in Manhattan.
Read the whole thing. Very good insights.
It is just amazing to find so many economists doing such insightful work. He also writes a blog which has become a part of must read list already. His voxeu columns are here.
Charles Plosser, President of Philadelphia Fed gave a speech recently. He says Ice Hockey great, Wayne Gretzky provides lessons for Monetary Policy.
This realization was driven home to me here in Rochester. As my children were growing up, I found that there was a way to combine all three of these things into one event — "early morning hockey practice." Driving through the cold and snow to a 6:00 a.m. hockey practice at Lake Shore was always an exhilarating way to start the morning. Yet, as I learned more about the game of hockey, I found that hockey players could teach us things that are relevant and useful in other disciplines, including, believe it or not, monetary policy.
Hockey great Wayne Gretzky was once asked about his success on the ice. He responded by saying, "I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been." He didn't chase the puck. Instead, Gretzky wanted his hockey stick to be where the puck would be going next. He scored many goals with that strategy, and I believe monetary policymakers can better achieve their goals, too, if they follow the Gretzky strategy.
Good monetary policymakers, like good hockey players, must be forward-looking in their actions. Setting policy that is appropriate for where the economy is today, or has recently been, is not likely to deliver the kind of economic outcomes we desire. Anticipating where the economy is headed is important because monetary policy actions affect the economy with long and variable lags. The major impact of policy often comes only after several quarters, or sometimes several years.
Wayne Gretzky emphasized that anticipation was important to being a successful hockey player. Failing to anticipate in hockey means that you always end up chasing the puck and never catching it. Since monetary policy works with a lag, policymakers must also anticipate and be forward-looking in their actions. Failing to do so would mean that policy would always be behind the curve — playing catch-up so to speak. The result would be greater instability in the economy and a failure to achieve our policy objectives.
John Taylor in his blog has a nice anecdote on how Gretzky example would save some embarrassment in his monetary policy class.
There was a very interesting speech by Mervyn King on how monetary policy lessons can be drawn from Maradona.
It is always interesting to draw lessons from sports arena. I r'ber Australian coach John Buchanan giving lectures to company management on mentoring. Same is the case with Steve Waugh who gives leadership lectures once a while. Infact, we see quite a few sportsmen giving these kinds of lectures these days.
Though I think Plosser misses on not emphasizing importance of knowing history as well. Forward looking is all good and important but without a proper reference to history turns into a disaster. I am sure Gretzky goes for the puck based on his experience and lessons he has learnt from the past. Infact, the challenge for central banks is more backward looking right now as they have to figure out why they have been ignoring lessons from financial crisis for so long.
I was just wondering Ice Hockey is very popular in Philadelphia part of the world and Football/Soccer in UK. Hence the examples. Cricket is very popular in India. Say RBI official is giving a speech on similar lines drawing analogy from sports. Which cricketer helps draw some lessons for monetary policy? Here are some ideas:
I am sure the readers would have their own names. I have watched cricket only since 1985 so just named a few from this period onwards. Obviously, Indian central bankers would have their own favorites from cricket or other sports as well.
I had written about the importance of understanding legal aspects of central banking (apart from economics). BoJ chief also gave a very interesting speech on importance of law in central banking.
ECB has a legal working paper series and I am trying to catch up with a few papers here. Very interesting and different stuff.
Otmar Issing: "Translation was, of course, linguistically always very good, but the same words and phrases may seem different against the background of different historical experiences. For example, one colleague once said to me, 'Otmar, we have a paragraph containing three times a reference to price stability. I think this is too much for this argument. In my country, if you say three times why you seek price stability, it weakens your argument.' And my argument was, if in Germany it's only two times, they say, 'Oh, is the ECB less stability oriented than the Bundesbank?'
There is a paper by Phoebus Athanassiou which looks at the multilingual aspects of European Union.
On 1 May 2004, 10 more countries acceded to the European Union (EU), bringing the total number of Member States to 25, increasing the EU's population to over 450 million and, last but not least, nearly doubling the number of the official languages of the EU. The recent enlargement, a cornerstone in the continuing process of European integration, poses unprecedented challenges, also because of its linguistic implications for the EU and for the language regime applicable to the Community Institutions. In the case of the ECB, this challenge is all the more evident due to the very short deadlines within which some of its operational decisions need to be taken and implemented and the practical implications that their adoption in all the official languages of the EU would entail.
This paper is divided in two Parts. Part I provides an overview of the rationale and of the legal basis underlying the EU's current language policy, outlining the language regime applicable to the Community Institutions and bodies and discusses exceptions and limitations to multilingualism associated with the particular situation of Member States with more than one official language or stemming from some recent case-law on the Institutions' language regime.
Part II examines the issue of the name of the single currency and some of the reasons underlying the ECB's stance on proposed national variations in its spelling.
It has some interesting case studies of Malta, Luxembourg, Ireland, Turkey, Cyprus etc where either national laws were made to accept second language as a working language (mostly English) or European Community laws were changed to accept a national language (like Irish). Super stuff.
It discusses language regime separately of
In ECB the multilingual issue is more interesting.
It should first of all be noted, as stated before, that the Regulation formally applies to the Community Institutions only. While the ECJ has relatively recently ruled that 'the ECB, pursuant to the Treaty, falls squarely within the Community framework' has since been 'affirmed' by Chapter II of Title IV of Part I of the European Constitution entitled 'The other Union Institutions and advisory bodies' is not, , an assessment that, it remains the case that the ECBstricto sensu, a Community Institution
A fundamental reason why the ECB's emphasis on the application of the principles of the Regulation differs from that of the Community Institutions is because of the dichotomy of its structure as the ECB is, on the one hand, a specialized Community law organization and, on the other hand, the decision-making centre of the European System of Central Banks ('ESCB') and the 'Eurosystem.'
So, ECB has broadly 2 kinds of communications. One internal communication – laws, regulations which need to be translated into all official languages. Two, external communication for financial markets which is mostly in English and translated into official languages of special cases (like policy rate changes).
Very insightful stuff on a very important issue in Europe. Though, the paper could have been written more simply. It should also have offered more case studies on language issues in Europe and how they resolved it.
Binyamin Appelbaum and David Cho have a nice write-up on where Fed went wrong in this crisis.
This one takes the cake:
In January 2005, National City's chief economist had delivered a prescient warning to the Fed's board of governors: An increasingly overvalued housing market posed a threat to the broader economy, not to mention his own bank and others deeply involved in writing mortgages.
The message wasn't well received. One board member expressed particular skepticism — Ben Bernanke.
"Where do you think it will be the worst?" Bernanke asked, according to people who attended the meeting, one in a series of sessions the Fed holds with economists.
"I would have to say California," said the economist, Richard Dekaser.
"They have been saying that about California since I bought my first house in 1979," Bernanke replied.
This time the warnings were correct, and the collapse of the California real estate market would bring down the nation's fourth-largest bank, the largest casualty of the financial crisis.
Complacency at its best (or worst??)
Krugman says he has lost more respect for his ex- head of department (i.e. Bernanke). THough, Bernanke has surely helped avoid second great depression, the initial errors and ignorance is grave.
Felix Salmon has a nice summary as well.
Patricia Pollard has written a useful primer on differences and similarities between Fed and ECB.
This article examines modern central banking with a focus on the world's two most prominent central banks—the Federal Reserve System and the European Central Bank.
First, it examines the structure and appointment process of the key policymakers at the central banks. Next, it highlights the tasks of the central banks, focusing on the monetary policy process. The goals and tools of monetary policy as well as the decision-making process and how they differ in each system are discussed. Finally, the article examines accountability and transparency in the Federal Reserve and the ECB.
It is a good paper to refer from time to time on the organisational differences between ECB and Fed. Has short history of the two as well.


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Winter Guard Season is in Full Swing
March 1, 2018
Though spring sports are starting up, the BV West winter guard season is still in full swing.
The winter guard season lasts from November through April. The winter guard program consists of two guards, Silver and Ruby. Silver consists of those who are newer to the program, while Ruby consists of performers who are experienced in guard. Each guard competes in their own class, which is based on skill level.
Silver's show, entitled "Color" is a beautiful show with bright-colored equipment and upbeat music. Ruby's show is a stark contrast; entitled "The Pursuit", it is based off of Avatar, and tells the story of an aggressive fire tribe.
The guards spend the months of November through early January putting together a show based on each guard's skills, to prepare for the actual competition season. They rehearse at least two days a week for six hours, and every few weeks rehearse on Saturdays for a minimum of 11 hours. The work can be grueling, but it is worth it to the dedicated performers.
Both guards have competed in two competitions so far this season, both placing sixth in their class at the first contest in January, and both leaping to the top three in their class by the second contest. The two guards have another contest in March, before traveling to Springfield, Missouri to compete in regional championships on April 7. Last year, Ruby medaled in their class at championships, so the hope is both guards will end the season with a medal, and in the top three best guards of the region.


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I've been awol for awhile now. Miranda got married in May and I spent about 9 months planning the wedding. I'll show you some pictures in an upcoming blog post 🙂 I'm so proud of Miranda and Jamie and all they've accomplished. But it definitely takes a village! We also spent quite a bit of time traveling this summer and I'll be sure and send some pics from our trip as well. But in this post I'm getting back to {Read More}
My Story~Prescription for Addiction (On video!)
Five-Minute Friday: "View"
It's Five-Minute Friday again when we write for five minutes unedited. Today's topic is "view." One, two, three…Go! Your view of the world is uniquely yours. It is how you look at life. Not just through your eyes, but through your ears, nose, mouth, and fingertips…and your heart. As life happens, your view changes. Standing at that sacred altar, vowing to leave your mother and father to create a life with the one you've chosen. Touching tiny toes, captivated by the {Read More}
A Letter to My Enemy
Maybe having my wisdom teeth pulled was my first mistake. At only 16, the decision was made for me. There must be a reason God gave us "wisdom" teeth, regardless of who actually named them. The pain from that surgery was the first time I let you into my life. You did a good job. You took away my pain and only made me a little nauseous. After a few days, the pain was gone, and so were you. {Read More}
Serving a Supernatural God in an Ordinary World—Is He Your Superhero?
For seven years I sought the help of medical doctors, psychologists, chiropractors, and other natural healers to cure me of grand-mal seizures, migraine headaches, depression, and opiate addiction. I hate the think about the thousands upon thousands of dollars I spent doing so. All that time, I had a direct line to a Superhero. I kept relying on worldly resources when I really needed the Great Physician. The creator of the universe. The ultimate healer. The one who holds {Read More}
Tips to a Happier You in 2012~The Power of Touch
I'm back to my posts on how we can use the five senses God gave us to fight depression and made us happier. Today it's the power of touch. The touch of Jesus is illustrated through story after story in the Bible. The story from the prescriptions verse above where he touched the leper and healed him. The story of Peter when he stepped out of the boat to walk on water. When he took his eyes off Jesus, he {Read More}
Make-a-change Monday~Prayer & Circumstance
Have you ever heard God speak? If God called you on the phone, would you recognize his voice? I remember as a teenager trying to figure out if God was telling me to do something, or if it was just made up in my head. It can be very confusing to know God's voice as opposed to the "voices in your head" if you don't talk to him—and listen to him—enough. Many people ask, "Why pray if God already know {Read More}
The Secret to a fulfilled life with purpose
I had an article published at "Inspire A Fire" this week on the addiction part of my story. If you've read my story page on here you know my story is full of gut wrenching moments, but the addiction part seems to gain much attention; maybe because I'm a pharmacist, maybe because I'm a Christian, or maybe just because it's the juiciest part of the story. It makes no difference to me, as long as someone is brought closer to Christ through it. One {Read More}
Tips to a happier you in 2012~Have Faith
From the moment I had my first seizure, I tried to hold on to this verse. Having peace in God in the midst of my world of seizures, addiction, and depression required much faith. Faith is belief in something that cannot be seen. Having faith is a decision based on life experiences, which are different for everyone. I became a Christian when I was seven years old. I went to church, did Bible studies, and said my prayers. But something {Read More}
Mustard Seed Miracles~My One Year Anniversary
Today required two prescriptions. The thing is, they seem to interact with one another. As a pharmacist, I always do my best to warn patients about interactions between their prescriptions, but this interaction is a tough one. You see, one year ago today, God healed me completely from migraine headaches, grand mal seizures, and severe depression. He healed me from the addiction of constantly chasing anything and everything for a cure. He showed me that even though Satan had a {Read More}
Intercourse…an adventure or a destination?
Be honest. Did the title make you want to read this? I'm sure this one will catch my hubby's eye…and I can't get him to read hardly anything I write! It's not very long, but you have to read to the end to get the title… If you have read my recent posts, you know my hubby and I just celebrated our 22nd anniversary. See my posts titled, "Its time for…." and "Do you get it?" to be up to {Read More}


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This is a truer version of my new haircolour. I know it's time to get a new camera and actually learn how to use it, but until then my face will look kind of like an overlit angel…and I don't mind that too much actually.
This outfit is a variation of what I wear to school most days: comfortable with a little style: not too much going on, but just enough to be me while still being functional for a long day of learning. I love these jeans, purchased at Gap Factory for $20. They're mucho comfortable and the rips really balance out my girly leanings. I don't wear the shoes too much, but when I do I get compliments on them. The top is just easy and goes with pretty much everything, and the jacket was purchased on sale in the summer; I'm just starting to get some use out of it now. The bag is perfect for carying a lot, and I really love how it pairs with the green here. Let the school day begin!
Leather Jacket: Le Chateau/ top: H&M/Jeans: Gap Factory/Shoes: Thrifted/Bag: Winners


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Cyber Fiction: Cory Doctorow and the rest of EFF are genuinely fighting for the rights of individuals, not to protect the profits of their corporate Silicon Valley benefactors. Photo Author and Attribution Ed Schipul under Creative Commons Share Alike 2.0 License.
Cory Doctorow the Canadian science fiction writer, Boing Boing editor, and creepy grown up Disneyland enthusiast, is also a special advisor to the Google funded Electronic Frontier Foundation (the world's first "progressive" anti-civil rights organization). One of our colleagues recently noticed this product for sale in the Boing Boing store. For $9.99 Boing Boing sells software it claims can rip ANY YouTube video presumably even illegally uploaded songs and movies from YouTube. Yeah sure, we know there are plenty of sketchy websites that allow you to do similar things (and also infect your computer with malware). But generally these sleazy websites don't add insult to injury by charging a fee and NOT sharing it with the creators of the work. Since Boing Boing sells this software in its store it is fair to assume that Boing Boing and hence Doctorow eventually get a cut. Creators of the music or videos being downloaded? Nada.
There is also the question of whether the software being sold by Boing Boing simply "records" the YouTube streams (an important legal distinction). Over the last couple of years we have tested many of the so called "YouTube to MP3 converters "and they appear to simply host the mp3s/mp4s themselves, making these services indistinguishable from full blown illegal cyberlocker sites like Hotfile or Megaupload The conversion from YouTube is completely fake, simply a ruse to hide the fact it's really a cyberlocker. The YouTube URL is only used to identify the track and seems intended to act as a MacGuffin for journalists. Reports show the Boing Boing software seems to make the conversion fairly quickly. This is pure speculation but I would wager at least even odds that this software sold by Boing Boing hosts or caches the most popular content on a "friendly" or commercially related server. But why speculate. I know we have enough tech savvy readers out there to test this software. Is a $100 bounty enough?
It's bad enough that Google/Youtube (the 2nd wealthiest corporation on the planet" has built a music streaming service on illegally uploaded music. But now we have a Google lapdog seemingly profiting from this decidedly non-progressive activity. You'd think it would bother someone like Doctorow who left the UK simply because a Tory was elected. But then again aren't all progressives completely full of shit these days? The old cliche was conservatives shilling for big banks and tobacco companies, now it is the modern progressive shilling for technology companies. Anyway what's the difference? It's the same old crony capitalist pay to play racket, they should all be taken down.
The fact that Doctorow continually dresses up his activities as progressive, vaguely revolutionary or for the benefit of "the public" only makes him more contemptible.
Here's the software that Boing Boing is gleefully pitching
Here is how it's described on the Boing Boing website:
"YouTube is a massive video and music library, but its only significant flaw is that you need internet access to use it. Well, not anymore. With Softorino YouTube Converter, you can download and import YouTube videos directly into your iTunes, Mac or iPhone. No Wi-Fi? No problem. It's as easy as copy and download, and all your favorite content will be readily available on your computer or mobile device in no time.
Import files to iTunes as MP3, MP4, or M4A w/o losing quality
Get automatic clipboard monitoring so you don't have to paste a link–just copy it
Download from Facebook, Vimeo, Instagram, YouTube & more
Skip the ads when you watch offline
Transfer videos & music to your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch w/ ease
Watch or listen in high quality 4k, 1080p HD video & 192kb/s music"


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Family from Portsmouth, but born in Birmingham in 1965, grew up in Frome, lived in London, now back in Portsmouth, (don't mention that song from the Lion King…). In my other life working in recruitment, have had some success with poems in magazines such as Acumen, Orbis, Envoi, Brittle Star, South, Frogmore Papers, Poetry Monthly etc. Maybe a collection one day. Involved in T & G since 2007, on the committee since 2009, helped with the selection of poems for the Portsmouth anthology; organized and hosted 'Poetry of Exile' evening.
The Last Wolves of England
My son is at the age for nightmares,
he says a wolf is in his room,
I tell him how it can't be true.
He points at a belt-strap of blackness,
a shadow in the corner,
the gap between two doors.
Memory grows from coppiced thought,
the warm slab of a wardrobe,
the trees where we once stood.
I want to tell him how it might have been,
of the last recorded hunting,
before our history begins its fade.
But breathing settles and deepens,
he rolls on to his side,
mind calmed for now till dawn.
I sit and watch the bulb burn through,
pull back the curtains,
the only light in the street.
First published in Envoi (November 2009)


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Diversity is everywhere, no matter where you go. That's the amazing thing of this world! Don't you think? I had not had the opportunity to be around a lot of people from different countries, cultures, ethnicities, languages, abilities, backgrounds, beliefs, religious, etc., "on a daily basis" until I came to Virginia Tech. This was a completely new experience for me!
As Katherine Phillips discusses in her article, it is really powerful when people with such diversity work together. It is not only the background what makes a big difference, there are the experiences and philosophies what bring to the table different perspectives and information.
I love being different and I do not want to appear something that I am not just to fit in a place or a culture. However, sometimes I feel that everyone is looking at me just because I do not look like a typical American student. Sometimes, even I do not feel comfortable speaking because I know that my English is not good enough. This, sometimes, may affect students' performance. There are several questions that come to my mind. Do the professors really care about diversity in the classroom?
I am taking a course this semester in which the professor, at the beginning of the class, posts trivial questions to engage students. We use i-clicker to answer those questions. From my point of view, this does not engage students at all or at least it does not work for me. I do not know any of those answers because all of these are related to movies/series of the United States. There are more than 150 students in that class and I would dare to say that there is a lot of diversity in that classroom. Could not he be more inclusive?
So, my questions for you are:
Are you promoting an inclusive environment in the classroom? If not, how can you do it? And, are you taking advantage of all the benefits that diversity groups may have on students' creativity, work, and interpersonal interaction?
It is time for an inclusive teaching and learning!
*Quote taken from Dr. Seuss