When the Iranian Clergy Switch Sides by Thomas Barnett

ARTICLE: Future Perfect, By Geneive Abdo, Newsweek , Nov 18, 2009

This fits nicely with the mullahs-have-lost-power scenario unfolding. Khamenei has so sold his soul to the Revolutionary Guard that the clergy are slowly coming to the conclusion that the faith would be better served detached from the government.

When this happens, a major portion of the clergy then switch over to the green movement and we get a Poland / Solidarnosc scenario that moves with great power.

The LHC is back II (CERN)

Particle beams are once again circulating in the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, CERN1’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC). This news comes after the machine was handed over for operation on Wednesday morning. A clockwise circulating beam was established at ten o'clock this evening. This is an important milestone on the road towards first physics at the LHC, expected in 2010.

“It’s great to see beam circulating in the LHC again,” said CERN Director General Rolf Heuer. “We’ve still got some way to go before physics can begin, but with this milestone we’re well on the way.”

The LHC circulated its first beams on 10 September 2008, but suffered a serious malfunction nine days later. A failure in an electrical connection led to serious damage, and CERN has spent over a year repairing and consolidating the machine to ensure that such an incident cannot happen again.

“The LHC is a far better understood machine than it was a year ago,” said CERN’s Director for Accelerators, Steve Myers. “We’ve learned from our experience, and engineered the technology that allows us to move on. That’s how progress is made.”

Recommissioning the LHC began in the summer, and successive milestones have regularly been passed since then. The LHC reached its operating temperature of 1.9 Kelvin, or about -271 Celsius, on 8 October. Particles were injected on 23 October, but not circulated. A beam was steered through three octants of the machine on 7 November, and circulating beams have now been re-established. The next important milestone will be low-energy collisions, expected in about a week from now. These will give the experimental collaborations their first collision data, enabling important calibration work to be carried out. This is significant, since up to now, all the data they have recorded comes from cosmic rays. Ramping the beams to high energy will follow in preparation for collisions at 7 TeV (3.5 TeV per beam) next year.

Particle physics is a global endeavour, and CERN has received support from around the world in getting the LHC up and running again.

“It’s been a herculean effort to get to where we are today,” said Myers. “I’d like to thank all those who have taken part, from CERN and from our partner institutions around the world.”

Military Video System Is Like YouTube With Artillery by David Hambling

Making footage shareable and searchable online has sparked a revolution in the cute animal, stupid human, and delicious tamale communities. New software just might mean a similar upgrade for military video intelligence: Think of it as a real-time YouTube with heavy artillery. The release of the new version has just been announced.

The U.S. military’s Task Force ODIN demonstrated the effectiveness of combining the video inputs from networked drones, aircraft and helicopters. When a roadside bomb went off, the team could wind back the video to see who planted it — and where they went. ODIN allegedly assisted in the takedown of thousands of insurgents in Iraq; their counterparts are starting work in Afghanistan.

The process of handling, archiving and then searching through a large number of video feeds is a challenging one. That’s one of the reasons why something like YouTube can be so helpful: Instead of having to search through a pile of videotapes, you can just type in a few keywords. Even better, you can search all your friends’ video collections and they can search yours. And this is where a system like adLib produced by EchoStorm Worldwide LLC comes in. It does the same sort of thing for the military by automatically archiving video feeds along with the associated telemetry data.

For example, suppose you want to find out what happened at point X at 8:30 yesterday. You don’t even have to know which platforms were in the area at the time.

“You can ask for video that matches a specific location using latitude and longitude or the MGRS (Military Grid Reference System) or by clicking and dragging on a map,” David Barton of EchoStorm told Danger Room. “You can even define a specific point and specify a radius to search from that point.”

Barton says that the system can take video feeds from all sorts of drones. It even works right down to the individual soldier level: FLIR Recon III binoculars have built-in video, GPS and a laser range finder which can feed straight into adLib.

The system requires some rack-mounted hardware, but once the data has been archived, it’s freely available to everyone: Like YouTube, users can access it on the internet without any special software. EchoStorm’s Multiplayer allows users to look at what’s happening right now. Looking into the past is one thing, but you might also want to look at how things are right now. It even allows for “Artillery Correction support,” so a fire support officer can redirect an barrage of shells from a video feed on his PC. Try doing that with your ninja cat videos.

The Illustrated Man: How LED Tattoos Could Make Your Skin a Screen by Charlie Sorrel

The title character of Ray Bradbury’s book The Illustrated Man is covered with moving, shifting tattoos. If you look at them, they will tell you a story.

New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real (minus the creepy stories, of course). Researchers there are developing silicon-and-silk implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning your skin into a screen.

The silk substrate onto which the chips are mounted eventually dissolves away inside the body, leaving just the electronics behind. The silicon chips are around the length of a small grain of rice — about 1 millimeter, and just 250 nanometers thick. The sheet of silk will keep them in place, molding to the shape of the skin when saline solution is added.

These displays could be hooked up to any kind of electronic device, also inside the body. Medical uses are being explored, from blood-sugar sensors that show their readouts on the skin itself to neurodevices that tie into the body’s nervous system — hooking chips to particular nerves to control a prosthetic hand, for example.

Chips are already used inside bodies, most notably the tiny RFID tags injected into pets. But the flexible nature of these “tattooed” circuits means they can move elastically with the body, sitting in places that a rigid circuit board couldn’t.

The first displays are sure to be primitive, but likely very useful for the patients that receive them. You won’t be getting the full-color, hi-res images that come with ink, but functional displays. This doesn’t mean that the commercial and artistic possibilities are being ignored. Philips, the electronics giant, is exploring some rather sexual uses:

It’s certainly rather creepy, but we’re sure that the inevitable next stage of playing adult movie clips on your partner’s back will be appealing to some. We, of course, are considering the geekier side of this tech. GPS, with a map readout on the back of the wrist would certainly be useful, as would chips that cover your eyeballs and can darken down when the sun is shining too bright.

And a full-body display will eventually be used for advertising. Combine this with bioluminescent ink, for example, and you could turn yourself into a small, walking version of Times Square. At least, unlike a real tattoo, you can switch this one off.

In fact, if you start to imagine the possible uses, they seems almost endless. Just like the stories that play across the body of the Illustrated Man.

Conflict and Computer Science by Aaron Mannes

Conflict has often been a driver for technological advances and computer science has been no exception. The requirements of code breaking during World War II led to the construction of Colossus – the first totally electronic computer device, while the Internet was originally constructed to provide a secure communications network for the military in the event of a nuclear war. While terrorist use of technology, and particularly the Internet, receives tremendous press, the current conflict is also sparking important developments in computer science that will have impacts far beyond the security realm.

My employer, the Laboratory for Computational Cultural Dynamics (LCCD) at the University of Maryland is one group seeking to develop the theory and algorithms required for tools to support decision-making in cultural contexts. LCCD has developed numerous systems including T-Rex, which can rapidly scan text in several languages and convert it into a database and SOMA (Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents) which can extract rules of likely behaviors by organizations from their past behaviors.

LCCD sponsors an annual conference, the International Conference on Computational Cultural Dynamics (ICCCD2009) – to be held this year on December 7-8 at the University of Maryland. Papers being presented include efforts to model insurgencies as well as piracy in Somalia, a tool used to map the Indonesian blogosphere, and SCARE (Spatial Cultural Abduction Reasoning Engine) which can help predict the locations of weapons caches in an urban environment. (See the full program here.)

Augmenting the Mind

The human brain is an impressive system, which also builds models. In some regards it far exceeds anything on the horizon in the realm of computer science. The ability of human beings to take information and place it in context and draw conclusions from it is profound. We build complex models of how the world works in order to function in it. But computers can process some forms of data far faster than humans and will do so systematically. Human minds cannot quickly process large quantities of data. In attempting to make sense of large amounts of information a human beings may discount or ignore information that does not fit in their model of how the world works – or alternately draw significant conclusions based on a very limited amount of data. Imagine an economist ignoring issues of ethnic identity in analyzing a nation’s policies or a political philosopher focusing on ideology while ignoring logistics in studying a terrorist group’s behavior. In short, computer systems are capable of substantially augmenting the power of human reason.

Things to Come

The impacts of these technologies will be profound. Real-time data collection and processing will potentially improve decision-making in many ways. Beyond providing better intelligence, it will allow the creation of in-depth virtual environments, which facilitate training to operate in different cultures. The Marines and Army have built mock Afghan and Iraqi villages staffed by actors for this kind of training. These are terrific facilities, but a computer simulation could inexpensively augment the real world training.

According to the late Alexander George, a renowned scholar of the presidency, many foreign policy accidents have occurred because leaders were unable to see the situation from the perspective of their counterpart. Leaders make assumptions about their opposite number and his (or her) actions based on an intuited model of their behavior. Models not operating on limiting assumptions may provide alternate explanations for behaviors and thereby give leaders the insight to avoid escalating conflicts that arose from misunderstandings.

But these systems will also have civilian applications. Game theory systems used to predict the behavior of adversaries may also be used to understand the behavior of business competitors. Tools that can analyze the opinions expressed on jihadi websites could also be used to analyze public opinion for marketing research. Models that identify the outbreak of terrorism and insurgency may also be turned to studying the outbreak of disease.

But this focuses on applications designed for policy-makers – and no doubt there will be many such tools. But only twenty years ago, very few people imagined a ubiquitous, international system that facilitated instantaneous communications and put vast amounts of information virtually at every user’s fingertips. Models and game theory will not remain in the realm of executives and professional analysts. They will also become everyday tools used by regular people to better plan their activities and make decisions about their lives.

In this vein, ICCCD2009 could prove to be a fascinating glimpse into the future.

Liquid Battery Big Enough for the Electric Grid? by David L. Chandler

There’s one major drawback to most proposed renewable-energy sources: their variability. The sun doesn’t shine at night, the wind doesn’t always blow, and tides, waves and currents fluctuate. That’s why many researchers have been pursuing ways of storing the power generated by these sources so that it can be used when it’s needed.

So far, those solutions have tended to be too expensive, limited to only certain areas, or difficult to scale up sufficiently to meet the demands. Many researchers are struggling to overcome these limitations, but MIT professor Donald Sadoway has come up with an innovative approach that has garnered significant interest — and some major funding.

The idea is to build an entirely new kind of battery, whose key components would be kept at high temperature so that they would stay entirely in liquid form. The experimental devices currently being tested in Sadoway’s lab work in a way that’s never been attempted in batteries before.

This month, the newly established federal agency ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency, Energy) announced its first 37 energy-research grants out of a pool of 3,600 applications, and Sadoway’s project to develop utility-scale batteries received one of the largest sums — almost $7 million over five years. And within a few days of the ARPA-E announcement, the French oil company Total — the world’s fifth-largest — announced a $4 million, five-year joint venture with MIT to develop a smaller-scale version of the same technology, suitable for use in individual homes or other buildings.

Because the technology is being patented and could lead to very large-scale commercialization, Sadoway will not discuss the details of the materials being used. But both Sadoway and ARPA-E say the battery is based on low-cost, domestically available liquid metals that have the potential to shatter the cost barrier to large-scale energy storage as part of the nation's energy grid. In announcing its funding of Sadoway’s work, ARPA-E said the battery technology “could revolutionize the way electricity is used and produced on the grid, enabling round-the-clock power from America's wind and solar power resources, increasing the stability of the grid, and making blackouts a thing of the past.”

Andrew Chung, a principal at Lightspeed Venture Partners in Menlo Park, Calif., which has no equity stake in Sadoway’s project at this point, says that “grid-scale storage is an area that’s set to explode in the next decade or so,” and is one that his company is following closely. The liquid battery concept Sadoway is developing “is an exciting approach to solving the problem,” he says.

Big is Beautiful

Most battery research, Sadoway says, has been aimed at improving storage for portable or mobile systems such as cellphones, computers and cars. The requirements for such systems, including very low weight and high safety, are very different from the needs of a grid-scale, fixed-location battery system. “What I did was completely ignore the conventional technology used for portable power,” he says. The different set of requirements for stationary systems “opens up a whole new range of possibilities.”

A large, utility-owned system “doesn’t have to be crash-worthy; it doesn’t have to be ‘idiot-proof’ because it won’t be in the hands of the consumer.” And while consumers are willing to pay high prices, pound-for-pound, for the small batteries used in high-value portable devices, the biggest constraint on utility-sized systems is cost. In order to compete with present fossil-fuel power systems, he says, “it has got to be cheap to build, cheap to maintain, last a long time with minimal maintenance, and store enormous amounts of energy.”

And so the new liquid batteries that Sadoway and his team, including graduate student David Bradwell, are designing use low-cost, abundant materials. The basic principle is to place three layers of liquid inside a container: Two different metal alloys, and one layer of a salt. The three materials are chosen so that they have different densities that allow them to separate naturally into three distinct layers, with the salt in the middle separating the two metal layers —like novelty drinks with different layers.

The energy is stored in the liquid metals that want to react with one another but can do so only by transferring ions — electrically charged atoms of one of the metals — across the electrolyte, which results in the flow of electric current out of the battery. When the battery is being charged, some ions migrate through the insulating salt layer to collect at one of the terminals. Then, when the power is being drained from the battery, those ions migrate back through the salt and collect at the opposite terminal.

The whole device is kept at a high temperature, around 700 degrees Celsius, so that the layers remain molten. In the small devices being tested in the lab, maintaining this temperature requires an outside heater, but Sadoway says that in the full-scale version, the electrical current being pumped into, or out of, the battery will be sufficient to maintain that temperature without any outside heat source.

While some previous battery technologies have used one liquid-metal component, this is the first design for an all-liquid battery system, Sadoway says. “Solid components in batteries are speed bumps. When you want ultra-high current, you don’t want any solids.”

Inspiration from Aluminum

The initial inspiration for the idea came from thinking about a very different technology, Sadoway says: one of the biggest users of electrical energy, aluminum smelting plants. Sadoway realized that this was one of the few existing examples of a system that could sustain extremely high levels of electrical current over a sustained period of years at a time. “It’s an electrochemical process that runs at high temperatures, and at a current of hundreds of thousands of amps,” he says. In a sense, the new concept is like an aluminum plant running in reverse, producing power instead of consuming it.

Chung says that from the point of view of a venture capitalist, the research is particularly intriguing for several reasons. Not only does it offer the potential to significantly lower the cost and increase cycle life [the number of times it can be charged and discharged] of large-scale electricity storage, but it also suggests that the risk typically associated with an early stage research project may be lower because the system draws on decades of experience in the design and operation of aluminum production facilities. “That gives us added confidence that some of the targets around cost, scalability and safety have merit,” he says.

The team is now testing a number of different variations of the exact composition of the materials in the three layers, and of the design of the overall device. Sadoway says that thanks to initial funding through the Deshpande Center and the Chesonis Family Foundation, he and his team were able to develop the concept to the point of demonstrating a proof-of-principle at the laboratory scale. That, in turn, made it possible to get the large grants to develop the technology further.

“It’s an example of work that sprang from basic science, was developed to a pilot scale, and now is being scaled up to have a real transformational impact in the world,” says Ernest Moniz, director of the MIT Energy Initiative.

The laboratory tests have provided “some measure of confidence,” Sadoway says. But many more tests will be needed to “demonstrate that the idea is scalable to industrial size, at competitive cost.” But while he is very confident that it will all work, there are a lot of unknowns, he says, including how to design and build the necessary containers, electrical control systems, and connections.

“We’re talking about batteries of a size never seen before,” he says. And the system they develop has to include everything, including control systems and charger electronics on an unprecedented scale.

For Sadoway, the project is worth pursuing despite its daunting challenges, because the potential impact is so great. “I’m not doing this because I want another journal publication,” Sadoway says. “It’s about making a difference … It’s an opportunity to invent our way out of the energy problem.”

Leaked UK government plan to create "Pirate Finder General" with power to appoint militias, create laws by Cory Doctorow

A source close to the British Labour Government has just given me reliable information about the most radical copyright proposal I've ever seen.

Secretary of State Peter Mandelson is planning to introduce changes to the Digital Economy Bill now under debate in Parliament. These changes will give the Secretary of State (Mandelson -- or his successor in the next government) the power to make "secondary legislation" (legislation that is passed without debate) to amend the provisions of Copyright, Designs and Patents Act (1988).

What that means is that an unelected official would have the power to do anything without Parliamentary oversight or debate, provided it was done in the name of protecting copyright. Mandelson elaborates on this, giving three reasons for his proposal:

1. The Secretary of State would get the power to create new remedies for online infringements (for example, he could create jail terms for file-sharing, or create a "three-strikes" plan that costs entire families their internet access if any member stands accused of infringement)

2. The Secretary of State would get the power to create procedures to "confer rights" for the purposes of protecting rightsholders from online infringement. (for example, record labels and movie studios can be given investigative and enforcement powers that allow them to compel ISPs, libraries, companies and schools to turn over personal information about Internet users, and to order those companies to disconnect users, remove websites, block URLs, etc)

3. The Secretary of State would get the power to "impose such duties, powers or functions on any person as may be specified in connection with facilitating online infringement" (for example, ISPs could be forced to spy on their users, or to have copyright lawyers examine every piece of user-generated content before it goes live; also, copyright "militias" can be formed with the power to police copyright on the web)

Mandelson is also gunning for sites like YouSendIt and other services that allow you to easily transfer large files back and forth privately (I use YouSendIt to send podcasts back and forth to my sound-editor during production). Like Viacom, he's hoping to force them to turn off any feature that allows users to keep their uploads private, since privacy flags can be used to keep infringing files out of sight of copyright enforcers.

This is as bad as I've ever seen, folks. It's a declaration of war by the entertainment industry and their captured regulators against the principles of free speech, privacy, freedom of assembly, the presumption of innocence, and competition.

This proposal creates the office of Pirate-Finder General, with unlimited power to appoint militias who are above the law, who can pry into every corner of your life, who can disconnect you from your family, job, education and government, who can fine you or put you in jail.

More to follow, I'm sure, once Open Rights Group and other activist organizations get working on this. In the meantime, tell every Briton you know. If we can't stop this, it's beginning of the end for the net in Britain.

What They Really Believe by Thomas L. Friedman

If you follow the debate around the energy/climate bills working through Congress you will notice that the drill-baby-drill opponents of this legislation are now making two claims. One is that the globe has been cooling lately, not warming, and the other is that America simply can’t afford any kind of cap-and-trade/carbon tax.

But here is what they also surely believe, but are not saying: They believe the world is going to face a mass plague, like the Black Death, that will wipe out 2.5 billion people sometime between now and 2050. They believe it is much better for America that the world be dependent on oil for energy — a commodity largely controlled by countries that hate us and can only go up in price as demand increases — rather than on clean power technologies that are controlled by us and only go down in price as demand increases. And, finally, they believe that people in the developing world are very happy being poor — just give them a little running water and electricity and they’ll be fine. They’ll never want to live like us.

Yes, the opponents of any tax on carbon to stimulate alternatives to oil must believe all these things because that is the only way their arguments make any sense. Let me explain why by first explaining how I look at this issue.

I am a clean-energy hawk. Green for me is not just about recycling garbage but about renewing America. That is why I have been saying “green is the new red, white and blue.”

My argument is simple: I think climate change is real. You don’t? That’s your business. But there are two other huge trends barreling down on us with energy implications that you simply can’t deny. And the way to renew America is for us to take the lead and invent the technologies to address these problems.

The first is that the world is getting crowded. According to the 2006 U.N. population report, “The world population will likely increase by 2.5 billion ... passing from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion in 2050. This increase is equivalent to the total size of the world population in 1950, and it will be absorbed mostly by the less developed regions, whose population is projected to rise from 5.4 billion in 2007 to 7.9 billion in 2050.”

The energy, climate, water and pollution implications of adding another 2.5 billion mouths to feed, clothe, house and transport will be staggering. And this is coming, unless, as the deniers apparently believe, a global pandemic or a mass outbreak of abstinence will freeze world population — forever.

Now, add one more thing. The world keeps getting flatter — more and more people can now see how we live, aspire to our lifestyle and even take our jobs so they can live how we live. So not only are we adding 2.5 billion people by 2050, but many more will live like “Americans” — with American-size homes, American-size cars, eating American-size Big Macs.

“What happens when developing nations with soaring vehicle populations get tens of millions of petroleum-powered cars at the same time as the global economy recovers and there’s no large global oil supply overhang?” asks Felix Kramer, the electric car expert who advocates electrifying the U.S. auto fleet and increasingly powering it with renewable energy sources. What happens, of course, is that the price of oil goes through the roof — unless we develop alternatives. The petro-dictators in Iran, Venezuela and Russia hope we don’t. They would only get richer.

So either the opponents of a serious energy/climate bill with a price on carbon don’t care about our being addicted to oil and dependent on petro-dictators forever or they really believe that we will not be adding 2.5 billion more people who want to live like us, so the price of oil won’t go up very far and, therefore, we shouldn’t raise taxes to stimulate clean, renewable alternatives and energy efficiency.

Green hawks believe otherwise. We believe that in a world getting warmer and more crowded with more “Americans,” the next great global industry is going to be E.T., or energy technology based on clean power and energy efficiency. It has to be. And we believe that the country that invents and deploys the most E.T. will enjoy the most economic security, energy security, national security, innovative companies and global respect. And we believe that country must be America. If not, our children will never enjoy the standard of living we did. And we believe the best way to launch E.T. is to set a fixed, long-term price on carbon — combine it with the Obama team’s impressive stimulus for green-tech — and then let the free market and innovation do the rest.

So, as I said, you don’t believe in global warming? You’re wrong, but I’ll let you enjoy it until your beach house gets washed away. But if you also don’t believe the world is getting more crowded with more aspiring Americans — and that ignoring that will play to the strength of our worst enemies, while responding to it with clean energy will play to the strength of our best technologies — then you’re willfully blind, and you’re hurting America’s future to boot.

A bipartisan push is needed to tame ballooning national debt by Evan Bayh

America's national debt cannot grow beyond a limit imposed by Congress known as the "debt ceiling."

In 1919, just after World War I, the limit on U.S. borrowing was $43 billion.

By 2001, it had grown to $5.9 trillion.

Today, the debt ceiling is at an all-time high of $12.1 trillion.

When President George W. Bush took office in 2001, our public debt amounted to 33 percent of our economy. Today, it is 60 percent of our gross domestic product. If we do nothing, our debt is projected to swell to over 70 percent by 2019.

To put those numbers in perspective: If you divided the debt equally among all Americans, every man, woman and child living in the United States today would owe more than $39,000.

Next month, members of Congress will be asked to vote to raise the roof on our allowable debt for the ninth time this decade.

Before such votes, it has become customary for Treasury officials to write members of Congress warning of the dire consequences of restricting the federal government's ability to borrow. There should be no mistake: These consequences are real.

What those letters often fail to mention, however, are the equally dire consequences of the status quo. Long-term deficits drive up interest rates for consumers, raise prices of goods and services, and weaken our country's financial competitiveness and security.

The bigger our deficits, the fewer resources we have to make critical investments in energy, education, health care and tax relief for small businesses and middle-class families.

The bigger our deficits, the more we must borrow from foreign creditors like China, allowing governments with competing interests to influence our economic and trade policies in ways that run counter to our national interest.

Last week, I was joined by a handful of my colleagues at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on strategies for reining in our exploding debt. United in our concern that Congress lacks the will to get our fiscal house in order, we mounted what I termed an "institutional insurrection."

Our unsustainable debt is neither a Democratic nor a Republican problem. It is rooted in the DNA of both political parties. Some in Congress like to spend more than we can afford, and some like to cut taxes more than we can afford. The easy path is simply to borrow until the credit markets will no longer allow it.

This approach violates something fundamental in the American character. Every generation before us has been willing to make the tough decisions and hard sacrifices required to ensure our children and grandchildren inherit a better way of life and stronger country. Now, it is our turn.

The path of least resistance that we have trod for so long is the path to national weakness. If you have the same people and the same process, you are going to get the same results.

For this reason, I will vote "no" on raising the debt ceiling unless Congress adopts a credible process to balance our books and eliminate the red ink.

The proposal I am supporting with Sens. Kent Conrad, D-North Dakota, and Judd Gregg, R-New Hampshire, would create a new debt-fighting commission. Conventional wisdom in Washington is that commissions are something politicians create to defer hard decisions. But our bipartisan panel would put all options on the table, including spending cuts and revenue raisers. Congress would then be compelled by law to debate the recommendations and take an up-or-down vote on the entire plan.

A debt commission will force members of Congress to take -- or reject -- a single gulp of politically difficult medicine to treat the fiscal problems that are ailing our country. Those who choose not to take that medicine would be forced to explain to their constituents why a $12 trillion national debt doesn't make them queasy.

There is precedent to create this type of commission with real teeth. President Ronald Reagan created a commission, chaired by Alan Greenspan, to shore up Social Security in the early 1980s. Congress created a special process to take parochial politics out of decisions on military base closures, and it worked.

Some of my colleagues in Congress believe that efforts to reduce the deficit should go through the regular committee system, but the national debt has doubled this decade. The existing process has not only failed to respond to this problem, it has made it worse.

There are rare moments of leverage in Congress when a few resolute members can force fundamental change. The upcoming vote to raise the debt ceiling is one of them.

Before we borrow more money from our children and grandchildren, we need to commit to a new fiscal process that ensures a legacy of which all Americans can be proud.

Apple Researching Methods for 'Pushing' User Interfaces to Accessories from Media Devices by Eric Slivka

In a patent application filed in May 2008 and published today, Apple discloses that it has been researching methods to allow media devices such as the iPod to "push" their graphical user interfaces (GUIs) to accessory devices for the purposes of controlling the media devices remotely. In pursuing this technology, Apple notes that while remote control accessories for media devices are common, the interfaces are generated by the accessory itself, leading to incomplete functionality and varying experiences when multiple devices are used with a single accessory or a single device is used with multiple accessories.

But existing remote GUIs are defined and controlled by the remote control device, and consequently, they may bear little resemblance to a GUI supplied by the portable media device itself Certain functions available on the portable media device (such as browsing or searching a database, adjusting playback settings, etc.) may be unavailable or difficult to find. Thus, a user may not be able to perform desired functions. Further, GUIs provided for the same portable media device by different remote control devices might be quite different, and the user who connects a portable media device to different accessories with remote control may find the inconsistencies frustrating.

As a response to these issues, Apple proposes methods for media devices to "push" their own GUIs to accessory devices, allowing for full functionality and a consistent user experience across compatible devices and accessories.

The portable media device can provide the accessory with an image to be displayed on the video screen; the image can include various user interface elements that can resemble or replicate a "native" GUI provided directly on the portable media device. The accessory can send information to the portable media device indicative of a user action taken in response to the displayed image; such information can indicate, for example, that a particular button was pressed or that a particular portion of a touch-sensitive display screen was touched by the user. The portable media device can process this input to identify the action requested by the user and take the appropriate action. The action may include providing to the accessory an updated GUI image to be displayed, where the updated GUI image reflects the user action.

The lead inventor on the patent application is William Bull, former iPod User Interface manager at Apple and currently Senior Director of Mobile User Experience at Yahoo. Also among the inventors is former Apple executive Tony Fadell, the "father of the iPod".

Look out! Outlook Wants to become your New Social Media and Collaboration Hubby by Sebastian Anthony

It's been a long time coming, and perhaps a little too late, but you can now track your friends' and colleagues' social networking activity in Outlook 2010. Dubbed the 'Outlook Social Connector' (OSC), the functionality is available right now to all Office 2010 Beta testers.

The list of much-needed features that OSC brings to Outlook is long and juicy. 'Activity Feeds' is the new social media technology, collating the activities of your contacts into your Outlook screen. LinkedIn support is included in the current beta version, but there's no mention of anything like Twitter or Facebook support yet.

There's also neat functionality to show you all of the attachments sent between you and another contact, a communication history that shows you your recent emails with that contact, Next year, there will be added connectivity with Windows Live Messenger! There are numerous mentions of 'extensibility' and an easy-to-use developer kit, however, so I'm sure lots of other add-ons will emerge in due course.

World Tries to Buck Up Dollar by Joanna Slater, William Mallard, and Bob Davis

Governments around the world stepped up efforts to stem the U.S. dollar's slide, as officials grow increasingly concerned about the impact of the weak greenback on their nascent economic recoveries.

Thailand, South Korea, Russia and the Philippines have been snapping up dollars this week in order to hold down the value of their currencies, traders said Wednesday, as the U.S. currency wallowed near 15-month lows.

China is one of the few exceptions among developing nations, seeing continued strong exports despite its currency's tie to the dollar.

In Latin America, Brazil's finance minister said the country's currency remained too strong, sparking speculation that the government would intensify recent efforts to curb the real's ascent. On Tuesday, Taiwan banned foreign investors from parking time deposits in the country in an effort to ease upward pressure on the local currency.

The fresh buzz over the dollar's fall prompted Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, visiting Tokyo on Wednesday, to repeat the Obama administration's commitment to a strong dollar. Still, Washington hasn't taken any concrete steps to arrest the slide. The weaker dollar is actually benefiting the U.S. as it struggles to come out of recession by helping keep U.S. exports competitive.

China is coming under new pressure from Pacific Rim countries to let its dollar-linked currency rise in value. On Wednesday, China's central bank made a nod to concerns about the declining dollar and yuan by issuing a rare change to the official language of its exchange-rate policy. The central bank said it would take major currency trends into account in setting policy, though it wasn't clear what impact that may have on the yuan's future value.

The U.S. wants to see a stronger yuan, though Washington has avoided explicit public pressure on China to abandon its policy of managing its currency. But in the jargon of finance ministers, Mr. Geithner has made clear that's what he thinks should happen. In an op-ed piece in Thursday's Wall Street Journal Asia, he emphasized the advantages of "market oriented exchange rates in line with economic fundamentals."

On Wednesday, the dollar briefly sagged to a 15-month low against a basket of major currencies before recovering slightly. It fell slightly against the euro, which was quoted at $1.4982 at 4 p.m. in New York. So far this year, the dollar is down 7% against the European currency.

Asian finance ministers, now gathered in Singapore for a meeting of the 21-member Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, are expected to raise their concerns about both the dollar's decline and the inflexibility of the Chinese yuan.

The fear is two-fold. If currencies surge against the dollar, it damages the ability of countries in the region to compete in world markets, by making their exports more expensive. What's more, one of their major competitors -- China -- ties its currency to the dollar. As the yuan sinks in tandem with the dollar, China is able to keep its export prices low and price out competition.

A concluding statement from the assembled APEC officials is expected to underline the importance of flexible exchange rates to sustainable global growth -- generally viewed as code for a rise in the Chinese yuan. Such efforts are unlikely to bear fruit in the near term, which means these countries must act on their own to slow their currencies' rise.

Experts estimate that some of the largest emerging economies may have spent as much as $150 billion on currency intervention over the past two months, judging from the growth of their international reserves, according to data from Brown Brothers Harriman. While that's not a huge amount in the currency markets, which have turnover of more than $3 trillion a day, traders pay keen attention to what the authorities are doing and where they are likely to intervene.

Thailand alone has bought $15 billion trying to push the dollar higher against the baht, Korn Chatikavanij, Thailand's finance minister, said in an interview with Dow Jones Newswires.

"Quite clearly, all Asian central banks have found it necessary to intervene, and it's costing us," Mr. Korn said.

The Chinese authorities aren't going to tip off financial markets in advance of a move in their currency, said Jim O'Neill, head of global economic research at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. But the fact that they adjusted the phrasing of their exchange-rate policy in a quarterly report Wednesday could be a response to the growing attention to the yuan, particularly from fellow developing nations.

"It's one thing for the Chinese to ignore the U.S. and Europe," he said. "But when they start ignoring the developing G-20 it's a bit trickier."

For the last three years, the International Monetary Fund has been pressing China to revalue its currency. At the recent meeting of finance ministers from the Group of 20 nations in Scotland, the IMF once again said the yuan "remains significantly undervalued from a medium-term perspective."

Emerging nations are recovering from the global slump far faster than their developed counterparts and investors are flocking to buy their stocks and bonds. That in turn puts upward pressure on their currencies.

Efforts to stem the flow of foreign capital or to intervene in currency markets pose serious challenges for governments and aren't always successful. Unless a government takes radical steps, it can't affect a U-turn in its currency. However, it "can lean against the wind," says Win Thin, a currency strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman, in this case by slowing the pace of currency strengthening.

Developing nations aren't the only ones uncomfortable with the dollar's slide. European governments, especially Germany, will be increasingly uneasy if the euro continues to gain on the dollar.

Governments that try to check the rise of their currency often end up accumulating dollars which they may not need.

"I'm convinced that in the long term the dollar is more likely than not to decline in value, so we're building up assets that are declining in value over time," says Mr. Korn of Thailand. "That's not healthy."

Lost There, Felt Here by Thomas L. Friedman

Belem, Brazil

“One million dollars?”

The question was asked with eyes wide and a voice of incredulity. The person asking was Antonio Waldez Góes da Silva, the governor of the Amazonian state of Amapá, which has the biggest national park in the world. I had just shared with Gov. Waldez Góes a recent news article in The Hill, the Congressional newspaper, which said the total cost of stationing one U.S. soldier in Afghanistan for one year is $1 million.

What if we kept just one soldier back from Afghanistan and gave you the money, I asked the governor? What would it buy you? Gov. Waldez Góes mulled that over: “If you kept three soldiers back, that would be enough for me to keep the State University of Amapá running for one year, so 1,400 students could take different courses on sustainable development for the Amazon.”

O.K., I know. It is a bit misleading to take a war budget and assume that if it weren’t spent on combat, it would all go to schools or parks. And we do have real enemies. Some wars have to be fought, no matter the cost. But such comparisons are still a useful reminder that our debate about Afghanistan is not taking place in a vacuum. We will have to make trade-offs, and there are other hugely important projects today crying out for funding, as my colleague Nick Kristof has pointed out regarding health care.

Well, if America is going to assume the primary burden of fixing Central Asia, maybe, say, China, could help pick up the tab for saving what is left of the Amazon and the world’s other great tropical forests. Could President Obama raise that idea in Beijing?

An intergovernmental working group for saving the rainforests estimates that for about $30 billion we could reduce deforestation in places like Brazil, Indonesia and the Congo by 25 percent by 2015. After that, financing from global carbon markets, plus these countries’ own resources, could save much of the rest. China now has $2.2 trillion in reserves. How about it, Beijing? Why don’t you step up and provide some public goods for the world for once — not because you get a direct benefit, but just because it would make the world a better place for everyone?

Sure, America should still lead such efforts. But China’s days as a global free-rider should be over. China should pay its fair share — and more — since it will benefit every bit as much as the U.S., Europe and Japan. Indeed, the U.N. Foundation estimates that because living tropical forests are such huge storehouses of carbon — which gets released when we chop the trees down — if we just stop deforestation, we get a big chunk of the carbon-emissions reductions the world needs between now and 2020.

“And forest-rich developing countries, like Brazil, are now ready to do their part because they depend on the water that the rainforests provide for energy and agriculture, and because they see a new model for growth based on their natural capital,” said Glenn Prickett, a senior vice president with Conservation International and my traveling companion here. “Brazil has developed the science, political will and basic rules and institutions for preserving its rainforests. What Brazil and other rainforest nations like Indonesia lack, though, are the funds to take this new economic model to scale.”

I was struck by how many of the building blocks for “natural capitalism” that Gov. Waldez Góes — whose state sits at the mouth of the Amazon — is putting in place, so that he can have an economy based on preserving the rainforest rather than stripping it. He’s building on the three P’s — creating protected forest areas, improving productivity on lands that have already been cleared so farmers there will not need more, and establishing property rights for Amazonian lands, which are a legal mess, inviting Wild West land grabs and scaring off investors in sustainable agriculture.

Gov. Waldez Góes has already protected 75 percent of his state as rainforest and has enacted the laws and created a technical college to provide for sustainable logging and eco-tourism and for developing medicinal and cosmetic products from rainforest plants. But he needs funds to implement and monitor at scale and prove that “natural capitalism” can deliver more than the extractive version.

“I am the son of a rubber tapper,” he explains. “I was born and raised in the jungle, so even before becoming a politician I had a strong connection to nature.” The world is facing this relentless “development path that brings pollution and degradation and deforestation,” he added. He and other Brazilians want to prove you can do better by bringing “conservation and development together.”

Tropical forests represent some 5 percent of the earth’s surface but harbor 50 percent of all living species. Conservation International has a motto: “What is lost there is felt here.” If we lose what is left of the Amazon, we’ll all feel the climate effects, changing rainfall and loss of biodiversity that enriches our world. Brazil seems ready to do its part. Are we? What about you, China?

Triumph of a Dreamer by Nicholas D. Kristof

Any time anyone tells you that a dream is impossible, any time you’re discouraged by impossible challenges, just mutter this mantra: Tererai Trent.

Of all the people earning university degrees this year, perhaps the most remarkable story belongs to Tererai (pronounced TEH-reh-rye), a middle-aged woman who is one of my heroes. She is celebrating a personal triumph, but she’s also a monument to the aid organizations and individuals who helped her. When you hear that foreign-aid groups just squander money or build dependency, remember that by all odds Tererai should be an illiterate, battered cattle-herd in Zimbabwe and instead — ah, but I’m getting ahead of my story.

Tererai was born in a village in rural Zimbabwe, probably sometime in 1965, and attended elementary school for less than one year. Her father married her off when she was about 11 to a man who beat her regularly. She seemed destined to be one more squandered African asset.

A dozen years passed. Jo Luck, the head of an aid group called Heifer International, passed through the village and told the women there that they should stand up, nurture dreams, change their lives.

Inspired, Tererai scribbled down four absurd goals based on accomplishments she had vaguely heard of among famous Africans. She wrote that she wanted to study abroad, and to earn a B.A., a master’s and a doctorate.

Tererai began to work for Heifer and several Christian organizations as a community organizer. She used the income to take correspondence courses, while saving every penny she could.

In 1998 she was accepted to Oklahoma State University, but she insisted on taking all five of her children with her rather than leave them with her husband. “I couldn’t abandon my kids,” she recalled. “I knew that they might end up getting married off.”

Tererai’s husband eventually agreed that she could take the children to America — as long as he went too. Heifer helped with the plane tickets, Tererai’s mother sold a cow, and neighbors sold goats to help raise money. With $4,000 in cash wrapped in a stocking and tied around her waist, Tererai set off for Oklahoma.

An impossible dream had come true, but it soon looked like a nightmare. Tererai and her family had little money and lived in a ramshackle trailer, shivering and hungry. Her husband refused to do any housework — he was a man! — and coped by beating her.

“There was very little food,” she said. “The kids would come home from school, and they would be hungry.” Tererai found herself eating from trash cans, and she thought about quitting — but felt that doing so would let down other African women.

“I knew that I was getting an opportunity that other women were dying to get,” she recalled. So she struggled on, holding several jobs, taking every class she could, washing and scrubbing, enduring beatings, barely sleeping.

At one point the university tried to expel Tererai for falling behind on tuition payments. A university official, Ron Beer, intervened on her behalf and rallied the faculty and community behind her with donations and support.

“I saw that she had enormous talent,” Dr. Beer said. His church helped with food, Habitat for Humanity provided housing, and a friend at Wal-Mart carefully put expired fruits and vegetables in boxes beside the Dumpster and tipped her off.

Soon afterward, Tererai had her husband deported back to Zimbabwe for beating her, and she earned her B.A. — and started on her M.A. Then her husband returned, now frail and sick with a disease that turned out to be AIDS. Tererai tested negative for H.I.V., and then — feeling sorry for her husband — she took in her former tormentor and nursed him as he grew sicker and eventually died.

Through all this blur of pressures, Tererai excelled at school, pursuing a Ph.D at Western Michigan University and writing a dissertation on AIDS prevention in Africa even as she began working for Heifer as a program evaluator. On top of all that, she was remarried, to Mark Trent, a plant pathologist she had met at Oklahoma State.

Tererai is a reminder of the adage that talent is universal, while opportunity is not. There are still 75 million children who are not attending primary school around the world. We could educate them all for far less than the cost of the proposed military “surge” in Afghanistan.

Each time Tererai accomplished one of those goals that she had written long ago, she checked it off on that old, worn paper. Last month, she ticked off the very last goal, after successfully defending her dissertation. She’ll receive her Ph.D next month, and so a one-time impoverished cattle-herd from Zimbabwe with less than a year of elementary school education will don academic robes and become Dr. Tererai Trent.

The Evolution of the God Gene by Nicholas Wade

In the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico, the archaeologists Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery have gained a remarkable insight into the origin of religion.

During 15 years of excavation they have uncovered not some monumental temple but evidence of a critical transition in religious behavior. The record begins with a simple dancing floor, the arena for the communal religious dances held by hunter-gatherers in about 7,000 B.C. It moves to the ancestor-cult shrines that appeared after the beginning of corn-based agriculture around 1,500 B.C., and ends in A.D. 30 with the sophisticated, astronomically oriented temples of an early archaic state.

This and other research is pointing to a new perspective on religion, one that seeks to explain why religious behavior has occurred in societies at every stage of development and in every region of the world. Religion has the hallmarks of an evolved behavior, meaning that it exists because it was favored by natural selection. It is universal because it was wired into our neural circuitry before the ancestral human population dispersed from its African homeland.

For atheists, it is not a particularly welcome thought that religion evolved because it conferred essential benefits on early human societies and their successors. If religion is a lifebelt, it is hard to portray it as useless.

For believers, it may seem threatening to think that the mind has been shaped to believe in gods, since the actual existence of the divine may then seem less likely.

But the evolutionary perspective on religion does not necessarily threaten the central position of either side. That religious behavior was favored by natural selection neither proves nor disproves the existence of gods. For believers, if one accepts that evolution has shaped the human body, why not the mind too? What evolution has done is to endow people with a genetic predisposition to learn the religion of their community, just as they are predisposed to learn its language. With both religion and language, it is culture, not genetics, that then supplies the content of what is learned.

It is easier to see from hunter-gatherer societies how religion may have conferred compelling advantages in the struggle for survival. Their rituals emphasize not theology but intense communal dancing that may last through the night. The sustained rhythmic movement induces strong feelings of exaltation and emotional commitment to the group. Rituals also resolve quarrels and patch up the social fabric.

The ancestral human population of 50,000 years ago, to judge from living hunter-gatherers, would have lived in small, egalitarian groups without chiefs or headmen. Religion served them as an invisible government. It bound people together, committing them to put their community’s needs ahead of their own self-interest. For fear of divine punishment, people followed rules of self-restraint toward members of the community. Religion also emboldened them to give their lives in battle against outsiders. Groups fortified by religious belief would have prevailed over those that lacked it, and genes that prompted the mind toward ritual would eventually have become universal.

In natural selection, it is genes that enable their owners to leave more surviving progeny that become more common. The idea that natural selection can favor groups, instead of acting directly on individuals, is highly controversial. Though Darwin proposed the idea, the traditional view among biologists is that selection on individuals would stamp out altruistic behavior (the altruists who spent time helping others would leave fewer children of their own) far faster than group-level selection could favor it.

But group selection has recently gained two powerful champions, the biologists David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, who argued that two special circumstances in recent human evolution would have given group selection much more of an edge than usual. One is the highly egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherer societies, which makes everyone behave alike and gives individual altruists a better chance of passing on their genes. The other is intense warfare between groups, which enhances group-level selection in favor of community-benefiting behaviors such as altruism and religion.

A propensity to learn the religion of one’s community became so firmly implanted in the human neural circuitry, according to this new view, that religion was retained when hunter-gatherers, starting from 15,000 years ago, began to settle in fixed communities. In the larger, hierarchical societies made possible by settled living, rulers co-opted religion as their source of authority. Roman emperors made themselves chief priest or even a living god, though most had the taste to wait till after death for deification. “Drat, I think I’m becoming a god!” Vespasian joked on his deathbed.

Religion was also harnessed to vital practical tasks such as agriculture, which in the first societies to practice it required quite unaccustomed forms of labor and organization. Many religions bear traces of the spring and autumn festivals that helped get crops planted and harvested at the right time. Passover once marked the beginning of the barley festival; Easter, linked to the date of Passover, is a spring festival.

Could the evolutionary perspective on religion become the basis for some kind of detente between religion and science? Biologists and many atheists have a lot of respect for evolution and its workings, and if they regarded religious behavior as an evolved instinct they might see religion more favorably, or at least recognize its constructive roles. Religion is often blamed for its spectacular excesses, whether in promoting persecution or warfare, but gets less credit for its staple function of patching up the moral fabric of society. But perhaps it doesn’t deserve either blame or credit. If religion is seen as a means of generating social cohesion, it is a society and its leaders that put that cohesion to good or bad ends.