Such a development could have lots of unexpected applications both indoors and out. The article goes into how these might evolve. Another piece on the same topic provides more details on the folks working in this area: "This initiative, known as the Smart Lighting Engineering Research Center (http://smartlighting.bu.edu), is part of an $18.5 million, multi-year NSF program awarded to Boston University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of New Mexico
idea of the movie seemed to come on an impulsive notion by Oliver Stone, hot off his success with Platoon, which gave him mojo with the studios to green-light a seemingly risky movie about financial geeks on Wall Street. As the author describes it: "The conceit for the movie was an afterthought on Stone's part. He wanted me to research and write a screenplay on the television quiz show scandals of the 1950s. During a story conference at a Mexican restaurant on a Friday night in Los Angeles, he
, referring to the getting credit flowing again to jump-start an increasingly stalled economy here and abroad. It starts of course by re-capping the Herculean game of chicken played between Congress and the financial markets this week: "NECESSARY, BUT NOT SUFFICIENT. That best describes the $700 billion financial-markets rescue package that made its tortured way through Congress last week, finally earning the House of Representatives' OK Friday, along with $152 billion of ancillary
and the financial markets this week: NECESSARY, BUT NOT SUFFICIENT. That best describes the $700 billion financial-markets rescue package that made its tortured way through Congress last week, finally earning the H Read the rest of this great post here
reading on the history of how Fannie Mae reached the tipping point on making riskier loans to lower-income home buyers, prodded on by legislators, constituents and lobbying groups connected to the company and industry (image source). Some excerpts: "Between 2005 and 2008, Fannie purchased or guaranteed at least $270 billion in loans to risky borrowers — more than three times as much as in all its earlier years combined, according to company filings and industry data...
at every level, the two parties who eagerly participated in every stage of the sub-prime boom and bust. Luckily, the Wall Street Journal sets the record straight in an article today, titled "How Government stoked the mania". Here're the choice bits: "Many believe that wild greed and market failure led us into this sorry mess. According to that narrative, investors in search of higher yields bought novel securities that bundled loans made to high-risk borrowers. Banks issued these loans because
I'm not talking about the bailout plan that sailed through the august body yesterday, but a Nuclear trade deal with India, that as the Washington Post explains, is a pretty big deal (image source): "The Senate last night approved a historic agreement that opens up nuclear trade with India for the first time since New Delhi conducted a nuclear test three decades ago, giving the Bush administration a significant foreign policy achievement in its
way to do what the TARP is trying to do, stabilize the current crisis in the credit markets, and put the economy on a footing to grow again. Edmund Phelps, the Economics Nobel prize winner in 2006, has the following suggestion in a WSJ op-ed today: "Right now our banking industry is barely operational. Whatever the corrective surgery indicated, the priority is to get the system operating again. Delay would be costly and risky. The most discussed of the proposed programs would address banks'
DEAL OR NO DEAL The squeaky wheel gets the most grease. That's the one sure thing to be found in any form Democracy from it's earliest days*. It's been interesting to see this principle in action again through the current financial crisis, as our representatives in Washington figure out whether they're for or against
But I did think these comments by the outgoing Prime Minister of Israel, on the eve of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, were one bright spot in a long time. The New York Times reports (image source): "Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in an interview published on Monday that Israel must withdraw from nearly all of the West Bank as well as East Jerusalem to attain peace with the Palestinians and that any occupied land it held onto would have to be
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