Genes can not be patented – true or false?

 by TexasGOPVote.com

The week in review: June 10-14
[Via SCOTUSblog]

The Court has transitioned to its end-of-Term schedule, releasing opinions on two action-packed days this week. We have seven opinions and one certiorari grant. That means there are just nineteen opinions to go before we put this Term to bed – and several of them raise exceptionally high-profile and contentious issues, including affirmative action, Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, state voter ID laws, and same-sex marriage. Here’s the rundown of what happened this week.

This week’s headline decision is Justice Thomas’s opinion for a unanimous Court in Association for Molecular Pathology v. Myriad Genetics, Inc. The Court held that naturally occurring DNA segments cannot be patented, but it reached the opposite conclusion with regard to complementary DNA – also known as cDNA, which is essentially a synthesized replica of the protein-encoding parts of natural DNA, but not of the entire DNA sequence. Myriad Genetics had isolated two genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, mutations in which correlate to a dramatically increased risk of breast and ovarian cancer; it then developed medical tests to detect the mutationsand therefore predict cancer. The company sought patents on the naturally occurring DNA sequences themselves, as well as on synthetic cDNA that it had created from the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes. Those patents effectively gave Myriad the sole right to isolate (or license others to isolate) the BRCA genes – which means that Myriad effectively held a monopoly on the ability to test for mutations in the genes. The patents also gave Myriad the sole right to create BRCA cDNA.

In yesterday’s much anticipated decision, the Court held that naturally occurring genes are not patentable, but cDNA is. The Court recognized the importance of isolating the natural BRCA genes, but it reasoned that “[g]roundbreaking, innovative, or even brilliant discovery does not by itself” justify a patent; instead, the question is whether a “new and useful . . . composition of matter” has been invented. Because the BRCA genes are part of the natural DNA sequence, the Court determined that by isolating the BRCA genes, “Myriad did not create anything,” and the natural BRCA genes could not be patented. However, because cDNA is created in a laboratory and does not occur in nature, those sequences could be patented.

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The Court’s decision will take some time to digest in its details. For example, it suggests that a gene made of DNA is not patentable. But if the RNA from that gene is converted into complementary DNA (cDNA) in the lab, then THAT gene made of DNA can be patented.

I imagine we have not heard the last of this, especially since it appears the court itself tried to make this a narrow ruling and not a generally applicable one.

In the meantime, don’t weep tears for Myriad. The costs for their tests seem high (around $3000 but are actually not that outrageous considering that the nature of the BRCA mutations requires them to find a few bases altered in a stretch of over 10,000, just about everyone with a BRCA mutation seems to have it in a different spot so every woman needs to have deep coverage over the entire region to be sure). It is not simply a quick sequencing check. 

And, what was not mentioned, was that the $3000 test also includes most of the costs for checking other family members. Because once Myriad knows where the exact mutations are for one woman, they can reaily check all the other female family members for minimal costs.

So, those who talk about Angelina having the money to pay for the test should also remember that her mother suffered from the same sort of cancer and her aunt just died of breast cancer. For around $3000, Myriad would have checked all three of them.

But the real value Myriad has now comes from the huge database it now has for BRCA mutations. No one else has such a resource and I expect them to use this over the near term.

In the mean time, I expect we have not seen the last court case on patents and life.

The end of the Tour de France?

 by malias

Mariage gay: avec le “Tour pour tous”, des opposants veulent s’en prendre au Tour de France
[Via Huffington Post/France]

Bien que la loi autorisant le mariage homosexuel a été publiée au Journal officiel le 18 mai, ses opposants continuent à mener des actions de plus belle. Et c’est nouveau, ils s’en prennent désormais aux grands évènements sportifs.

Ainsi, après avoir perturbé la finale masculine de Roland-Garros dimanche (voir plus bas), voici que des anti-mariage gay menacent maintenant le Tour de France cycliste, rapporte France Info.

Une action, baptisée “Le Tour pour tous”, a été initiée sur les réseaux sociaux par Samuel Lafont, qui se présente comme “conseiller national UMP” sur Twitter et qui apparaît comme un fervent contempteur du mariage pour tous. Avec ce nouveau mouvement, celui-ci compte perturber chaque étape du Tour 2013, qui partira le 29 juin de Porto-Vecchio en Corse.

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This translates – viaGoogle – into:

Although the law allowing gay marriage was gazetted on May 18, opponents continue to take action than ever. And it’s new, they are now targeting the major sporting events.

Thus, having disrupted the men’s final at Roland Garros Sunday (see below), here as anti-gay marriage now threaten the Tour de France, France Info reported.

Action, called “The Tower for all”, was initiated on social networks by Samuel Lafont, who presents himself as “UMP National Council” on Twitter and appears as a fervent hater of marriage for all. With this new movement, it has disturbing each stage of the Tour in 2013, which starts June 29 in Porto-Vecchio in Corsica.

Riders in the Tour risk their lives riding at high speed just inches from people. That is what makes it so exciting for the millions who stand there for hours.

Now they have to worry about lunatics jumping out with flares to protest.

Some of the most spectacular spills happened when a fan accidentally touched a racer.Like here:

Or when a car hits them:

Every year riders get hurt becuase of road hazards like dogs:

If these protests put the riders’ safety in peril, it could lead to the end of one of the great aspects of road racing.

And that would be a shame.

Cutting edge capitalism that can change the world

 by Abi Skipp

Dot Chat: From Energy Campaigners to Solar Finance Entrepreneurs
[Via Dot Earth]

An online conversation with a young energy activist turned solar entrepreneur.

[More]

Here we have a couple of entrepreneurs who are leading new approaches to financing the needs we will have for future energy.

What is interesting is both were clean energy activists who have taken to new approaches for raising capital to fund needed cleantech projects. Instead of fighting capitalism, they are bending it to their needs.

Mosaic allows people to make microinvestments (as low as $25) into clean energy projects with perhaps 4.5% interest on their investment. The projects were funded with hours. It has invested over $2 million using about $1000 in marketing expenses.

Mosaic raises money for solar projects and as the projects generate revenue, some of that revenue accrues to the investors. Those investors are regular people.

And they are doing this with just 3 employees focussed full time on origination, underwriting and servicing of loans. No Wall Street firm could ebven look at this with just 3 employees. (Mosaic actualy has 7 people working on its IT.)

Think of that – a financial services company with over twice as many people working on IT than working on the financial services.

It does not even build its own IT infrastructure. Mosaic uses Amazon Web Services to do its work. It can expand as much as it needs by leveraging what AWS provides.

And it does it by directly brokering projects with community investors. Wall Street is not in on the process. 

 

There are other groups using these sorts of approaches but this one is even more focussed – it just does solar.

It can work because the cost for solar panels has dropped tremendously. And crowdsourcing approaches permit them to disintermediate Wall Street brokers. 

That is, ‘notes’ can be issued for projects that would not be moneymakers for Wall Street. A community project costing $100,000 would not be worthwhile to most companies because their profit would be too low. Their models require tens of million or more for it to make money for them.

Here, being able to broker many, many notes to people  can work. They make it up in quantity, along with the drop in actually doing the process.

They take a small fee for administrating the note of 1% of the total interest. So the note is actually at perhaps 5.5% and they pay out 4.5%.

Read a prospectus to understand more. As with most investments, there are risks. But the ability to directly invest in local community projects that would have a very hard time selling binds is truly amazing.

It is like a whole new way to create bonds in the days of the Information Age.

Mosaic has over 10,000 people waiting to invest in the next projects.

And things will really change when the SEC publishes the rules about crowdinvesting. That will make it easier for microinvestment in corporations, altering the way stocks are sold in the same way this is changing the way bonds are created.

The other company is taking a non-profit approach to the same thing – letting people donate money rather than invest.

Both will be hugely disruptive to Wall Street, all while making capital flow more easily for small investors.

So expect the big guys to do what they can to stop it.

So what would you do if a drone coptor showed up outside your bedroom?

by Don McCullough

How Low Can Drones Go?
[Via Techdirt]

As we’ve pointed out in a few stories, drones aren’t necessarily something to worry about. Like any technology, they can be used for good and bad purposes, and shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. But determining where exactly the line between acceptable and unacceptable lies is tricky, as the following story from the Capitol Hill Seattle blog shows:

This afternoon, a stranger set an aerial drone into flight over my yard and beside my house near Miller Playfield. I initially mistook its noisy buzzing for a weed-whacker on this warm spring day.

So how close does a drone have to be to someone’s home before it becomes intrusive? Clearly, at some height the air is part of the sky commons that belongs to everyone, as a famous 1946 US Supreme Court decision laid down:

The air is a public highway, as Congress has declared. Were that not true, every transcontinental flight would subject the operator to countless trespass suits. Common sense revolts at the idea.

The post continues:

After several minutes, I looked out my third-story window to see a drone hovering a few feet away. My husband went to talk to the man on the sidewalk outside our home who was operating the drone with a remote control, to ask him to not fly his drone near our home. The man insisted that it is legal for him to fly an aerial drone over our yard and adjacent to our windows. He noted that the drone has a camera, which transmits images he viewed through a set of glasses. He purported to be doing “research”. We are extremely concerned, as he could very easily be a criminal who plans to break into our house or a peeping-tom.

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So, what happens when a citizen, standing on public sidewalks, operates a drone in the air over private property? How about if he was on his own property? What happens if he uploads video he took while operating the drone? What happens if you destroy his drone while it is operating over your property? Do you get to keep it if you capture it? Can you legally block the signal controlling his drone? Will there be a market for a directed device that can incapacitate someone’s drone?

Some interesting questions will be hitting the courts soon.

Senators may have overplayed their hand with Apple

by epSos.de

Tim Cook tells Congress why Apple won’t move $100 billion back home
[Via Ars Technica]

There’s a disconnect between how Apple CEO Tim Cook sees his company’s tax strategies and how some members of the US Senate view it. That became clearer than ever today after Cook and two other Apple executives testified before Congress, explaining why they’re holding most of their international income in Irish subsidiaries like Apple Operations International (AOI), which declare no tax residency anywhere in the world.

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While both Republicans and Democrats went after Tim Cook, the feedback on this article is fascinating. Usually when Apple is involved it is pretty evenly split between pro and con.

But in this case, almost everyone sees Apple as simply doing what Congress allows it. If Congress wants things to be different, then change the law.

Virtually no one was on the side of the senators.

If they expected this to be a launching point for going after Apple, I don’t think that is going to happen.

Our current government cannot properly be relied on with regard to copyright protection

by Orange County Archives
*I’m assuming that the Orange County Archives has the right to publish this as the movie came out in 1920 

A Framework For Copyright Reform
[Via Techdirt]

I watched a large part of the House Subcommittee on Intellectual Property’s first hearing on copyright reform, and came away somewhat disappointed. While the panelists presented a variety of interesting viewpoints and worked hard to highlight areas of agreement, many of the Congressional Representatives were clearly confused about the law, the Constitution and the nature of the debate itself. I came away with a few key concerns, but also with some ideas for a framework that any debate on copyright should necessarily take. First up, the concerns:

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The Constitution never mentions protecting anything by using Copyright. Copyright is to be used to promote:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Too often our government sees copyright only as a right to make money, at the expense of the progress of science. At the moment, any corporate entity can have an exclusive right for 120 years.

I don’t mind money being involved and do not think everything should be free. But I do think the pendulum has gone too far and that protecting a flow of capital is more important than promoting progress.

I do not believe the original purpose of copyright is served by allowing non-creators of a work to control access for so much longer than anyone’s lifetime. Yet that is what our government is interested in – protecting the rights of corporations rather than promote progress.

The balance needs to shift back. As this article mentions, we are all content creators now. The entire arena is being disintermediated, decentralized and disrupted. Powerful monied interest threatened by this process are abusing Congress and copyright. Those that made their livelihood by marketing and distributing  the creative works of others should simply have less power to control copyright than they currently possess.

America has not seen copyrighted works enter the public domain since the 70s.  Just about anything since the early 20s is still covered by someone’s copyright. The ‘limited time’ was extended to 95  years to keep Disney happy. I expect that when Mickey Mouse comes up against this limit, Congress will just extend this ‘limited time.’

One detrimental example of the harm this does is the inability to determine what is really licensed or who holds copyright. One of my favorite documentaries – Hollywood by Brownlow – dealt with the early silent film era. Using archival material, It was a fabulous resource on a critical time in American history. None of us can legally watch it on our DVDs because it is not clear who holds copyright anymore for much of the archival material.

So many entities have come and gone over the last 100 years that it is simply impossible to know who has a legitimate copyright.

No matter how many people want to pay to watch this great documentary, copyright issues will keep it from appearing again. Only old videotapes from 20 years ago can be watched. But there are only used ones available for public sale. When they go, it will be lost to us. At least legal versions.

There are many works that people want to enjoy and will even pay for but cannot legally because no one knows who has the rights anymore. Searching out these questions has become too costly to make such publication worthwhile.

They will simply be lost to us. 

People create new versions of what is in the public domain and corporations simply claim they own it. We just saw a movie based on characters from a public domain works – Oz, the Great and Powerful – where huge amounts of money needed to be spent to fend of lawyers representing a work made decades after the original. They even haggled over the exact color of green that could be used.

Hard to see how anything but corporation coffers and lawyers pockets are being promoted here.

Perhaps in 2019 we will see some works from before 1923 lose their copyright. Or Disney and others will get it extended again. Corporations benefit but the rest of us do not. The progress of science and the useful arts are stymied when works are controlled well past the point where their authors and inventors are even alive.

Skeptics of AGW a disappearing breed – except in politics and the media

Zombie climate sceptic theories survive only in newspapers and on TV | Graham Readfearn
[Via Science news, comment and analysis | guardian.co.uk]

Study finds overwhelming scientific consensus that humans have caused global warming, but media still hasn’t caught up

Here’s the news from 1991 – a vanishingly small number of peer-reviewed studies in science journals argue that humans aren’t the cause of global warming.

Here’s the news from 2013 – since 1991, less than two per cent of all peer-reviewed studies say climate change is caused by something other than human activities (that’s burning fossil fuels and digging up forests, to you and me).

Both the news from 2013 and the news from 1991 come from new research published this week in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

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The paper – Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature – is Open Access.

Here is the take home figure:

 

What is interesting is not that there really are no papers the reject AGW. It is the increase in number that take no real position. This took place rapidly in the late 90s and has stabilized.

The paper looked at some of the possible reasons for this and came to the conclusion that scientists were taking no position because it was simply understood that AGW was happening. By 2000 or so, they no longer felt they needed to state the obvious and were more concerned with new problems, not with restating what was already known.

There have been millions of dollars invested to make people think there is not a scientific consensus regarding climate change. As the conclusions state:

A key strategy involved constructing the impression of active scientific debate using dissenting scientists as spokesmen (Oreskes 2010). The situation is exacerbated by media treatment of the climate issue, where the normative practice of providing opposing sides with equal attention has allowed a vocal minority to have their views amplified (Boykoff and Boykoff 2004). While there are indications that the situation has improved in the UK and USA prestige press (Boykoff 2007), the UK tabloid press showed no indication of improvement from 2000 to 2006 (Boykoff and Mansfield 2008).

The data show otherwise.

 

Going to Space Camp – How community changed the life of a young girl, first for ill and then for good.

Teenage chemistry enthusiast won’t be charged with felony, will go to space camp
[Via Boing Boing]

Kiera Wilmot — the Florida 16-year-old who created a small explosion just outside her school before classes started by mixing cleaning solution and tin foil (she was just curious, nobody was harmed) — will not be charged with a felony, after all. Florida State Attorneys dropped the charges against Wilmot yesterday. After her case garnered national attention, she ended up with a lawyer who has defended her mostly for free. There’s no word yet on whether she’ll be allowed to return to the school that expelled her and pressed charges in the first place.

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Not a felon. Going to Space Camp. I just love stories like this.

This shows that new communities  created on the Internet can be smarter than zero-tolerance laws. 

First her community expelled her, threatened to send her to jail and possible mark her as a felon for her life. For something that hurt no one, that many people have done and that was at most a poor choice – something that teenagers really should be allowed to make. Because… zero-tolerance.

But, because the internet can create ad hoc communities of real social power, with tools to affect rapid change, it did not stop there. Strangers stepped up to raise their voices and to help her. She got a good lawyer to step up. The social pushback stopped the previous process and allowed cooler, smarter decisions to be made.

And what is really great is people did more than just raise their voices. There are tools to allow them to put their money where their mouth is.

So a fund was created to pay for her defense. Over $8000 was raised. After any remaining legal expenses are paid for, the money will be used in a trust for her education.

However the really great thing was started by Homer Hickam, the former NASA engineer whose story is told in October Sky – he built rockets as a teenager, really high powered ones. It would not be surprising to have seen him put in a similar position today as Kiera.

Homer set up a crowdfunding project to send Kiera and her sister to Space Camp! More than enough money has been rasied to send them. Homer just added this:

We have the girls scheduled now, their tuition paid, their flight suits purchased, and nearly everything arranged.  They’re excited and so are we!

What a great story. Instead of destroying this girl’s life, the community actually taught the lesson it needed to (get some oversight before any science work, just to double check?) and then provided her opportunities she did not even have before. 

And the rapidity at which this happened demonstrates that we are beginning to create the social norms to balance safety to a community vs freedom for the individual.

Instead of going to jail, Kiera is going to learn about space. Amazing.

The five grants that, because of conservative Representatives, could change US science forever

by MartialArtsNomad.com

Here are the five grants that has conservatives so upset they want to alter how research is done in the US.

• Award No. 1247824: “ Animals in National Geographic, 1888-2008″ ($227,437)
• Award No. 1230911: “Comparative Histories of Scientific Conservation: Nature, Science, and Society in Patagonian and Amazonian South America” ($195,761)
• Award No. 1230365: “The International Criminal Court and the Pursuit of Justice” ($260,001)
• Award No. 1226483: “Comparative Network Analysis: Mapping Global Social Interactions” ($435,000)
• Award No. 1157551: “Regulating Accountability and Transparency in China’s Dairy Industry” ($152,464)

You only have to read the conservatives online to see exactly why they dislike these grants – not because of the intellectual content of the work but because of their personal political views. So now we use political debate to examine grants

And political opinion, not facts, to determine funding.

These five grants represent  a minuscule number of funded grants and tiny amount of funding the NSF provides a year. They gave out 11,000 grants last year and have a budget of $7,000,000,000l The total of these grants are about $1,300,000 averaging over 2 years  in length – so $650,000 a year. This is 0.009% oif the total budget

So, let’s assume that the number  of grants everyone can agree are ‘bad’ are 100-times greater than this (a big if since many people feel these 5 grants are fine). That still means less than 1% of all the funding NSF makes is a mistake.

Even if we could find 500 grants that we all agreed were bogus, 99% of the grants would be acceptable to some Americans. 

Even assuming these 5 grants are totally worthless – not very likely – are we really going to overhaul the research engine so we can let politicians decide which gets funded and which does not?

Is the problem really bad enough to require the sticky hands of politicians to be responsible for research funding? Because that is what conservatives in Congress are proposing.

The end of the US as an innovation machine is upon us

Trofim Lysenko

U.S. Lawmaker Proposes New Criteria for Choosing NSF Grants - 
[Via ScienceInsider]

The new chair of the House of Representatives science committee has drafted a bill that, in effect, would replace peer review at the National Science Foundation (NSF) with a set of funding criteria chosen by Congress. For good measure, it would also set in motion a process to determine whether the same criteria should be adopted by every other federal science agency.

The legislation, being worked up by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), represents the latest—and bluntest—attack on NSF by congressional Republicans seeking to halt what they believe is frivolous and wasteful research being funded in the social sciences. Last month, Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) successfully attached language to a 2013 spending bill that prohibits NSF from funding any political science research for the rest of the fiscal year unless its director certifies that it pertains to economic development or national security. Smith’s draft bill, called the “High Quality Research Act,” would apply similar language to NSF’s entire research portfolio across all the disciplines that it supports.

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The sequester is already hurting research funding in the US. Now conservative politicians want to make an even larger impact.

How do we want to make the research decisions funding American Innovation – peer-view by scientists or patronage by demagogic politicians? Looks like conservative politicians want to make it the latter.

Currently, researchers peer-review grants to decide on the ones that get funding. Baeed on the best scientific rationales. Not political ones.

In its place conservatives fell that grants can only be funded if they are directly applicable to health, wealth,  welfare and defense of the United States. They must be groundbreaking and must not be duplicative of any other project. These are all things that are very politicized and very subjective. They tremendously complicate the very act of doing research

It’s hard enough to get a grant funded when just using intellectual content as a criteria. Now these conservative politicians want to add another layer of political considerations into the process.

Luckily we have other politicians who recognize the danger of letting politicians decide what is good science or not. Eddie Johnson, who has worked on the Committee for over 20 years, wrote:

It is not perfect but GOP legislators now want to include more political criteria. Research grants can not just be given because they  expand our knowledge of the world around us, because they have intellectual merit. 

These efforts make scientific research a political football. Top-down micromanaging of scientific research destroyed Soviet  efforts for generations. Now some conservatives want to similarly politicize Federal funding of research grants.

Again, Rep. Johnson:

The GOP leader of this committee is already trying to begin this process, asking for general information from NSF on several five specific grants that he feels needs better explanation for their intellectual merit. How much more onerous will this be when he has created a whole bunch of new criteria that are directly political?

And he wants it be applied to all grants given by any Federal agency. He wants to impose HIS political views on which grants should be funded.

As John Holden stated, “It’s a dangerous thing for Congress, or anybody else, to be trying to specify in detail what types of fundamental research NSF should be funding.” Doing research using top-down driven mandates is what killed Soviet science for generations. In the same way, it will destroy research here.

If this GOP Representative’s plan comes to fruition, the opinions of corrupt politicians will be substituted for the views of American researchers.

The process that has generated innovations for 60 years will be gone, replaced by one as distorted as that seen in defense procurement, where things that are not needed and not even wanted are pushed forward by politicians needing to provide a government handout to their patrons.

The government WILL find a way to read your digital communications in real time unless we stop them

Google, Facebook, and others could face fines over government wiretap refusals
[Via The Verge - All Posts]

A new bill being drafted by a secret government task force would impose fines on internet companies — such as Facebook, Google, gaming and VoIP companies — if they don’t comply with court orders to allow law enforcement to wiretap on user communications, The Washington Post reports. According to the The Post, the legislation is being written up to address the FBI’s recent complaints that many web companies don’t or can’t comply with court orders forcing them to “intercept online communications” in real-time. The FBI calls this the “going dark” problem.

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Legislation is being created to allow the government to access our email, text messages, etc. Ostensibly to keep us safer.

The article does not mention that the message system Apple uses on iPhones – iMessage – is encrypted in ways that does not permit real-time access. even if Apple wanted to. So what are they going to do? Fine Apple into oblivion.

If this happens, I will work to encrypt everything I sen don the Internet. It may not do much but it is something. Of course, they will then move to wipe out encrption.

And, as the article states, adding in all these backdoors makes everything LESS safe, opening entire systems up to hackers. Making us ‘safer’ demonstrably makes our networks less safe.

Anti-vaccine denialists have been at work for a long, long time

by aldenchadwick

How vaccine scares respect local cultural boundaries.
[Via Bad Science]

I was on Newsnight this evening, discussing the measles outbreak in Swansea, and how we can get people vaccinated with MMR when they’ve previously refused. In my view: prevention is better than cure, it’s hard to reverse a scare story once the toothpaste is out of the tube, and we must innoculate ourselves against future [...]

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This is a fascinating story, providing historical context for anti-vaccine ideas. The report from the 1888 Scientific American discussing how anti-vaccine denialists got Zurich to stop smallpox vaccines, resulting in a 40-fold increase in smallpox in three years.

The report indicates that the underlying reasons for anti-vaccine hysteria respect cultural boundaries and what drives one group to reject vaccines is very different that others.

But, it seems to me, a major underlying reason is for a group to deny vaccines is that they see them as  devices from ‘outlanders’ to control the in-group. That vaccines do not help them and actually hurts them.

It may just be a human condition – using some sort of technology to scare the community and gain power thereby. It is almost always eventually harmful  and will damage communities that deny facts. 

It is very human for some people to deny facts for selfish reasons. Not smart and not helpful but very human. I wonder what the best approach to alter their incorrect views would be?

Only four of twenty attend Committee meeting on unemployment – our Congress at work

Just Four Lawmakers Show Up To Congressional Hearing On Long-Term Unemployment
[Via ThinkProgress]

The nearly-empty committee room (via Niraj Chokshi)

With the nation’s unemployment rate at 7.6 percent, members of Congress are fond of saying that they are focused on nothing but jobs. And yet, when Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D) scheduled a Joint Economic Committee hearing on one of the biggest jobs-related crises facing the United States, just four of the committee’s 20 members bothered to show up.

When Klobuchar’s hearing on long-term unemployment began at 10:30 Wednesday morning, she was the only member in attendance. She was later joined by three other members, though not a single one of the committee’s 10 Republican members managed to attend, as National Journal’s Niraj Chokshi reports:

The Joint Economic Commitee is one of a handful of committees whose members come from both parties and both houses of Congress. Klobuchar was eventually joined by three colleagues (in order of their appearance): Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, Maryland Rep. John Delaney and Maryland Rep. Elijah Cummings. All four are Democrats.

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I’ve generally tried to stay away from politics but this story hits both parties in both Houses. Yeah, 10 Republicans did not attend but so did 6 Democrats.

Jobs should be the number one things these guys are focussing on, not how to help Wall Street hedge fund managers pay less  in taxes. Obama should be shouting “Jobs” every time he leaves the White House instead of  talking about his dance moves. Pelosi and Boehner should be focussed on jobs, not austerity or chained-CPI or immigration.

Almost 40% of all unemployed Americans have been out of work for 6 months or more. And this does not count people who have simply given up looking for any work at all.

And businesses seldom hire anyone who has been out of work for 6 months or more. You’d think Congress would be interested in making sure people have jobs. Almost all the budget problems would be taken care of if people had jobs.

I guess getting out of town for a long weekend is more important.

Just remember this incorrect fact – our schools have ALWAYS been terrible.

by Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

The Kids Are All Right | 
[Via Mother Jones]

STANDARDIZED TESTS may not tell us everything there is to know about a school like Mission High, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have their uses. And one of those uses is myth busting—in particular, the myth that America’s schools are in a state of terminal decline and students aren’t learning as much as those of a generation ago.

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There have always been complaints about how awful our education system is, how it used to be better but is so awful today. This is a complaint that goes back almost to the beginning.

A complaint about how our kids are not learning since the very days of public education, even as each generation of kids is better educated.

Today we hear the same refrain, in almost the exact same words. Let’s look at the current numbers over time.

The article does a good job of showing real data – not just the anecdotal ramblings of someone with an ax to grind or something to sell. These look at test scores over the last 40 years.

Ninth graders are reading at a grade level higher and doing math at 2 grades higher than they were in 1971. There is still a gap in minority education but since the early 70s. blacks and latinos have increased 2-3 grade levels in reading while whites are up 1. There is now very little gender gaps at all. And the bottom 10% are improving faster than the top 10%.

The news is not as good for High Schoolers. They have pretty much shown no improvement at al in their scores, with or without No Child Left Behind. But they have not gotten worse since 1971.

In a powerful article from 1997 in American Heritage, Gerald Bracey looked at the history of complaints about the American education system. One of the first efforts to modify public education came from the Committee of Ten in 1882. The idea of an elementary education of 8 years followed by a High School education of 4 came from them.

At the time, with 3,000,000 children eligible to attend secondary school, only 203,000 did. Yet, as Bracey quoted, the Committee of Ten was not happy with the state of education:

 As things are now the high school teacher finds in the pupils fresh from the grammar schools no foundation of elementary mathematical conceptions outside of arithmetic. . . . When college professors endeavor to teach chemistry, physics, botany, zoology, meteorology, or geology to persons of eighteen or twenty years of age, they discover that in most instances new habits of observing, reflecting, and recording have to be painfully acquired—habits which they should have acquired in early childhood. The college teacher of history finds in like manner that his subject has never taken any serious hold . . .

Wow. Could have written yesterday. At the turn of the 20th century, the High School graduation rate was 3%, by mid-Century it was over 50%. Now over 78% do. Drop out rates are the lowest in over 20 years.

Yep, there were complaints but they have been quite different since WWII. Before 1950, the complaints almost all came from educators wanting to improve the system. Things changed after the war, as a whle industry arose to  change education, as well as the idea that education was a national security issue.

What arose after WWII was an industry cherrypicking facts to claim that schools were worse and that we needed to accept the plans that this industry proposed to fix things.  They had things to sell.

And then the Cold War intruded, helping this industry gather political strength by making education a national priority in order to fight the Communists. Thus we got all sorts of new curricula  in order to fix things – often when they were not even broken. So we heard things like this from the 50s:

The facts of the school crisis are all out and in plain sight and pretty dreadful to look at, A surprisingly small percentage of high school students is studying what used to be considered basic subjects. . . . People are complaining that the diploma has been devaluated to the point of meaninglessness. . . . It is hard to deny that America’s schools, which were supposed to reflect one of history’s noblest dreams and to cultivate the nation’s youthful minds, have degenerated into a system for coddling and entertaining the mediocre.

We were going to lose the Cold War because our students were not learning. Yet they were doing well.

Those words could probably be repeated verbatim today, as the industry can only make money by continually remaking our education system. Even 40 years ago, researchers wondered about the American anxiety regarding education, since study after study, with real data, showed how much better American students were doing. Marketing and politics explains much of this.

Discussing the decline in education is now a large industry in America, one with substantial political ramifications as political leaders use it as one more touchstone.

So we get cherrypicking of data in order to support a premise which cannot really be supported. We get denialist arguments to push world views that do not actually exist. We get an industry marketing ideas that are not correct.

Better test scores, higher graduation, fewer dropouts, fewer gaps. Yet to hear these people talk, we are worse then ever. Then they try and sell us something.

Our schools have always been terrible, even as they have increasingly educated our children better.

 

Texas won’t let Tesla sell cars in the state

by randychiu

Tesla CEO takes dealer fight to Texas, says he can sell more cars
[Via  - latimes.com]

In the latest chapter of an ongoing battle against traditional dealer networks, Tesla Motors Inc. Chief Executive Elon Musk has taken his fight to Texas, telling lawmakers his company could sell as many as 2,000 cars next year if allowed to open its own stores. Musk testified Monday before a committee of the Texas Legislature in support of HB 3351 and SB 1659, bills  that would allow U.S.-based manufacturers of 100% electric- or battery-powered vehicles to sell directly to Texas consumers.

[More]

Apparently there are other states than Texas that prevent Tesla from selling cars. Texas is the biggest market that currently prevents Tesla from selling  cars in its state.

Wouldn’t it be better for the consumer to buy a car directly from the maker and not have to pay middleman markup? No Texas regulation prevents Apple from selling directly to the customer. Nor oil companies having their own stations to sell gas directly to customers. Why cars?

I’ve bought cars directly from the maker and I have always had to go through a dealer, paying them a set fee for the deal. Can’t buy directly from the auto maker.

Yet if I want to buy a car directly from Volvo in Sweden, they will not only give me two tickets to fly there, they will pay for the hotel and ship it back to the US for free. 

BMW has something similar. Buy the car for 7% off the manufacturers price. The discount pays for the trip, even if the tickets are not paid for. Get 14 days of driving in Europe. They ship it home. Similarly with Mercedes-Benz. Also Porshe and Audi.

So we can end up with a two week European vacation and a new car for what we have to pay for a new car here in the US. Because we have to work through dealers.

Why should I have to pay a dealer a fee here when I can get a trip to Europe and a new car for the same price? These car companies would not be doing all that if it was a money loser for them. In fact, it would seem that they could sel directly here and mark the price down rather than have us come all the way to Europe for the deal. But regulations prevent them.

Middle men are being required by the regulations.

That is what  the exponential economy does – it shortens the distance between customer and corporation. Yet here we have people trying to hold onto a failing business model, much like we see music companies trying to hold onto their outrageous profits, or movie companies or book companies or universities or cable or TV or just about anything impacted by the declining curve of the exponential economy.

They cannot compete in the market place, so they then retreat to government regulations. Regulations that level the playing field by making all businesses follow the rules in order to benefit customers is one thing. Regulations that help certain businesses to the detriment of other businesses and the customers is an entirely different case.

Maybe Tesla should follow the same model as the European companies and fly customers out to California, give them a two week vacation and deliver the cars to the state. Would that violate any regulations?