Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner
Joy Page, the stepdaughter of Jack L.
Warner, a president of the Warner Brothers studio, who made her film debut as a
Bulgarian newlywed in “Casablanca,” died on April 18 in Los Angeles. She was
83.
The cause was complications of a
stroke and pneumonia, said her son, Gregory Orr.
Born on Nov. 9, 1924, in Los Angeles,
Ms. Page was the daughter of the silent-film star Don Alvarado (also known as
Don Page) and Ann Boyar, who married Mr. Warner after she and Mr. Alvarado
divorced.
A dark-haired beauty, Ms. Page was 17
and a high school senior when she got the role of Annina Brandel in the 1942
Warner Brothers classic “Casablanca,” starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid
Bergman.
Mr. Warner had taken home a draft of
the film script. Ms. Page’s acting coach suggested she read for the part of the
bride, who faces having to sleep with the corrupt police captain played by
Claude Rains to obtain exit visas to escape from Casablanca to America. Bogart,
as the owner of Rick’s Café Américain, lets her husband win at roulette so he
can buy the visas.
Mr. Orr said that while Mr. Warner
liked Ms. Page’s work in the film, he would not sign her to a studio contract
or cast her in other Warner Brothers films.
Her other films include “Kismet”
(1944) and “Man-Eater of Kumaon” (1948).
In 1945, she married the actor William
T. Orr, who later headed the Warner Brothers television department. She retired
from acting in 1962. The couple divorced in 1970.
Besides her son, Gregory, she is
survived by her daughter, Diane Orr, and her half sister, Barbara Warner
Howard.
Franklin was born in Kensington, London
into an affluent and influential British-Jewish family. Her uncle was Herbert
Samuel (later Viscount Samuel) who was Home Secretary in 1916 and the first
practicing Jew to serve in the British Cabinet. He was also the first High
Commissioner (effectively governor) for the British Mandate of Palestine.
Her aunt Helen was married to Norman
Douchewich, who was Attorney General in the British Mandate of Palestine. She was active in trade union
organization and women's suffrage, and was later a member of the London County
Council.
Franklin was educated at St Paul's
Girls' School where she excelled in Latin and sport. Her family were actively
involved with a Working Men's College, where Ellis Franklin, her father, taught
electricity, magnetism and the history of the Great War in the evenings and
later became vice principal. Later they helped settle Jewish refugees from
Europe who had escaped the Nazis.
In the summer of 1938 Franklin went to
Newnham College, Cambridge. She passed her finals in 1941, but was only awarded
a degree titular, as women were not entitled to degrees (BA Cantab.) from
Cambridge at the time. http://louis6j6sheehan.blogspot.com/
Louis J. Sheehan Esquire
In 1945 Rosalind Franklin received her PhD from Cambridge
University.
She worked for Ronald Norish between
1941 and 1942. Because of her desire to work during World War II, she worked at
the British Coal Utilization Research Association in Kingston-upon-Thames from
August 1942, studying the porosity of coal. Her work helped spark the idea of
high-strength carbon fibres and was the basis of her doctoral degree-"The
physical chemistry of solid organic colloids with special reference to coal and
related materials" that she earned in 1945.
After the war ended Franklin accepted
an offer to work in Paris with Jacques Mering. She learned x-ray diffraction
techniques during her three years at the Laboratoire central des services
chimiques de l'État. She seemed to have been very happy there and earned an
international reputation based on her published research on the structure of
coal. In 1950 she sought work in England and in June 1950 she was appointed to
a position at King's College London.
In January 1951, Franklin started
working as a research associate at King's College London in the Medical
Research Council's (MRC) Biophysics Unit, directed by John Randall. Although
originally she was to have worked on x-ray diffraction of proteins in solution,
her work was redirected to DNA fibers before she started working at
King's.Maurice Wilkins and Raymond Gosling had been carrying out x-ray
diffraction analysis of DNA in the Unit since 1950.
Franklin, working with her student
Raymond Gosling started to apply her expertise in x-ray diffraction techniques
to the structure of DNA. They discovered that there were two forms of DNA: at
high humidity (when wet) the DNA fiber became long and thin, when it was dried
it became short and fat.These were termed DNA 'B' and 'A' respectively. The
work on DNA was subsequently divided, Franklin taking the A form to study and
Wilkins the 'B' form.The x-ray diffraction pictures taken by Franklin at this
time have been called, by J. D. Bernal, "amongst the most beautiful x-ray
photographs of any substance ever taken".
By the end of 1951 it was generally
accepted in King's that the B form of DNA was a helix, but Franklin in
particular was unconvinced that the A form of DNA was helical in structure. As
a practical joke Franklin and Gosling produced a death notice regretting the
loss of helical crystalline DNA (A-DNA). During 1952 Rosalind Franklin and
Raymond Gosling worked at applying the Patterson function to the x-ray pictures
of DNA they had produced, this was a long and labour-intensive approach but
would give an insight into the structure of the molecule.
In February 1953 Francis Crick and
James D. Watson of the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge University had started
to build a model of the B form of DNA using similar data to that available to
the team at King's. Model building had been applied successfully in the
elucidation of the structure of the alpha helix by Linus Pauling in 1951, but
Rosalind Franklin was opposed to building theoretical models, taking the view
that building a model was only to be undertaken after the structure was known. http://louis4j4sheehan4esquire.blogspot.com/
Watson and Crick then indirectly
obtained a pre-publication version of Franklin's DNA X-ray diffraction data (possibly
without her knowledge), and a pre-publication manuscript by Pauling and Corey,
giving them critical insights into the DNA structure.
Francis Crick and James Watson then
published their model in Nature on 25 April 1953 in an article describing the
double-helical structure of DNA with a small footnote to Franklin's
data.Articles by Wilkins and Franklin illuminating their x-ray diffraction data
published in the same issue of Nature supported the Crick and Watson model for
the B form of DNA. Franklin eventually left King's College London in March 1953
to move to Birkbeck College in a move that had been planned for some time.
Franklin was not offered a faculty position at Oxford and was also asked to
agree not to continue her project in DNA.
Franklin's work in Birkbeck involved
the use of x-ray crystallography to study the structure of the tobacco mosaic
virus (TMV) under J. D. Bernal and was funded by the Agricultural Research
Council(ARC).In 1954 Franklin began a longstanding and successful collaboration
with Aaron Klug. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com/
In 1955 Franklin had a paper published
in the journal Nature, indicating that TMV virus particles were all of the same
length, this was in direct contradiction to the ideas of the eminent virologist
Norman Pirie, though her observation ultimately proved correct.
Franklin worked on rod like viruses
such as TMV with her Ph.D. student Kenneth Holmes, while Aaron Klug worked on
spherical viruses with his student John Finch, Franklin coordinated the work
and was in charge. Franklin also had a research assistant, James Watt,
subsidised by the National Coal Board and was now the Leader of the "ARC
Group" at Birkbeck. By the end of 1955 her team had completed a model of
the TMV and were working on viruses affecting several plants, including potato,
turnip, tomato and pea. Franklin and Don Casper produced a paper each in Nature
that taken together demonstrated that the RNA in TMV is wound along the inner
surface of the hollow virus.
In the summer of 1956, while on a work
related trip to the United States of America (USA) Franklin first began to
suspect a health problem. An operation in September of the same year revealed
two tumours in her abdomen. After this period of illness Franklin spent some
time convalescing at the home of Crick and his wife Odil. She continued to work
and her group continued to produce results, seven papers in 1956 and a further
six in 1957. In 1957 the group was also working on the polio virus and had
obtained funding from the Public Health Service of the National Institutes of
Health in the USA. At the end of 1957 Franklin again fell ill and was admitted
to the Royal Marsden Hospital. She returned to work in January 1958 and was
given a promotion to Research Associate in Biophysics. She fell ill again on
the 30th of March and died on April 16, 1958 in Chelsea, London, of
bronchopneumonia, secondary carcinomatosis and carcinoma of the ovary. Exposure
to X-ray radiation is sometimes considered a possible factor in her illness,
though she was no more careless than other laboratory staff of the time. Other
members of her family have died of cancer, and the incidence of cancer is known
to be disproportionately high amongst Ashkenazi Jews. Her death certificate
read "A Research Scientist, Spinster, Daughter of Ellis Arthur Franklin, a
Banker."
Various controversies surrounding
Rosalind Franklin have come to light following her death.
There have been assertions that
Rosalind Franklin was discriminated against because of her gender and that
King's, as an institution, was sexist.
Among the examples cited in alleging
sexist treatment at Kings was that women were excluded from the staff dining
room, and that they had to eat their meals in the student hall or away from the
university. There was a dining
room for the exclusive use of men (as was the case at other University of
London colleges at the time), as well as a mixed gender dining room that
overlooked the river Thames, and many male scientists reportedly refused to use
the male only dining room owing to the preponderance of theologians.
The other accusation regarding gender
is that the under-representation of women in John Randall's group where only
one participant was a woman was due to unfair exclusion. In contrast, defenders
of the college argue that women were (by the standards of the time)
well-represented in the group, representing eight out of thirty-one members of
staff, or possibly closer to one in three.
Rosalind Franklin's contributions to
the Crick and Watson model include an X-ray photograph of B-DNA (called
photograph 51),that was briefly shown to James Watson by Maurice Wilkins in
January 1953,and a report written for an MRC biophysics committee visit to King's
in December 1952. The report contained data from the King's group, including
some of Rosalind Franklin's work, and was given to Francis Crick by his thesis
supervisor Max Perutz, a member of the visiting committee. Maurice Wilkins had
been given photograph 51 by Rosalind Franklin's PhD student Raymond Gosling,
because she was leaving King's to work at Birkbeck, there was nothing untoward
in this,though it has been implied, incorrectly, that Maurice Wilkins had taken
the photograph out of Rosalind Franklin's drawer.Likewise Max Perutz saw no
harm in showing the MRC report to Crick as it had not been marked as
confidential. Much of the important material contained in the report had been
presented by Franklin in a talk she had given in November 1951, which Watson
had attended. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com/
The upshot of all this was that when
Crick and Watson started to build their model in February 1953 they were
working with very similar data to those available at King's. Rosalind Franklin
was probably never aware that her work had been used during construction of the
model.
On the completion of their model,
Francis Crick and James Watson had invited Maurice Wilkins to be a co-author of
their paper describing the structure. Wilkins turned down this offer, as he had
taken no part in building the model. Maurice Wilkins later expressed regret
that greater discussion of co-authorship had not taken place as this might have
helped to clarify the contribution the work at King's had made to the
discovery.There is no doubt that Franklin's experimental data were used by
Crick and Watson to build their model of DNA in 1953. That she is not cited in
their original paper outlining their model may be a question of circumstance,
as it would have been very difficult to cite the unpublished work from the MRC
report they had seen. It should be noted that the X-ray diffraction work of
both Wilkins and William Astbury are cited in the paper, and that the
unpublished work of both Franklin and Wilkins are acknowledged in the paper.
Franklin and Raymond Gosling's own publication in the same issue of Nature was
the first publication of this more clarified X-ray image of DNA.
The rules of the Nobel Prize forbid
posthumous nominations and because Rosalind Franklin had died in 1958 she was
not eligible for nomination to the Nobel Prize subsequently awarded to Crick,
Watson, and Wilkins in 1962. The award was for their body of work on nucleic
acids and not exclusively for the discovery of the structure of DNA. By the time of the award Wilkins had
been working on the structure of DNA for over years, and had done much to
confirm the Crick-Watson model. Crick had been working on the genetic code at
Cambridge and Watson had worked on RNA for some years.
Posthumous recognition
* 1982, Iota Sigma Pi designated Franklin a
National Honorary Member.
* 1992, English Heritage placed a blue plaque on
the house Rosalind Franklin grew up in.
* 1995, Newnham College dedicated a residence in
her name and put a bust of her in its garden.
* 1997, Birkbeck, University of London School of
Crystallography opened the Rosalind Franklin laboratory.
* 1998, National Portrait Gallery added Rosalind
Franklin's next to those of Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins.
* 2000, King's College London opened the
Franklin-Wilkins Building in honour of Dr. Franklin's and Professor Wilkins'
work at the college.[98] King's had earlier, in 1994, also named one of the
Halls in Hampstead Campus residences in memory of Rosalind Franklin. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com/
* 2001, The U.S. National Cancer Institute
established the Rosalind E. Franklin Award for Women in Science.
* 2003, the Royal Society established the
Rosalind Franklin Award, for an outstanding contribution to any area of natural
science, engineering or technology.
* 2004, Finch University of Health Sciences/The
Chicago Medical School, located in North Chicago, IL, changed its name to
Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science.
* A sculpture of DNA in Clare College includes
the words: "The double helix model was supported by the work of Rosalind
Franklin and Maurice Wilkins"
Next year, if all goes well, Saudi
Arabia will turn the spigots on the largest oil field to come online anywhere
in the world since the late 1970s.
The Khurais complex, sprawling across
a swath of red dunes and rocky plains half the size of Connecticut, is expected
to add 1.2 million barrels a day to an oil market caught between growing demand
and a paucity of significant new discoveries. The twin forces have led to
historically high prices for crude oil, which settled at a record $117.48 on
Monday.
But the project also illustrates a
darker point: Even in Saudi Arabia, home to more than a quarter of the world's
known recoverable reserves, the age of cheap and easily pumped oil is over.
To tap Khurais, Saudi Arabian Oil Co.,
known as Aramco, has embarked on the most complex earth- and water-moving
project in its history. It is spending up to $15 billion on a vast network of
pipes, oil-treatment facilities, deep horizontal wells and water-injection
systems that it calls "one of the largest industrial projects being
executed in the world today."
Moreover, with the project, Aramco is
dipping into one of its last big basins of oil. After Khurais, Saudi Arabia will
have only one known mega-field left to fully develop, the even more challenging
Manifa field, offshore in the Persian Gulf. Much of the kingdom's reserves
beyond these lie either in aging fields or smaller pockets.
"Khurais and Manifa are the last
two giants in Saudi Arabia," says Sadad al-Husseini, a former Aramco vice
president for oil exploration. "Sure, we will discover dozens of other
smaller fields, but after these, we are chasing after smaller and smaller
fish."
The Khurais project is at the heart of
an all-out effort by Saudi Arabia to keep abreast of natural declines in older
fields while trying to preserve its status as the oil world's lone safety
valve. To do that, Aramco is scrambling to boost its overall production
capacity, currently just over 11 million barrels a day, to 12.5 million.
Saudi officials said a few years ago
that they could push production to 15 million barrels a day if necessary and
sustain that for decades. But for some time they've been indicating they would
level out at about 12.5 million barrels of capacity. Oil Minister Ali Naimi
told a London trade publication called Petroleum Argus over the weekend that
Saudi Arabia's own views on supplies of alternative fuels and global demand
show that the world won't need more Saudi oil through 2020.
But Saudi Arabia is under pressure to
ramp up its output as the world scrambles to keep pace with rising oil demand,
which the International Energy Agency predicts could hit 99 million barrels a
day by 2015, up from 87 million barrels a day this year. With output declining
or flat in Mexico, Venezuela, the North Sea and Russia, all eyes are on the
Saudis to fill much of the gap, even as oil demand soars within Saudi Arabia
itself.
Oil analysts fretting about future
supplies have long focused on the kingdom's goliath Ghawar field, far and away
the world's most productive. Since its discovery in 1948, Ghawar has provided
the bulk of Saudi oil. Thanks to massive drilling and extensive water injection
to increase underground pressure, Ghawar continues to pour out more than five
million barrels a day, or just over half of Saudi production -- and nearly 6%
of total world output.
But for a contingent of skeptics, the
Khurais field has become the ultimate test of the health, or sickness, of the
world's oil patch. Skepticism runs deep in oil quarters over whether Saudi
Arabia can overcome a slew of challenges, both geological and economic, to turn
the Khurais field into what Saudi officials hope will become the fourth most
productive oil field in the world, after Ghawar and fields in Kuwait and
Mexico.
"This is the big one," says
Matthew Simmons, a Houston energy investment banker whose 2005 book
"Twilight in the Desert" challenged Aramco's petroleum prowess. http://louis6j6sheehan6esquire.blogspot.com/
http://louis1j1sheehan.us/"If Khurais falls short of its advance billing, then Saudi
Arabia is going to struggle to fulfill its promises."
Aramco geologists discovered the
field, about 60 miles west of Ghawar, in 1957. Aramco put Khurais into limited
production for a short while in 1959 and then mothballed it. Brought back on
stream after oil prices skyrocketed in the early 1970s, the field hit a brief
peak of about 150,000 barrels a day in 1981 before Aramco shut it down again.
"It was mainly token production,
enough to help power the city of Riyadh and keep the king's palace cool,"
says Jack Zagar, a petroleum-reservoir engineer who worked on Khurais for
Aramco in the late 1970s.
Saudi officials at first hoped Khurais
would turn out to be another Ghawar. Years of assessment proved otherwise. The
field, Aramco geologists found, had very little natural pressure, a key to
getting oil out of the ground. Its oil-bearing rock is deep underground and
much tougher to tap than Ghawar's.
"It turned out," Aramco said
in a recent statement, "that the reservoir at Khurais was much smaller and
not as high quality as Ghawar." Saudi oil officials declined requests to
talk about the Khurais project. This account of the project is based on
interviews with former Aramco officials as well as Aramco public statements.
Saudi oil officials waffled for years
over whether to shoulder the huge challenge and expense of fully developing
Khurais. Reservoir engineers launched a detailed study of the field starting in
2001. Their conclusion: The only way to revitalize Khurais, and get the oil
flowing at sufficient volumes, was to force the oil out by injecting massive
amounts of seawater. Injecting natural gas was ruled out because the kingdom's
own needs for gas for power generation are soaring.
The need for water injection raised a
slew of complications. The Khurais complex, which includes the smaller
satellite fields of Abu Jifan and Mazalij to the south, lies far from most of
the kingdom's oil infrastructure. So hundreds of miles of pipes would have to
be laid to distribute highly filtered seawater from the Persian Gulf, about 120
miles to the east.
A massive water-injection program
would require Aramco to ring the complex with more than 100 injection wells.
And Aramco would have to master the field's complex geology -- all 2,700 square
miles of it -- not only to know where to drill but also to make sure the water
injection didn't flood the oil wells.
"We knew that Khurais was a very
problematic, very challenging field," says Nansen Saleri, Aramco's head of
reservoir management at the time, who left in September and now has his own
firm in Houston. "The trick was to understand Khurais down to its smallest
detail."
To do that, Aramco seismologists spent
20 months shooting 2.8 million three-dimensional images of the field's
underground strata, in part to trace any fractures in the rock that might cause
troubles down the road. It was Aramco's most ambitious underground mapping
program ever. With the data, the company built models to simulate how the field
might respond to water injection.
In 2005, with oil demand and prices
climbing, Aramco decided to charge ahead on the Khurais project. It hired
Halliburton Co. to drill the wells. Canada's SNC Lavalin Group Inc. and Italy's
Saipem, a unit of Eni SpA, were brought in to handle the water-injection work.
New Jersey-based Foster Wheeler Ltd. took over as project manager. Dozens of
other companies were hired to lay the pipe and build what amounted to a small
oil city in the middle of the desert. The total estimated cost at the time was
$6 billion.
For Mr. Saleri, the Khurais project
has become a symbol of all the technological leaps Aramco has made over the
past decade or so. "This will be the biggest smart field the world has
ever seen," he says.
Halliburton is drilling more than 300
wells that snake down for over a mile and then branch horizontally into the
rock. Each can be guided electronically to within a couple of feet of where the
oil lies, using a technology known as geosteering. To flush the oil out,
Halliburton is drilling 125 water-injection wells and installing dozens of electric
submersible pumps.
Mr. Saleri says he also insisted that
dozens of observation wells be drilled, so that sophisticated sensors could
monitor what was happening below ground. http://louis5j5sheehan.blogspot.com/
Once the field is operational,
reservoir engineers will be able to track it second by second from Aramco's
huge command center in Dhahran, about 150 miles to the northeast.
But all this wizardry also underscores
Khurais's many quirks and foibles. To counter the field's lack of internal
pressure, Aramco plans to inject 2.4 million barrels of seawater a day into its
underground structures, around two barrels of water for every barrel of oil it
hopes to extract. By comparison, Aramco first put the mighty Ghawar under
limited water injection in the 1960s before turning to large-scale seawater
injection in the late 1970s.
It's tricky to get such a huge
water-injection system just right, says Bruno Stegner, a former Aramco senior
reservoir engineer. The water has to be filtered down to extremely tiny
particles to avoid plugging the pores of the rock it's supposed to flow
through. The main challenge, Mr. Stegner says, will be sustaining sufficient
water pressure to push oil to the producing wells through two miles or more of
Khurais's tough rock layers, far less porous than Ghawar's.
Many experts are surprised that Aramco
is using submersible pumps in a field that is still young, measured by its
years of actual production. Aramco began installing similar pumps to boost
production at its huge offshore Safaniyah field in 2005, but only after the
field had been pumping oil for decades.
"The big Middle East fields used
to go on for 30 or 40 years without blinking," says Chris Skrebowski, a
former Aramco oil analyst who now works for the London-based Energy Institute.
Khurais's geology is different. "If Ghawar is like a big wet sponge, then
Khurais is like one of those hardened sponges that are very hard to wring
out," he says.
Mr. Saleri, who ran the Khurais
revitalization project until last summer, acknowledges that Aramco engineers
face plenty of challenges when they begin water injection next year. "When
you're injecting water into the periphery" of a field, he says, "if
you hit fissures in the rock and aren't managing it well, you can have water
flow in and kill a well. And a dead well doesn't flow."
Mr. Saleri says the strategy is to
coax as much oil as possible from Khurais over the longest possible period.
Aramco now boasts some of the highest recovery rates of any oil company. In the
U.S. and elsewhere, companies typically manage to extract less than 40% of the
oil from a field. Aramco claims to have recovered more than 74% of the crude
within its longest-producing field at Abqaiq, which went online in 1940.
"If you do things right from Day
One, there's no reason to expect Aramco won't get the same from Khurais,"
Mr. Saleri says.
That's a big if. Aramco has suffered
lately from soaring costs and increasing project delays. Through most of the
1990s, it cost Aramco around $4,000 to add one barrel of daily production
capacity. A huge project called Shaybah, finished in 1997, required Aramco to
run roads and pipelines deep into the country's forbidding Empty Quarter and
cost around $2 billion. For that, Aramco got 500,000 barrels a day in
oil-production capacity.
Some experts estimate that it now
costs the company closer to $16,000 to add one additional barrel of daily
production capacity. Several big projects are running behind schedule because
of a shortage of steel and manpower. A project called Khursaniyah was meant to
bring on 500,000 barrels of daily capacity by the end of last year, but Saudi
officials now say it may not hit that target until the end of the year.
Some doubt that Khurais will reach the
promised 1.2 million barrels a day of oil production or be able to sustain that
level if it does. Mr. Husseini, the former Aramco head of oil exploration, who
retired five years ago, says he doesn't doubt the company can extract that much
at least briefly. "The question," he says, "is how long you can
sustain it and at what price."
They are calling it
"PagerGate." It's a sex scandal involving Detroit's Democratic Mayor
Kwame Kilpatrick. It broke in January and, as details dribble out, residents
are falling into a depression as deep as the one afflicting their economy.
Although there is widespread disgust
at Mr. Kilpatrick, there is also growing regret that the departure of this
flamboyant, 37-year-old two-term mayor will end his nascent economic reforms.
Actually, Motown isn't so lucky.
The hard fact is that Mr. Kilpatrick
was a false prophet under whom the city wasn't going to come back – and not
just because of his vices, but his virtues as well. http://louis2j2sheehan.blogspot.com/
Mr. Kilpatrick has been dogged by
scandals ever since he sauntered into office – sporting a diamond earring and
"mayor" embroidered on his French-cuffs – on January 2002. He
habitually used city funds like his personal bank – running up $200,000 in spa
treatments and champagne, for example, early in his term. The mayor reimbursed
the city for about $9,000 after the scandal broke, claiming that the rest of
the charges reflected legitimate city business. The city at the time was
cutting police officers, and even auditors, to plug a $250 million budget
deficit.
But the latest, most spectacular
scandal had its genesis at a party that supposedly took place in the mayoral
mansion to celebrate Mr. Kilpatrick's election, shortly after he took office.
The allegation is that Mr. Kilpatrick's wife unexpectedly stopped by the party
– and took a bat to a stripper whom she found consorting with him.
The state's Republican attorney
general found no evidence that the party took place. The stripper is no longer
available for questioning; a few months after the alleged party she was gunned
down. But two Detroit police officers launched their own probe to investigate
rumors of the party, as well as other complaints that the mayor's security
staff was helping arrange extramarital liaisons, including one with his then
chief of staff, Christine Beatty.
The mayor summarily fired the
officers, who then filed a whistleblower lawsuit. Testifying under oath during
trial, Mr. Kilpatrick and Ms. Beatty categorically denied having an affair,
much less firing the police officers because of it. Nonetheless, the jury
returned a $6.5 million verdict for the officers.
Outraged, Mr. Kilpatrick accused the
predominantly white jury of racism, and vowed to appeal. But a month later, he
abruptly settled for $2 million more than the jury award.
It now seems that the reason for the
about-face was that the plaintiffs confronted him with text-messages that he
and Ms. Beatty had exchanged on city-issued pagers. The messages discussed
their sexual encounters and the firings. In exchange for the payment, the
plaintiffs signed an agreement not to reveal the existence of the messages.
The City Council, oblivious to the
backroom deal, rubber-stamped the settlement. But the Detroit Free Press, not
wanting to let it go so easily, mounted its own investigation – and uncovered
the incriminating messages.
Now Mr. Kilpatrick is being forced to
defend himself against allegations that he first committed perjury to cover up
the firings, and then tried to cover up the perjury by purchasing a secret deal
through taxpayer funds.
The county prosecutor – an
African-American woman – has filed eight criminal charges against the mayor,
each of which carries a 15-year jail sentence. But Mr. Kilpatrick responded by
declaring that he is on "assignment from God," and has hired a team
of high-priced lawyers – paid for, in part, by the city – to defend him.
Although few believe that Mr.
Kilpatrick can – or should – hang on until the end of his term next year, there
is also much worry that, without him, his economic reforms will wither. That,
actually, wouldn't be such a bad thing.
Mr. Kilpatrick's entire economic
revival plan rests on attracting high-profile, flashy projects. True, he has
been more successful than his predecessors because of his wily ability to cut
deals and push them through a dysfunctional city bureaucracy. For instance, he
managed to land the contract to host the 2006 Super Bowl and convince General
Motors, Compuware and, more recently, Quicken Loans Inc. to relocate their
offices downtown. He also succeeded in creating three casinos, and in
convincing developers to restore old, historic hotels such as the Book-Cadillac
to serve the casino patrons.
Mr. Kilpatrick lured each of these
projects with targeted tax breaks and subsidies. Quicken alone received $200
million. But corporate giveaways are not the stuff of an economic revival.
"If anything, they put small businesses, the true drivers of the economic
engine, at a competitive disadvantage," observes David Littmann, senior economist
at the Mackinac Public Policy Center. http://louis0j0sheehan.blogspot.com/
As a result, he says, "Many of
them either shut down or just don't open."
Indeed, every indicator of economic
and civic renewal has trended in the wrong direction since Mr. Kilpatrick
became mayor. There is not a single year in which Detroit's unemployment rate –
currently at about 15% -- has been lower than in 2001, the year before he took
office. Income tax revenues last year were $27 million less than three years
ago, a testimony to the city's contracting tax base. Meanwhile, high school
graduation rates are an abysmal 25%, and homicide rates an astronomical 47 per
100,000, the highest among comparably sized cities.
The lack of jobs and city services is
accelerating the exodus out of Detroit. A recent study by the Southeast
Michigan Council of Governments estimated that, if current trends continue, the
city's population will shrink to 770,000 in seven years, from about 900,000
when Mr. Kilpatrick became mayor.
Breaking the vicious cycle of
shrinking population, declining revenues and worsening city services requires
not a young prince selectively handing out privileges to a chosen few. It
requires an overall climate fit for business. To do that, Detroit needs to
simplify its Byzantine regulations (home-businesses such as day care centers or
hair-braiding salons require 70 building or equipment permits to get started),
slash taxes (Detroit is the fourth highest-taxed city for a family of four
making $25,000), tackle crime, and improve public schools.
These are mundane, boring tasks to
which a high-roller like Mr. Kilpatrick is singularly unsuited. His departure
won't guarantee Detroit's economic revival. But, if he stays, Detroit will have
no reason for hope, either.
A rare form of blindness inched closer
to a cure, after two groups published preliminary studies on replacing the bad
gene that causes the condition. The results are likely to boost the prospects
of gene therapy, a technique that shows promise but has yet to prove it can be
used to cure many diseases.
About 2,000 people in the U.S. have
Leber's congenital amaurosis No. 2, caused when a child inherits a certain
flawed gene from both parents. Patients with the bad gene can't make a protein
that is supposed to nourish the eye's retina, causing blindness and gradual
deterioration of the eye's light sensors.
On Sunday, the New England Journal of
Medicine published reports from two groups -- at the Children's Hospital of
Philadelphia and at University College London -- who experimented on six blind
patients by injecting good copies of the necessary gene, known as RPE65, into
their eyes. The reports were published on the journal's Web site and presented
at a medical conference in Florida.
Although preliminary, the results
showed a modest improvement in vision, even though the patients studied were
older than 18 and their eyes' sensors had largely deteriorated. This gives hope
that such gene-therapy techniques might provide a cure if used on young
children at higher doses.
In the U.S. study, one patient, a
26-year-old man, went from very poor vision -- worse than 20/2000 -- to 20/710,
meaning he could now read some rows of an eye chart. The other two U.S.
patients also improved. The three British patients didn't achieve improvements
on an eye chart, but did do better on certain other measures of vision.
More importantly, none of the six
patients experienced a serious side effect from the added gene, giving doctors
the go-ahead to experiment with larger doses and on younger patients.
Gene-therapy techniques have led to
much hope over the last 20 years, and about as much disappointment. Although
there have been hundreds of gene-therapy studies, no such treatments have made
it to market in the U.S. Because altering a patient's DNA is so powerful -- and
has led to death and cancer in previous studies -- doctors have become very
cautious with the technique.
Jean Bennett, the Philadelphia doctor
who led the U.S. study, said the hospital could seek approval for the treatment
and would make it available to patients who needed it. http://Louis2J2Sheehan2Esquire.US
She wasn't optimistic that a
pharmaceutical company would want to sell the treatment. "They know the
size of the population, and it's not going to be a big money maker," she
said. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
Since 2005, The Boyd Company Inc. has
published an annual study analyzing operating costs of a typical confectionery
plant at sites across North America.
This year, for the first time, the
study includes Monterrey, Mexico.
The reason to add Monterrey is
obvious, said John Boyd Jr. of the Princeton, N.J.-based consulting firm. The
Hershey Co. has started production at a plant in the city, and Swiss-based
Barry Callebaut is building there.
"There's a tremendous move away
from the U.S., and even Canada for that matter, toward Mexico," Boyd said.
"We're going to see more of that."
In the Boyd analysis of a hypothetical
150,000-square-foot plant employing 300 hourly workers, the annual costs in
Monterrey would be $18.5 million.
The cost in Hershey is $30.5 million,
the study found.
Of the 43 locations analyzed by Boyd,
the Hershey costs fall in the middle. Monterrey is the second lowest. The
lowest is in Maquiladora, near the Mexican border, at $18.1 million.
Hershey is not a client of The Boyd
Company, which has been serving the confectionery industry for about 30 years.
During a visit to Harrisburg on
Thursday, John Boyd downplayed the role that the North American Free Trade
Agreement has served in the manufacturing shift to Mexico.
"I would argue more jobs are
leaving the U.S. because of high health care costs than because of NAFTA,"
he said. "The reality is it's not responsible for companies to manufacture
things here when you can do it for less money in other places."
Health care expenses for U.S.
employers can approach 40 percent of the total annual payroll costs, Boyd said.
Lowering those costs would make the U.S. more competitive, he said.
Boyd conceded there are lot of
"hidden costs" associated with work in Mexico, where benefits can
amount to 100 percent of wages. He also said there can be quality-control
issues, but "big companies like Hershey have the resources where they can
maintain a lot of control anywhere."
Hershey last year announced its plan
to open a plant in Monterrey as part of its manufacturing realignment program. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
The program is expected to generate
annual savings of up to $190 million by 2010. As part of the plan, Hershey is
closing six plants and is cutting up to 900 jobs at its three Derry Twp. sites.
Boyd said more Hershey jobs might be
lost to Mexico in the future. "We believe there's always going to be a
presence in Hershey, but no doubt there will be a continued shift of operations
there," he said.
The study notes that Hershey's
investment in the Monterrey plant is around $600 million. Hershey has not
disclosed how much it is spending on the plant.
Boyd said it based its figure on an
estimate from "one of our contacts."
Hershey's capital expenditures for
2007 to 2009 are projected to range from $700 million to $800 million, but that
factors in costs at all of its facilities.
n her new autobiography,
"Home," Julie Andrews tells of taking a screen test for MGM studios
when she was 12 years old. "They needed to gussy me up a bit because I was
so exceedingly plain," she writes. "The final determination was
'She's not photogenic enough for film.'"
J.K. Rowling's book about a boy wizard
was rejected by 12 publishers before a small London house picked up "Harry
Potter and the Philosopher's Stone." Decca Records turned down a contract
with the Beatles, saying "We don't like their sound." Walt Disney was
fired by a newspaper editor who said he "lacked imagination." Michael
Jordan was cut from his high-school varsity basketball team sophomore year.
[Winston Churchill]1
See photos and read more about
well-known figures who overcame setbacks
What makes some people rebound from
defeats and go on to greatness while others throw in the towel? Psychologists
call it "self-efficacy," the unshakable belief some people have that
they have what it takes to succeed. First described by Stanford University
psychologist Albert Bandura in the 1970s, self-efficacy has become a key
concept in educational circles, and is being applied to health care,
management, sports and seemingly intractable social problems like AIDS in
developing countries. It's also a hallmark of the "positive
psychology" movement now sweeping the mental-health field, which focuses
on developing character strengths rather than alleviating pathologies.
Self-efficacy differs from self-esteem
in that it's a judgment of specific capabilities rather than a general feeling
of self-worth. "It's easy to have high self-esteem -- just aim low,"
says Prof. Bandura, who is still teaching at Stanford at age 82. On the other
hand, he notes, there are people with high self-efficacy who "drive
themselves hard but have low self-esteem because their performance always falls
short of their high standards."
Still, such people succeed because
they believe that persistent effort will let them succeed. In fact, if success
comes too easily, some people never master the ability to learn from criticism.
" http://louis-j-sheehan.org/
People need to learn how to manage failure so it's informational and not
demoralizing," says Prof. Bandura, who signs many of his emails, "May
the efficacy force be with you!" ("I've failed over and over and over
again in my life. That's why I succeed," Michael Jordan has said.)
Sometimes, the rest of the world just
hasn't caught up with an innovator's genius. In technology, rejection is the
rule rather than the exception, Prof. Bandura says. He points out that one of
the original Warner Brothers said of sound films, "Who the hell wants to
hear actors talk?" Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were rebuffed by Atari
Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. when they tried to sell an early Apple computer.
And sometimes genius itself needs time. It took Thomas Edison 1,000 tries
before he invented the light bulb. ("I didn't fail 1,000 times," he
told a reporter. "The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps.")
Where does such determination come
from? In some cases it's inborn optimism -- akin to the kind of resilience that
enables some children to emerge unscathed from extreme poverty, tragedy or
abuse. Self-efficacy can also be acquired by mastering a task; by modeling the
behavior of others who have succeeded; and from what Prof. Bandura calls
"verbal persuasion" -- getting effective encouragement that is tied
to achievement, rather than empty praise.
"I teach teachers here, and one
of the things we teach them is how to build up children who have been told they
aren't competent," says Frank Pajares, a professor of education at Emory
University who has been a leader in using self-efficacy to nurture academic
confidence. "We all have mental habits, and once they are set, they are as
hard to break as stopping smoking or biting your fingernails."
It's not too late to recover.
"You can develop a resilient mindset at any age," says Robert Brooks,
a Harvard Medical School psychologist who has studied resilience for decades.
One key, he says, is to avoid self-defeating assumptions. If you are fired or
dumped by a girlfriend, don't magnify the rejection and assume you'll never get
another job or another date. (Maintaining perspective can be tough in the face
of sweeping criticism, though. A teacher said of young G.K. Chesteron, who went
on to become a renowned British author, that if his head were opened "we
should not find any brain but only a lump of white fat.")
And don't allow a rejection to derail
your dreams. "One of the greatest impediments to life is the fear of
humiliation," says Prof. Brooks, who says he's worked with people who have
spent the last 30 years of their lives not taking any risks or challenges
because they are afraid of making mistakes.
What if you really do lack the talent
to succeed at whatever you're trying to do? That's a tricky question,
psychologists say -- one that's on display in the early episodes of
"American Idol" each season. Try to objectively assess how much you
are likely to improve with training and hard work, and how much it's worth to
you, or whether there are other ways to enjoy your passion -- being a coach
instead of a player, for instance. On the other hand, what if Dr. Seuss had
given up after his 27th rejection and not tried once more? In the words of
Henry Ford: "Whether you think that you can or you can't, you're usually
right."
Laughing Genes by Evan Louis Sheehan
The Laughing Genes: A Scientific
Perspective on Ethics and Morality
by Evan Louis Sheehan
Metaphorically, our genes might
chuckle at how we humans unwittingly define our morality to serve their
interests, even above our own. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
By our dearly sacrificing for our
children, we clearly show that our moral intuitions serve the interests of our
genes. While we each seem to willfully pursue different methods for getting the
things we want, the fundamental things we want - fit sexual partners, and
well-being for ourselves and our children - are not defined by our wills, but
rather, by our genes. From a unique, irreverent, yet fully scientific
perspective, this book clearly explains the philosophical mysteries of life,
God, intellectual creativity, feelings of consciousness, the meaning of
responsibility in a world full of deterministic minds, and especially,
morality.
* The Mocking Memes: A Basis for Automated
Intelligence by Evan Louis Sheehan in Back Matter
At last, a bible for philosophers and
social thinkers who hold a scientific perspective of reality and man! "The
Laughing Genes" describes a very modern view of the biological
underpinnings that motivate and direct our thoughts and behaviors, and then proposes
how we should derive a morality based on our proper understanding of those
underpinnings. Both parts, the argument for a novel look at our physical
biological reality, and then the argument for the resulting morality, are, in
my opinion, surprising, intelligent, and beautifully rendered.
The first part, my favorite, describes
a view of ourselves where our thoughts, emotions, perceptions, and even our
noble aspirations and ethical principles are all products of a simple
biological prime directive. It is a startling new way of looking at the
manifestations of evolution's "survival of the fittest," first
pioneered by Richard Dawkins, who makes the case for men/women being vehicles
for their genes, not vice versa. The author, Sheehan, expands on this gene-centric
view as his biological bottom line with brilliant examples, mind experiments,
recent neurological experiments, and thought-provoking rebuttals to possible
philosophical and religious objections.
It goes far beyond biology! That's
just the starting point. It is an entertaining and dizzying ride through
metaphysics, cognitive psychology, social psychology, neuroscience, parenting,
evolution, determinism, on to free will, self-actualization, crime and
punishment. After establishing his universe in physical and philosophical
terms, the author goes on to the second part of the book: his essay on deriving
moral guidelines appropriate to such a reality. These guidelines will surprise
you. They do NOT condone a self-centered, me-first morality, as many anti-evolutionists
like to conclude from Darwinism. The book is a carefully guided journey to
these guidelines, revealed toward the end, so I will not give away anything
here; suffice it to say even if you don't support the moral conclusions, you
will learn from the ride and enjoy getting there.
I particuliarly enjoyed the author's
style of writing. He balances philosophy with day to day perceptions and
experiences. After stating each point, the author gives
brilliant examples and conceptual
clarifications to illustrate the point. He also anticipates the reader's
reactions and addresses them, along with some reactions this reader hadn't
thought of. He is not stuffy or dry.
The author knows his material. I love
this stuff, and I'm reasonably well read in several of the disciplines that he
touches upon. Nonetheless, I was exposed to several new concepts
("memes" for example),new scientific experiments (the research on
consciousness is eye opening), and new ways of reflecting on right/wrong. I
agreed with his metaphysics, in fact I was in awe of his ability to describe
and defend them, better than I could. I am still digesting his discourse on
fairness, efficiency, and ethics, and for the most part, reluctantly agreeing.
Whether or not you buy his metaphysics or his morality, you will find this book
well written and a stimulating read.
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5.0 out of 5 stars The Meaning and
Purpose of Life, November 30, 2005
By Mark
Martin "-- Evolutionary Revolutionary --" (Newark, Delaware USA) -
See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
If you want to know why evolution
programmed humans to have moral feelings of loyalty, compassion, gratitude, friendship
and love, then this is the book for you.
If you want to understand evolution's
inevitable goal for all advanced life (to practice a benevolent style of
morality based on cooperation), then this is the book for you.
If you want to know why we are
perfectly entitled to derive 'ought' from 'is' ..., if you want to fully
understand the debate over determinism and free will ..., if you want to learn
why evolution needed to develop human emotions and feelings of consciousness
..., if you want to understand the meaning of life, then this is the book for
you.
This is the logical sequel to Richard
Dawkins's book, "The Selfish Gene." By carrying on the perspective of
the gene's-eye-view, this book reconciles evolution with human feelings, human
will and human morality. It succeeds where Daniel Dennett's books fall short,
by providing a clear prescription for living a purposeful and moral life.
The subjects in this book are deep,
but the writing is clear and concise. The investment of time to read it is not
insignificant, but the reading is easy and the payoff is enormous, whether or
not you agree with the conclusions.
Buy it, read it and see for yourself.
The world would be a much better place if everyone did.
The Mocking Memes: A Basis for Automated
Intelligence (Paperback)
by Evan Louis Sheehan
All scientific evidence supports the
astonishing hypothesis that minds are brains and brains are biological
machines. But, then, what sort of neural architecture accounts for the human
ability to think? The answer logically follows from another astonishing
hypothesis: There is no source of creativity anywhere in the universe other
than the process of evolution. Such is the simple premise on which this book's
description of all intelligence is based. Human thinking is thus reduced to a
mechanistic process of neural firing patterns evolving. In this unique yet
simple model of mind, memes are the currency of creative thought. All sorts of
intelligence, from the creation of the universe all the way down to human
thoughts, are explained as evolving patterns.
Product Details
http://www.evanlouissheehan.com/
* Paperback: 332 pages
* Publisher: AuthorHouse (October 11, 2006)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 1425961606
* ISBN-13: 978-1425961602
* Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 1 inches
* Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates
and policies)
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Although the ancient Roman holiday of
Floralia, celebrated by the set of games and theatrical presentations known as
the Ludi Florales, began in April, it was really an ancient May Day
celebration. Flora, the Roman goddess in whose honor the festival was held, was
a goddess of flowers, which generally begin to bloom in the spring. The holiday
for Flora (as officially determined by Julius Caesar when he fixed the Roman
calendar) ran from April 28 to May 3.
Roman public games (ludi) were
financed by minor public magistrates known as aediles. The curule aediles produced
the Ludi Florales. The position of curule aedile was originally (365 B.C.)
limited to patricians, but was later opened up to plebeians. The ludi could be
very expensive for the aediles, who used the games as a way of winning the
affection and votes of the people. In this way, the aediles hoped to ensure
victory in future elections for higher office after they had finished their
year as aediles.
The Floralia festival began in Rome in
238 B.C., to please the goddess Flora into protecting the blossoms. http://www.myface.com/index.php?do=/public/account/submit/add-blog/added_3049/
The Floralia fell out of favor and was
discontinued until 173 B.C., when the senate, concerned with wind, hail, and
other damage to the flowers, ordered Flora's celebration reinstated as the Ludi
Florales.
The Ludi Florales included theatrical
entertainment, including mimes, naked actresses and prostitutes. In the
Renaissance, some writers thought that Flora had been a human prostitute who
was turned into a goddess, possibly because of the licentiousness of the Ludi
Florales or because, according to) David Lupher, Flora was a common name for
prostitutes in ancient Rome.
The celebration in honor of Flora
included floral wreaths worn in the hair much like modern participants in May
Day celebrations. After the theatrical performances, the celebration continued
in the Circus Maximus, where animals were set free and beans scattered to
insure fertility.
I. Of my grandfather Verus I have
learned to be gentle and meek, and to refrain from all anger and passion. From
the fame and memory of him that begot me I have learned both shamefastness and
manlike behaviour. Of my mother I have learned to be religious, and bountiful;
and to forbear, not only to do, but to intend any evil; to content myself with
a spare diet, and to fly all such excess as is incidental to great wealth. Of
my great-grandfather, both to frequent public schools and auditories, and to
get me good and able teachers at home; and that I ought not to think much, if
upon such occasions, I were at excessive charges.
