The highest-profile failure involved a
project known as FutureGen, which President Bush himself announced in 2003: a
utility consortium, with subsidies from the government, was going to build a
plant in Mattoon, Ill., testing the most advanced techniques for converting
coal to a gas, capturing pollutants, and burning the gas for power.
The carbon dioxide would have been
compressed and pumped underground into deep soil layers. Monitoring devices
would have tested whether any was escaping to the atmosphere.
About $50 million has been spent on
FutureGen, about $40 million in federal money and $10 million in private money,
to draw up preliminary designs, find a site that had coal, electric
transmission and suitable geology, and complete an Environmental Impact
Statement, among other steps.
But in January, the government pulled
out after projected costs nearly doubled, to $1.8 billion. The government
feared the costs would go even higher. A bipartisan effort is afoot on Capitol
Hill to save FutureGen, but the project is on life support.
The government had to change its
approach, said Clarence Albright Jr., the undersecretary of the Energy
Department, to “limit taxpayer exposure to the escalating cost.” http://louisgjgsheehan.blogspot.com
Trying to recover, the Energy
Department is trying to cut a deal with a utility that is already planning a
new power plant. The government would offer subsidies to add a segment to the
plant dedicated to capturing and injecting carbon dioxide, as long as the
utility bore much of the risk of cost overruns.
It is unclear whether any utility will
agree to such a deal. The power companies, in fact, have been busy pulling back
from coal-burning power plants of all types, amid rising costs and political
pressure. Utility executives say they do not know of a plant that would qualify
for an Energy Department grant as the project is now structured.
Most worrisome to experts on global
warming, the utilities have recently been canceling their commitments to a type
of plant long seen as a helpful intermediate step toward cleaner coal.
In plants of this type, coal would be
gasified and pollutants like mercury, sulfur and soot removed before burning.
The plants would be highly efficient, and would therefore emit less carbon
dioxide for a given volume of electricity produced, but they would not inject
the carbon dioxide into the ground.
But the situation is not hopeless. One
new gasification proposal survives in the United States, by Duke Energy for a
plant in Edwardsport, Ind.
In Wisconsin, engineers are testing a
method that may allow them to bolt machinery for capturing carbon dioxide onto
the back of old-style power plants; Sweden, Australia and Denmark are planning
similar tests. And German engineers are exploring another approach, one that
involves burning coal in pure oxygen, which would produce a clean stream of
exhaust gases that could be injected into the ground.
But no project is very far along, and
it remains an open question whether techniques for capturing and storing carbon
dioxide will be available by the time they are critically needed.
The Electric Power Research Institute,
a utility consortium, estimated that it would take as long as 15 years to go
from starting a pilot plant to proving the technology will work. The institute
has set a goal of having large-scale tests completed by 2020.
“A year ago, that was an aggressive
target,” said Steven R. Specker, the president of the institute. “A year has
gone by, and now it’s a very aggressive target.”
The inhabitants of Israel's Village of
the Blind, near Gedera, are shown off so often that they have become
indifferent to visitors. But today, in words of Dr. Nissim Hagel, blind
director of the village, they welcomed Helen Keller "not as a guest but as
a sister."
Helen Adams Keller was born on 27 June
1880 in Tuscumbia, a small rural town in Northwest Alabama, USA. The daughter
of Captain Arthur Henley Keller and Kate Adams Keller she was born with full
sight and hearing.
Kate Keller was a tall, statuesque
blond with blue eyes. She was some twenty years younger than her husband
Captain Keller, a loyal southerner who had proudly served in the Confederate
Army during the American Civil War.
The house they lived in was a simple,
white, clapboard house built in 1820 by Helen’s grandparents. At the time of
Helen’s birth the family were far from wealthy with Captain Keller earning a
living as both a cotton plantation owner and the editor of a weekly local
newspaper, the “North Alabamian”. Helen’s mother, as well as working on the
plantation, would save money by making her own butter, lard, bacon and ham.
Helen falls ill
But Helen’s life was to change
dramatically. In February 1882, when Helen was nineteen months old, she fell
ill. To this day the nature of her ailment remains a mystery. The doctors of
the time called it “brain fever”, whilst modern day doctors think it may have
been scarlet fever or meningitis. http://louisjjjsheehan.blogspot.com
Whatever the illness, Helen was, for
many days, expected to die. When, eventually, the fever subsided, Helen’s
family rejoiced believing their daughter to be well again.
However, Helen’s mother soon noticed
how her daughter was failing to respond when the dinner bell was rang or when
she passed her hand in front of her daughter’s eyes.
It thus became apparent that Helen’s
illness had left her both blind and deaf.
The following few years proved very
hard for Helen and her family. Helen became a very difficult child, smashing
dishes and lamps and terrorising the whole household with her screaming and
temper tantrums. Relatives regarded her as a monster and thought she should be
put into an institution.
By the time Helen was six her family
had become desperate. Looking after Helen was proving too much for them. Kate
Keller had read in Charles Dickens’ book “American Notes” of the fantastic work
that had been done with another deaf and blind child, Laura Bridgman, and
travelled to a specialist doctor in Baltimore for advice. They were given
confirmation that Helen would never see or hear again but were told not to give
up hope, the doctor believed Helen could be taught and he advised them to visit
a local expert on the problems of deaf children. This expert was Alexander
Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, Bell was now concentrating on what
he considered his true vocation, the teaching of deaf children.
Alexander Graham Bell suggested that
the Kellers write to Michael Anagnos, director of the Perkins Institution and
Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind, and request that he try and find a teacher
for Helen. Michael Anagnos considered Helen’s case and immediately recommended
a former pupil of the institution, that woman was
Anne Sullivan had lost the majority of
her sight at the age of five. By the age of ten, her mother had died and her
father deserted her. She and her brother Jimmie were sent to the poorhouse in
February 1876.
Anne’s brother died in the poorhouse.
It was October 1880 before Anne finally left and went to commence her education
at the Perkins Institution. One summer during her time at the institute, Anne
had two operations on her eyes, which led to her regaining enough sight to be
able to read normal print for short periods of time.
Anne graduated from Perkins in 1886
and began to search for work. Finding work was terribly difficult for Anne, due
to her poor eyesight, and when she received the offer from Michael Anagnos to
work as the teacher of Helen Keller, a deaf-blind mute, although she had no
experience in this area, she accepted willingly.
Helen meets Anne
On 3 March 1887 Anne arrived at the
house in Tuscumbia and for the first time met Helen Keller. Anne immediately
started teaching Helen to finger spell. Spelling out the word “Doll” to signify
a present she had brought with her for Helen. The next word she taught Helen
was “Cake”. Although Helen could repeat these finger movements she could not
quite understand what they meant. And while Anne was struggling trying to help
her understand, she was also struggling to try and control Helen’s continuing
bad behaviour.
Anne and Helen moved into a small cottage
on the land of the main house to try and get Helen to improve her behaviour. Of
particular concern were Helen’s table manners. She had taken to eating with her
hands and from the plates of everyone at the table.
Anne’s attempts to improve Helen’s table
manners and make her brush her own hair and button her shoes led to more and
more temper tantrums. Anne punished these tantrums by refusing to “talk” with
Helen by spelling words on her hands. http://www.myspace.com/louis_j_sheehan_esquire
Over the coming weeks, however,
Helen’s behaviour did begin to improve as a bond grew between the two. Then,
after a month of Anne’s teaching, what the people of the time called a
“miracle” occurred.
Helen had until now not yet fully
understood the meaning of words. When Anne led her to the water pump on 5 April
1887, all that was about to change.
As Anne pumped the water over Helen’s
hand , Anne spelled out the word water in the girl’s free hand. Something about
this explained the meaning of words within Helen, and Anne could immediately
see in her face that she finally understood.
Helen later recounted the incident:
“We walked down the path to the
well-house, attracted by the fragrance of the honey-suckle with which it was
covered. Someone was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the
spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the
word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed
upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of
something forgotten, a thrill of returning thought, and somehow the mystery of
language was revealed to me.”
Helen immediately asked Anne for the
name of the pump to be spelt on her hand and then the name of the trellis. All
the way back to the house Helen learned the name of everything she touched and
also asked for Anne’s name. Anne spelled the name “Teacher” on Helen’s hand.
Within the next few hours Helen learnt the spelling of thirty new words.
Helen’s progress from then on was
astonishing. Her ability to learn was far in advance of anything that anybody
had seen before in someone without sight or hearing. It wasn’t long before Anne
was teaching Helen to read, firstly with raised letters and later with braille,
and to write with both ordinary and braille typewriters.
Michael Anagnos was keen to promote
Helen, one of the numerous articles on her that he wrote said of Helen that
“she is a phenomenon”. These articles led to a wave of publicity about Helen
with pictures of her reading Shakespeare or stroking her dog appearing in
national newspapers.
Helen had become famous, and as well
as again visiting Alexander Graham Bell, she visited President Cleveland at the
White House. By 1890 she was living at the Perkins Institute and being taught
by Anne. In March of that year Helen met Mary Swift Lamson who over the coming
year was to try and teach Helen to speak. This was something that Helen
desperately wanted and although she learned to understand what somebody else
was saying by touching their lips and throat, her efforts to speak herself
proved at this stage to be unsuccessful. This was later attributed to the fact
that Helen’s vocal chords were not properly trained prior to her being taught
to speak.
On 4 November 1891 Helen sent Michael
Anagnos a birthday gift of a short story she had written called “The Frost
King”. Anagnos was so delighted with the story that he had soon published it in
a magazine hailing its importance in literary history.
However, it was soon discovered that
Helen’s story was the same as one called “The Frost Fairies” by Margaret Canby.
This was ultimately to be the end of Helen and Anne’s friendship with Michael
Anagnos. He felt he had been made to appear foolish by what he considered to be
Helen’s deception.
There had to be an investigation and
it was discovered that Helen had previously been read the story some years
before and had obviously remembered it. Helen always claimed not to recall the
original story and it should always be remembered that Helen was still only 11
years old, however, this incident created a rift that would never heal between
Helen, Anne and Anagnos. It also created great doubt in Helen’s own mind as to
whether any of her thoughts were truly her own.
In 1894 Helen and Anne met John D
Wright and Dr Thomas Humason who were planning to set up a school to teach
speech to the deaf in New York City. Helen and Anne were very excited by this
and the assurances of the two men that Helen’s speech could be improved excited
them further. Helen thus agreed to attend the Wright-Humason School for the
Deaf.
Unfortunately though, Helen’s speech
never really improved beyond the sounds that only Anne and others very close to
her could understand.
Helen moved on to the Cambridge School
for Young Ladies in 1896 and in the Autumn of 1900 entered Radcliffe College,
becoming the first deafblind person to have ever enrolled at an institution of
higher learning.
Life at Radcliffe was very difficult
for Helen and Anne, and the huge amount of work involved led to deterioration
in Anne’s eyesight. During their time at the College Helen began to write about
her life. She would write the story both in braille and on a normal typewriter.
It was at this time that Helen and Anne met with John Albert Macy who was to
help edit Helen’s first book “The Story of My Life” which was published in 1903
and although it sold poorly at first it has since become a classic.
On 28 June 1904 Helen graduated from
Radcliffe College, becoming the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of
Arts degree.
John Macy became good friends with
Helen and Anne, and in May 1905 John and Anne were married. Anne’s name now
changed to Anne Sullivan Macy. The three lived together in Wrentham,
Massachusetts, and during this time Helen wrote “The World I Live In”,
revealing for the first time her thoughts on her world. It was also during this
time that John Macy introduced her to a new and revolutionary way of viewing
the world. And in 1909 Helen became a member of the Socialist Party of
Massachusetts.
In 1913 “Out of the Dark” was
published. This was a series of essays on socialism and its impact on Helen’s
public image was immense. Everyone now knew Helen’s political views.
Helen tours the World
Helen and Anne filled the following
years with lecture tours, speaking of her experiences and beliefs to enthralled
crowds. Her talks were interpreted sentence by sentence by Anne Sullivan, and
were followed by question and answer sessions.
Although Helen and Anne made a good
living from their lectures, by 1918 the demand for Helen’s lectures had
diminished and they were touring with a more light-hearted vaudeville show,
which demonstrated Helen’s first understanding of the word “water”. These shows
were hugely successful from the very first performance, a review of which read
as follows:
“Helen Keller has conquered again, and
the Monday afternoon audience at the Palace, one of the most critical and
cynical in the World, was hers.”
At this time they were also offered
the chance to make a film in Hollywood and they jumped at the opportunity.
“Deliverance”, the story of Helen’s life, was made. Helen was, however, unhappy
with the glamorous nature of the film and it unfortunately did not prove to be
the financial success that they had hoped for.
The vaudeville appearances continued
with Helen answering a wide range of questions on her life and her politics and
Anne translating Helen’s answers for the enthralled audience. They were earning
up to two thousand dollars a week, which was a considerable sum of money at the
time. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
In 1918 Helen, Anne and John moved to
Forest Hills in New York. Helen used their new home as a base for her extensive
fundraising tours for the American Foundation for the Blind. She not only
collected money, but also campaigned tirelessly to alleviate the living and
working conditions of blind people, who at that time were usually badly
educated and living in asylums. Her endeavours were a major factor in changing
these conditions.
Helen’s mother Kate died in 1921 from
an unknown illness, and this left Anne as the sole constant in Helen’s life.
However that same year Anne fell ill again and this was followed in 1922 by a
severe bout of bronchitis which left her unable to speak above a whisper and
thus unable to work with Helen on stage anymore. At this point Polly Thomson,
who had started working for Helen and Anne in 1914 as a secretary, took on the
role of explaining Helen to the theatre going public.
They also spent a lot of time touring
the world raising money for blind people. In 1931 they met King George and
Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace, who were said to be deeply impressed by
Helen’s ability to understand what people said through touch.
All the while Anne’s health was
getting worse, and with the news of the death of John Macy in 1932, although
their marriage had broken up some years before, her spirit was finally broken.
She died on 20 October 1936.
When Anne died, Helen and Polly moved
to Arcan Ridge, in Westport, Connecticut, which would be Helen’s home for the
rest of her life.
After World War II, Helen and Polly
spent years travelling the world fundraising for the American Foundation for the
Overseas Blind. They visited Japan, Australia, South America, Europe and
Africa.
Whilst away during this time Helen and
Polly learnt of the fire that destroyed their home at Arcan Ridge. Although the
house would be rebuilt, as well as the many mementoes that Helen and Polly
lost, also destroyed was the latest book that Helen had been working on about
Anne Sullivan, called “Teacher”.
It was also during this time that
Polly Thomson’s health began to deteriorate and whilst in Japan she had a mild
stroke. Doctors advised Polly to stop the continuous touring she and Helen did,
and although initially they slowed down a bit, the touring continued once Polly
had recovered.
In 1953 a documentary film “The
Unconquered” was made about Helen’s life, this was to win an Academy Award as
the best feature length documentary .It was at the same time that Helen began
work again on her book “Teacher”, some seven years after the original had been
destroyed. The book was finally published in 1955.
Polly Thomson had a stroke in 1957,
she was never to fully recover and died on March 21, 1960. Her ashes were
deposited at the National Cathedral in Washington DC next to those of Anne
Sullivan. It was the nurse who had been brought in to care for Polly in her
last years, Winnie Corbally, who was to take care of Helen in her remaining
years.
The Miracle Worker
It was in 1957 that “The Miracle
Worker” was first performed. A drama portraying Anne Sullivan’s first success
in communicating with Helen as a child, it first appeared as a live television
play in the United States.
In 1959 it was re-written as a
Broadway play and opened to rave reviews. It became a smash hit and ran for
almost two years. In 1962 it was made into a film and the actresses playing
Anne and Helen both received Oscars for their performances.
Helen retires from public life
In October 1961 Helen suffered the
first of a series of strokes, and her public life was to draw to a close. She
was to spend her remaining years being cared for at her home in Arcan Ridge.
Her last years were not however
without excitement, and in 1964 Helen was awarded the Presidential Medal of
Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award, by President Lyndon Johnson. A
year later she was elected to the Women’s Hall of Fame at the New York World’s
Fair.
On June 1, 1968, at Arcan Ridge, Helen
Keller died peacefully in her sleep. Helen was cremated in Bridgeport,
Connecticut and a funeral service was held at the National Cathedral in
Washington DC where the urn containing her ashes would later be deposited next
to those of Anne Sullivan and Polly Thomson.
Helen’s legacy
Today Helen’s final resting place is a
popular tourist attraction and the bronze plaque erected to commemorate her
life has the following inscription written in braille:
“Helen Keller and her beloved
companion Anne Sullivan Macy are interred in the columbarium behind this
chapel.”
So many people have visited the
chapel, and touched the braille dots, that the plaque has already had to be
replaced twice.
If Helen Keller were born today her
life would undoubtedly have been completely different. Her life long dream was
to be able to talk, something that she was never really able to master. Today
the teaching methods exist that would have helped Helen to realise this dream.
What would Helen have made of the technology available today to blind and
deafblind individuals? Technology that enables blind and deafblind people, like
Helen, to communicate directly, and independently, with anybody in the world.
Helen Keller may not have been
directly responsible for the development of these technologies and teaching
methods. But with the help of Anne Sullivan, through her writings, lectures and
the way she lived her life, she has shown millions of people that disability
need not be the end of the world.
“The public must learn that the blind
man is neither genius nor a freak nor an idiot. He has a mind that can be
educated, a hand which can be trained, ambitions which it is right for him to
strive to realise, and it is the duty of the public to help him make the best
of himself so that he can win light through work.”
Further reading
The world has changed a lot since
Helen's time. The internet now gives people the freedom to learn and
communicate equally. From emailing, browsing, learning online, playing games,
downloading music and shopping, it has opened up a new world to blind and
partially sighted people. Find out how web designers can make their websites
accessible to people who are deaf and blind - Web Access Centre.
We are UK’s leading charity offering
information, support and advice to over two million people with sight problems.
Find out more about RNIB.
Up to three million adults and
children in the UK who are blind, partially sighted or have a reading
disability such as dyslexia are denied the right to read. Support our Right to
Read campaign.
More families are looking right under
their feet to ease the problem of high food prices.
As consumers balk at the rising cost
of groceries, homeowners increasingly are cutting out sections of lawn and
retiring flower beds to grow their own food. They're building raised vegetable
beds, turning their spare time over to gardening, and doing battle with insect
pests. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire1.blogspot.com
At Al's Garden Center in Portland,
Ore., sales of vegetable plants this season have jumped an unprecedented 43%
from a year earlier, and sales of fruit-producing trees and shrubs are up 17%.
Sales of flower perennials, on the other hand, are down 16%. It's much the same
story at Williams Nursery, Westfield, N.J., where total sales are down 4.6%
even as herb and vegetable-plant sales have risen 16%. And in Austin, Texas,
Great Outdoors reports sales of flowers slightly down, while sales of
vegetables have risen 20% over last year.
The grow-your-own trend comes as the
price of food has skyrocketed. The government recently reported that April's
0.9% increase in food prices from the previous month was the fastest pace in 18
years -- a reflection of global pressures, from drought in Australia to
increased demand in India and China.
For Michele von Turkovich in South
Burlington, Vt., those pressures hit home when she noticed her average grocery
bill hit $800 a month. "I reached for the organic strawberries the other
day and realized, 'I can't buy organic,' " says the research-lab
technician and mother of three teenage daughters.
After chatting with a neighbor who has
a large garden, Ms. von Turkovich in April decided to dig up a 10-by-12-foot
patch of lawn struggling on the side of her house to plant vegetables. Her
neighbor helped her to think about making the best use of the space so that
there would always be something in the garden to harvest.
So far, the lettuce is an inch high,
and she's looking forward to radishes in about a week. Also sprouting are about
a dozen varieties of greens, including Swiss chard, kale, scallions and endive.
A used soccer net serves as a makeshift trellis for the peas she is expecting.
It's a lot of toil, though. Ms. von Turkovich says she typically spends at
least an hour after work each day on her garden and about half the weekend.
"It takes a significant amount of my spare time."
Even before this year's food-price
crunch, the vigor for veggies was already gaining momentum. An annual survey of
more than 2,000 households by the National Gardening Association shows the
average amount spent per household on flowers was flat in 2007 compared with a
year earlier. But spending on vegetable plants rose 21% to $58 per household
last year, and spending on herbs gained 45% to $32.
Bruce Butterfield, the association's
research director, expects 2008 will be another strong year for vegetable
gardening thanks to "the combination of gas prices, food prices, and
people staying at home because the world's gone crazy," he says. "At
least they can have some control over their backyard."
George Ball, chief executive of seed
giant W. Atlee Burpee & Co. in Warminster, Pa., says he thinks the
veggie-gardening rage is prompted by more than just food costs. His business
has seen more baby boomers "entering their prime gardening years," he
says. Now, this generation has "a lot of time, the rat race is over, a
home that is likely to be their last, and kids past puberty," he says.
Burpee's sales of vegetables and herbs are up about 40% this year, twice last
year's growth rate. Tomatoes, summer squash, onions, cucumbers, peas and beans
continue to be top sellers. "We're running out of things like onions, that
you think would never be that hot and raging," he says.
In West Columbia, S.C., Sarah
Rosenbaum ripped up about a quarter of her family's landscaped yard to install
six raised vegetable beds. "You get a pack of seeds for a dollar or two,
and you have got a whole bed of organic vegetables for a fraction of what you'd
pay at the store. And they taste better."
The project got under way in early
March when Ms. Rosenbaum, her partner and his 12-year-old twins started seeds
indoors for all their vegetables -- from bok choy to zucchini. "We're out
in the garden after work every day, pretty much" she says. "We love
doing the work, so it doesn't really feel like work." She hopes the
experience will also inspire the twins to eat more vegetables.
To be sure, a new gardener can find
himself plunking down a significant amount of money to get started. Ms.
Rosenbaum says that the initial investment in her vegetable garden was around
$500 for everything from lumber to wire cages. While that may seem high for
someone trying to save on food costs, she plans on reusing the materials year
after year. "We're even planning to save seeds for next year," she
says.
In the Garden Grove neighborhood of
Portland, Ore., a community garden got a big makeover. Not only did the 15
participating households decide to double the garden's size and install a
rain-sensitive sprinkler system; they also set aside a section so that each
family gets its own subplot. "I'm in no way a tie-dye wearing granola
hippie," says Garden Grove resident Dylan T. Boyd, a vice president at an
email marketing company and father to two small boys. "But I was looking
at the price of blueberries the other day -- $5 for a fistful. I thought, 'Are
you kidding me?' "
While it's a time commitment, he says,
the payback is far greater. "It's so much easier to walk to the top of the
street and grab your lettuce and tomatoes for dinner, fresh every day."
Talk to your local nursery or check
the seed packet for instructions on ideal planting times, which vary depending
on what part of the country you live in. Here are some other things to
consider:
If you live near an industrial plant
or even in an old house where lead-based paint may have seeped into the soil,
you should consider getting the soil checked for contaminants. A cooperative
extension affiliated with a state university can usually do this.
If you build a separate or raised bed
filled with compost and topsoil, you can forgo testing the soil you're worried
about.
You can also buy a soil-testing kit at
a garden center which will tell you the pH and key nutrient levels. Optimum pH
for growing vegetables is generally slightly acidic (between 6.5 and 7). If you
don't have enough nitrogen, phosphorous or potassium you should add organic
matter, such as good compost mixed in with your existing soil. Also consider
organic fertilizers to boost those nutrients, such as blood meal, alfalfa meal,
sea kelp or fish emulsion.
Most vegetables do best when they get
plenty of sun, so pick a spot that gets optimum sunlight, at least six to eight
hours of direct sun daily. Leafy greens such as lettuce and spinach can
tolerate shadier conditions. Also, those leafy vegetables typically want to be
planted in the cooler part of the season, before average temperatures go much
past 70 degrees. Vegetables that do best in the hotter months include tomatoes,
peppers, cucumbers and squash. To conserve space, consider planting lettuce
underneath tomato vines or even mixing them in other parts of the garden, where
the foliage, vines and flowers can be captivating in their own right.
"Sometimes people think they have
to be in perfect rows, but there's no reason you can't put them in a little
closer and mix them in with flower gardens," says Lori Bushway, a
gardening outreach specialist at Cornell University. She adds that doing so is
also a good foil for pests that tend to zero in more rapidly on plants that are
massed together. When distributed around the landscape, "they're harder to
find," she says.
If you see a pest, find out what it is
before reaching for that scary-sounding spray can. "People are buying
sprays without even knowing what the problem is in the first place," says
John Traunfeld, director of the home and garden information center at the
University of Maryland's College of Agriculture and Natural Resources. The
local cooperative extension can help identify the problem and suggest the best
remedy. "A lot can be taken care of by just hand picking," he says.
Do Americans save enough? That depends
on what the meaning of the word "enough" is. Enough for our own good?
Enough for that of our neighbors? Our grandchildren? Our neighbors'
grandchildren and our grandchildren's neighbors?
Ronald T. Wilcox, a business professor
at the University of Virginia, acknowledges that these are very different
questions, but he believes that they all have the same answer. By any standard
that Mr. Wilcox can imagine, he is sure that we save too little.
By most standards, he is probably
right. Like philanthropy, saving is an act of self-denial that enriches your
neighbors (by leaving more goods available for them to consume). But unlike
philanthropy, saving is punished by the tax system (via the taxes on interest,
dividends, capital gains and inheritance). That's nuts. When you tax saving,
you encourage people – wealthy people in particular – to spend more and grab a
larger share of the consumption pie. "More consumption by the rich"
should not be among the primary objectives of the tax code.
The alternative is to tax consumption.
Mr. Wilcox thus believes (as do I and probably most economists) that a
consumption tax is better than an income tax, at least in principle. But he
withholds his full endorsement for a variety of spurious reasons, mostly born
of his false assumption that any consumption tax must be levied at the point of
sale. He worries, for example, that a consumption tax is necessarily
nonprogressive. But you can easily implement a consumption tax with a Form 1040
that says: "How much did you earn this year? How much did you save? Now
pay tax on the difference." And you can make that tax as progressive as
you like.
The tax code alone is reason to
believe that Americans don't save enough. Mr. Wilcox offers a menu of other
reasons, not all of them convincing. He repeats the canard, popularized by
Robert Frank of Cornell University, that "keeping up with the
Joneses" is a force for excessive consumption. One could argue equally
well that it is a force for excessive saving. If I am trying to outshine the
neighbors' Mercedes, I might well decide to be extra frugal until I can afford
a Rolls Royce.
Mr. Wilcox makes another fundamental
error when he points to high foreign savings as a cause of excessive U.S.
consumption. When foreigners save, U.S. interest rates drop. This makes it
smart for Americans to consume more. "More" is not always the same as
"excessive."
Such errors aside, traditional
economic theory does suggest that we save too little for the general good. It
denies, however, that we save too little for our own good. Regarding the second
point, I suspect, along with Mr. Wilcox, that traditional economic theory is
wrong. Smart people make stupid investment decisions all the time. They thoughtlessly
accept the default asset allocations in their retirement plans; they fail to
grasp the miraculous power of compound interest; they hire financial advisers
to help them pick individual stocks; they choose taxable savings vehicles
instead of IRAs. I know an internationally renowned economist who, for 10
years, unknowingly put all his retirement savings in bonds instead of equities
because he had checked the wrong box on a form.
Mr. Wilcox does an excellent job of
addressing these problems. He stresses education, and indeed the single best
investment you can make in your children's future is to teach them the returns
to saving. You can do that by pointing to some of Mr. Wilcox's graphs, or you
can just quote the numbers I always quote to my students: Invest $1,000 a month
in 3% bonds and in 40 years you'll have almost a million dollars. Invest the
same $1,000 a month in a diversified portfolio of stocks earning the historical
average of 8% and you'll have more than $3.5 million. Give it 50 years instead of
40 and that $3.5 million grows to $8 million. (All these numbers are corrected
for inflation. If inflation runs at 2%, you can expect a 10% return on the
stock market. In the end, you'll have the equivalent of eight million of
today's dollars; if prices double, you'll have 16 million instead of eight.)
It is worth noting that a 1%
management fee on your mutual fund can easily eat up two of those eight
million. Yet almost nobody pays attention to these fees. Moral: Stick with
low-fee funds. Bigger moral: There are some very simple things that we can all
do to become wiser investors. http://louis2j1sheehan2esquire.blogspot.com
In "Whatever Happened to
Thrift?," Mr. Wilcox draws these morals and others to help individual
savers. He also has advice for paternalistic employers who want their workers
to save more: Offer a limited number of low-fee mutual funds; offer targeted
financial education; above all, reset the defaults on your pension plans to
something other than 100% cash, and so that 401(k) plans are opt-out rather
than opt-in.
The idea here is to increase employee
pension-fund participation, which means that you'll probably have to cut back
on matching funds. That's good for your financially naïve employees but bad for
the financially savvy ones who would have participated anyway. Mr. Wilcox
acknowledges this fact but fails to acknowledge that your financially savvy
employees are likely to be smarter and more valuable. (Interestingly, he makes
this very observation earlier in the book but seems to forget it by the end.)
I'm not sure that it is good company policy to make your most productive
workers subsidize the rest.
Mr. Wilcox has an enviably lively
prose style and an admirable commitment to brevity. Not everything he says is
correct, but much of what he says is both correct and valuable. A conscientious
reader could easily secure a comfortable retirement by taking his advice to
heart.
Red wine may be much more potent than
was thought in extending human lifespan, researchers say in a new report that
is likely to give impetus to the rapidly growing search for longevity drugs.
The study is based on dosing mice with
resveratrol, an ingredient of some red wines. Some scientists are already
taking resveratrol in capsule form, but others believe it is far too early to
take the drug, especially using wine as its source, until there is better data
on its safety and effectiveness.
The report is part of a new wave of
interest in drugs that may enhance longevity. On Monday, Sirtris, a startup
founded in 2004 to develop drugs with the same effects as resveratrol,
completed its sale to GlaxoSmithKline for $720 million.
Sirtris is seeking to develop drugs
that activate protein agents known in people as sirtuins.
“The upside is so huge that if we are
right, the company that dominates the sirtuin space could dominate the
pharmaceutical industry and change medicine,” Dr. David Sinclair of the Harvard
Medical School, a co-founder of the company, said Tuesday.
Serious scientists have long derided
the idea of life-extending elixirs, but the door has now been opened to drugs
that exploit an ancient biological survival mechanism, that of switching the
body’s resources from fertility to tissue maintenance. The improved tissue
maintenance seems to extend life by cutting down on the degenerative diseases
of aging.
The reflex can be prompted by a
faminelike diet, known as caloric restriction, which extends the life of
laboratory rodents by up to 30 percent but is far too hard for most people to
keep to and in any case has not been proven to work in humans.
Research started nearly 20 years ago
by Dr. Leonard Guarente of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed
recently that the famine-induced switch to tissue preservation might be
triggered by activating the body’s sirtuins. Dr. Sinclair, a former student of
Dr. Guarente, then found in 2003 that sirtuins could be activated by some
natural compounds, including resveratrol, previously known as just an ingredient
of certain red wines.
Dr. Sinclair’s finding led in several
directions. He and others have tested resveratrol’s effects in mice, mostly at
doses far higher than the minuscule amounts in red wine. One of the more
spectacular results was obtained last year by Dr. John Auwerx of the Institute
of Genetics and Molecular and Cellular Biology in Illkirch, France. He showed
that resveratrol could turn plain vanilla, couch-potato mice into champion
athletes, making them run twice as far on a treadmill before collapsing.
The company Sirtris, meanwhile, has
been testing resveratrol and other drugs that activate sirtuin. These drugs are
small molecules, more stable than resveratrol, and can be given in smaller
doses. In April, Sirtris reported that its formulation of resveratrol, called
SRT501, reduced glucose levels in diabetic patients.
The company plans to start clinical
trials of its resveratrol mimic soon. Sirtris’s value to GlaxoSmithKline is
presumably that its sirtuin-activating drugs could be used to treat a spectrum
of degenerative diseases, like cancer and Alzheimer’s, if the underlying theory
is correct.
Separately from Sirtris’s
investigations, a research team led by Tomas A. Prolla and Richard Weindruch,
of the University of Wisconsin, reports in the journal PLoS One on Wednesday
that resveratrol may be effective in mice and people in much lower doses than
previously thought necessary. http://louis3j3sheehan.blogspot.com
In earlier studies, like Dr. Auwerx’s
of mice on treadmills, the animals were fed such large amounts of resveratrol
that to gain equivalent dosages people would have to drink more than 100
bottles of red wine a day.
The Wisconsin scientists used a dose
on mice equivalent to just 35 bottles a day. But red wine contains many other
resveratrol-like compounds that may also be beneficial. Taking these into
account, as well as mice’s higher metabolic rate, a mere four, five-ounce
glasses of wine “starts getting close” to the amount of resveratrol they found
effective, Dr. Weindruch said.
Resveratrol can also be obtained in
the form of capsules marketed by several companies. Those made by one company,
Longevinex, include extracts of red wine and of a Chinese plant called giant
knotweed. The Wisconsin researchers conclude that resveratrol can mimic many of
the effects of a caloric-restricted diet “at doses that can readily be achieved
in humans.”
The effectiveness of the low doses was
not tested directly, however, but with a DNA chip that measures changes in the
activity of genes. The Wisconsin team first defined the pattern of gene
activity established in mice on caloric restriction, and then showed that very
low doses of resveratrol produced just the same pattern.
Dr. Auwerx, who used doses almost 100
times greater in his treadmill experiments, expressed reservations about the
new result. “I would be really cautious, as we never saw significant effects
with such low amounts,” he said Tuesday in an e-mail message.
Another researcher in the sirtuin
field, Dr. Matthew Kaeberlein of the University of Washington in Seattle, said,
“There’s no way of knowing from this data, or from the prior work, if something
similar would happen in humans at either low or high doses.”
A critical link in establishing
whether or not caloric restriction works the same wonders in people as it does
in mice rests on the outcome of two monkey trials. Since rhesus monkeys live
for up to 40 years, the trials have taken a long time to show results. Experts
said that one of the two trials, being conducted by Dr. Weindruch, was at last
showing clear evidence that calorically restricted monkeys were outliving the
control animals.
But no such effect is apparent in the
other trial, being conducted at the National Institutes of Health.
The Wisconsin report underlined
another unresolved link in the theory, that of whether resveratrol actually
works by activating sirtuins. The issue is clouded because resveratrol is a
powerful drug that has many different effects in the cell. The Wisconsin
researchers report that they saw no change in the mouse equivalent of sirtuin
during caloric restriction, a finding that if true could undercut Sirtris’s
strategy of looking for drugs that activate sirtuin.
Dr. Guarente, a scientific adviser to
Sirtris, said the Wisconsin team only measured the amount of sirtuin present in
mouse tissues, and not the more important factor of whether it had been
activated.
Dr. Sinclair said the definitive
answer would emerge from experiments, now under way, with mice whose sirtuin
genes had been knocked out. “The question of how resveratrol is working is an
ongoing debate and it will take more studies to get the answer,” he said.
Dr. Robert E. Hughes of the Buck
Institute for Age Research said there could be no guarantee of success given
that most new drug projects fail. But, he said, testing the therapeutic uses of
drugs that mimic caloric restriction is a good idea, based on substantial
evidence.
Now, some of the same collection
agencies, as well as other firms that purchase debt outright, have begun
participating as bidders in online auctions, in which they buy the debt or
provide guaranteed payments to hospitals for access to the unpaid accounts.
Some experts say this gives them more reason to aggressively pursue patients in
arrears. Auctions can drive up the amount paid for debt, meaning a collector
must recoup more money from patients to cover its initial investment and turn a
profit. And the winning bidders often get to keep all the money they collect on
the auctioned debt.
Winning bidders may "have to work
harder" to make a profit from auctioned debt, says Michael Klozotsky, an
analyst at Kaulkin Ginsberg Co., a collections-industry strategic-advice
company. "Working harder means sometimes using strategies that are more
aggressive."
Many of the auctions of hospital debt
have been done through Web site ARxChange.com1 -- shorthand for "accounts
receivable exchange" -- owned by TriCap Technology Group. Another site is
medipent.com2, run by Medipent LLC. The auction-site owners, both small
companies based in New York, say their systems create safeguards that protect
patients from potential abuse. Collection firms are vetted for their tactics
and approach to patient needs and concerns before they are allowed to
participate in auctions, the site owners say. The site owners also try to
ensure that collectors comply with hospital rules -- whether they must record
phone calls, for instance, or get the hospital's permission before initiating a
lawsuit against a patient. Hospitals have final say over who bids on their
accounts, and, on ARxChange.com, don't necessarily award the contract to the
highest bidder.
Hospitals "don't want a black eye
from a PR standpoint," says Joseph LaManna, TriCap's chief executive. Both
TriCap and Medipent receive fees from the hospitals and collectors, based on
the size of the winning bid.
The auctions reflect hospitals'
continuing search for ways to collect from the uninsured and underinsured. In
2006, nearly 5,000 community hospitals provided uncompensated care totaling
$31.2 billion -- mostly unpaid patient bills or charity care -- representing
nearly 6% of all costs, according to the American Hospital Association.
The amount of debt auctioned so far is
relatively small. ARxChange.com says it has handled more than $400 million in
patient debt in about 27 auctions, involving nine hospital systems and four
individual hospitals. Medipent.com says it has hosted events involving 12 New
York hospitals and $60 million of debt.
Participating hospitals say they are
still testing the process, often putting up for bid some of their older debt
with a low likelihood of being repaid. Bidders typically offer just pennies or
fractions of pennies on each dollar owed, reflecting the small amount they
expect to collect from patients while still pulling in a profit.
Woman's Christian Association Hospital
of Jamestown, N.Y., last fall auctioned about $7 million of debt on
ARxChange.com that had already gone through collection efforts by the
hospital's staff and by CBJ Credit Recovery, an outside collection agency. CBJ
decided to take another shot at the accounts and submitted the winning bid, an
agreement to pay the hospital $80,000 over the course of a year in exchange for
keeping what it collects from the debtors. "Even though [the unpaid bills]
were very old, it was additional value we were able to extract from them,"
says Chuck Iverson, chief financial officer at the hospital.
CBJ co-owner Andrew Hartweg says his
firm is approaching the collection effort in the same way it would if it were
working on a traditional contingency basis. This generally involves sending
letters to debtors, calling them on the phone, reporting them to credit bureaus
and, as a "very last-ditch effort," getting clearance in court to
garnish their paychecks, he says. Mr. Hartweg wouldn't say how much CBJ has
collected so far on the accounts, but said it has extracted payments on bills
dating back to 2003 and anticipates making a profit.
Consumer advocates say patients are
less likely to successfully dispute bills or negotiate them downward if they
are dealing with a third-party collector rather than a hospital directly.
Collectors also are further removed from hospitals' financial-assistance
policies.
"The hospital is an institution
in the community, has a reputation, in many cases has a nonprofit mission to
uphold," says Anthony Wright, executive director of the consumer-advocacy
coalition Health Access California. http://louis3j3sheehan3esquire.blogspot.com
"Once it goes to collections,
that starts a process that can get a lot more antagonistic, a lot more
aggressive, and a lot more damaging to a family's credit history and financial
future."
One health system that has backed away
from the online auctions is St. John Health. The Detroit system, which owns six
hospitals, says it learned recently that, without its knowledge, some of its
patient debt had been posted on ARxChange.com by Accretive Health, an outside
company that manages collections for St. John. The hospital system says it
"expressed our displeasure" to Accretive and told it not to continue
because "we do not believe an environment such as a Web site is
appropriate in dealing with patient accounts." No transaction was
completed, St. John says. Accretive declined to make a statement about its
business with St. John.
The federal Fair Debt Collection
Practices Act and some state laws govern how debt collectors can treat
consumers. For instance, debt collectors aren't allowed to harass consumers or
make false statements, including implying they will sue if they don't intend to
do so. Consumer groups say calling the medical provider or your insurer could
help clarify any confusion about what you owe. The hospital also could provide
information about financial assistance or charity-care.
What the hospitals can do to help
patients may depend on the terms of their agreement with the collector, says
Mark Rukavina, executive director of the Access Project, a research and
advocacy group that focuses on medical debt. Many hospitals include provisions
in their contracts with the debt buyers that allow the hospitals to help
resolve confusion over bills and retrieve patient accounts from the firms in
circumstances such as charity-care qualification. (TriCap also says it looks
for charity-care cases prior to auctions by guessing at incomes based on
factors such as ZIP Codes.)
"We do not want our patients'
debt handled in any egregious manner," says Neal Somaney, vice president
of business office operations at Vanguard Health Systems, a Nashville, Tenn.,
company that owns 15 hospitals in four states. When Vanguard sold $48.8 million
of patient debt in an auction in January on ARxChange.com, it chose to award
the contract to a firm it had worked with previously and trusted, says Mr.
Somaney.
New Island Hospital of Bethpage, N.Y.,
participated in medipent.com's first health auction last year, offering $7.3
million of unpaid patient bills that ranged from about four to 15 months old.
Drew Pallas, New Island's chief financial officer, says the hospital received
complaints from two debtors about the collection agency. But when the hospital
subsequently listened to recordings of the agency's calls to those people, it
determined that the collector had acted with professionalism, he says.
“I do not doubt that most or all of
the facts in the article have a place, but they are a drop in the ocean. THERE
IS NO ATMOSPHERE OF FEAR in the country, though the journalist is subtly
painting the picture of a ‘bloody regime’ that pressures its citizens.
We do have problems and we will solve
them in time. Democracy is great when you live under a warm roof and have your
piece of bread with butter for lunch. For now, the people do not need
democracy, but the possibility to live humanely.
Please, do not teach us how to live.”
dmlord
“Russia has always needed to have a
czar who tells people how to live and condemns things that are not right.”
victor_aka
“You’re facing an uphill perception
battle. Your article is a piece of investigative journalism; to you — but not
to your audience. Most of what’s published in this genre in Russian are thinly
veiled, slanted opinion pieces masquerading as reporting. Your work, to a
greater or lesser extent, will be read in the same vein.” muphta
“We criticize our own government with
pleasure, as well as the way of life that they impose on us. But we will never
allow non-Russians to criticize our Motherland. Even Pushkin noted that.”
3rd_world_kid
“If it’s a propaganda material, it is
very stupid and weak. If it’s a journalist’s text, such journalists have to
fired for professional incapacity. It’s better not to translate such a
nightmare into Russian. One can only repeat what McCain’s wife said: I am
ashamed for The New York Times.” panam
“Anti-American propaganda is under the
Russians’ skin, and will be for a long time.” Sashapyls
“It is funny to read this from people
who, for 10 years, have invaded other countries, toppled the stable regimes
that ruled and enforced their rules there. Especially funny to read it if you
don’t forget about prisons and torture in Guantánamo. And completely funny when
you recall how these people hanged the former president of the country they
invaded. Why am I saying this? Because Mr. Putin and his team are evil, of
course. And only cattle vote for him. BUT these are OUR problems. And WE will
sort them out.” happy_bra
“People in Russia today have still
failed to learn how to really look at things. For many Russians, it is still
easier to blame some ‘enemy’ for all of their problems than to look for
solutions to those problems.”
“How frightening it is to live in this
country.” ouks
“This article is somehow strongly
reminiscent of an editorial in Pravda from the Soviet days. The journalistic
brainwashing techniques are identical.” Yurvur
“So much noise, so much noise and the
article itself is absolutely objective, it tells truth. Why attack it? Yes, the
newspaper does not depend on any authorities, it’s difficult for the Russian
bloggers to imagine it.” boris_petrov
“Americans don’t understand an
elementary thing.
There is no real opposition, not
because ‘Putin banned’ it, but because it has discredited itself.” archer5
“Ah, freedom of speech, the foundation
stone of democracy. How you got me with your ‘denunciation’ of the Putin
regime. Sometimes I think that the majority of people see more
‘totalitarianism,’ ‘dictatorship’ and other frightening words than there is in
reality, much more.
My grandmother told me how in the
1940s at night they came and took people. That was a police state.” chiga28
“Looks like everything is correct and
that overall, the quite ugly picture of political reality in Russia is outlined
with high authenticity.
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