Kelley appears to get that; in the
interview, he said that the hook of the show may be its juicy depiction of
wife-swapping, but that it’s really about the specific ways in which people
embraced the changes of the time. You wouldn’t guess that from the show itself;
the first ten minutes of the first episode are like a checklist of seventies
references—a woman smoking on an airplane, a woman drinking a can of Tab (I lost
a bet with myself over how soon that would show up), a girl putting on Dr.
Scholl’s sandals—and the opening scene turns out to be a lewd joke, a kind of
homage to “Airplane!,” which, of course, was itself a parody, leading you to
wonder right off the bat whether this is going to be merely a late-night
version of “That ’70s Show.”
In that first scene, we see a
handsome, if slightly sleazy-looking, airline pilot, his jacket and shirt off,
who is speaking to the cabin on his cockpit radio, while the top of a blond
head moves up and down at the bottom of the screen. (The pilot’s sleazy look is
a combination of the International Male mustache and the fact that he’s played
by Grant Show, whom you will remember, whether you admit it or not, as Jake,
the dangerously sexy downwardly mobile biker on “Melrose Place.”) Can this be,
you think? Of course not; it may be 10 P.M., but this is still network TV. When
the woman stands up, we realize that she’s a housemotherly, middle-aged
stewardess who’s helping him clean up some coffee that a young stewardess
accidentally spilled on him. Shortly afterward, that young thing is in bed with
the pilot, Tom, and his wife, Trina, who’s played by Lana Parrilla. (And,
shortly after that, the wife goes to the kitchen for the Tab. Threesomes—they
just make you so darn thirsty.) These two scenes sound pretty risqué, and they
are, but they also seem slightly unworthy, like dirty jokes that aren’t dirty
enough and so seem even dirtier, in the same way that Bob Eubanks, the icky
host of “The Newlywed Game,” made the expression “making whoopee” sound filthy.
It’s the Fourth of July weekend, and a
new couple is moving into the house across the street from Tom and Trina’s—the
upwardly mobile but likable Susan and Bruce Miller (Molly Parker, who shone in
“Deadwood,” and Jake Davenport, from the original, British version of
“Coupling”). Susan and Bruce are leaving behind, in their old,
lower-upper-middle-class neighborhood nearby, Roger and Janet (Josh Hopkins and
Miriam Shor), who are their best friends in that slightly tense way that
suburban couples sometimes are: the two men don’t really know each other that
well; one of the husbands doesn’t like the other wife; and one of the women is
envious and openly critical of the other. If they hadn’t lived near each other
and had kids the same age—two young boys who are friends—they’d have had
nothing to do with each other. Janet, a hyper-proper near-hysteric, senses that
she’s going to lose Susan as a friend because of the move, and alternately fawns
over and needles her.
Kelley and his producing partner, Alan
Poul (who was an executive producer of “Six Feet Under” and also directed a
number of episodes), appear to have been uninterested in giving Janet a real
thought or a genuine feeling.
She’s the most rigid of the six main
adult characters, who are distributed along the continuum of receptivity to
change, and it’s notable—and not in a good way—that she is treated as a joke by
Kelley and Poul. (There is a seventh character, Gail, played by Kate Norby, who
lives next door to Susan and Bruce’s new house; she’s a blowsy,
self-disrespecting cocaine addict, hiding in the shadows—she wears sunglasses
indoors and covers her windows with aluminum foil, to keep out the glare of
societal disapproval.) Janet has been made to be the stereotypical Creature
from the Suburban Lagoon—a Stepford wife, an American Beauty, the distaff half
of Ozzie and Harridan, a Mommie Dearest, a Desperate Housewife, and a
distillation of every drag performance you’ve ever seen. It doesn’t help that
Shor plays up the character’s risibility; following a party at Tom and Trina’s
that Janet has stormed out of after coming upon some disturbing sexual activity
in the basement (it involved more than two people), Janet is seen at home on
her knees, in full housewife regalia—chest-protector apron and rubber
gloves—maniacally scrubbing her oven. Her husband hopelessly asks her, “Why
don’t you come to bed?” You’d have to have a heart of Teflon not to laugh when
she spits at him, “Because we live in a pigsty!” This is TV at its TV-est.
Much of the dialogue in “Swingtown” is
as unfortunately memorable as that outburst, partly because none of the adults
are allowed to have any self-awareness. They say things like “Who’s up for a
Harvey Wallbanger?” At her Fourth of July party, Trina holds a little box out
to Susan and says, “Quaalude?,” as if she were offering an Altoid. Susan says
she’s never had one. “Then I insist,” Trina says. “It’ll take the edge off.”
But Susan hasn’t indicated that she has an edge, or, if she does, that it needs
taking off. This is boilerplate seventies-speak, and it doesn’t get at anything
beyond itself. AMC’s “Mad Men,” as punctiliously faithful to the externals of
the late fifties and early sixties as “Swingtown” is to the mid-seventies,
cracks open the dreams and myths of its time; there’s brutality to that show, a
willingness to look at the blood pumping through the era’s heart of darkness.
But “Swingtown” is a little too fond of the seventies to reveal anything about
them that we don’t already know.
According to the Times piece, Kelley
and Poul wanted to combine elements of the movie “Boogie Nights” and the TV
show “The Wonder Years.” If you can describe your show that easily, you can
sell it to the networks but not necessarily to viewers. (“Swingtown” recalls
any number of movies and TV shows, from “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice”
to “The Ice Storm,” with its parents and teen-agers living parallel lives and a
smart, odd teen-age girl riding around alone on a bicycle.) “Swingtown,” as
part of its fetish for authenticity, has impeccably and precisely horrible
costumes and sets, but, to a serious fault, it makes use of the most overplayed
music of the period. “Dream Weaver,” “Dancing in the Moonlight,” “Come and Get
Your Love,” and other such beige tunes are thrown one after another onto the
soundtrack, until your ears are crying. With few exceptions, the songs are not
integrated into the show—the characters don’t hear them. They’re there just to
pander to viewers of a certain age. The characters in “Swingtown” may be going
through big personal changes and having, along with their free sex, some rough
times, but I envy them: they have to live through the seventies only once.
A gentle tale gently told, “When Did
You Last See Your Father?” is grown-up, civilized fare. If that sounds like a
compliment, it is, even though the whole thing might have been improved with a
bit of messiness, a little vulgarity to leaven its tastefulness and tact. This
isn’t a groundbreaking work; just a smartly played story, enlivened by drama
and spiked with passion, the very thing that thinking audiences pine for,
especially during the summer spectacle season when theaters are clogged with
sticky kids’ stuff and television reruns.
Colin Firth, one of the few screen
actors who make male decency seem sexy, plays Blake, a successful poet and
resentful son. The story, adapted from the British author Blake Morrison’s
nonfiction best seller of (almost) the same title, takes the measure of that
resentment, which gurgles to the surface when the son learns that his father is
dying. Working from David Nicholls’s screenplay, the director Anand Tucker (who
made the wonderful “Hilary and Jackie”) approaches the material from the inside
out. He takes us deep inside Blake’s thinking — both in the present and in
childhood flashbacks — to show how this sympathetic, otherwise temperate man
developed such prickly, seemingly petty feelings toward his father, Arthur, who
seems perfectly harmless if for no other reason than he’s played by Jim
Broadbent.
Though often called upon to play
blustery charmers (you can imagine him sleeping in tweeds and searching for the
bowler already parked on his head), Mr. Broadbent is a sly puss, a nimble
stealer of scenes. He has a great, jowly face for comedy, as his estimable work
with Mike Leigh and other directors attests, but there is something about his
shrewd eyes that suggests a darting, penetrating intelligence. He uses that
face and those eyes to very good effect in “When Did You Last See Your
Father?,” creating a complex portrait — executed in broad strokes rather than
detailed lines — of a needy, somewhat desperate man whose bullying ways and
boorishness obscure his other qualities, particularly from his only,
increasingly estranged son.
The movies are filled with epically
bad fathers, legendary monsters, destroyers of women and children alike. One
reason may be that monsters are inherently dramatic and cinematically easy: A
shaking fist or a smack across a downy cheek can goose up even the flattest
scene. Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire
One of the nicest surprises here is
that Arthur isn’t a monster, simply careless, sometimes cruel. He routinely
calls the younger Blake fathead and blunders into his son’s private life
whenever it suits him. He lies and flirts and, worst of all, routinely and
publicly humiliates his wife, Kim, a monument to connubial patience, played by
the stellar Juliet Stevenson. It’s no wonder that the adult Blake can’t see his
father as just a man — the child never did, never could.
Fluidly edited, the film regularly
shifts between the present, with the adult Blake confronting death, and the
past, with the younger Blake confronting life. For the most part this
oscillation between time frames and emotional registers works well, even if Mr.
Tucker, whose sensitive touch with actors is his greatest strength as a
director, tends to clutter up the scenes with too much fussy, self-conscious
camerawork. It’s a pleasure to watch Mr. Firth — a supremely controlled actor
who makes each developing fissure visible — show the adult Blake coming to
terms with his contradictory feelings, letting the love and the hurt pour out
of him. If only Mr. Tucker had let the tears flow and kept his whirling dervish
of a camera on a much shorter leash.
When Sen. Ted Kennedy's diagnosis of
brain cancer was announced, it set off a morbid, sometimes irresponsible,
countdown.
Reporters wanted to know how long he could
live with his tumor, known as a glioma. Doctors, going by the limited
information available from Sen. Kennedy's doctors, responded with answers that
were all over the map.
Some doctors, not hearing any mention
of surgery as an option, said Sen. Kennedy may have just six months. But the
senator underwent surgery at Duke this week. Others cited stats for the
most-severe type of glioma, which kills half of patients within 15 months -- or
is it 12? Still others optimistically shared typical survival rates for a
less-extreme form of the condition: three to five years.
When it comes to answering the most
enduring question about a life -- when it ends -- even the best scientific
studies of some of the more common medical cases points to one conclusion: We don't
really know.
"It is lies, damned lies and
statistics," says Lynne Taylor, director of neuro-oncology at the Virginia
Mason Medical Center in Seattle. "What everyone cares about is what's
going to happen to Ted Kennedy, and that's the one thing statistics can't
tell."
Even if the media's medical experts
could draw on the same information as Sen. Kennedy's doctors, it would be hard
to predict survival time. "Most of the numbers are based on all
comers," says Jeffrey Raizer, director of Northwestern University's
medical neuro-oncology program. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.de
Age -- Sen. Kennedy is 76 years old --
and functional impairment, as measured by the Karnofsky Performance Status
score, have a big impact on the prognosis. An otherwise healthy person his age
might do as well as a typical 40-year-old. "You have to treat the
individual, not the statistic," Dr. Raizer says. http://louis-j-sheehaN.NET
Also, life-expectancy data for such
patients are dated. "True life expectancy with best treatment is
constantly changing," says Jonathan A. Friedman, a neurosurgeon and
director of the Texas Brain and Spine Institute. "Measurement and
reporting of this will always lag behind reality."
Some news articles say glioma patients
typically live 12 months from diagnosis; others bump the figure to 15 months
because a more-recent study showed promise. The news media add to the confusion
by treating median survival times like death sentences. Saying most such
patients are given a certain amount of time to live implies there is no chance
to live longer. Yet half of patients outlive those estimates, says Ellen Fox, a
health-care ethicist for the Veterans Health Administration.
On either side of the midpoint,
survival times can vary widely. A 2005 study of radiotherapy and a drug called
temozolomide found that 27% of patients lived more than two years and nearly
20% lived past three years -- more than twice the typical survival time.
On the other hand, we hear about the
outliers, those who inspire hope with their prolonged survival despite doctors'
grim forecasts. But these are exceptions. Doctors struggle to translate
survival statistics for the news media, and do far worse when trying to apply
these stats specifically to their patients.
The error is usually on the side of
overoptimism, in part because doctors tend to be confident in their abilities
and hopeful for their patients. http://louis-j-sheehan.com
Doctors overestimated dying patients' survival by a factor of
5.3, Harvard Medical School professor Nicholas Christakis found in a study of
terminally ill patients referred to hospice care who had, on average, about a
month to live.
In a study of Dutch nursing homes,
half of patients expected to have four to six weeks to live had died by the end
of the third week. "Doctors simply overlook the signs of nearing
death," says study co-author Hella Brandt of the Netherlands Institute for
Health Services Research.
Predictions of death fall short
because of twin failures of science and communication. The science of prognosis
is poorly understood and inadequately taught. On surveys, most physicians say
they weren't adequately trained in prognosis, Dr. Christakis says.
The pain and difficulty of
communicating the prediction exacerbates the error. "Research in this area
shows that most people want a broad idea of what to expect, but not all want
precise details regarding statistics," says Josephine Clayton, of the
University of Sydney.
Many patients never ask even for the
broad outline, out of fear of the answer. Their doctors, in turn, also fear
this moment. When estimating life expectancy for patients who, it turned out,
had about a month to live, doctors tacked 15 days onto their private
predictions, which were already overly optimistic, according to a separate
study by Dr. Christakis and Dr. Elizabeth Lamont.
And patients sometimes tack on still
more time, as demonstrated by a Duke University study published this week
showing that patients with heart failure significantly overestimate their life
expectancy. Only one-third of them spoke to their clinicians about a prognosis,
and that didn't help their forecasts.
The implications go beyond any
emotional consequences of dying patients thinking they have more time to live.
Patients and doctors expecting a longer survival time may agree on
more-invasive treatment, adding the burden of side effects and complications to
patients in their final days, and keeping them in hospitals.
Not every study shows a tendency
toward optimism. A study from an Ireland hospice this year found that senior
clinical staff tended to underestimate survival. But all studies agree that the
accuracy rate is alarmingly low: Fewer than half of predictions are within 33%
of the correct survival time.
Feedback and quality control could
help hone survival estimates. Hospital doctors could remove some of the
statistical noise by averaging predictions from all members of their team, Dr.
Christakis suggests. The natural competitiveness of doctors might spur them to
track their accuracy rates and adjust accordingly for future patients.
For all their predictive failings,
doctors generally can discriminate between cases. One patient predicted to live
longer than another usually does.
Oncologist Martin Stockler from the
University of Sydney found physicians do better predicting big-picture
statistics. If you ask how long 10% of similar patients -- or 90% or 50% --
were likely to survive, they give more-accurate predictions.
Dr. Taylor improved her accuracy after
comparing her estimates for past patients with their actual survival times, and
realizing she had been too optimistic. "Your relationship with the patient
is you only want the best for them," she says, "and you only want to
give them hope."
The success of Silvio Berlusconi's
hair transplant, four years ago, relied on the fact that the septuagenarian
prime minister had enough of a thatch on the back of his head to enable some of
it to be transferred to his thinning top. Although hair transplants have
advanced to the stage where they are virtually undetectable (no more plugs of
hair), they still rely on moving hairs from one place to another. So, though
hairlines such as Mr Berlusconi's can be thickened up, or even straightened,
there may well not be enough material available to lower a hairline to its
former, youthful level.
Finite supply remains the main
drawback of this sort of transplant surgery. The most common form of hair loss
in men is “male pattern baldness”, characterised by a receding hairline and the
thinning of the hair on the crown. It is caused by hormones and mediated by
genetic predisposition. Hair transplants work because the hairs at the back of
a man's head are not vulnerable to hormonal attack, and will thus grow quite
contentedly in their new home—assuming there are enough of them to transplant.
For those so follicularly challenged
that they have little hair to move around in this way, however, there is now
hope. This comes not in a jar, but in a test-tube from a Manchester-based
company called Intercytex. The firm's technique exploits the regenerative
properties of what are known as dermal papilla cells. These are the cells that
create hair follicles in the first place. They remain at the base of the hair
when they have finished their job.
Some years ago it was discovered that
when these cells are relocated, an entirely new hair will grow. That
observation is only useful, though, if you can multiply dermal papilla
cells—and do so in a way that allows them to keep their ability to induce hair
growth. For, in normal culture, dermal papilla cells quickly lose this
sought-after ability.
This, says Nick Higgins, Intercytex's
boss, has taxed scientists for years. Intercytex appears to be working on two
solutions. Although it is understandably tight-lipped about the exact mechanism
behind its success, one probably enlists the help of cells called
keratinocytes, which interact naturally with the dermal papilla cells of the
hair follicle and secrete a chemical factor that supports their growth. At
present, the identity of this growth factor is a mystery. However, it is likely
that one of Intercytex's methods involves supplying this factor to cultured
dermal papilla cells. Intercytex's second approach seems to involve culturing
the dermal papilla cells with proteins that take part in signalling during the
process that creates hair.
The long and short of it is that being
able to multiply these cells while preserving their efficacy opens the way for
unlimited supplies of head hair. Intercytex is therefore conducting a trial of
the technology in Manchester. Nineteen “patients” have had a small amount of
hair removed, follicles and all, from the backs of their heads. Their dermal
papilla cells have been extracted, multiplied and re-injected into their
scalps. The trial's full results will not be available until March 2009, but
the company has already said that at least two-thirds of its patients have generated
new hair within six months.
Unfortunately for eager baldies,
regulations require more trials. As a result it is likely to be five years
before any product is on the market. Nor will Intercytex's technique do
anything about that other bane of ageing, the tendency of hair to go grey. For
the time being, even Mr Berlusconi will have to continue to dye his locks.
Organ-transplant data provide more
evidence that stem cells cause cancer
Doctors track the long-term health of
organ-transplant patients in registries. Such registries make it possible to
uncover trends or long-term problems in the population that may be missed in
smaller samples. But they can also be pressed into service to support basic
research. And a group of researchers led by Sanford Barsky of Ohio State
University College of Medicine in Columbus has done just that. As they reported
on June 2nd to a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, in
Chicago, they have used one such registry to support the increasingly popular idea
that many if not all cancers are caused by stem cells gone bad.
Each organ and tissue in the body has
its own collection of stem cells. When these cells divide, they produce two
very different daughter cells. One resembles the parent stem cell and thus
allows the whole process to continue. The progeny of the other differentiate
into mature cells within the skin, kidney, lung or what have you. This is how
organs renew themselves over the life of an individual. In a healthy organ, the
stem cells divide only when needed—usually in response to injury or when other
cells have died. Some cancer scientists, however, think that stem cells can
lose this control function and thus divide endlessly, leading to tumours.
Dr Barsky reasoned that if the cancer
stem-cell hypothesis is true, then stem cells from a donor organ may cause
cancer somewhere else in a transplant recipient's body. Looking in a patient
registry, he identified 280 people who had undergone an organ transplant and
later developed a solid tumour. In nearly half of these cases donor and
recipient were of different sexes, which means the cells from each would have
different sex chromosomes (women have two X chromosomes, men an X and a Y). http://louiscjcsheehan.blogspot.com
That makes a cancer derived from the
transplant easy to identify.
To find out if the tumour cells were
the same sex as the body they inhabited, Dr Barsky labelled slices of tumour
with green fluorescent tags that bind to the X chromosome and red tags that
bind to the Y. And he found transplant-derived cancers in abundance: in 12% of
cases, the sex of the tumour matched the donor rather than the recipient. For
example, a 48-year-old woman developed skin cancer nine months after receiving
a bone-marrow transplant from a man. The tumour cells had a Y chromosome,
indicating that the cancer arose from the donated bone marrow. In another case,
a 62-year-old man developed colon cancer ten years after receiving a kidney
transplant from a female donor. The colon-cancer cells lacked a Y chromosome.
Closer examination of the DNA in the
tumour cells and surrounding tissue showed that the tumours definitely did
originate from the donor organs, not the recipients. Dr Barsky also found that
if a tumour formed in the transplanted organ, it could be derived from either
recipient or donor cells.
In each of these cases, the tumour
that formed resembled any other tumour that would form in that site. The
48-year-old woman's looked like skin cancer, not cancer of the bone marrow. The
62-year-old man's looked like colon cancer and not like a kidney tumour. Thus,
once a cell migrated to a new site, it took on the behaviour and appearance
appropriate to that location—losing the identity it had held in its organ of
origin.
This observation does not absolutely
prove that the migrating cells are stem cells, but it would be astonishing if
fully differentiated cells from one tissue could up sticks to another organ and
then take on the characteristics of that organ. Besides, biologists do know
that stem cells in the bone marrow move into the blood stream. Thus the
formation of donor-derived tumours in distant tissues after a bone-marrow
transplant is not entirely unexpected. A few reports also exist in the medical literature
of donor-derived tumours arising after a solid organ, such as a liver or a
kidney, has been transplanted. Dr Barsky's data, though, show that this is not
such a rare event after all. Stem cells in one organ thus seem malleable enough
to adopt a whole new developmental programme in another organ, even late in a
person's life.
More important, though, in Dr Barsky's
opinion, is that the new data support the idea that tumours arise from stem
cells that have gone wrong. It is not clear whether those stem cells are
healthy when they migrate to a new site and mutate into cancer stem cells after
they have taken up residence, or if they mutate first and then migrate. Either
way, however, transplant registries may just have shed light on a fundamental
question in cancer biology. http://louishjhsheehan.blogspot.com
What happened after California
abolished bilingual education
Ten years to the day after California
banned teaching in any language other than English, Erlinda Paredes runs
through a new sentence with her kindergarten class. “El payaso se llama
Botones”, she intones—“the clown's name is Buttons”. When a pupil asks a
question in English, she responds in Spanish. It is an improbable scene. But the
abolition of bilingual education has not worked out in quite the way anybody
expected.
Before 1998 some 400,000 Californian
children were shunted into classes where they heard as little as 30 minutes of
English each day. The hope was that they would learn mathematics and other
subjects in their native tongue (usually Spanish) while they gently made the
transition to English. The result was an educational barrio. So that year Ron
Unz, a software engineer, sponsored a ballot measure that mandated teaching in
English unless parents demanded otherwise. Proposition 227 passed easily, with
considerable support from Hispanics. Voters in two other states, Massachusetts
and Arizona, have since followed suit.
In Santa Ana, a mostly poor Latino
city in Orange county, the number of children in bilingual classes promptly
halved. Demand would have been even less had schools not prodded parents to
request waivers for their children. In the past few years demand for bilingual
education has fallen further. This year 22,000 pupils in Santa Ana are enrolled
in “structured English immersion” programmes, where they hear little but that
language. Just 646 are taught bilingually.
It has been a smooth transition,
disappointing the many teachers and Latino politicians who forecast imminent
doom for immigrant children. Yet the revolution in standards promised by Mr
Unz's supporters has not come to pass either. State tests show that immigrants
are indeed doing better in English. But so are native English speakers. In the
second grade (ages seven and eight) the gap in reading ability between natives
and the rest has narrowed only slightly; in higher years it has not narrowed at
all. The results of national tests are even less encouraging.
Before 1998 many poor immigrant
children in California received a dismal education informed by wrong-headed
principles. They now just suffer from a dismal education. Fully 74% of English
learners in the fourth grade read at “below basic” level, according to the
National Assessment of Educational Progress. In 2006 a study found that, after
six years, just one-quarter of Hispanic pupils could expect to be reclassified
as fluent in English—which is, admittedly, a pretty high bar. This augurs badly
for their economic future. And, since more than one immigrant child in five
lives in California, it is also bad news for America's largest state.
Howard Bryan, who is responsible for
English learners in Santa Ana, says that formal teaching methods matter
surprisingly little. Pupils in well-run schools with demanding teachers, who
are encouraged by their parents, tend to succeed whatever the language.
The problem is that many parents are
unwilling or unable to push their children, and most programmes are weak. The
abolition of bilingual education has revealed a much bigger problem.
California's public education system is sclerotic, with a meddlesome central
bureaucracy and mighty teachers' unions. Until it is reformed, immigrants will
continue to struggle.
Few such problems afflict Ms Paredes's
pupils. Hers is a “two-way” bilingual class in which exactly half of the
children already speak English fluently. Most of them are the offspring of
upper-middle-class Hispanics who worry that their children will grow up knowing
no Spanish. The class is drip-fed English according to a strict formula. In
kindergarten pupils speak English 10% of the time; by fifth grade they speak it
50% of the time. Not surprisingly, given the pupils' backgrounds, such classes
score remarkably well in tests, Partly for this reason, two-way bilingual
education is entirely uncontroversial.
Although such two-way programmes are
much rarer than old-fashioned bilingual education, they have roughly doubled in
number in the past ten years. They have even popped up in affluent white areas
like Santa Monica. While the teaching of English to immigrants is not going too
well, the teaching of Spanish to natives is going swimmingly. The clearest
change wrought by Proposition 227 is that Spanish has turned from a remedial
language into an aspirational one.
FEW people, other than scholars, will
be familiar with the story of the Cambridge don whose study of China’s
scientific history helped to change the West’s appraisal of a civilisation once
thought hopelessly backward. By the time Joseph Needham died in 1995, he had
published 17 volumes of his “Science and Civilisation in China” series,
including several that he wrote entirely on his own.
The Chinese began printing 600 years
before Johannes Gutenberg introduced the technique in Germany. They built the
first chain drive 700 years before the Europeans. And they made use of a
magnetic compass at least a century before the first reference to it appeared
elsewhere. So why, in the middle of the 15th century, did this advanced
civilisation suddenly cease its spectacular progress?
So powerful has Needham’s contribution
been to the historiography of Chinese science that this conundrum is still
known as “The Needham Question”. Even the Chinese themselves use it: the phrase
in Mandarin is Li Yuese nanti.
Simon Winchester’s lively biography
(see article) focuses on what drove Needham to wrestle with this issue. In 1936
three Chinese assistants came to work in his biochemistry laboratory. One, Lu
Gwei-djen, who came from Nanjing, began teaching him Chinese, which ignited
Needham’s interest in the country’s technological and scientific past. He
retrained as a Sinologist and took a job in Chongqing as Britain’s scientific
emissary.
Mr Winchester draws much from
Needham’s diaries which describe an unconventional lifestyle, an open marriage
and numerous extra-marital affairs, as well as exotic adventures travelling
across China in search of its science.
Among Needham’s destinations in his
Chevrolet truck was Dujiangyan, a city badly hit by the recent earthquake in
Sichuan Province. There he was able to study a huge irrigation project that was
created 2,300 years ago and which still stands today, though now cracked by the
earthquake. At that time, only the Mesopotamians had made such strides in
controlling their rivers, Mr Winchester says.
Needham’s focus on China’s
achievements naturally won him praise there. The Republican government granted
him one of its highest honours shortly before it was overthrown by the
Communist Party in 1949. But Needham also had strong ties with China’s new
rulers. This controversial relationship threatened to blight his career. His
participation in a Chinese-led inquiry into alleged American use of germ warfare
during the Korean war, together with his failure to be more sceptical about
what many believe to have been Soviet and Chinese fakery, prompted many of his
peers in the West to shun him.
Needham’s Cambridge college, Gonville
and Caius, however, retained its faith in his scholarship and gave him
extraordinary freedom from normal academic duties to pursue his book-writing.
Needham never fully worked out why
China’s inventiveness dried up. Other academics have made their own
suggestions: the stultifying pursuit of bureaucratic rank in the Middle Kingdom
and the absence of a mercantile class to foster competition and
self-improvement; the sheer size of China compared with the smaller states of
Europe whose fierce rivalries fostered technological competition; its
totalitarianism.
With its unreformed one-party system,
its rote-learning in schools and state control of big businesses, “new China”
is hardly a haven for innovative thinking. Yet the Chinese continue to fret
about the Needham question. A Communist Party chief of a middle school in
central China recently said that it deserved deep thought and that the answer
lay in an education system that fails to emphasise improving “character”. A
former government minister also referred to Needham’s lament that China had
produced no idea or invention of global impact for more than 500 years. Its
contribution henceforth, the official said, should be “harmony”.
Lord Levy was the son of the shammas
in the local Orthodox synagogue, himself the son of a Polish immigrant, who
lived in contented poverty. There was no chance that the clever boy, Michael,
would go to university. John Prescott was the son of a railwayman who was an
active trade unionist. He failed the 11-plus and when he left secondary school
at 15, the headmaster told his mother that he would never amount to much. He
became a steward on ocean liners sailing out of Liverpool. Mrs Blair’s father
was a well-known Liverpudlian actor called Tony Booth, a boozer who abandoned
his family before Mrs Blair was ten years old. http://louisijisheehan.blogspot.com
She had a strict Catholic education.
The nuns identified her as an ill-disciplined child who would never make
prefect, never mind head girl, but she was clever and independent-minded. She
chose to study law at the London School of Economics, where she was able to
shower every day in her student residence instead of sharing a bath with the
rest of her family once a week.
Lord Levy and Mr Prescott freely admit
to having a chip on their shoulders, and a streak of vanity which drove them
on. Mr Prescott became an MP sponsored by the National Union of Seamen, rising
to become Labour’s leading class warrior, and deputy prime minister. Lord Levy,
who started a record label (his star performer was Alvin Stardust) and became
rich when he sold it, was a celebrated fund-raiser for Jewish charities. He
performed the same role for Tony Blair so successfully that he became known as
Lord Cashpoint.
Mrs Blair became a QC, and the story
of her legal career is rather more interesting than her score-settling account
of life as the prime minister’s wife. She was a junior in the chambers of the
future Lord Chancellor, Derry Irvine, and watched him in combat with Tom Bingham,
later Lord Chief Justice. “Derry was like an attacking rhinoceros. Tom Bingham
on the other hand was like a snake, smooth, charming, almost hypnotic, exposing
the weakness in the other side’s argument without ever raising his voice.
Bingham subsequently became my role model. As a woman I could never have been
as aggressive an advocate as Derry.”
Where did it all go wrong? Mr Prescott
felt deeply that he was unappreciated: “I got branded as an uneducated yob. It
was an image I suppose never left me. I began to hate the press.” He developed
bulimia, caused in part, he says, by stress. An affair with his diary secretary
tore at the last vestiges of his authority. His book, which is a lazy,
once-over-lightly non-apology of a life, does not restore it.
Lord Levy comes across as a more
sympathetic character. He has written the case for his defence in the recent
cash-for-honours scandal that involved even Mr Blair. As a vain man, he was
particularly proud of his role as Mr Blair’s Middle East envoy, but he acknowledges
that he suffered from hubris. “I sometimes revelled in the public attention. In
politics I had sometimes been blinded by the light.”
Mrs Blair’s problem is that she could
never keep quiet: “I have never been taught the meaning of the phrase ‘discretion
is the better part of valour’.” She is a doughty hater, with Gordon Brown as
her principal antagonist, and Alistair Campbell and the Princesses Margaret and
Anne not far behind. Her loyalty to Mr Blair is absolute: “There were times
when I faltered...But I knew him and knew he would never do the wrong thing.”
Her book is easily outselling the others, and deserves to, but each leads
irresistibly to the same conclusion: there are very few happy endings in
British politics.
Tens of thousands of teachers formed
picket lines outside nearly 900 schools here Friday morning to protest cuts to
education financing proposed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to help close
California’s projected $17 billion budget gap.
If passed, the cuts would reduce financing
for Los Angeles schools by $340 million next year, said A. J. Duffy, president
of United Teachers of Los Angeles, the local teachers union.
Mr. Duffy said the union, which
represents 48,000 teachers, had announced plans for the hourlong protest more a
month ago, allowing principals and teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School
District, the nation’s second-largest K-12 public school system, to work
together to plan supervision of almost 700,000 students between 7:30 and 8:30
a.m. Substitute teachers and administrators from neighboring districts were
brought in to sit with students in auditoriums, gymnasiums and on playgrounds,
he said.
When the protest ended at 8:30 a.m.,
teachers reported to their classrooms for their regular duties. http://ljsheehan.blogspot.com
School district officials said they
opposed the budget cuts, but denounced the protest as a disruption of the
school day. The district failed to win a court injunction in early May to
prevent teachers from leaving their classes to take part in the protest.
On Thursday night, Superintendent
David Brewer sent an automated call to parents, notifying them of the protest
and calling it “the wrong message” to send to legislators and to the community.
At 7:30 Friday morning, teachers
wearing red T-shirts and carrying signs with slogans like “Honk for No Budget
Cuts” were joined by some parents on sidewalks outside their schools. Many
smiled and waved at morning commuters, some of whom sounded their horns.
Retirements are increasing from a baby
boomer generation of teachers and others in the state's public education
system, taking with them years of invaluable classroom experience.
As many as 12,000 retirements are
expected this year alone by the Pennsylvania Public School Employees Retirement
System, while the Pennsylvania State Education Association says 30 percent of
the state's teachers -- there were more than 123,000 in the profession as of
2005-06 -- are within five years of their normal retirement age.
Officials of several midstate school
districts say colleges are producing enough capa ble graduates and that many
are more sophis ticated in technology and other modern edu cation than prior
generations.
But short ages exist in key subjects such
as math, language, physics and chemistry -- skills needed by employers and ones
that likely are going to become even more crucial in the future. There also
continues to be a lack of minorities going into teaching, an issue that urban
districts in particular are finding challenging.
The Harrisburg School District, for
example, had a 94.7 percent minority student population last year, but only 23
percent of its teachers represented minorities.
There is much to be said for teacher
training and majoring in education in terms of one's ability to be effective in
the classroom. But the retirement wave on top of shortages of teachers in
certain subject areas and the dearth of minorities reinforce the need to
revisit federal and state certification requirements that have been tightened
in recent years under the No Child Left Behind Act and Pennsylvania's Teachers
for the 21st Century Initiative.
Although perhaps well-intentioned,
they have presented huge obstacles for nonteaching professionals looking to
make a career change and who have much to offer students. Prior to No Child
Left Behind, a school district would take a person with an MBA and a background
conducive to teaching math, economics or business, put him or her in the
classroom immediately and have the individual work toward completing a list of
courses needed for teaching certification.
Now, the certification must come
first, meaning the applicant would likely have to bear the financial hardship
of quitting his or her job while taking classes.
They do have the option of taking and
passing the national teachers exam, something Mark Holman, director of human
resources for the Harrisburg School District, has compared to "trying to
pass the bar exam before going to law school."
Meanwhile, since the 2003-04 school
year, the initiative launched under the Ridge administration require teachers
graduating college to have a 3.0 grade point average. But some students for
reasons of maturity, homesickness or personal hardship struggle with their
studies their freshmen and sophomore years, then turn it around and become A
and B students their remaining years. In those cases, the GPA is misleading.
The state should reconsider these GPA
requirements and Congress should revisit the certification issue while debating
reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. Not only have the federal and
state governments usurped local discretion in the hiring process, they are
keeping some potentially good teachers out of the classroom.
Hose or no hose? That's the working
woman's dilemma around this time of year. The weather grows warmer, and the
debate heats up: Are bare legs proper?
In today's casual workplaces, many
women have peeled off the panty hose, and it is now common to see bare legs
even on conservative Wall Street and at business events. Yet the transition has
highlighted a generational divide. For women who entered the work force before
the 1990s, hose were considered as necessary as underwear. But many
twentysomethings have never worn panty hose at all. http://louisajasheehan.blogspot.com
The fashion shift has left some baby
boomer managers feeling that their hose make them look frumpy. Kathy Garland,
the 54-year-old chairwoman of the Northern Dallas area for the National
Association of Women Business Owners, says she finally threw out a bag full of
hose last week. An executive coach herself, she noticed a few years ago that
she was the only woman wearing hose at a formal business fund-raiser. "Younger
women don't even think about panty hose," she says.
There are certainly weightier issues
to ponder these days, what with a presidential election and a war going on. But
to managers in offices encompassing several generations, panty-hose policies
are an opportunity to set fair rules.
Attached to this memo is an update of
our dress code that I have approved and is effective immediately, subject to
final approval of our Board (as are all official policies).
This change makes the wearing of hose
by females optional with both business and business casual. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
Our standards are based on what is
generally and widely accepted as the professional dress standard consistent
with conservative professional appearance. The reason for this change is a
result of legitimate questions by prospective staff members about this
standard. Kristen contacted nearly two-dozen local financial institutions about
their standard in this area. She also contacted the Wichita Eagle, and I
consulted with the professional business-wear reporter for the Wall Street
Journal. The vast majority responded that hose was an option with dresses,
skirts and slacks in the professional world. Since this is the marketplace
standard, we are adopting it.
Please be aware that these are minimum
standards. What we truly want is for our members to see us in the most
professional light that is reasonable. We encourage you to look your best with
these minimum standards as your guide.
Personally, I believe hose enhance a
woman's professional appearance and would be the preferred choice for upwardly
mobile women both here and in other professional organizations. Please feel
free to make the choice you believe presents you in the most professional way
to our members-our ultimate judge.
This is the issue that lately has
occupied the mind of Jim Holt, president of Mid American Credit Union, a small
financial institution in Wichita, Kan. Mr. Holt is 58 and a three-decade member
of the U.S. Army Reserves. He joined Mid American, which has 50 employees, four
years ago, inheriting a dress code that prohibited, for women, such things as
boots and mules, or backless shoes. The company required "hose" at
all times -- even under pants.
When Mr. Holt attended a
dress-for-success seminar that year, he got advice that caused him to loosen
the reins on women's boots and mules. But not bare legs. The rule, "nylon
hose and dress shoes are to be worn at all times," applied even to
business-casual contexts. "We're not New York or San Francisco," Mr.
Holt says, wearing ironed khaki slacks, an ironed golf shirt, and crisply
creased socks. "We're the Midwest." http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
If there is a male equivalent of panty
hose -- forcing wearers to balance comfort and formality -- it is probably the
tie. Ties aren't required at Mid American. "The revolution has already
taken place in the tie area," says Mr. Holt. He wears ties only on Mondays
for his weekly Rotary Club luncheons.
As for fairness, it's hard to say
whether ties or panty hose are more uncomfortable. One male reader of this
newspaper, after making a bet with a female co-worker, attempted to discover
the answer by secretly wearing panty hose under his business suit for several
weeks. He claims ties are worse.
About a year and a half ago, Mr. Holt
hired Kristen Spear as executive director of administration and human
resources. Ms. Spear is 28. Like Ms. Garland in Texas, Ms. Spear found that
wearing hose to professional events sometimes made her stand out awkwardly. Yet
it was her job to counsel wayward employees on Mid American's dress code, which
she did dutifully if not enthusiastically.
One bare-legged 23-year-old clerk in
indirect loans -- where she dealt with customers by phone -- confessed she had
never owned a pair of hose. Hose are "so foreign right now to Gen Y or Gen
X," Ms. Spear says.
Ms. Spear encouraged Mr. Holt to
reconsider his stand on hose. "According to her local research, hose are
optional," Mr. Holt said in a recent email to me.
He relented just last week. "I
didn't want to be so old-fashioned that people would be like, 'Do you require
corsets, too?'" he said.
Mid American's newly loosened dress
code, allowing bare legs, will be announced to employees in coming weeks in a
series of meetings. Women at the credit union would be well-advised to listen
closely. Mr. Holt says that when evaluating employees' performance in dress, as
well as workmanship, he'll make a distinction between "who is meeting the
minimum standards and who is exceeding them." In other words, hose will be
optional but advised. http://Louis-J-sheehan.info
I suspect it is only a matter of time
until Ms. Spear's point of view wins out entirely.
For the time being, Ms. Spear says
she'll wear hose to board meetings "or if there is reason to exude the
highest professional appearance. I will not wear them if I will be in the
office all day, because I believe one can be professional-looking without
wearing hose."
How to Date a Playboy Bunny
Step1
Be attractive. While you do not have
to be the best looking person in the world, you do have be attractive or at
least have an attractive personality trait. No Bunny wants to date a loser. You
may need to have plastic surgery done to improve your appearance.
Step2
Find a retired Playboy Bunny. You need
to find someone who worked as Bunny. You can hire a private detective, or you
can attend one of the advertised events that the Bunnies hold. These events are
generally charity fund-raisers. You could also plan to attend a Playboy Club
reunion. The reunion is for former Playboy Club employees, but you can
generally find the location for the event.
Step3
Visit the Playboy Mansion. While most
of the women at the mansion are Playmates and might make you forget your quest
to date a Bunny, a few Bunnies have been known to visit. You can also meet
people who know Bunnies and can put you in contact with them.
Step4
Be open sexually. The premise of Hugh
Hefner's "Playboy" is open sexuality. If you are not comfortable with
your sexuality, you are in the wrong arena for dating. Some Bunnies prefer
women, others look both ways and some just want to have an open relationship.
Step5
Watch for international Bunnies. Hugh
Hefner currently has plans to revive the Bunnies at a new Playboy Mansion
planned to open in China.
Dr. Jacob Robbins, whose studies of
the thyroid gland at the National Institutes of Health helped explain how it
helps govern metabolism and how thyroid cancers caused by radiation may be
treated or possibly prevented, died on May 12 in Bethesda, Md. He was 85.
The cause was heart failure, his
family said.
With another endocrinologist at the
health institutes, Joseph E. Rall, Dr. Robbins embarked on a study of
thyroxine, an important hormone produced by the thyroid that helps regulate
metabolism. In the 1950s, the two researchers theorized that levels of
thyroxine might vary in the bloodstream, but that the level of thyroxine
actually in use would often be markedly lower. They found that thyroxine had to
be “free,” or not bound to globulin and other plasma proteins, to be effective,
whatever the overall thyroxine level in the bloodstream.
The findings of Dr. Robbins and Dr.
Rall yielded insights about what are “normal and pathologic states in the
thyroid, and how to distinguish between them,” said Dr. Phillip Gorden, an
endocrinologist who directed the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive
and Kidney Diseases at the N.I.H. from 1986 to 1999. The observations have also
aided physicians and pharmaceutical companies in developing targeted dosages of
thyroxine, which in some pregnant women helps prevent or treat hypothyroidism,
a hormone deficiency that can cause lasting developmental problems in infants.
In further fruitful collaborations
with Dr. Rall and others, Dr. Robbins studied incidences of thyroid cancer in
patients exposed to radioactive fallout from nuclear testing. Earlier, in the
1950s, he had examined the therapeutic properties of radioactive iodine when
used to pinpoint and treat cancer in the thyroid. In the decades that followed,
Dr. Robbins became an authority on the harmful effects of radioactive iodine
released spontaneously into the atmosphere.
At the health institutes, Dr. Robbins
helped direct long-term studies of the survivors of nuclear tests and
accidents, and he followed the health effects of iodine fallout after the
Chernobyl reactor meltdown in Ukraine in 1986 and after American weapons
testing in the Marshall Islands from the 1940s to the 1980s. He joined a vocal
group of scientists who called for wider availability of a drug that can help
prevent thyroid cancers from showing up after intense exposures to radiation.
That drug, potassium iodide, is taken orally and floods the thyroid with iodine
to block the absorption of radioactive iodine.
Dr. Robbins argued that people living
near commercial nuclear reactors, particularly children, should have immediate
access to potassium iodide. He urged the federal government to stockpile the
drug and widen its potential distribution. http://louisdjdsheehan.blogspot.com
In 2001, he told The New York Times,
“To me, the smart thing to do would be to have it in homes, in blister packs
with adhesive backs.”
Jacob Robbins was born in Yonkers. He
studied chemistry at Cornell before earning a medical degree there in 1947.
Dr. Robbins joined the health
institutes as an investigator in 1954. He was chief of the clinical endocrinology
branch at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases
from 1963 to 1991. The health institutes named him a scientist emeritus in
1995.
Dr. Robbins was a president of the
American Thyroid Association. From 1968 to 1972, he was editor in chief of the
journal Endocrinology.
Dr. Robbins is survived by his wife,
the former Jean Adams. The couple lived in Bethesda. He is also survived by a
son, Mark, of Seattle; two daughters, Alice of Amherst, Mass., and Susan of
Shelburne Falls, Mass.; a brother, Lionel, of Bloomfield Hills, Mich.; a
sister, Evelyn Savitzky of Pittsboro, N.C.; and four grandchildren.
how the business works and how the
operators of the state’s estimated 500 dispensaries deal with the high risks
and high costs of working in a legal gray area (cnbc.com).
Medical marijuana is legal in
California, but federal law still bans sales. Amid the uncertainty that this
creates — including the occasional raid by federal agents — a full-fledged
industry has blossomed, taking in about $2 billion a year and generating $100
million in state sales taxes, CNBC reported.
Setting up a clinic “can cost as much
as a hundred grand,” Ms. Wells reports. The equipment, the cuttings from which
plants are grown and office space all tend to be expensive. And from there, the
costs only grow, mostly in the form of legal fees. Many clinics keep lawyers on
retainer.
Nonetheless, “this is the business
model of the future,” says JoAnna La Force of Farmacy, an herbal remedy shop in
Southern California. Ms. LaForce says her business is close to breaking even
(medicalmarijuanafarmacy.com).
A slew of ancillary businesses has
grown up around medical marijuana. Bill Britt, identified on the Web site as a
patient, has found a new career as an expert witness in cases brought against
dispensaries and patients, earning $250 to $350 a case.
He gained his expert knowledge by
attending Oaksterdam University, a trade school in Oakland, Calif. At
Oaksterdam (oaksterdamuniversity.com), students learn everything from “The
Politics of Cannabis” to botany to business operations.
Getting into the quasi-legitimate
marijuana business is a challenge, says Jeff Jones, chancellor of Oaksterdam’s
Los Angeles campus. But, he adds, “The investment is well worth it, except for
the federal risk.”
As air travel grows increasingly
nightmarish even as it gets more expensive, Patrick Smith, writer of Salon’s
Ask the Pilot column, has been singing the praises of Southwest Airlines, the
(relatively) cut-rate, bare-bones carrier.
Southwest recently took first place in
a survey of airline satisfaction conducted by the University of Michigan.
Mr. Smith’s initial explanation was
this: “People don’t expect much. Southwest Airlines is nothing if not
unpretentious” and has “mastered the art of get-what-you-pay-for satisfaction.”
His readers, though, thought
otherwise. Many wrote to say that, though Southwest dispenses with a lot of
perks, it offers a basic level of customer service that bigger airlines often
do not.
Mr. Smith acknowledged that
Southwest’s comparatively small size gave it an advantage in maintaining a
consistent level of service. Nevertheless, it is “the last of a nearly vanished
breed: an airline with a true personality, that large numbers of fliers have
unwavering fondness for.”
As a test of airport security, a
customs officer planted marijuana in the side pocket of a random suitcase at
Narita International Airport in Tokyo, the BBC reports (news.bbc.co.uk).
The test failed when the sniffer dogs
were unable to detect the pot. But the officer could not remember which bag he
had used.
Using an actual passenger’s suitcase
is against regulations, and the airport’s customs service has apologized.
Meanwhile, the marijuana is still out
there. “Anyone finding the package has been asked to contact customs
officials,” according to the BBC. So far, nobody has spoken up. http://louiskjksheehan.blogspot.com
For years, scientists have had a
straightforward idea for taming global warming. They want to take the carbon
dioxide that spews from coal-burning power plants and pump it back into the
ground.
President Bush is for it, and indeed
has spent years talking up the virtues of “clean coal.” All three candidates to
succeed him favor the approach. So do many other members of Congress. Coal
companies are for it. Many environmentalists favor it. Utility executives are
practically begging for the technology.
But it has become clear in recent
months that the nation’s effort to develop the technique is lagging badly.
In January, the government canceled
its support for what was supposed to be a showcase project, a plant at a
carefully chosen site in Illinois where there was coal, access to the power
grid, and soil underfoot that backers said could hold the carbon dioxide for
eons.
Perhaps worse, in the last few months,
utility projects in Florida, West Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota and Washington
State that would have made it easier to capture carbon dioxide have all been
canceled or thrown into regulatory limbo.
Coal is abundant and cheap, assuring
that it will continue to be used. But the failure to start building, testing,
tweaking and perfecting carbon capture and storage means that developing the
technology may come too late to make coal compatible with limiting global
warming.
“It’s a total mess,” said Daniel M.
Kammen, director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at the
University of California, Berkeley.
“Coal’s had a tough year,” said John
Lavelle, head of a business at General Electric that makes equipment for
processing coal into a form from which carbon can be captured. Many of these
projects were derailed by the short-term pressure of rising construction costs.
But scientists say the result, unless the situation can be turned around, will
be a long-term disaster.
Plans to combat global warming
generally assume that continued use of coal for power plants is unavoidable for
at least several decades. Therefore, starting as early as 2020, forecasters
assume that carbon dioxide emitted by new power plants will have to be captured
and stored underground, to cut down on the amount of global-warming gases in
the atmosphere.
Yet, simple as the idea may sound,
considerable research is still needed to be certain the technique would be
safe, effective and affordable.
Scientists need to figure out which
kinds of rock and soil formations are best at holding carbon dioxide. They need
to be sure the gas will not bubble back to the surface. They need to find
optimal designs for new power plants so as to cut costs. And some complex legal
questions need to be resolved, such as who would be liable if such a project
polluted the groundwater or caused other damage far from the power plant.
Major corporations sense the
possibility of a profitable new business, and G.E. signed a partnership on
Wednesday with Schlumberger, the oil field services company, to advance the
technology of carbon capture and sequestration.
But only a handful of small projects
survive, and the recent cancellations mean that most of this work has come to a
halt, raising doubts that the technique can be ready any time in the next few
decades. And without it, “we’re not going to have much of a chance for
stabilizing the climate,” said John Thompson, who oversees work on the issue
for the Clean Air Task Force, an environmental group.
The fear is that utilities, lacking
proven chemical techniques for capturing carbon dioxide and proven methods for
storing it underground by the billions of tons per year, will build the next
generation of coal plants using existing technology. That would ensure that
vast amounts of global warming gases would be pumped into the atmosphere for
decades.
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