World's Largest Yacht is Paparazzi Proof

Roman Abramovich's latest extravagance, Eclipse, probably so-called because it's almost big enough to block out the sun, is the world's largest mega-yacht. Measuring 557ft long, it boasts two swimming pools, two helipads and an onboard missile defence system. And, just in case any missiles do get through, it comes complete with an escape pod: its own submarine. Its most curious feature, however, defends it against an altogether more insidious weapon: the prying eyes of the paparazzi.

The boat's anti-paparazzi system, described in several reports as a "laser shield", is a little less science fiction than it sounds. The lasers – beams of infrared light – are used to detect the electronic light sensors that digital cameras use instead of film. The camera is then targeted with a focused beam of bright light that disrupts the potential photo, making any shots unusable. It's not so much a space-age Star Wars laser shield, then, as a big budget version of shining a torch in someone's face.

A similar technology is already available to all in the form of an anti-paparazzi purse, devised by New York University student Adam Harvey, which detects the flash of a camera and responds with a bright flash of its own, cloaking the intended target in a blob of white light. Nigel Atherton, editor of What Digital Camera, explains, "You couldn't stop them taking a picture but you could ruin the picture." Eclipse's anti-paparazzi defence grid, he suspects, "is essentially a large-scale version of that."

What makes Eclipse's system special is that it can detect any digital camera, whether it's using a flash or not, and before the first shot. But Abramovich's shield still has a serious weakness: it can't possibly detect the presence of an old-fashioned analogue or mechanical camera.

So for £724m, he's got himself a boat that digital-camera-wielding paparazzi can't photograph, say, falling over outside a nightclub at 3am. It's a shame really. That's exactly the sort of memory you'd want to capture.

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Source:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/sep/22/roman-abramovich-yacht-paparazzi

Tags:

Roman Abramovich, Eclipse Yacht, Anti-Papparazzi system, lasers, New York University, Laser shield, escape pod, missile defense systems, Global Blog Network, Billionaire, paparazzi protection, flash photography,

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Australia, US to Invite China to War Games

Australia and the United States will invite China to take part in joint military exercises to help ease fears about an arms race in the Asia-Pacific region.

Ties between Australia and China have been strained over concerns about Beijing's military expansion and the precarious nature of trade negotiations. As a way of soothing tensions, Australian and U.S. defense officials have agreed to approach the Chinese about taking part in joint military exercises.

Admiral Timothy Keating, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, told a Sydney newspaper that talks with Beijing were a positive sign that China was willing to cooperate in the plan. Keating also expressed hope that any joint exercise would help the U.S. and its allies better understand China's reasons for boosting its weapons capabilities.

The U.S. is reportedly worried that some of China's military ambitions do not appear to be peaceful. Andrew Davies from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute thinks that closer military sides will benefit all three countries. "It gives each side confidence in the ability of the other to act professionally and it also teaches each side how the other tends to operate, which can reduce the opportunity for accidents and misunderstandings," he said.

China's ambassador to Australia, Zhang Junsai, has welcomed the prospect of joint army and navy exercises as a way of ensuring regional stability and peace. Tensions between Australia and China have intensified recently over Canberra's decision to grant a visa to an exiled ethnic Uighur activist and the arrest in Beijing of an Australian mining executive accused of infringing trade secrets and bribery.

Zhang Junsai hopes the problems can be ironed out. "Current difficulties in bilateral relations is something that China does not want to see. So, we hope Australia will join China to respect and accommodate each other's interests and our concerns," said Zhang. Few details have been released about possible joint military exercises between China, the United States and Australia.

Reports have suggested they could include naval and land activities as well personnel exchanges. A U.S. military spokesman at Admiral Keating's headquarters in Hawaii said that no formal invitations to join an exercise had yet been extended to China.

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Source:

http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-09-03-voa14.cfm

Tags:

Australia, United States, China, joint military exercises, arms race, Asia-Pacific region, Beijing's military expansion, trade negotiations, soothing tensions, U.S. defense officials, Admiral Timothy Keating, U.S. forces in the Pacific,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Where's The Weed? Mapping L.A.'s Marijuana Dispensaries

It's green. It's herbal. It's organic. It's compassionate. It's healing. And it's nonprofit too.

This plethora of adjectives is not describing a gimmick to cash in on alternative energy or a new diet plan. No, it's L.A.'s latest retail craze: medical marijuana.

Those words, pulled from the Los Angeles city clerk's website, were the most common descriptors in the names of the 966 dispensaries registered in the city. A Times analysis of pot store names, however, showed that the most frequently occurring word was the socialist-tinged "collective," appearing in 199 of the names.

Whether that choice of words is merely merchandising double-speak or genuine cultural expression -- a point on which reasonable minds might differ -- may ultimately be of little consequence. But by plotting the addresses of the pot dispensaries, The Times has made another finding: At least 260 of them fall within 1,000 feet of a school, a library or a park. The distance is significant because it's the buffer in a proposed law the Los Angeles City Council has been kicking around for a couple of years.

The ordinance is still pending, with no vote yet scheduled, while council members figure out how to shield their constituents from too much underground pot culture without trampling the dispensaries' legal right to exist. The marijuana conundrum goes back to the Compassionate Use Act of 1996, passed by California voters. It legalized the use of marijuana for pain or illness. Then in 2003, state Senate Bill 420 (yes, the same number as the underground name for pot) authorized the attorney general to set possession limits and shielded physicians from prosecution.

Alarmed by the rate at which dispensaries were opening, the Los Angeles City Council in 2007 froze the number at the 186 already licensed. No new ones were supposed to open unless applicants received a hardship exemption. But the moratorium had the opposite effect as would-be pot impresarios rushed to reserve their licenses by filing applications. The city attorney opined that enforcement officials could not shut them down while their applications are pending.

By the time the city cut off the exemption loophole in June, 779 applications had been filed. That's not to say that every one of them is actually selling pot. Many of the registered businesses exist only on paper, apparently filed by entrepreneurs who hoped to get a foothold. Among them are the 58 registered at a single address in Northridge.

The City Council has recently begun crawling through the 779 hardship applications, deciding on a case-by-case basis which will be allowed. It has reviewed about 85 applications, and all of them were rejected or withdrawn.

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Source:

http://www.latimes.com/news/la-me-weed11-2009sep11,0,3123586.story?track=rss

Tags:

Medical Marijuana, Los Angeles City Council, Compassionate Use Act of 1996, legalized marijuana, marijuana for pain or illness, California Senate Bill 420, Global Best Practice,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Delivering Data At Light Speed

You may not have heard of nanophotonics, but it may be the technology that puts Intel and Broadcom chips to shame.

Greg Young serves as president and CEO of Luxtera [full disclosure: My venture firm, Lux Capital, is an equity investor]. Prior to Luxtera, he was vice president and general manager of the High Speed Ethernet Controller and High Definition Media PC Video business units at Broadcom. While there, Greg led the growth of the Ethernet Controller business unit from concept to hundreds of millions in revenue and the No. 1 market share position. Prior to joining Broadcom, Greg was with Intel, where he held several engineering marketing and leadership positions.

Josh Wolfe: What career path led you to Luxtera?

Greg Young: After trying some startups out of school I joined Intel ( INTC - news -people ) in the mid-90s, beginning as an engineer and then transitioning over to marketing and running product lines. I worked at Intel until 1999, when I joined Broadcom ( BRCM - news - people ). I spent eight years at Broadcom helping to pioneer the company's participation in the Ethernet market for the network interface controller business. Ultimately, I helped grow that business to about $350 million dollars a year in semiconductor revenue. Most of my career has been spent building businesses off of advanced transceiver technology (devices that both transmit and receive information), so when I recognized the opportunity within Luxtera, it was easy for me to see how the technology could be built into a large-scale enterprise.

What excited you about the company?

First, some market backdrop here: It's getting harder and harder to send fast signals over copper wires. The world of optics has been sitting out there for a long time as the performance leader, but it has been a very expensive way to get the performance that you need for the same kind of input/output speeds. When I recognized that Luxtera had the ability to create a complete optical transceiver in CMOS technology to take performance to 10 gigabits and well beyond 10 gigabits at a cost point that was previously unachievable, I saw the same kind of opportunity I was given at both Intel and Broadcom.

Put it in perspective--how fast is 10 gigabits?

If you use a cable modem at home, that's about a 1 megabit connection--a million bits per second. We're talking about ultimately transitioning people to the point where they can readily transmit 10 billion bits a second. That's the equivalent of downloading more than 300 songs every second.

Why do photons trump electrons when it comes to broadcasting bits?

When you send an electronic signal over copper wires, there is a relationship between speed, distance, and signal integrity. As you get faster and faster over the same distance of wire, your signal integrity gets worse, and you see distortion in the signal that starts to dominate the signal quality at higher speeds. Because of that relationship, there is a natural limit for how fast and far you can push a signal over a copper wire.

At 10 gigabit speeds, electrical interconnects over copper wires really start to break down--it's hard to transmit the signal even 10 meters. Alternatively, you can send a burst of photonic energy down a low-cost fiber optic waveguide, and you can easily send a 10 gigabit signal over 10 kilometers. You can do it with less power, less complexity, and with Luxtera's technology--lower cost.

Why is transceiver technology important in this industry?

While at Intel and Broadcom, I saw two things: first, mixed signal circuitry (combined analog and digital circuitry) would enhance the communications signals between systems, and second, I realized that the rate at which you come out with new transceiver technology is really what controlled the cadence of the innovation in the industry. I first saw this at Intel.

The company was able to utilize its own technology to build transceivers for 100 megabit Ethernet. At the time, 3Com ( COMS - news - people) was the dominant player, but by leveraging the cost and performance benefits of having an integrated transceiver technology in CMOS, we were able to transition the market from 10 megabit to 100 megabit Ethernet and move Intel's position from a minority player to the market leader within the network interface controller business. That was a really interesting learning experience for me.

When I joined Broadcom in 1999, the company was the leader in mixed signal in CMOS and was just entering the Ethernet space, building up their business as an Ethernet transceiver vendor. What I was handed when I came into the company was a complete, single-chip gigabit Ethernet transceiver. At the time, no other company in the world knew how to build a single-chip transceiver for 1 gigabit data rates, and by having that technology I was able to facilitate a very similar transition to what I had been involved with at Intel--driving the market from 100 megabit Ethernet to 1 gigabit Ethernet.

Today, you can barely buy a computer that doesn't have a gigabit Ethernet network controller in it, and it was that transceiver advantage that Broadcom had that allowed them to subsequently grab the No. 1 market position from Intel.

CMOS, photonics, optical transceivers--sounds complex! In the simplest of terms, what is it that Luxtera's technology does?

Our technology takes a high-speed signal and gets it from point A to point B. A transceiver sends out a signal at point A and receives the same signal at point B. We send that signal over a fiber optic cable, giving us performance and signal quality advantages. Our system is less expensive than other optical approaches because of nanophotonics--we've shrunk the optical elements down to the same scale as the transistors that sit inside your PC's CPU.

By being down at that scale, we've enabled the manufacturing of our systems with the same processes that makes computer chips, meaning we can precisely stamp them out in large quantities, without needing complex assembly. We've been able to move the world of photonic interconnects from an era equivalent to that of the vacuum tubes, to one of the modern integrated circuit.

Who's competing with Luxtera in this market?

If you look at the area of silicon CMOS photonics, Intel, IBM ( IBM -news - people ), Hewlett-Packard ( HPQ - news - people ) and many other big names within the industry are all doing research. But Luxtera is the leader in development in this space. The original foundation for the company came out of advanced research at Caltech, which stimulated the very early years of development.

We have pioneered a brand new space, moving nanophotonic structures into a CMOS-compatible silicon process. By doing that, we've figured out how to increase performance while reducing cost. We've blazed a new trail, and in doing so we've established the methods and techniques needed to bring this technology into production. Based upon research papers written by other companies exploring this area, we estimate that we're at least five years ahead of the nearest competitor.

What do you see as the current market opportunity for this technology?

There is a huge short-term opportunity for Luxtera within the high-performance computing segment. High-performance computing refers to supercomputers and computer clusters like data centers that are trying to achieve maximum performance to solve complex computations or process large amounts of data. They are all on the cutting-edge of technology, and typically that technology very quickly waterfalls down into the mainstream PC market.

High-performance computing centers are typically the starting point for many innovations in the industry. In each of these centers, there are many, many processors that are trying to communicate with one another at mind-boggling speed, and it's becoming nearly impossible to make that communication work with copper wires.

While there has always been a broad opportunity for photonics, the photonic approaches thus far have always been too expensive to implement. Our technology allows us to take the performance of optics and reduce the cost so that we're able to interconnect these high-performance computing centers economically.

When will we see this type of technology in our home computers?

Over time, optics will transition into every market as speeds get faster and faster. The move from copper to fiber optics is a very natural transition forecasted by just about every industry pundit. You can find this technology today within the high-performance computing space, where we have products that send signals over fiber optics used to connect high-performance computing data centers.

Some of the world's fastest computer systems use photonic interconnects, and over time you're going see that transition down into consumer electronics: Home PCs, DVD players and TVs will all ultimately pick up optics for communications between subcomponents. What's notable is that optics has already moved into the home. The transition from magnetic media--like VHS and cassette tapes--to digital optical data storage on CDs and DVDs is a great precedent where storage requirements exceeded the limits of magnetic, copper-type systems and transitioned over to optics. Communication interconnects are moving down that same path.

Is Luxtera still focused on research or is the company shipping products today?

We are in production with products today. While we continue to do research to move the edge of technology forward (with 23 PhDs on staff), we are a product company with development engineering and manufacturing operations. In fact, we recently announced that through a partnership with Freescale Semiconductor ( FSL - news - people), we've reached full-scale production status for CMOS photonics technology.

What does this collaboration with Freescale mean for the company?

It means we can now design and produce chips that use our structures on a very large scale. Freescale already has a process that they use to build transistors at very large scale, and they produce lots of chips for things like network processors and automotive sensors. We've been able to integrate our novel nanophotonic device structures into Freescale's process, so now their factories can produce CMOS photonic transceivers.

As anyone in the semiconductor industry knows, it takes about five years to develop a new CMOS process, and once you have that process in production, you build products in it for a number of years. By taking our process to maturity through our relationship with Freescale, we can now design a whole host of products and bring them very quickly from design into volume manufacturing.

How do you think big players like Intel and Broadcom perceive your company in the market today?

I think that Intel in particular, and others that work in silicon photonics, see silicon CMOS photonics as being part of their future roadmap. Having a company like Luxtera out there that's in production with CMOS photonics, on the cutting edge of technology, I think one, it comforts them that the roadmap in front of them is truly viable, and two, if I were in their shoes, I would be a little threatened by it. Our technology can be applied to anyone in the industry. Any company that wants to be able to adopt

CMOS photonics to gain performance benefits in a very large market can leverage our technology platform and get to market very quickly. On the other hand, I think a lot of companies view us as an opportunity to get their hands on a technology that could move them ahead on their own roadmap faster.

The ease by which we transport massive waves of data may leave many unaware of the physical systems that enable our virtual world. How do you give people a sense of appreciation for the importance of this technology?

Here's an analogy that may give people some sense of scale: Many people have gone through the transition from a 56k modem to a cable modem or DSL service. What photonics represents to high-performance computing is akin to the transition from dial-up to broadband.

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Source:

http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/24/intel-broadcom-luxtera-personal-finance-guru-insight-nanophotonic-gigabit.html

Tags:

Josh Wolfe, Forbes, CMOS, photonics, Luxtera, Freescale, Greg Young, Lux Capital, Broadcom, electrons, optical transceivers, Freescale Semiconductor, nanophotonic structures, CMOS-compatible silicon process,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Who's To Blame For The Mortgage Crisis?

If you're having a hard time getting your head around exactly what happened in the historic meltdown of America's home-mortgage market, you're not alone.

As the wife-and-husband investigative team Leslie and Andrew Cockburn suggest in their new documentary, "American Casino," nobody fully understands it: Not the bankers and brokers who sold subprime mortgages (often using deceptive tactics or disingenuous language), not the Wall Street wizards who carved them up into ever more esoteric financial instruments, not the free-market wise men like former Fed chair Alan Greenspan or former Sen. Phil Gramm, and certainly not the ordinary citizens who believed they were fulfilling the American dream and wound up losing their homes, their financial security and their self-respect.

Actually, the Cockburns meet one guy in "American Casino" who understands the whole mess better than most, a California real estate investor named Jeff Greene who smelled the end of the housing bubble around 2006 and bet $1 billion against the mid-decade exuberance of Wall Street. Sitting in his walled and gated beach compound in Malibu, Greene calmly tells the camera that the opportunity for his successful hedge bet (which has yielded $500 million so far) involved massive pain for millions of homeowners.

We meet some of those people too; the Cockburns focus in particular on the African-American community of Baltimore, a city devastated by the tidal wave of foreclosures. Of course foreclosed properties can be found in virtually every neighborhood of every town and city, and at every income level. But Latinos and African-Americans are several times more likely to be affected than whites, and while the problem is undeniably complicated, that almost certainly reflects the enduring legacy of racism. In the 1990s and 2000s, neighborhoods that had previously been "redlined" by traditional lenders became targeted by unregulated and unscrupulous vendors of subprime mortgages, who neither knew nor cared whether borrowers were likely to default on those loans. As we now know, the results were toxic.

One of the film's sad ironies is that middle-class homeowners like Denzel Mitchell, a Baltimore high-school teacher, or Patricia McNair, a family therapist, might well have qualified for conventional loans from normal banks. (One survey mentioned in the film suggests that at least half the people who applied for subprime mortgages in 2006 could have qualified for prime mortgages.) Instead, they were enticed into too-good-to-be-true first and then second mortgages that adjusted sharply upward, which they couldn't realistically afford. Both people are aware that their own lack of financial sophistication is partly to blame for their predicament, but that does nothing to lessen the heartbreak as McNair and her husband have to leave the appealing family home where her adult children grew up, or as Mitchell must abandon his organic vegetable garden and the Tuskegee Airmen-themed bedroom for his little boys.

But if you want to blame somebody for what happened to Mitchell, McNair and millions of other Americans, the place to point the finger is at the fervid deregulation advocated by Greenspan and enacted by Congress under the whip of Gramm and other free-market ideologues. Such laissez-faire reforms created a wide-open marketplace where bankers and brokers could sell whatever extortionate mortgage deals they wanted to whomever they wanted, while lying to consumers about what they were getting and lying to lenders about the borrower's income and assets. Meanwhile, as one anonymous former Bear, Stearns banker tells the Cockburns, Wall Street securities dealers carved up packages of mortgages into abstruse, "fourth-dimensional" instruments to be sold to "idiots."

"American Casino" is of necessity a fragmentary tale; it was being filmed in 2008 as the crisis broadened and deepened, with events unfolding too fast for the Cockburn cameras. But while the mortgage crisis still awaits a rigorous deconstruction along the lines of Alex Gibney's "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," this film stands as an intimate, terrifying document that renders an incomprehensible slice of recent history in human terms. While the stories of Denzel Mitchell and Patricia McNair made me want to weep, the film's most memorable images stem from the Sisyphean task of Jared Dever, a bright and handsome local official in Riverside County, Calif., whose job is to control the county's mosquito epidemic, largely caused by the fetid, abandoned swimming pools behind foreclosed suburban homes.

Dever patrols a nightmarish, new-but-decrepit landscape straight out of the fiction of J.G. Ballard, carefully checking empty houses for signs of meth labs or marijuana grow zones before attacking the pools, whose algae-green water is full of abandoned patio furniture, tires and sports equipment, along with millions of mosquito larvae and the minnows who live on them. I'm not sure that hosing down the whole subdivision with Malathion is any kind of answer. Civilization didn't leave much of an imprint on that place. Now that the bankers have sucked out all its supposed economic value, we might as well drain the pools, knock down the houses and let the coyotes and rattlesnakes take over.

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Source:

http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/btm/feature/2009/09/02/casino/index.html?source=rss&aim=/ent/movies/btm/feature

Tags:

Salon, American Casino, Leslie and Andrew Cockburn, documentary, bankers, brokers, subprime mortgages, Jeff Greene, redlined, Phil Gramm, Alan Greenspan, Global Economic News,

Posted via email from Global Business News

Workers Adjust To The New F-word: Furloughs

"Furlough Fridays" for John Krumm may as well be called "Food Bank Fridays."

Along with 210,000 fellow state government workers, the driver and safety clerk for the Department of Motor Vehicles is helping California balance its battered budget by taking an unpaid day off from work three Fridays each month. But he's not going to Project Open Hand's kitchen to volunteer. "I go to save money and get food for my table," says Krumm, describing a still-life tableau of his furlough handout:

"Couple pieces of chicken. Some fruits and vegetables. Beans, milk and cheese. I'm losing $450 each month from my paycheck, so I'm watching every penny," he says. "And if they make us take off any more days, I won't be able to afford my rent."

As private and public employers seek to whittle overhead while skirting the heavier costs of laying off and rehiring staff, millions of workers are being poked and prodded with America's hottest management tool.

"Furloughs make sense because if you have a good employee, you want to do whatever you can to keep them," says labor lawyer Michael S. Bernick, former head of California's Employment Development Department under Gov. Gray Davis. "But while they may help reduce layoffs, they have their other side — for most workers, taking a 10 to 20 percent pay cut is a big hit."

Furloughs can also create huge workload backups as well as raise sticky legal questions for employers who try to force exempt workers into unpaid leaves. And critics like San Francisco State University professor John Sullivan say the management tool could actually end up causing more workplace problems than they solve. "If you cut everyone's pay," he says, "you'll drive away your top performers and end up with mediocre people."

Cost-cutting tool

As the new F-word makes the rounds of the water-cooler and cocktail-party circuit, it seems everyone from autoworkers to bridge inspectors to newspaper reporters is being forced to take unpaid leave as companies try to stay afloat and governments slash budgets. Firm numbers are hard to come by, according to economist Stephen Levy, who says that in the private sector, at least, "as long as sales start to pick up slightly, we're probably at the peak of layoffs and furloughs right now."

But in an economy where 6.7 million jobs have disappeared since the recession began in December 2007, and as private wages and salaries continue to fall each month, no one's betting against the prospect of more furloughs. In fact, 6 percent of employers surveyed by the consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide say they will force mandatory furloughs within the next 12 months, while nearly one in 10 of those asked say they expect to implement a shortened workweek over the same time frame.

And while nearly half the state governments have instituted or proposed furloughs, it may have been California's historic embrace that moved them onto the front page. In addition to planned layoffs, California hopes to save $3 billion over 17 months by sending home state employees the first three Fridays of each month. With the Department of Personnel Administration using the tool for the first time to bridge its gaping deficit, spokeswoman Lynelle Jolley says furloughs were the best fix for a dire situation.

"With the state in a precarious position, we needed to conserve cash immediately," she says. "The layoff process can be quite lengthy, but with furloughs we can achieve savings immediately. We were desperate."

State governments seem to be taking a page from industries like heavy manufacturing and airlines, which historically have furloughed employees when business slowed. In Silicon Valley, temporary shutdowns have been a common practice, often a year-end tradition at many high-tech firms.

Mark Perry, a computer programmer with 30 years' experience in the valley, says state workers are now "getting a taste of real life that we've known for years in tech. They've been sort of sheltered. "I was with Intel, Fairchild, 23 different companies, and I was furloughed at about half of them until business turned around," says Perry, laid off in 2003 from Applied Materials. "The first time it's a bit of a shock, because you depend on a certain amount of income. But gradually you learn to treat it like you're on a pretend vacation. You kind of expect it and build it into the salary you think you're making. "Furloughs," Perry says, "train you not to live paycheck to paycheck."

Beats a layoff, but "...

A lot of affected employees are conflicted: Having a job is great — but taking a pay cut to keep that job stinks. First-timers like John Krumm are struggling with furlough shock. "I think it's a shame," says Krumm, who works at a San Francisco branch of the DMV. "You've already cut our pay by 14 percent, and if you add another day, you're up to 18 percent. People working here will now be making less than they made when they started 10 years ago."

For a couple employed by the state, the furloughs can be devastating. Krumm says "a lot of my colleagues at the DMV are filing for bankruptcy. A lot of them have a partner or husband who works for the state," which is a double whammy for the family budget.

While most experts stress the positive impacts of furloughs over layoffs, no one says they're a panacea. They punish lower-paid workers disproportionately; they can torpedo workplace morale; and workers whose pay has been cut make for lousy consumers, saving more and spending less, hampering a quick economic recovery.

Forced to downsize by his boss to a three-day workweek, San Jose real estate professional William Huey says his furlough threw him off kilter, "because I'd had this structured routine and suddenly everything changed. On my days off, I had to think, 'What am I supposed to be doing today?' "

Even though his three days eventually turned into a layoff, Huey does see some benefits to mandatory time off. "In retrospect,'' says Huey, who used his forced leave to help his wife start a private Chinese-language school, "it was as if I'd been allowed to leave my job gradually, because having that time off gives you the chance to explore other ideas you may want to try. The furlough,'' he says, "was like the severance package I never got in the end."

Hard choices

Yet for Rick Binger, furloughs became a powerful if painful management tool to save his San Francisco catalog marketing firm and, he hopes, will ensure that his six staffers all have jobs when the recession recedes. In February, faced with a virtual collapse of his business, Binger had his employees take a month off without pay. When new business didn't materialize, the furlough grew even longer until work picked up and employees started coming back to their jobs in July.

"I told everyone I was really sorry, but I just didn't have any work so there was no income coming in," he says. "My hands were tied. Everyone sacrificed, and I think they knew that as hard as this was, it was better than being laid off."

The use of furloughs, says Binger, "enabled me to survive over those four months." Others, though, say furloughs create more problems than they fix. Sullivan, of San Francisco State University, is not only a passionate critic of the practice, but he's now being forced to take a furlough himself as part of the college system's efforts to cut costs.

"I ask employers, 'Why are you doing furloughs?' and they say, 'Because the other guy is,' " he says. "But they're a fad and they don't really save money. It's the poorly managed companies that use them, not places like Microsoft or Google."

Sullivan says the smarter route would be better planning, a greater push for productivity gains — and the corner-office fortitude to let heads roll. "Managers are chicken to make the tough decision and let you go. But that's what a great manager does."

"When you cut time and not workload," he says, "you've really compounded the problem you had to begin with." Just ask Krumm. DMV offices on Monday mornings after a Friday furlough have been described on online forums as a circuslike crush of humanity, with drivers lined up out the door to reach clerks whose workloads have been stacking up since Thursday. "After a while,'' Krumm says, "they have to stop people from coming in the door because otherwise we'd be in violation of the fire code."

FURLOUGH FACTS

Although the actual number of furloughs is hard to come by, one national survey of employers found some interesting statistics:

» 17 percent of employers surveyed in April said they had initiated mandatory furloughs, up from 11 percent the previous month.

» Nearly one in 10 employers expect to implement a shortened workweek within the next 12 months.

» Another 6 percent will force mandatory furloughs.

» 9 percent say they"ll have voluntary furloughs.

» 7 percent have cut workers" salaries.

Source: Watson Wyatt Worldwide

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Source:

http://www.siliconvalley.com/news/ci_13053940?nclick_check=1

Tags:

California state government workers, Department of Motor Vehicles, unpaid day off, Project Open Hand's, furlough, Michael S. Bernick, California's Employment Development Department, Gov. Gray Davis, San Francisco State University, John Sullivan,

Posted via email from Global Business News

IBM First to X-Ray a Molecule

IBM scientists claim to be the first to image the inner structure of a molecule, opening up new possibilities in building smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient computing components. The achievement, reported in the August 28 issue of Science magazine, is described as a milestone in surface microscopy, which pushes the exploration of using molecules and atoms in the field of nanotechnology.

"Though not an exact comparison, if you think about how a doctor uses an x-ray to image bones and organs inside the human body, we are using the atomic force microscope to image the atomic structures that are the backbones of individual molecules," IBM Researcher Gerhard Meyer said in a statement.

The latest publication comes two months after IBM scientists used the same complex technique known as "non-contact atomic force microscopy" to measure the charge states of atoms within a molecule. That work, combined with the latest achievement, are considered breakthroughs in the investigation of how an electrical charge transmits through molecules or molecular networks.

An understanding of how a charge is distributed at the atomic scale is essential for building smaller, more powerful, and more energy-efficient computing components than today's processors and memory devices, IBM said. In imaging the inner structure of a molecule, IBM scientists in Zurich, Switzerland, operated an atomic force microscope at an ultra-high vacuum at minus 451 degrees Fahrenheit. As a result, the researchers for the first time were able to look through the electron cloud covering the molecule to see its atomic backbone.

Atomic force microscopy, or AFM, uses a sharp metal tip to measure the tiny forces between the tip and within the molecule to create an image. The image created by IBM scientists was of an organic molecule called a Pentacene, consisting of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms measuring 1.4 nanometers in length. The researchers imaged the carbon atoms, which were only 0.14 of a nanometer apart, or about 1 millionth the diameter of a grain of sand. From this image, scientists deduced the positions of the hydrogen atoms.

A particular challenge in the imaging process was getting the tip of the AFM within a half nanometer from the molecule without disturbing it. To achieve this, a carbon monoxide molecule was placed at the tip, which acted as a powerful magnifying glass able to capture a 3D map of the molecule's inner structure. The IBM scientists who worked on the project were Meyer, Leo Gross, Fabian Mohn, and Nikolaj Moll. The researchers worked in collaboration with Peter Liljeroth of Utrecht University. A video of the scientists describing their work is on YouTube.

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Source:

http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/processors/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=219500495&cid=RSSfeed_IWK_News

Tags:

IBM scientists, inner structure of a molecule, energy-efficient computing components, Science magazine, surface microscopy, atoms, nanotechnology, Gerhard Meyer, Leo Gross, Fabian Mohn, Nikolaj Moll, Peter Liljeroth, Utrecht University,

Posted via email from Global Business News