roby님의 프로필House of Roby Widjaja사진블로그리스트기타  |  도구 도움말 |
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3월 31일 10 Fun Facts About Your BrainYour brain uses less power than your refrigerator light The brain uses 12 watts of power, about the same amount of energy as in two large bananas. Curiously, even though the brain is very efficient, it's an energy hog. It is only 3 per cent of the body's weight, but consumes 1/6 (17 per cent) of the body's total energy. Most of its energy costs go into maintenance; the added cost of thinking hard is barely noticeableFrequent jet lag can damage memory Paulson, Not Bernanke, Is Washington's Most Powerful ManPaulson, Not Bernanke, Is Washington's Most Powerful Man It used to be said the Federal Reserve Chairman is the most powerful man in Washington. He could make or break presidents. As Bob Dylan said quite a few years ago, “the times they are a-changin’.” Former Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan had a powerful enough public aura to transcend both Democratic and Republican administrations. While in office, the maestro could do no wrong. No president was willing to endure the potential political backlash of firing him. Former Treasury Secretary Rubin made great progress in enhancing the strength of his position, but the public never considered him Greenspan’s equal. During the O’Neill and Snow periods of the Bush II administration, the Treasury appeared weak and disorganized. With academic Bernanke in charge of the Fed, a power vacuum was left for the new Treasury Secretary to fill. Paulson did just that. Paulson was a bit timid at first when interacting with the media. He had to balance pragmatism with the Bush “free market” doctrine. But, the Bear Stearns (BSC) meltdown gave him the opportunity to break out. I believe he directed the Fed’s actions every step of the way, and later justified shifting from free market to government intervention when necessary. Over the last two weeks Paulson, rather than Bernanke, handled all of the public relations. That’s a clear shift in power. Paulson and Bernanke clearly disagree on the remedy for the mortgage/housing crisis. In "Bernanke’s Harsh Warning," I wrote that Bernanke wants to trade mortgage principal write downs for government guarantees. Then, in “Treasury Sec. Paulson Rejects Systemic Approach to Foreclosures,” I wrote that Paulson called this type of approach “not yet ready for the starting gate.” The New York Times published Paulson’s “Treasury’s Summary of Regulatory Proposal.” The essence of this executive summary is to create a Federal Reserve with limitless power to react in times of crisis. But, the Fed should not interfere too much when markets are stable. Paulson is justifying the Fed’s recent actions retroactively. With a weak Fed Chairman, this power would indirectly be assumed by the Treasury. Paulson would continue to pull all the strings. The beneficial aspect of Paulson’s proposal is the separation of the solvency regulators from the consumer protection regulators. All federally chartered financial institutions would have to be chartered by both. While he does consolidate the solvency regulatiors of all federally chartered insured deposit institutions and creates the new opportunity for federally charted insurance companies, his organizational chart is almost as complicated as Hillary-care One. While Paulson has consolidated his power over both the Treasury and the Federal Reserve, he is heading for a clash with Congress. The President wants consumers to be taught moral hazard and Congress wants Wall Street to take a larger hit in favor of consumers. How well Paulson soothes these conflicting constituencies will determine his staying power. I believe the big surprise is that Paulson is becoming the new Greenspan. A new Democratic administration may be forced to keep Paulson at Treasury to maintain stability in the markets. Disclosure: Author is long BSC. Fed's Plosser: Price Stability Should be Key
3월 29일 Quote of The Day #91"When you see only two alternatives-yours and the "wrong" one-you can look for a synergistic third alternative. There's almost always a third alternative, and if you work with a Win/Win philosophy and really seek to understand, you usually can find a solution that will be better for everyone concerned."
[ Stephen R. Covey, 7 Habits, pg. 284 ] Sachs appealEconomic ideas Sachs appealMar 27th 2008 IF GILBERT AND SULLIVAN were looking for the very model of a modern intellectual, they would surely pick Jeffrey Sachs. He is so “right on” that when Time magazine featured him in its global list of people who influence the world, his profile was written by Bono, a rock singer. His job titles—director of the Earth Institute and special adviser to the United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals—seem almost tailor-made to get up the noses of conservatives. Nor is Mr Sachs lacking in ambition. His previous book was called “The End of Poverty”. Now he has moved on to tackle a wide range of other challenges facing the planet, from climate change through to disease eradication. His goals include stabilisation of the world's population, a move to sustainable energy use and “a new approach to global problem solving”. If the above makes Mr Sachs sound like an impractical dreamer, that would be rather unfair. This densely written book is packed with statistics and carefully worded arguments. Nor is the author a left-wing ideologue. He recognises that the private sector and market-based solutions have a vital role to play. He cites, for example, the success achieved by public-private sector initiatives in tackling acid rain and chlorofluorocarbon emissions. On population control, he makes the good (if counter-intuitive) point that improvements in infant mortality are an important part of the solution. When families know that more of their children will survive into adulthood, they have fewer kids. Reduced fertility in turn leads to improved living standards and, eventually, by cutting the numbers of idle and impoverished young men, reduces the potential for conflict and terrorism. As he remarks, this makes the Bush administration's negative attitude towards family planning even more difficult to understand. Courageously, Mr Sachs does not ignore costs. He reckons the bill for tackling the issues he raises will come to a total of 2.4% of rich-world economic output (about one year's growth). That seems a reasonable price to pay, provided of course that you are not paying it. Indeed, the book's rather jaunty tone plays down some of the hard choices that will need to be made if the world's problems are to be tackled. On climate change, Mr Sachs is very enthusiastic about carbon capture and sequestration, a technology that is unproven on a large scale and will be difficult to adapt to existing power plants. One must also doubt whether all the world's cars could really be converted into gas-electric hybrids by 2026, as he suggests. This brings us to the main problem with the book: it is unremittingly worthy and expects other people to be so too. When the author writes that a post-Kyoto agreement on climate change “should include all actors, not just the rich ones, and not just the rich ones who are willing to reduce emissions”, one wonders how many real people would vote for that. Similarly, he says blithely that “in order to combat poverty and inequality, it is also essential to combat racism and intolerance.” If everyone in the world were as reasonable as Mr Sachs, his solutions would be easy to implement. However, if everyone were that reasonable, there would not be so many problems in the first place. WebsitesClick to buy from Amazon.com: “The End of Poverty”, by Jeffrey Sachs (Amazon.co.uk). As special adviser on the UN's Millennium Development Goals, Mr Sachs gave a presentation to the World Bank. Book detailsCommon Wealth: Economics For a Crowded Planet Some See a Commodities Bubble Forming
Quote of The Day #90Speaking of Nobel prizes, a few weeks ago I heard Charlie Munger give a talk (Warren Buffet’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway) while at Caltech. A story was recounted of Nobel Laureate William Shockley (he who co-invented the transistor). Shockley known for outrageous antics allegedly wanted to start a sperm bank of Nobel Prize winners, offering would-be clients prodigy progeny. As he went from fellow Nobel colleague to colleague, one of them said, “Shockley, you’ve got it all wrong. I’m a Nobel Prize winner and both my sons play guitar. What you want is the poor illiterate immigrant tailors like my parents were!” [ from: FORBES/WOLFE Weekly Insider: MAR.28.2008 by Josh Wolfe ] Kudlow: ‘Let’s Give Bernanke a Little Credit’
3월 28일 Researchers find song recorded before Edison's phonograph Researchers find song recorded before Edison's phonograph
By Jody Rosen
Thursday, March 27, 2008
For more than a century, since he captured the spoken words "Mary had a little lamb" on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison's invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades. The 10-second recording of a singer crooning the folk song "Au Clair de la Lune" was discovered earlier this month in an archive in Paris by a group of American audio historians. It was made, the researchers say, on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California "This is a historic find, the earliest known recording of sound," said Samuel Brylawski, the former head of the recorded-sound division of the Library of Congress, who is not affiliated with the research group but who was familiar with its findings. The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio, and its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison. Scott's device had a barrel-shaped horn attached to a stylus, which etched sound waves onto sheets of paper blackened by smoke from an oil lamp. The recordings were not intended for listening; the idea of audio playback had not been conceived. Rather, Scott sought to create a paper record of human speech that could later be deciphered. But the Lawrence Berkeley scientists used optical imaging and a "virtual stylus" on high-resolution scans of the phonautogram, deploying modern technology to extract sound from patterns inscribed on the soot-blackened paper almost a century and a half ago. The scientists belong to an informal collaborative called First Sounds that also includes audio historians and sound engineers. David Giovannoni, an American audio historian who led the research effort, will present the findings and play the recording in public on Friday at the annual conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California Scott's 1860 phonautogram was made 17 years before Edison received a patent for the phonograph and 28 years before an Edison associate captured a snippet of a Handel oratorio on a wax cylinder, a recording that until now was widely regarded by experts as the oldest that could be played back. Giovannoni's presentation on Friday will showcase additional Scott phonautograms discovered in Paris, including recordings made in 1853 and 1854. Those first experiments included attempts to capture the sounds of a human voice and a guitar, but Scott's machine was at that time imperfectly calibrated. "We got the early phonautograms to squawk, that's about it," Giovannoni said. But the April 1860 phonautogram is more than a squawk. On a digital copy of the recording provided to The New York Times, the anonymous vocalist, probably female, can be heard against a hissing, crackling background din. The voice, muffled but audible, sings, "Au clair de la lune, Pierrot répondit" in a lilting 11-note melody — a ghostly tune, drifting out of the sonic murk. The hunt for this audio holy grail was begun in the fall by Giovannoni and three associates: Patrick Feaster, an expert in the history of the phonograph who teaches at Indiana University, and Richard Martin and Meagan Hennessey, owners of Archeophone Records, a label specializing in early sound recordings. They had collaborated on the Archeophone album "Actionable Offenses," a collection of obscene 19th-century records that received two Grammy nominations. When Giovannoni raised the possibility of compiling an anthology of the world's oldest recorded sounds, Feaster suggested they go digging for Scott's phonautograms. Historians have long been aware of Scott's work. But the American researchers believe they are the first to make a concerted search for Scott's phonautograms or attempt to play them back. In December Giovannoni and a research assistant traveled to a patent office in Paris, the Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle. There he found recordings from 1857 and 1859 that were included by Scott in his phonautograph patent application. Giovannoni said that he worked with the archive staff there to make high-resolution, preservation-grade digital scans of these recordings. A trail of clues, including a cryptic reference in Scott's writings to phonautogram deposits made at "the Academy," led the researchers to another Paris institution, the French Academy of Sciences, where several more of Scott's recordings were stored. Giovannoni said that his eureka moment came when he laid eyes on the April 1860 phonautogram, an immaculately preserved sheet of rag paper 9 inches by 25 inches. "It was pristine," Giovannoni said. "The sound waves were remarkably clear and clean." His scans were sent to the Lawrence Berkeley lab, where they were converted into sound by the scientists Carl Haber and Earl Cornell. They used a technology developed several years ago in collaboration with the Library of Congress, in which high-resolution "maps" of grooved records are played on a computer using a digital stylus. The 1860 phonautogram was separated into 16 tracks, which Giovannoni, Feaster and Martin meticulously stitched back together, making adjustments for variations in the speed of Scott's hand-cranked recording. Listeners are now left to ponder the oddity of hearing a recording made before the idea of audio playback was even imagined. "There is a yawning epistemic gap between us and Léon Scott, because he thought that the way one gets to the truth of sound is by looking at it," said Jonathan Sterne, a professor at McGill University in Montreal and the author of "The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction." Scott is in many ways an unlikely hero of recorded sound. Born in Paris in 1817, he was a man of letters, not a scientist, who worked in the printing trade and as a librarian. He published a book on the history of shorthand, and evidently viewed sound recording as an extension of stenography. In a self-published memoir in 1878, he railed against Edison for "appropriating" his methods and misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott argued, was not sound reproduction, but "writing speech, which is what the word phonograph means." In fact, Edison arrived at his advances on his own. There is no evidence that Edison drew on knowledge of Scott's work to create his phonograph, and he retains the distinction of being the first to reproduce sound. "Edison is not diminished whatsoever by this discovery," Giovannoni said. Paul Israel, director of the Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey, praised the discovery as a "tremendous achievement," but called Edison's phonograph a more significant technological feat. "What made Edison different from Scott was that he was trying to reproduce sound and he succeeded," Israel said. But history is finally catching up with Scott. Sterne, the McGill professor, said: "We are in a period that is more similar to the 1860s than the 1880s. With computers, there is an unprecedented visualization of sound." The acclaim Scott sought may turn out to have been assured by the very sonic reproduction he disdained. And it took a group of American researchers to rescue Scott's work from the musty vaults of his home city. In his memoir, Scott scorned his American rival Edison and made brazen appeals to French nationalism. "What are the rights of the discoverer versus the improver?" he wrote less than a year before his death in 1879. "Come, Parisians, don't let them take our prize."  Copyright © 2008 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com 
3월 27일 Bush calls Chinese leader about Tibet
Bush calls Chinese leader about Tibet Also acknowledeges mistake on missile fuse shipment to Taiwan
The Associated Press
updated 4:07 p.m. ET March 26, 2008
WASHINGTON - President Bush called China's President Hu Jintao on Wednesday and raised concerns about the crackdown in Tibet, joining a growing chorus of international protests about Beijing's tough tactics. Bush also told Hu that a "mistake had been made" in the shipment of nuclear missile fuses to Taiwan, the president's national security adviser said. The White House said that Bush encouraged Hu to engage in "substantive dialogue" with representatives of the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet. The president also called on China to allow access for journalists and diplomats in Tibet. China's crackdown in Tibet is in response to the most sustained uprising against Chinese rule in almost two decades — a challenge that has put China's human rights record in the international spotlight, embarrassing and frustrating a Communist leadership that had hoped for a smooth run-up to the Olympic Games. The White House has said that Bush would not boycott the Beijing Olympics because of the crackdown, arguing that the games are an event that are supposed to be about the athletes, not politics. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has suggested he might boycott the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Sarkozy, visiting the Houses of Parliament in London on Wednesday, said France and Britain should struggle together for human rights and religious and cultural identity. Sarkozy called for dialogue between China's government and the Dalai Lama. Foreign journalists allowed in Bush's conversation with Hu also covered Taiwan, North Korea and Mynanmar.
Bush said the election in Taiwan of Ma Ying-jeou, who has promised to defuse tensions and expand trade with China, would provide "a fresh opportunity for both sides to reach out and engage one another in peacefully resolving their differences." On the issues of the missile fuses, the president's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, said the matter came up briefly on Wednesday. Hadley described the phone call by saying, "Basically, the president indicated that a mistake had been made." The U.S. military's mistaken delivery to Taiwan of electrical fuses for an intercontinental ballistic missile has raised concerns over U.S.-China relations. It has also triggered a broad investigation into the security of Pentagon weapons. China on Wednesday strongly protested the mistaken delivery. Bush and Hu pledged to work together with other partners to press North Korea to make a complete and accurate declaration of all of its nuclear weapons programs and to complete a promised disarmament, the White House said. Earlier Wednesday, the foreign ministers of the United States and South Korea said Wednesday that patience is running out over North Korea's failure to hand over a promised declaration of nuclear weapon efforts. Pyongyang was to provide a list that was due at the end of last year. The late declaration has bogged down six-nation disarmament talks.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23813316/
© 2008 MSNBC.com 3월 26일 Quote of The Day #89"my financial solution through the investment company just like an "additional tool" among "existed tools inside the financial toolbox". Those existed tools are; microfinance banking, ordinary banking, investment bankers, etc." Those "tools" will not replace each other, but it will complete each other."
[ Roby Widjaja ]
Quote of The Day #88"... in order to avoid commodities (such as: rice, rubber, spices, etc) price fluctuation, buyer and seller could establish an agreement which can guarantee price certainty to anticipate price fluctuation (hedging). Japan was the first country which has done this hundred years ago through rice trading."
[ "Esai-Esai Nobel Ekonomi" book, page 111, Publisher: Kompas ] An unwanted election in BhutanBhutan An unwanted election in BhutanMar 24th 2008 | BJEEZAM The tiny kingdom gets democracyReuters
 STREAMING down mountain paths in their best national costume, thousands of Bhutanese turned out to vote in their country’s maiden election on Monday March 24th. Early estimates suggested that nearly 80% of some 320,000 registered voters had cast a ballot—a triumph for civic educators in the fastidiously-ministered Himalayan kingdom. Of two political parties contesting the poll—both led by a former prime minister—the Druk Phuensum Tshogpa (DPT) won with a landslide. Voters may have approved of the many former ministers among its candidates: there being little else to choose between the DPT and its rival, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). 
In Bjeezam village, in central Bhutan, a queue of voters awaited the opening of a polling-station, a primary school in a paradisal wooded gorge, beside a crashing mountain stream. Many had travelled 200km from Thimpu, the capital, to vote in the place of their birth. As they passed through the school’s gates, local peasants and city-slickers turned a giant Buddhist prayer-wheel that stood there. “Democracy can be a good thing—we hope,” said one metropolitan voter, Norbu Wangdi, putting a brave face on a political transition that has stirred more fear than joy in Bhutan. Leaders of both the parties have said they would prefer to have remained under the former monarchic system. Many voters said they were casting a ballot—with a heavy heart—simply because this was the wish of their recently-abdicated ruler, King Jigme Singye Wangchuk. Few elected governments could boast of the king’s record. Accelerating a reform process begun by his father, whom he succeeded in 1972, the king transformed Bhutan from one of the world’s most reclusive poor countries to one of its more enlightened. Over the past 25 years its economy has grown at an average annualised rate of 7%, mainly on the back of sales of hydro-generated electricity to India. With massive investments in public health care, life expectancy has risen from 40 years at the time of the king’s succession to 64 years today. The school enrolment rate leapt by over 20% in the 1990s. At the same time, the king maintained a strict control on the lives of his 700,000 subjects, especially through rules to preserve environmental resources and the Buddhist culture of the majority. In a society rich in sacred streams and memories of demons, this was, by and large, popular. Yet a big minority of Nepali-speakers from the country’s south, including many Hindus, had more to complain of. Some among them became violent in the 1990s, to protest against their perceived marginalisation. In response, the government drove around 60,000 southerners—including, it said, many illegal immigrants—into Nepal. Most languish there still, in UN-run camps. in 2006 America offered sanctuary to as many as 60,000 of these refugees. But that has not resolved the worries of Nepali-speakers who remain in Bhutan. Thousands have been denied citizenship and voting rights because of their association with the lot sent into exile. For them, at least, democracy may offer a better future. Of 47 candidates, the DPT fielded nine Nepali-speakers; another six contested the election for the PDP. Officials in both parties said that resolving the southerners’ grievances would be a priority of their government. More generally, candidates promised voters more of the sort of developments they had received at the former king’s favour—especially more electricity connections and rural roads. Both parties keenly expressed loyalty to the former king, and to his 28-year-old son and successor, King Jigme Khesar Namgyal Wangchuck. This was unsurprising. Besides its leader, Jigmi Thinley, the PDT boasted another former prime minister among its candidates and several former ministers. The DPD is led by a former prime minister, Sangay Ngedup, a brother of the former king’s four wives—who are also sisters. Nonetheless, the election campaign saw an unexpectedly high degree of rancour between the rival candidates and their supporters. In Bjeezam, some voters said they feared this might lead to constant feuding between the two parties—or even civil war. Others said that they feared that, after India’s example, Bhutan will now see a surge in corruption. And so saying, they spun the prayer-wheel, and cast their vote. 3월 25일 US House Speaker urges international probe into Tibet unrestAgence France-Presse - 3/21/2008 9:44 AM GMT US House Speaker urges international probe into Tibet unrest US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday called for an international probe into the causes of deadly unrest in Tibet but added she was not seeking a boycott of the Beijing Olympics. "We call upon the international community to have an independent outside investigation on accusations made by the Chinese government that His Holiness (the Dalai Lama) was the instigator of violence in Tibet," she said after flying into the hill town of Dharamshala, seat of Tibet's government-in-exile. "This investigation is to make sure there is no association between His Holiness and violence in Tibet," said Pelosi who was greeted by cheering crowds of refugees and banners proclaiming "American-Tibet Friendship." Pelosi also said she was "not calling for any boycott of the Olympic Games," echoing similar statements by the Dalai Lama, who has denied orchestrating the nearly two weeks of upheaval in his homeland. But the "world is watching" events in China, added Pelosi, one of the sharpest critics of Beijing's human rights record, who was making the first high-level US visit to the Dalai Lama since the unrest erupted in Tibet. Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on Thursday said Beijing had "plenty of evidence that proves that these incidents were organised, premeditated, masterminded and incited by the Dalai clique." But the Dalai Lama, who has repeatedly insisted he wants autonomy and not independence for the region he fled in 1959 after a failed uprising against Beijing's rule, has replied that the Chinese are welcome to send a team to Dharamshala to "investigate thoroughly" their allegations. China, keen to put its best face forward ahead of the Olympic Games in Beijing in August, has been faced by the worst rioting against its rule in Tibet in nearly 20 years and has poured security forces into the vast Himalayan region to suppress the unrest. A poem written by Eleanor Roosevelt...Dear Friends,
I've got this poem from a friend. She asked me to spread it
 . Well, after I read it, it is a nice poem actually, just like a cup of coffee in the morning Sincerely,
Roby Widjaja.
:-) Friendship (-:
Many people will walk in and out of your life.
Friends
Great minds discuss ideas; He, who loses money, loses much; Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, Learn from the mistakes of others Friends, you and me... Yesterday is history.
When you receive this letter, You don't have to send it to your friends, it's your choice. (-: Don't make them disappointed! :-)
3월 24일 Beware, Inventors WorldwideCommentary Beware, Inventors Worldwide Shun-Kuo Su 03.18.08, 6:00 AM ET
Many Americans probably assume that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awards patents exclusively to American inventors. But in 2006, almost half of all patents granted by the U.S. were awarded to foreigners. Why so much foreign interest in the American system? U.S. patents are renowned for being the world's strongest form of intellectual property protection. It's therefore puzzling that the U.S. Congress is looking to radically change this system. Given America's growing concern about its image abroad, U.S. leaders would be making a grave error undermining their patent system. It stands as a key component of America's soft power. What is Congress looking to do? First, it would replace America's unique "first-to-invent" rule with a "first-to-file" system. Under "first-to-invent," the first person to actually invent a product is granted a patent. "First-to-file" merely awards the first person to arrive at the patent office. "First-to-file" stacks the deck against individuals and small firms, as only large corporations have the legal and financial resources to navigate the patent bureaucracy effectively. Second, the bill would eliminate patent-holders' protection against frivolous lawsuits. A cumbersome post-grant review process would be the new method of adjudication, allowing patents to be challenged almost indefinitely. These and other changes in the proposed legislation would cause inventors' costs to skyrocket. Patent values would erode as their legal stature fall into question. That uncertainty spells trouble for the future of research-intensive innovation. Currently, foreigners are driving much of the innovation passing through the Patent Office. Inventors the world over depend on the U.S. to protect the intellectual property that drives their entrepreneurial ambitions. Without its strong patent system, the American market would look significantly less appealing--and American influence would wane considerably. My home country of Taiwan, for example, relies heavily on the American patent system. In 2006, Taiwanese inventors edged out their U.S. counterparts, nabbing 3.3 patents per 10,000 inhabitants, compared with 3.1 per 10,000 in the U.S. And it is not just Taiwanese inventors flocking to the U.S. Patent Office. It's the busiest patent authority in the world; of the nearly 450,000 patent applications received by the U.S. Patent Office in 2006, about 210,000 were filed by foreigners. Weakening the U.S. patent system would damage an important source of foreign goodwill toward America. The ramifications would be especially damaging to important allies. Even more distressing, the U.S. Congress seems strangely unconcerned that large-scale counterfeiters and copycat artists would profit handsomely under the new system. Such companies, often wholly or partly state-sponsored, thrive on weak protection of intellectual property rights. The Government Pharmaceutical Organization (GPO) in Thailand is a great example. In late 2006 and early 2007, the state-owned company violated the patents of three popular drugs: the anti-AIDS medicines Kaletra and Efavirenz and the heart-disease drug Plavix. Thailand's government blessed the move. It's likely that organizations like the GPO will be even more brazen in seizing intellectual property if patent protections are weakened. Other copycat companies have already said they will do as much. "Seeking invalidation of patents is likely to be a part of the patent strategy that Indian generics companies may follow in the U.S.," promised the secretary general of the Indian Pharmaceutical Alliance. Such a coordinated attack on American patents would be devastating to inventors--and to consumers who rely on their products. In deciding whether to pass the Patent Reform Act, Congress must choose whether it wants to protect the world's most productive and innovative minds or prop up manufacturers whose only contributions are made through imitation. The choice should be easy. Mr. Shun-Kuo Su served as Majority Whip of Taiwan's Provincial Assembly from 1977 to 1980. He also served as a professor of law at the Chinese Culture University. He is currently chairman of a nonprofit organization promoting better ties between Taiwan and the U.S Wall Street's crisisWall Street Wall Street's crisisMar 19th 2008 What went wrong in the financial system—and the long, hard task of fixing it THE marvellous edifice of modern finance took years to build. The world had a weekend to save it from collapsing. On March 16th America's Federal Reserve, by nature hardly impetuous, rewrote its rule-book by rescuing Bear Stearns, the country's fifth-largest investment bank, and agreeing to lend directly to other brokers. A couple of days later the Fed cut short-term interest rates—again—to 2.25%, marking the fastest loosening of monetary policy in a generation. It was a Herculean effort, and it staved off the outright catastrophe of a bank failure that had threatened to split Wall Street asunder. Even so, this week's brush with disaster contained two unsettling messages. One is analytical: the world needs new ways of thinking about finance and the risks it entails. The other is a warning: the crisis has opened a new, dangerous chapter. For all its mistakes, modern finance is worth saving—and the job looks as if it is still only half done.
Rescuing Bear Stearns and its kind from their own folly may strike many people as overly charitable. For years Wall Street minted billions without showing much compassion. Yet the Fed put $30 billion of public money at risk for the best reason of all: the public interest. Bear is a counterparty to some $10 trillion of over-the-counter swaps. With the broker's collapse, the fear that these and other contracts would no longer be honoured would have infected the world's derivatives markets. Imagine those doubts raging in all the securities Bear traded and from there spreading across the financial system; then imagine what would happen to the economy in the financial nuclear winter that would follow. Bear Stearns may not have been too big to fail, but it was too entangled. Gordian conduitsAs the first article in our special briefing on the crisis explains, entanglement is a new doctrine in finance (see article). It began in the 1980s with an historic bull market in shares and bonds, propelled by falling interest rates, new information technology and corporate restructuring. When the boom ran out, shortly after the turn of the century, the finance houses that had grown rich on the back of it set about the search for new profits. Thanks to cheap money, they could take on more debt—which makes investments more profitable and more risky. Thanks to the information technology, they could design myriad complex derivatives, some of them linked to mortgages. By combining debt and derivatives, the banks created a new machine that could originate and distribute prodigious quantities of risk to a baffling array of counterparties. This system worked; indeed, at its simplest, it still does, spreading risk, promoting economic efficiency and providing cheap capital. (Just like junk bonds, another once-misused financial instrument, many of the new derivatives will be back, for no better reason than that they are useful.) Yet over the past decade this entangled system also plainly fed on itself. As balance sheets grew, you could borrow more against them, buy more assets and admire your good sense as their value rose. By 2007 financial services were making 40% of America's corporate profits—while employing only 5% of its private-sector workers. Meanwhile, financial-sector debt, only a tenth of the size of non-financial-sector debt in 1980, is now half as big. The financial system, or a big part of it, began to lose touch with its purpose: to write, manage and trade claims on future cashflows for the rest of the economy. It increasingly became a game for fees and speculation, and a favourite move was to beat the regulator. Hence the billions of dollars sheltered off balance sheets in SIVs and conduits. Thanks to what, in hindsight, has proven disastrously lax regulation, banks did not then have to lay aside capital in case something went wrong. Hence, too, the trick of packaging securities as AAA—and finding a friendly rating agency to give you the nod. That game is now up. You can think of lots of ways to describe the pain—debt is unwinding, investors are writing down assets, liquidity is short. But the simplest is that counterparties no longer trust each other. Walter Bagehot, an authority on bank runs, once wrote: “Every banker knows that if he has to prove that he is worthy of credit, however good may be his arguments, in fact his credit is gone.” In our own entangled era, his axiom stretches to the whole market. A question of prioritiesThis mistrust is enormously corrosive. The huge damage it could do to the world economy dictates what must now be done first. No doubt, there are many ways in which financial regulation needs to be fixed; but that is for later. The priority for policymakers is to shore up the financial system. That should certainly be done as cheaply as possible (after all, the cash comes from the public purse); and it should avoid as far as possible creating moral hazard—owners and employees should bear the costs of their mistakes. But these caveats, however galling, should not get in the way of that priority. To its credit, the Fed has accepted that the new finance calls for new types of intervention. That is the importance of its decision on March 16th to lend money directly to cash-strapped investment banks and brokers and to accept a broader array of collateral, including mortgage-backed and other investment-grade securities. If investment banks can overcome the stigma of petitioning the central bank, this will guard them against the sort of run that saw Bear rejected by lenders in the short-term markets. Henceforth, the brokers will be able to raise cash from the Fed. The Fed is now lender-of-last-resort not just to commercial banks but to big investment banks as well (a concession that will surely in time demand tighter regulation). Even if that solves Wall Street's immediate worries over liquidity, it still leaves the danger that recession will lead to such big losses that banks are forced into insolvency. This depends on everything from mortgages to credit-card debt. These, in turn, depend on the American economy's likely path, the depth to which house prices decline and the scale of mortgage foreclosures—and none of these things is looking good. Goldman Sachs's latest calculations, which suppose that American house prices will eventually fall by 25% from their peak, suggest that total losses will reach just over $1.1 trillion. At around 8% of GDP that is not to be sniffed at. But it includes losses held by foreigners, and “non-leveraged institutions” such as insurers. Goldman expects eventual post-tax losses for American financial firms to be around $300 billion, just over 2% of GDP, or about 20% of their equity capital. The rebuilders' dilemmaThat suggests a serious problem, but not a catastrophic banking crisis. And with the world awash with savings, banks ought to be able to raise new capital privately and continue lending. Unfortunately, things are not quite so simple. It would not take many homeowners to walk away from their debts for the losses to grow rapidly. Also, bank shareholders may prefer to cut back on lending rather than raise new equity. That would suit them, as equity is expensive and dilutes their stake. But it would not suit the economy, which would be pushed further into recession by sudden cuts in leverage. By lending money to more banks for longer against worse collateral, the Fed hopes to stem panic and buy time. It wants Wall Street's banks to assess their losses and strengthen their balance sheets without the crippling burden of dysfunctional markets. And it hopes that cheaper money will ease that recapitalisation, inject confidence and cushion the broader economy. But that lingering risk of insolvency means that the state needs to be ready to take yet more action. One option is to keep on intervening as events unfold. The other is to shock the markets out of their mistrust by using public money to create a floor to the market, either in housing or in asset-backed securities. For the moment, gradualism is the right path: it is cheaper and less prone to moral hazard (ask investors in Bear Stearns). Yet it is not easy to pull off—again, ask Bear Stearns's backers, who could possibly have been saved had the Fed begun lending to brokers sooner. If the crisis drags on and claims more victims, gradualism could yet become more expensive than a more ambitious approach. Something important happened on Wall Street this week. It was not just the demise of a firm that traded through the Depression. Financiers discovered that they had created a series of risks that the market could not cope with. That is not a reason to condemn the whole system: it is far too useful. It is a sign that the rules need changing. But, first, stop the rot. The myth of Tibetan autonomyTwo countries, one systemMar 19th 2008 The myth of Tibetan autonomyTHE ugly violence that has scarred Lhasa and other parts of Tibet in recent days is only the latest episode in more than half a century of sporadic resistance to Chinese rule. China’s Communists invaded (or, as they would see it, “liberated”) Tibet in 1950. The next year they persuaded—coerced, his supporters would say—the young Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, to sign a “17-point agreement”, recognising Chinese sovereignty in return for a high degree of autonomy. AFP
 Conciliator?China’s failure to honour that promise of autonomy led to an uprising in 1959. It was quashed. The Dalai Lama and some 100,000 of his followers fled into exile in India, and China tightened its grip. Tibet, however—or rather one part of the area regarded by many Tibetans as their historic homeland—remains an “autonomous region” of China, like four other areas with large ethnic minorities (Guangxi, Inner Mongolia, Ningxia and Xinjiang). In practice, these regions enjoy no more autonomy than do provinces, though the national party makes some token efforts toward minority representation. The government of the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), for example, has usually been headed by an ethnic Tibetan. (The more important post of regional Communist Party secretary has been held by a Han Chinese, including, at one time, Hu Jintao, the present national party leader.) But China has offered significant internal autonomy to two important regions—Taiwan and Hong Kong—in return for their recognition of China's sovereignty. On October 1st (National Day) 1981, Ye Jianying, then the chairman of the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp legislature, made a “nine-point proposal” to Taiwan (China’s leaders have a thing about numbers). Still the basis of official policy, it offered Taiwan, in effect, self-government and the preservation of its own political system—and even of its own army—in return for accepting a position as part of China. Three years later, broadly similar ideas were incorporated into the Sino-British Joint Declaration on the future of Hong Kong after 1997. The offer to Hong Kong, as a British colony, was rather less generous (Hong Kong was never allowed to build its own army). In the nervous 1990s, ahead of the handover to China, Tibet’s grim experience of “autonomy” in China was sometimes held up as a warning to Hong Kong. But in fact China has in many ways respected Hong Kong’s autonomy as a “special administrative region” of China. It has not, however, allowed Hong Kong directly to elect its own leaders or more than a portion of its legislators. For this reason, viewed from Taiwan, where a robust democratic tradition has taken firm root in just two decades, Hong Kong is not an advertisement for life under Chinese sovereignty. Nor is it for many Tibetans, who, unlike most people in Hong Kong, are ethnically and linguistically distinct from Han Chinese, and claim to be historically, culturally and legally separate from China. 
The Dalai Lama, however, remains a supporter of Tibetan autonomy within China. This week, he again said that full independence is “out of the question”. He also threatened to stand down from his role as Tibet’s leading advocate if the violence spreads. He is 72. Although he is in good health, Tibetans already worry about his passing. There will be a vacuum while his next incarnation grows up. There may well be a dispute about the identity of the reincarnation. Or there may not be one at all: the Dalai Lama has suggested holding a referendum on whether the institution should survive. China too should worry about the Dalai Lama’s death. It would lose a powerful voice urging Tibetans down the path of moderation; and one calling for just the sort of accommodation China claims it wants. 3월 21일 Celebrate Jesus Christ’s Glorious Resurrection!Celebrate Jesus Christ’s Glorious Resurrection!
I often ask myself, Where would I be today had I not met Jesus in 1972? Frankly, I don’t even want to think about it, for my life would be empty now and meaningless. I’ve said to the Lord numerous times, “It would have been better to never have been born than to not have met You.”
And I’m sure there have been moments when you, too, have wondered, Where would I be without Jesus? He has done so much for you and so much for me. Truly, great is the Lord and greatly to be praised. Now this same precious Jesus, who has touched your life and given rest to our souls, is calling you and me to serve Him and to obey Him. The World Longs for His Peace Think about the billions of dollars humanity spends looking for joy and peace, yet this joy and peace comes only through Jesus. And somebody’s got to tell them. That somebody is you and me. For the Lord has called you and me to preach the glorious Gospel of salvation to the nations, and truly our time is running out. In 1974, at the age of 21, I began to preach the Gospel, and I have been preaching it ever since and will continue until the day I die. And as God in those days gave me men and women to stand by me, 34 years later He’s still calling men and women so that His purpose might be fulfilled. What Can You Do as We Celebrate the Resurrection? Our precious Jesus declared, “As my Father hath sent me, even so send I you” (John 20:21).
That is why Paul the apostle wrote that God has called and anointed us so that His purpose might be accomplished. The Gospel must be preached. And so today, as you sow your precious seed for the work of the Gospel, the Gospel will be preached. As you give, it shall be given unto you. As you honor the Lord with your substance, your barns will be filled with plenty. And I pray that He who is able to do exceedingly abundantly above all you ask or think, will bless you beyond measure.
Clash of ideals
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MSNBC.com
Think about this most glorious privilege…think about those words as God the Father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of glory, has sent His Son to earth. And this same God—the mighty One…the eternal One, the everlasting God, has called you.
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