Planetary Nebula - JKHC

• Planetary Nebula - What is it ? What is its significance to life on earth ? We are all stardust !
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• A nebula is also known as a planetary nebula which is an exploded star at the end of its life when all its original hydrogen is fused under the nuclear fusion process until the whole star core becomes iron ( at which point no further nuclear fusion can proceed ). With the loss of the powerful outward force of nuclear fusion the core catastrophically collapses under the inward gravitational force of its entire iron core resulting in a huge and bright explosion called a supernova. It can shine as bright as a whole galaxy. A special type of supernova known as type 1a always produces a standard brightness which makes it a standard candle for measuring absolute distances in the universe. Thus, a supernova is very useful to astronomers. In my pet astronomy project - Galaxy Zoo - there is now a new sub-project of supernova hunt to look for more supernovae. Everyone can volunteer to help online.
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  Joseph K. H. Cheng All visible nebulae are within our own Milky Way galaxy as exploded stars in other galaxies are too dim to be seen. The next closest galaxy is the Small Magellanic Cloud ( SMC ) , a small irregular galaxy some 170,000 light years away. The next nearest spiral galaxy is the Andromeda galaxy some 2.5 million light years away.
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  Joseph K. H. Cheng How small and insignificant are we in our universe ? Yet each and everyone has his or her own talents and purpose in the grand design of the universe only if we care to find out for ourselves !
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• We are all stardust - http://jkhcforum.blogspot.com.au/2010/11/thoughts-to-you-from-yours-truly-48.html
  
  Astronomy is a really inspirational and humbling subject for everyone especially the politicians as it will keep their inflated ego at a manageable level.
  
  http://jkhcforum.blogspot.com.au/2010/11/prose-staring-at-stars-poetry-prose-3.html

Staring at the Stars ( 看星星 )

More stars than sand to be gazed upon they are really spectacular and cool.
繁星多越恆河沙數，燦爛而有性格，更可任人觀賞。

In my life time they have given me endless comfort and showed me the eternal truth.
在我一生中，它們給予我無限安慰和為我展示了永恆的真理。

Start staring at the stars to learn your life story, too.
你們也不防試試看星，或許也可以如我一般獲得些人生的啟示。

Start staring at them especially when you feel blue.
正當你感覺繁亂之際，這也正好是開始觀星的適當時候。

So, let us start what we must do from here and now until you know what to do.
那麼就讓我們開始做我們必須做的事， 直到我們學會怎樣做為止。

When you are born stare at the stars. Their mystical omnipresence will symbolize you.
當你誕生時，請看着星星。它們神秘地無處不在，正像徵着你生命的存在。

When you are young stare at the stars. Their illusive twinkling will mesmerize you.
當你仍年輕的時候，請看看繁星，它們虛幻的閃爍， 令你切底地着了迷。

When you are lost stare at the stars. Their lasting brightness will guide you.
當你感到迷失和落魄的時候，請看看星空， 它們的永恆光芒會指引你的路途。

When you are successful stare at the stars. Their profound grandeur will humble you.
當你成功之際，更要看看星星，因為它們的偉大壯觀，使你感覺謙卑。

When you are angry stare at the stars. Their soothing tranquility will clam you.
當你忿怒時，也得看看繁星，它們有着令人心情舒緩的寧靜， 會使你悄悄地安靜下來。

When you are down stare at the stars. Their glamorous beauty will lift you.
當你心情沮喪的時候，請看看星星，它們的優美和燦爛，令你情緒提昇。

When you are happy stare at the stars. Their constant wonders will excite you.
當你快樂時， 也應舉頭看星，它們有着經常性的奇妙， 會令你更加興奮。

When you are wavering stare at the stars. Their great steadfastness will inspire you.
當你舉棋不定時，你需要看看星星，它們的永固不移，會給予你深刻的啟發。

When you are tired stare at the stars. Their endless energy will revitalize you.
當你疲倦之際，你也得仰首觀星，因它們無盡的能量，能使你活力得予重振。

When you are in love stare at the stars. Their unfathomable eternity will reassure you.
當你沐浴愛河時， 你可以舉頭看星， 它們無法量度的永恆存在，令你得到愛的保證。

When you are old stare at the stars. Their everlasting myths will provide dreams for you.
當你年老的時候，你更加要看看星星，它們的不死傳說，令你可以繼續造你的長生夢。

When you are dead stare at the stars, too, for they will all be around you !
當你不幸死去，希望你仍能看着所有陪伴在你左右的繁星，因為這樣的話，你已經身處天堂了！

For all the above reasons, I love astronomy dearly and would gladly introduce it to all of you.
由於以上諸因，我浩愛天文學，更十分樂意將它推薦給各位仁兄仁姐，予以分享, 奇景共賞。

JKHC.
鄭冠合


Planetary 

6 Common Grammatical Errors and How to Correct Them - Entrepreneur.com

http://time.com/3964902/grammar-errors-correction/

6 Common Grammatical Errors and How to Correct Them
Jonathan Long / Entrepreneur.com July 21, 2015   

Do not underestimate the power of incorrect grammar


Proper grammar seems to be a thing of the past — why stress about tiny technicalities, right? Wrong.

You should be a grammar stickler for many reasons. Do you want to risk turning off potential clients, employers and connections because of grammatical mistakes?

Many people are so concerned with what they are saying in an email or text message that they completely forget to pay attention to how they are saying it. If you chose to turn grammar mode off when you are communicating with friends, that is one thing, but there is absolutely no reason to send a professional communication that contains errors.

Here are six grammatical errors that are so simple, yet such common offenders. Make sure you aren’t making them.

1. Your/You’re

This is probably the most common mistake I see on social media, in text messages and in emails. This one is real simple — if you are trying to say “you are” then “you’re” is correct. If you are talking about something that belongs to you, such as “your car” then you use “your.”

2. Too/To/Two

Many people confuse these and don’t even realize they are doing it. It’s real easy — “two” is a number, “too” is an adverb that means “also,” and “to” is a preposition used to express motion, direction, limit of movement, contact, a point of limit in time, purpose, intention and destination — to name a few.

For example:

“I would like to become an entrepreneur.”

“I too would like to become an entrepreneur.”

3. There/Their/They’re

What should have been squared away in third grade continues to haunt grammar police on a daily basis. The there/their/they’re mistake is common — but it’s really simple to avoid.

Use “they’re” when you are trying to say “they are.”

“Their” should be used when you are indicating possession.

Finally, “there” needs to be used when referring to a location.

Example: “They’re going to love working there. Their company culture is amazing!”

4. You/U

This one is really just pure laziness rather than a grammatical mistake. Texting has completely ruined grammar and you/u is a perfect example. I understand that “u” is perfectly acceptable if you are texting a friend and are in a rush — but it’s not acceptable in a professional email.

Here is an excerpt of an email I received last week from a C-level executive who is in charge of a company that does business worth several hundreds of millions of dollars every year:

… that would be gr8! Talk to u soon!
He managed to nail two text slangs back to back like a champ. Again, if it was a text message, fine — but a professional email is no place for this. This email is actually what sparked me to write this article, so thank you grammatically challenged C-level executive.

5. Then/Than

When you are talking about time you use “then” and when you are making a comparison you use “than.” It really shouldn’t be that difficult to distinguish what one to use:

“We are going to grab a quick bite to eat and then head back to the office.”

“This new software update is much better than the previous version.”

6. It’s/Its

This one confuses a lot of people, mainly due to the apostrophe, which typically symbolizes possession. Use “it’s” when you are trying to say “it is” and use “its” when you are looking for the possessive form of “it.”

“I looked at its owners manual to get the correct settings.”

“It’s a beautiful day outside.”

This article originally appeared on Entrepreneur.com

The making of Modiano - Nobel Prize winner in literature - TIME

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/e830ad1a-45c0-11e5-af2f-4d6e0e5eda22.html

August 21, 2015 4:16 pm
The making of Modiano
Tobias Grey


The Nobel laureate’s newly translated works take us back to the beginning of his project to grapple with the dark years of Nazi rule
French novelist Patrick Modiano in Paris in 1969©Sophie Bassouls/Sygma/Corbis
French novelist Patrick Modiano in Paris in 1969
Pedigree, by Patrick Modiano, translated by Mark Polizzotti, MacLehose Press, RRP£14.99/Yale University Press, RRP$25, 144 pages
The Occupation Trilogy: La Place de l’Étoile; The Night Watch; Ring Roads, by Patrick Modiano, translated by Caroline Hillier, Patricia Wolf and Frank Wynne, Bloomsbury, RRP£18.99/$18, 352 pages
So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood, by Patrick Modiano, translated by Euan Cameron, MacLehose Press, RRP£14.99/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, RRP$24 160 pages
In his unflinching coming-of-age memoir, Pedigree (2004), Patrick Modiano recalls how at 13 he was first confronted with images of the Nazi extermination camps. Modiano — who was born on the outskirts of Paris in July 1945 — had accompanied his Jewish businessman father, Albert, to a cinema where they watched a documentary on the Nuremberg trials. The experience would leave an indelible impression on the future novelist, as would his father’s silence on the subject of the Holocaust. “Something changed for me that day,” he wrote. “And what did my father think? We never talked about it, not even as we left the cinema.”

The question of what Modiano’s evasive father did in occupied Paris during the war is one that has haunted the winner of last year’s Nobel Prize in Literature. Eventually he discovered that his father avoided wearing the obligatory yellow badge for Jews, did not register himself as one of them, and narrowly escaped deportation when “someone” intervened in his favour after he was arrested in 1943. But had Albert simply been a black marketeer who lived off his wits, as appears to have been his official line? Or was he, more tragically, what the French call a collabo — a willing collaborator with the enemy?
Before Modiano won the Nobel Prize, this most singular writer, noted for his elliptical plots and regretful tone of voice, had barely caused a ripple in the English-speaking world. Only eight of his 30 novels had been translated into English and most of those had fallen out of print. But since the award, publishers in Britain and the US have been falling over themselves to have their own Modiano moment.
Last year, Yale University Press rushed into print Suspended Sentences, a standalone book comprising a trio of newly translated novellas — After­image (1993), Suspended Sentences (1988) and Flowers of Ruin (1991). This month sees the UK publication of Bloomsbury’s Occupation Trilogy, a retrospective grouping devised by his Spanish publisher that constitutes translations of Modiano’s first three novels, originally published in France between 1968 and 1972. And in September, MacLehose Press will publish the first English-language translations of Pedigree and his most recent novel So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood, which came out in France last year; they are to be published in the US by Yale and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. In January, MacLehose will also bring out new translations of Modiano’s 2007 novel In the Café of Lost Youth and The Black Notebook (2012).

Modiano has spoken about being a product of “the dunghill of the Occupation”. His mother, Louisa Colpeyn — a Flemish-speaking Belgian actress who spent the war years in Paris working for the German-controlled French film production company Continental — died earlier this year. In Pedigree he describes her as having been “a pretty girl with an arid heart” whose encounter with his father was a “rash” one. “Periods of great turbulence often lead to rash encounters, with the result that I’ve never felt like a legitimate son, much less an heir,” Modiano writes.
His fictions are most often meditations on identity and contain auto­biographical elements — notably the names of streets where the author has lived or places he used to frequent. The 1978 Prix Goncourt-winning Missing Person, about an amnesiac detective investigating his own past, is just such a novel. Though he rarely invokes the Holocaust directly, its horrific violence — both physical and moral — seethes beneath the surface.
Modiano became famous in France at the end of the 1960s for being one of the country’s first novelists to dare to write about the underbelly of the Occupation and, in particular, about the French Gestapo. His novels, with domestic sales often in excess of 100,000 copies, receive the attention of the top French critics, who invariably describe his elegant, pared-down prose in terms of “la petite musique de Modiano”.
He is not much of a joiner and has turned down several requests by the Académie Française to become an immortel. For a long time Modiano lied about his age, telling interviewers that he was born in 1947 (the year his brother Rudy was born). His French biographer Denis Cosnard has suggested this was a way for Modiano to both pay homage to his brother, who died from leukaemia aged 10, and to distance himself from the war. At the beginning of his novel Ring Roads, Modiano quotes one of his favourite poets, Arthur Rimbaud: “If only I had a past at some other point in French history! But no, nothing.”
Ring Roads forms the third part of the Occupation Trilogy, which, along with The Night Watch (Modiano’s second novel), had already been translated into English in the early 1970s. Both have been subsequently revised for the new edition. The real discovery, though, is the first English-language translation of Modiano’s controversial debut, La Place de l’Étoile, originally published in 1968 when the author was only 22.

No doubt it took the imprimatur of Modiano winning the Nobel Prize to finally reveal La Place to English-language readers in all its youthful and frenetic glory. The novel’s protagonist is the wretchedly-named Raphäel Schlemilovitch — from the Yiddish tradition meaning son of a schlemiel (one who is bereft of luck). The luckless Raphäel is both Jewish collabo and anti-Semite to boot. In a tour-de-force of inventive pastiche, Modiano appropriates the chiselled, curt sentences and polemical style of collaborationist writers such as Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Lucien Rebatet and the journalist Robert Brasillach (all of whose books he had discovered in his father’s library) to depict a wartime France awash in corruption, complacency and concupiscence.
It was the work of an angry young man who wanted to torpedo the Gaullist myth of France as a country full of resistance fighters. It was also a son’s revenge. “In my first book I wanted to reply to all those people whose insults hurt me on account of my father,” writes Modiano in Dora Bruder (1997) — his peerless book about his investigation into the disappearance of a Jewish teenager during the war. “And [I wanted] to do it on the battlefield of French prose by once and for all reducing them to silence.”
Modiano’s vocation as a writer has always been about keeping memory alive, however much others might be keen to move on and forget. There remain some in Paris who would prefer for the Occupation, often referred to as les années noires, to be less visibly integrated into the city’s architecture. Last year outrage ensued when it was discovered that after some building work a plaque at 93, Rue Lauriston, commemorating the lives of tortured Resistance members, had not been replaced.
Though he rarely invokes the Holocaust directly, its horrific violence — both physical and moral — seethes beneath the surface of his novels
The business that rented the address — where the French Gestapo had its headquarters between 1941 and 1944 — argued that retaining the plaque would confront their clients with a bitter reminder of the past. The news surely didn’t escape Modiano’s attention. His father once had an office at nearby Rue Lord Byron and the author spent a great deal of time exploring the environs of the 16th arrondissement.
The Night Watch, published in 1969, features characters who are very closely based on Pierre Bonny and Henri Lafont, leading figures in the French Gestapo whose gang was known as “La Bande de la Rue Lauriston”. Into their midst Modiano introduces a rootless young man. He is not evil per se but far too easily influenced by those with more experience than himself: “Not enough moral fibre to be a hero. Too dispassionate and distracted to be a real villain. On the other hand, I was malleable, I had a fondness for action, and I was plainly good-natured.”
The novel’s protagonist is remarkably similar to the one Modiano and Louis Malle came up with in their screenplay for the Bafta-award winning film Lacombe, Lucien (1974). Both eschew a focus on ideology to show a young man being shaped by the environment in which he finds himself. In Lacombe, Lucien, this means presenting a thrill-seeking lout who, after being turned down by the French Resistance as a potential recruit, soon finds himself presented with the opportunity of enrolling with the enemy.
Some influential French film critics such as Serge Daney attacked Modiano and Malle for the blankness of their protagonist and a general lack of psychological insight. But it is precisely the passivity of these characters that explains their corruptibility. The world they enter into, to borrow Modiano’s words, is one of “flashy foreigners, abortionists, swindlers, hack journalists, shyster lawyers and crooked accountants”, not to mention “a whole battalion of women of easy virtue, erotic dancers, morphine addicts”. Ring Roads, which was published three years after The Night Watch, navigated similarly murky waters in its story of a young Jew who goes in search of his collaborationist father.

It is a world the novelist still contemplates today but in a far more restrained key. As a study in contrasts it is fascinating to read Modiano’s most recent novel, last year’s So You Don’t Get Lost in the Neighbourhood alongside La Place de l’Étoile. There is still plenty of moral unpleasantness at play but the focus has narrowed and the intrigue has grown less haphazard.
The story begins when a reclusive but eminently sane writer, Jean Daragane, is contacted by a stranger, who says he has found the author’s address book and wants to return it to him in person. From this slender premise Modiano weaves a complex tale which switches between past and present. The Occupation is never mentioned but Daragane’s fallible memories are of a peripatetic upbringing straight after the war and the wayward individuals he encountered while his parents were absent.
Some French critics have suggested that So You Don’t Get Lost is Modiano’s most autobiographical novel yet. In his beautifully wrought Nobel lecture, he hinted as much by evoking his upbringing and how it shaped his future as a writer. Modiano recounted how he often found himself away from his parents, staying with their friends, about whom he knew nothing. (His mother was often touring in theatrical productions and his father’s fruitless business-dealings frequently took him abroad.)
At the time Modiano didn’t think much of it but later he tried — in vain — to find out more about the people on whom his parents had foisted him. Such early efforts to resolve enigmas beyond his grasp persuaded Modiano, he said in the Nobel lecture, to turn to fiction — “as if writing and the imagination could help me finally tie up all those loose ends”.
Tobias Grey is a critic based in Paris

What I Learned From Going On More Than 100 Job Interviews in 8 Months - TIME

http://time.com/4000800/100-job-interviews-lessons/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

Brittney Oliver / Levo League @levoleague Aug. 18, 2015   

Be specific and adamant about what you’re looking for in a job

“I am a warrior with a warrior spirit!” This is the phrase I repeated to myself over and over again after I heard my pastor say it one Sunday morning. I quickly rushed home so I could jot it down and hang it up on my wall. Those seven words helped me stay encouraged through 8 months of unemployment—yes, that’s 243 frustrating, resume-writing, tear-filled days. And in that period, I went on more than 100 interviews, from the traditional, in-person sit-down to nerve wracking phone calls and dozens of video chats. There is so much that I learned about myself and the job search during that time that has made me a wiser woman and a more confident job candidate. I hope you’re never in my shoes, but if you are, keep these six things in mind:

1. Don’t give up on finding the perfect fit.

When looking to begin a career, you should not only be a good fit for the company, but it should be a good fit for you, too. When I graduated from college all I wanted was to live in New York City and work in consumer PR full-time. I didn’t have a specific firm that I wanted to work for, but I knew that I wanted an opportunity to get my feet wet. Companies are looking for candidates that they feel will adapt well with their teams and their corporate culture. There were times I would pretend to be a good fit for a team out of desperation, when I knew in my heart that the job or the company wasn’t right. Don’t do this. Be specific about what you’re looking for in a job—and consider asking for an informational interview before you send in an official application somewhere. Either way, decide it’s a fit before applying for the gig.

2. Avoid the job board black hole by doing your research.

Most job postings will take you down the road of an online application. Indeed, MediaBistro, LinkedIn, and other job boards are great tools that I used during my job hunt. However, I also went the extra mile to land my interviews by finding a contact at the companies where I applied. LinkedIn is a great way to connect with current employees to inquire about a position. If you use Craigslist as a job tool, make sure you look up the company before you interview. One time, I was asked to come to Atlanta for an interview, but after thorough research on Glassdoor, the company turned out to be a call center and not a marketing firm. I saved myself time and money on a flight by doing preliminary research first.

3. Don’t be afraid to ask for help.

As I watched my classmates land exciting jobs, I grew more and more embarrassed to still be unemployed. I was tight-lipped about my job search challenges, but then I remembered a line from one of my favorite movies: “Closed mouths don’t get fed.” And its true. Your professional and personal relationships can greatly improve your job search. My mentors, alumni network and my colleagues helped me refine my pitch and sent along listings. They also offered to look over my resume, set up meetings with hiring managers, and even gave me mock interviews.


4. Life is so much more than a Valencia filter.

We have to remember not to live life through a Valencia filter—you know, that perfectly smooth photo effect on Instagram. We have to trust the process and be mindful that our journey is uniquely ours to take. My social media feeds began to affect me negatively during my job search. Although I was ecstatic to read job announcements from my colleagues, I was wondering when I would get to share mynew job status. I decided to take a break from social media to focus on me. Take breaks from your social media accounts to help you stay positive. Start off slow with a weekend hiatus and then progress to a week of newsfeed-free living. Like me, you’ll probably notice how much more you’re able to accomplish (and how much less bummed you feel) by taking a break.

5. When you open your mind, you open your world.

In the midst of my search slump, I began to see people turn their degrees and internships into transferrable skills that helped them land jobs outside of their fields. I decided to do the very same thing. I had tunnel vision when I started my job hunt and that was to land a PR job in New York City. I was not interested in anything else or living anywhere else. Once I realized that art and psychology majors were getting the PR jobs that I interviewed for, I decided to open myself up to other opportunities. From there I started applying to jobs all over the United States and in different industries. Be open when job-hunting, you never know where new doors will lead and you may just discover hidden talents.

6. Stay positive by finding a “pump you up” anthem.

Keeping a positive mind can change your circumstances. Christina Aguilera’s “Fighter” was my theme song during my job hunt. Even though it took me a while to find a job, it made me “a little bit stronger” and “a little wiser” each time I had an interview. I learned to train my mind to think positive by taking negative thoughts and turning them into hopeful statements. Instead of saying “I had a horrible interview,” try saying “I did the best I could during that interview.” Instead of saying “I’m a complete failure for not landing the job,” think, “ I may not have landed this job—but I have what it takes to get the next one.”

Once I opened my mind, I reached out to a relative that worked at the number one hospital in New York City. Equipped with the lessons I learned and utilizing her connections, I was able to get a job as an office assistant. After that short stint, I finally reached my goal and got a full time job in public relations. Be resilient and keep working towards your dreams, when the timing is right everything you wished for will happen for you.

This article originally appeared on Levo.com

A look inside the crazy five-tier caste system of Kim Jong-un's North Korea -TIME

A look inside the crazy five-tier caste system of Kim Jong-un's North Korea

JOSEPH K. H. CHENG·SATURDAY, OCTOBER 3, 2015

According to http://NKNews.org/ and based on a source who used to work for the North Korean police force, the five castes from the elite down are:

http://i100.independent.co.uk/artic...

Special

Nucleus

Basic

Complex

Hostile

The system, known as songbun, was put in place by the founder of present-day Communist North Korea, Kim Il-sung (Kim Jong-un's grandfather), and is based on what happened during the 1950-1953 Korean War and the Japanese colonial period before that.

Your status is determined on the paternal side, and by how previous generations of your family acted during the war and occupation.

So the descendants of war heroes and generals would find themselves in the Special class. But deserters or people whose grandparents were subservient to the Japanese would be in the lower categories Complex and Hostile.

By 1967, the report says, the system completely determined where people were allowed to live, work, and what education their children received.

There are very few Specials, who form the elite of society, and it is thought that the Kim family are exempt from the class system altogether.

Nucleus, the second tier, is the largest caste. You have to be born as a Special or Nucleus - and lower than these classes there is severe and systemic discrimination.

Basics can work their way up into becoming Nuclei, but for Complex and Hostile citizens that is virtually impossible.

It's possible to raise your songbun either by hard work or by joining the Communist party as an official, and by being "awarded with an audience", or speaking with the Supreme Leader for more than 20 minutes (or taking a picture with him).

It was previously thought that there were only three social classes. The Complex classification was only added to the system in the 2000s and Special was also previously unknown.

So, the Higgs boson might not have been discovered after all - TIME

http://i100.independent.co.uk/article/so-the-higgs-boson-might-not-have-been-discovered-after-all--xyFJiupwwe


by Matthew Champion in tech

A year after Peter Higgs and Francois Englert were handed the Nobel Prize for their work in helping discover the Higgs Boson, a group of scientists have claimed the so-called God particle may not have been found after all.

A team of Danish researchers said that while particle physicists at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) Large Hadron Collider definitely found something, it could have been another particle entirely.

“The current data is not precise enough to determine exactly what the particle is,” said Mads Toudal Frandsen of the University of Southern Denmark’s Centre for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology, publishing the team’s findings in the Physical Review D journal.

“It could be a number of other known particles.”

Rather than the Higgs boson - the building block in the Standard Model of the fundamental forces of physics and the creation of the universe - the Danish-based team believe that another theoretical particle called the techni-higgs could have been discovered.

Techni-higgs is not elementary but made up of techni-quarks, which in turn could form in some combinations dark matter, which makes up most of the matter in the universe but that the Higgs boson cannot explain.

The Large Hadron Collider was shut down for maintenance in early 2013 and will not start smashing protons together again until next year.

Origin-of-Life Story May Have Found Its Missing Link - Live Science

http://www.livescience.com/51106-origin-of-life-chemistry-found.html?cmpid=514629_20150726_47452336&adbid=1097727456921955&adbpl=fb&adbpr=123862014308509

Origin-of-Life Story May Have Found Its Missing Link
by Jesse Emspak, Live Science Contributor | June 06, 2015 10:47am ET

How did life on Earth begin? It's been one of modern biology's greatest mysteries: How did the chemical soup that existed on the early Earth lead to the complex molecules needed to create living, breathing organisms? Now, researchers say they've found the missing link.

Between 4.6 billion and 4.0 billion years ago, there was probably no life on Earth. The planet's surface was at first molten and even as it cooled, it was getting pulverized by asteroids and comets. All that existed were simple chemicals. But about 3.8 billion years ago, the bombardment stopped, and life arose. Most scientists think the "last universal common ancestor" — the creature from which everything on the planet descends — appeared about 3.6 billion years ago.

But exactly how that creature arose has long puzzled scientists. For instance, how did the chemistry of simple carbon-based molecules lead to the information storage of ribonucleic acid, or RNA? The RNA molecule must store information to code for proteins. (Proteins in biology do more than build muscle — they also regulate a host of processes in the body.)


The new research — which involves two studies, one led by Charles Carter and one led by Richard Wolfenden, both of the University of North Carolina — suggests a way for RNA to control the production of proteins by working with simple amino acids that does not require the more complex enzymes that exist today. [7 Theories on the Origin of Life on Earth]

Missing RNA link

This link would bridge this gap in knowledge between the primordial chemical soup and the complex molecules needed to build life. Current theories say life on Earth started in an "RNA world," in which the RNA molecule guided the formation of life, only later taking a backseat to DNA, which could more efficiently achieve the same end result. Like DNA, RNA is a helix-shaped molecule that can store or pass on information. (DNA is a double-stranded helix, whereas RNA is single-stranded.) Many scientists think the first RNA molecules existed in a primordial chemical soup — probably pools of water on the surface of Earth billions of years ago. [Photo Timeline: How the Earth Formed]

The idea was that the very first RNA molecules formed from collections of three chemicals: a sugar (called a ribose); a phosphate group, which is a phosphorus atom connected to oxygen atoms; and a base, which is a ring-shaped molecule of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen atoms. RNA also needed nucleotides, made of phosphates and sugars.

The question: How did the nucleotides come together within the soupy chemicals to make RNA? John Sutherland, a chemist at the University of Cambridge in England, published a study in May in the journal Nature Chemistry that showed that a cyanide-based chemistry could make two of the four nucleotides in RNA and many amino acids.

That still left questions, though. There wasn't a good mechanism for putting nucleotides together to make RNA. Nor did there seem to be a natural way for amino acids to string together and form proteins. Today, adenosine triphosphate (ATP) does the job of linking amino acids into proteins, activated by an enzyme called aminoacyl tRNA synthetase. But there's no reason to assume there were any such chemicals around billions of years ago.

Also, proteins have to be shaped a certain way in order to function properly. That means RNA has to be able to guide their formation — it has to "code" for them, like a computer running a program to do a task.

Carter noted that it wasn't until the past decade or two that scientists were able to duplicate the chemistry that makes RNA build proteins in the lab. "Basically, the only way to get RNA was to evolve humans first," he said. "It doesn't do it on its own."

Perfect sizes

In one of the new studies, Carter looked at the way a molecule called "transfer RNA," or tRNA, reacts with different amino acids.

They found that one end of the tRNA could help sort amino acids according to their shape and size, while the other end could link up with amino acids of a certain polarity. In that way, this tRNA molecule could dictate how amino acids come together to make proteins, as well as determine the final protein shape. That's similar to what the ATP enzyme does today, activating the process that strings together amino acids to form proteins.

Carter told Live Science that the ability to discriminate according to size and shape makes a kind of "code" for proteins called peptides, which help to preserve the helix shape of RNA.

"It's an intermediate step in the development of genetic coding," he said.

In the other study, Wolfenden and colleagues tested the way proteins fold in response to temperature, since life somehow arose from a proverbial boiling pot of chemicals on early Earth. They looked at life's building blocks, amino acids, and how they distribute in water and oil — a quality called hydrophobicity. They found that the amino acids' relationships were consistent even at high temperatures — the shape, size and polarity of the amino acids are what mattered when they strung together to form proteins, which have particular structures. 

"What we're asking here is, 'Would the rules of folding have been different?'" Wolfenden said. At higher temperatures, some chemical relationships change because there is more thermal energy. But that wasn't the case here.

By showing that it's possible for tRNA to discriminate between molecules, and that the links can work without "help," Carter thinks he's found a way for the information storage of chemical structures like tRNA to have arisen — a crucial piece of passing on genetic traits. Combined with the work on amino acids and temperature, it offers insight into how early life might have evolved.

This work still doesn't answer the ultimate question of how life began, but it does show a mechanism for the appearance of the genetic codes that pass on inherited traits, which got evolution rolling.

The two studies are published in the June 1 issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Internet Can’t Replace Real Human Interaction - TIME

September 17, 2015 at 7:08pm

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http://time.com/4036310/rosh-hashana-internet-sacred-spaces/

The Internet Can’t Replace Real Human Interaction
Rabbi David Wolpe Sept. 16, 2015   


David Wolpe is the Max Webb Senior Rabbi of Sinai Temple in Los Angeles.
A Rosh Hashana reminder of the power of sacred spaces


Watching people assemble for services on Rosh Hashana, I was struck anew by a powerful reality of houses of worship: They remain that rare place in American society where people of different ages sit together in common cause. Yes, people gather at a sports arena or concert, but that is to watch, not to participate. Besides, the baby in the stroller and the 93-year-old are not usually found at the same concert. In a world where community is increasingly difficult, and atomization is becoming the norm, Prayer is a moment of togetherness.

Sociologist Robert Putnam famously wrote about the shrinking of social capital more than a decade ago. Observing that bowling leagues declined as more and more people chose to bowl alone, he cast his eye about society and saw the fragmentation in almost every sphere of public life. Political parties are less attractive, social clubs and groups less cohesive and prevalent. Now more than ever in history we can function autonomously, sitting at home, watching TV, getting our news from the Internet, paying our bills online, and ordering up everything from food to books to videos to lawn furniture, all without moving from one spot.

Not so if you attend a Synagogue or Church or Mosque. Many houses of worship now stream their services, yet they are still designed as places for people to come and join together. The inevitable frictions and joys of human contact are central to prayer. Each year after the holidays I receive letters of complaint about people who were talking, disturbing those who sat near them. But I get far more letters of appreciation as people renew acquaintances, see children grow from year to year, feel the mysterious, sad tug of realizing that certain faces are no longer there, and remembering that a video screen cannot match the anxious thrill and warm spark of human contact.

An old Jewish story has it that two men, Schwartz and Goldberg, were walking to the synagogue. A neighbor, spotting them traveling together, stops and asks: “Hey Goldberg, I understand why you are going to synagogue—you are a believer. But Schwartz, you aren’t religious. Why are you going?” And Schwartz answers, “Goldberg goes to talk to God. I go to talk to Goldberg.”

I long ago learned that most people do not come to the synagogue for doctrine. They come for one another. In the hallway encounters, in the catching up—yes, even in the gossip—there is the tie of community that runs deep in our nature.

The decline in attendance at churches and synagogues is sad for those of us who care for religion, of course. But it is also sad to see the waning of one of the last great institutions that brings people together. Yes, the synagogue is full of problems and politics, but that is just another way of saying it is full of people. Here is a place that welcomes us, sublime and sinful as we are, and asks us to share together with others who are no better and no worse. The Internet will be humming when you get home. The news will be ready at a moment’s notice. In the meantime, you will have interacted with other human beings, and perhaps, had a moment to encounter God.

For U.S. Pilots, the Real War on ISIS is a Far Cry From ‘Top Gun’ - New York Times

September 17, 2015 at 12:33am

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For U.S. Pilots, the Real War on ISIS is a Far Cry From ‘Top Gun’
By HELENE COOPERSEPT. 16, 2015



ABOARD THE U.S.S. THEODORE ROOSEVELT, in the Persian Gulf — Soon after this aircraft carrier arrived here for its Middle East deployment, two F/A-18 Super Hornets catapulted off its deck for a six-and-a-half-hour bombing run toward Islamic State targets in Iraq. In one of the fighter jets was Navy Lt. Michael Smallwood, 28, call sign Bones, and in the other was his friend and roommate, Navy Lt. Nick Smith, also 28, call sign Yip Yip.

For a minute or two that day in May, the Hornets were right next to each other in the sky, but then Lieutenant Smith’s plane had engine trouble and began to lose altitude. Over the radio, Lieutenant Smallwood could hear his friend turn around, try to land back on the carrier and then eject into the Persian Gulf. The $60 million Hornet crashed into the sea.

Lieutenant Smallwood found himself fighting to keep his mind off the fate of his friend, but his orders were to continue climbing and fly on to Iraq. On many such missions, he simply loitered in the skies, dropped no munitions and headed back to the carrier.


The Pilots Fighting ISIS
In the year since the American air offensive against the Islamic State began, fighter pilots have assumed a huge bulk of the war effort. Here are some of the American pilots carrying out those operations.



This is the life of the modern day American fighter pilot — long periods of monotony, combat missions that end with bombs still intact to avoid hitting civilians, occasional moments of fear. It is a long way from “Top Gun,” the iconic 1986 Hollywood blockbuster that made Tom Cruise a household name and Navy fighter pilots the heroes of adolescent boys everywhere.

But these real-life pilots — the elite of the elite, trained to routinely land on moving aircraft carriers and to refuel in midair, two of the most difficult maneuvers in aviation — are some of America’s main warriors against the Islamic State. In the year since airstrikes against Islamic State militants began, American pilots have assumed a huge bulk of the war effort. They have conducted more than 4,700 airstrikes since August 2014 — 87 percent of the manned flights by the American-led coalition — and provided air support for Iraqi security forces and Kurdish pesh merga fighters on the ground.

The Islamic State may have shoulder-fired, heat-seeking missiles, commonly known as Manpads for Man-Portable Air Defense Systems. But at the moment, the militant Sunni group does not appear to have the capability to bring down American fighter jets. A Jordanian plane that crashed in Syria in December, leading to the capture of the pilot and his eventual immolation by the Islamic State, is widely believed to have gone down because of mechanical failure or pilot error, and not because it was shot down.

“Quite honestly, the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marines own the skies,” said Maj. Anthony Bourke, a former Air Force fighter pilot. “So even though pilots dream of dogfights, the biggest risk now is small-arms fire, and if you stay above 10,000 feet, you’re not going to be hit.”

The risks are different. As Lieutenant Smallwood’s plane flew toward Iraq in May after his friend had ejected from his own jet, he could hear from the chatter on the radio that a recovery effort was underway. But Lieutenant Smallwood knew better than to clog up the frequency asking if Lieutenant Smith and his weapons officer on the plane had been found alive.


Five more hours to go. Arriving in the skies over Iraq, Lieutenant Smallwood’s Super Hornet connected with a refueling tanker to get gas, then continued with the task at hand. But whenever there was a lull in the flight, “all I could think about was my roommate and his W.S.O.,” Lieutenant Smallwood said, using the military term for weapons officer.

Engine troubles are not the only risk at 25,000 feet. The F/A-18s today require more G-forces than the planes of the “Top Gun” era, and pilots today pull nine G’s instead of four and five G’s. It is the difference, they say, between feeling that your head weighs 90 pounds instead of 40 pounds. (Most people’s heads weigh around 10 pounds.) So pilots have to be physically fit — not dehydrated or hungover from drinking and crooning the Righteous Brothers to Kelly McGillis at a bar the night before.

Beyond that, Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria are often in heavily populated civilian areas, which limits the air war to small, remote targets: single trucks, weapons caches and even individual machine guns.

Despite the precautions the pilots say they take, there are civilian casualties from airstrikes, although the number is in deep dispute. Officials with United States Central Command, which overseas American military operations in the Middle East, recently said that they had received reports of 31 episodes involving civilian casualties since the airstrikes began, and had dismissed 17 as not credible, with six still under investigation. One report, investigated for more than six months, led Centcom officials to conclude that two children were probably killed by a coalition airstrike.

Monitoring groups say the command’s figures are a gross understatement.

“When you’re called in to deliver a weapon, general world opinion swings very violently against you when you start killing the wrong people,” said Capt. Benjamin Hewlett, 46, call sign Pizza, who is the commander of air wing aboard the Roosevelt. He said that in the war against the Islamic State, bombs hit their intended targets almost all of the time. A big part of the reason, Captain Hewlett said, is that there are no American troops on the ground.

“So we don’t feel that we have to rush in,” he said. “The natural tendency is, our guys are under fire, I’ve got to get in there. But when you rush a bad delivery, people get hurt.”

Pilots and weapons officers spend a lot of their time in the air watching patterns of civilian life, to determine whether a movement on a road just outside of Ramadi is a truck full of Islamic State fighters or a pickup with civilians. They fly over designated grid areas, typically 60 square miles, searching for fighters, artillery and other signs of the enemy. They very often return to the Roosevelt with all of their bombs still strapped to the planes.

Certainly there are no Mavericks in the sky conducting barrel rolls over suspicious-looking enemy pilots in MiG fighters. “That is not tactically viable,” said Capt. Kyle Wilson, 29, call sign Betty, a Marine pilot on the Roosevelt.


It was late at night, and he and other members of his squadron were in the “ready room,” an eight-floors-deep clubroom/classroom that fighter pilots use when they are not in the air. The men — there is only one female pilot aboard the Roosevelt for this deployment — had been up at least since the shipwide reveille at dawn.

“If you do that, I’m just going to shoot you,” Captain Wilson said about the barrel rolls. The Pentagon in fact condemns them. When a Chinese fighter jet did one last August over an American Navy spy plane near Hainan Island, China, the Pentagon called it “unsafe and unprofessional” and the Obama administration issued a stern protest to the Chinese authorities.

Still, there was a lot of machismo on display. There is plenty of drinking at bars (although no alcohol is allowed on the Roosevelt), and plenty of attitude. Many of the men sport Breitling watches, the go-to expensive accessory of pilots around the world.

The big question in the ready room was the rumor that Hollywood was making “Top Gun 2.” So what would take the place of the beach volleyball scene with all the “Top Gun” pilots sweating under the California sun?

“Crud,” said Capt. Lanier Bishop, 31, call sign Pope. He flashed a quick look at his commanding officer and fellow pilot, Maj. William Mitchell, 39, call sign Skull. “It’s got to be Crud, right?”

Crud, the two said, is a combination of pool and rugby that fighter pilots play. At pool tables in officers’ clubs across the world, pilots use their hands, instead of pool cues, to whip the ball across the table, and then bodily tackle each other for some reason. One pilot said he had broken someone’s ribs playing Crud.

There remains a lot of camaraderie. Back in May, Lieutenant Smallwood did not know the fate of his roommate when he finally landed back on the Roosevelt just after 11 p.m., after his six-and-a-half-hour strike mission.

As he bolted out of his plane, Lieutenant Smallwood was told that his friend had survived, fished out of the water by rescuers.

“But I still had to run down to the room to see for myself,” Lieutenant Smallwood recalled. “First thing I did was hug him.”

‘Kissinger’, by Niall Ferguson - A review by Chris Patten - Financial Times

September 23, 2015 at 11:38pm

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http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/0a69b8b8-5c73-11e5-9846-de406ccb37f2.html

September 18, 2015 1:27 pm
‘Kissinger’, by Niall Ferguson
Chris Patten

In his account of a journey from Bavaria to the heart of power in Washington, Niall Ferguson portrays his subject as a man driven by principle more than pragmatism

Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist, by Niall Ferguson, Allen Lane, RRP£35 / Penguin Press, RRP$39.95, 1,008 pages
The All Souls historian Rohan Butler concluded the first volume of his biography of the French statesman Choiseul with this sentence on page 1,078: “The diplomatic and political career of the Duke of Choiseul had begun.”
Alas, Butler died before he was able to continue the story. We must hope that the same fate does not befall Niall Ferguson, the author of this huge biography of a great international public servant and scholar. Weighing in at close to 1,000 pages, it ends at the moment in 1968 when Henry Kissinger gets his first big job in a Washington administration, as national security adviser to President Richard Nixon. The runway to take-off stretches a very long way.
This is not to contest Kissinger’s importance and notoriety in 20th-century history. Now 92, he is one of the giants of America’s years of global pre-eminence. No wonder he appeared 15 times on the cover of Time magazine during his period as national security adviser and then secretary of state. Moreover, he continued to attract celebrity attention for decades after leaving office in 1977. This is partly because of his record in government, which made him the dark darling of conspiracy theorists; the next volume of this biography will presumably cover some of these controversies. Kissinger has also been kept in the spotlight by his regular and authoritative interventions in public debate, which continue to this day.
He offers his views not just as an experienced diplomat but also as a fine historian. This perhaps lured Ferguson — a professor of history at Harvard University and a ubiquitous contributor to the written and electronic media — into extensive analysis of and quotation from his subject’s early academic work, as if it all pointed the way inexorably to what he would do when transformed by presidential authority into a policymaker at the heart of the most powerful government in the world. What these passages admittedly do is to remind us that Kissinger’s life is not a value-free zone; he was clearly shaped more by Spinoza and Kant than by Machiavelli.

But we can understand more about Kissinger’s tactics and strategy from what he wrote after his years in office. You learn about his preoccupations as a policymaker, for example, by reading his masterly Diplomacy (1994). This draws significant parallels between the two international systems that have brought the modern world the greatest stability: the Concert of Europe that existed between 1815 and 1914, and the system dominated by the US after the second world war. Today the route to world order is more difficult to discern and navigate.
Kissinger’s personal journey from the industrial town of Fürth in Bavaria, whose Jewish community was terrorised by Nazi gangs, to the “Happy Days Are Here Again” years of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New York tells us much about his own values and fortitude. He was initially quite ambivalent about his new home. Writing to a friend in 1939 he noted, as have many other Europeans on their first encounter with the US, that he had to balance things he admired against things he deplored: “Alongside excessive wealth, unspeakable poverty. And then this individualism! You stand completely on your own, no one cares about you, you have to make your own way upwards.”
That is exactly what he did, first as a soldier-citizen fighting in Europe, then as one of those who managed the denazification campaign after the war’s end and the discovery in the concentration camps of what Nazism had meant for millions of Jews, homosexuals and other minorities. He explained thoughtfully to his parents why his job should not involve the pursuit of vengeance. It was vital to be fair as well as tough; nor did he lose his profound sense of the centrality of Germany to European civilisation. He had instructed those who worked for him to “lose no opportunity to prove by word and deed the virility of our ideals”.
Returning to America, Kissinger, like 2m other American servicemen, took advantage of the GI Bill to go to university on a Harvard scholarship — in his case accompanied by a cocker spaniel, Smoky. His peer group was rich in talent that took many of its members to the top in politics, journalism and public service. He majored in government but wrote his immensely long thesis on “The Meaning of History”. Then began the years of hand-to-hand combat common to so many competitive academic careers, where the ferocity of the argument is often in inverse proportion to the importance of the subject.
Kissinger was initially quite ambivalent about the US. ‘Alongside excessive wealth, unspeakable poverty,’ he wrote. ‘And then this individualism!’
Like other ambitious academics, Kissinger pitched his tent in “BosWash”, travelling backwards and forwards from Harvard to Washington to give his advice to any who would listen, regardless of their political affiliations. He was deeply hostile to the Soviet Union’s scheme for exerting its power and influence on Europe, for example by its proposal for a reunification of Germany on the basis of that country’s neutrality. He had a deep knowledge of German politics, as well as of the country’s strategic importance to the rest of its continent, and was always inclined to give precedence in his transatlantic travels to Bonn and Berlin, and even Paris, over London.
Ferguson argues that for all Kissinger’s expertise in German affairs, his problem was that he knew more about his country of birth than he did about the country of his citizenship. As late as 1959, the biographer suggests, Kissinger had probably visited fewer than 10 of America’s 50 states. This must have contributed to one of his major blind spots: his inability to understand that the aristocratic Governor Nelson Rockefeller, to whom he hitched his wagon, was increasingly unlikely to attract majority support in a Republican party that was moving at a canter to the right. He was horrified by the rabid intolerance of rightwing Barry Goldwater supporters at the 1964 Republican convention, just as he was later shocked by the antics of the anti-Vietnam war left on university campuses.
Kissinger became notorious for the first time through his writings on the tactics of nuclear warfare, which left him with the unjust reputation of a Dr Strangelove. To be fair to him, he was wrestling with what seemed to many to be the implausible basis of America’s security policy, namely that if its interests or those of an ally such as Germany were seriously threatened then massive nuclear retaliation would be the inevitable response. At an intellectual level it was impossible to imagine that anyone could seriously contemplate visiting Armageddon on the planet if, say, Moscow pushed too hard on Berlin. Kissinger argued that each threat should be dealt with at an appropriate level; the response to a smaller threat could be a smaller nuclear device. But it was not convincing that you could use smaller so-called tactical nuclear weapons without catastrophic consequences. The fallout in every sense could not be contained.
As it happened, it was possible to conduct a policy of flexible response, as President John F Kennedy did, combining credible military threats with imaginative diplomacy to end the Cuban missile crisis without blowing up the world. As for the other crises of the cold war, they were contained by the realisation, in Moscow as in Washington, that mutually assured destruction would follow any attempt to overplay a security hand. The policy was turned suitably enough into the acronym “MAD”, which it was. In recent years, Kissinger has joined other former American foreign policy and security officials to advocate beginning the elimination of all nuclear weapons.

Ferguson is particularly convincing in arguing against the popular view that Kissinger is the ultimate pragmatic realist, a polar opposite to those whose ideals shape and infuse their actions. It is of course possible and sensible to be pragmatic at one moment and an idealist the next, according to circumstance. Indeed as Tony Blair’s career demonstrated, it is even possible, if confusing, sometimes to be motivated by both sentiments at the same time. That was the case with the former British prime minister’s arguments for intervention in states that abused their citizens’ human rights. For Ferguson, Kissinger is a mainstream European conservative, moulded by Kant’s realism about humanity and by Burke’s respect for historical forces. “It is the dilemma of conservatism,” Kissinger once wrote, “that it must fight revolution anonymously, by what it is, not by what it says.” Kissinger’s views on how to handle postwar Germany, how to hold at bay Soviet ambitions, and how to articulate American foreign and security policy all had a moral and idealistic as well as a practical core.
As noted earlier, Kissinger’s blind spots included knowledge of American democratic politics, which certainly contributed to his unlikely alliance with Nixon. He had previously worked for both Kennedy and Johnson, in the latter case being led up the garden path by wily Vietnamese diplomacy in the honourable pursuit of a peace deal that would enable the US to escape from a terrible and divisive war. He would have liked to work for a Rockefeller administration, and contributed much good sense to the governor up to and beyond the point at which the billionaire politician’s presidential ambitions were finally sunk. A more cynically ambitious man might have abandoned the Rockefeller ship long before that. And then Nixon — tricky, but pretty clever, Dicky — almost accidentally made him an offer which he could not possibly refuse. The contingent factor in history took another bow.
Nixon shared Kissinger’s admiration for big historical figures. Kissinger himself rather exaggerated, in my view, the geopolitical wisdom of Charles de Gaulle. He was surely correct, like his new master, to see the huge significance of Mao, an appalling tyrant but the leader of a vast country that had held together after the war partly thanks to the ruthlessness of its leadership. China had mighty potential and promise. Nixon probably saw its economic significance more clearly than Kissinger, who never seems quite at home in the world of gross domestic product extrapolations, export figures and demography. The president understood that Vietnam was an appallingly damaging diversion for the US, since capitalism was inevitably going to trump communism and since globalisation would create a different and less polarised world. How best to get out of Vietnam and draw China into a changing global order? These were to be dominant subjects for the partnership of the “odd couple” formed in Washington in 1968.
This is where Ferguson leaves us. His last paragraph tells us that “the time of becoming was over” for Kissinger; “the time of being had at last begun”. The sentiment echoes Rohan Butler on Choiseul. What we can be sure of is that future volumes about “the time of being” will excite a lot more controversy than this one. Kissingerphobes must be counting the days. So next time passions will run much higher; knives will be out; judgment will be reached and simplistically demanded about the career in office of a very remarkable statesman, who like the rest of us (but on a global scale) tried to wrestle with the predicament of what it is to be human.
Lord Patten is chancellor of the University of Oxford. He is a former European commissioner for external relations and was the last governor of Hong Kong

Volkswagen’s deception is a warning to every company - Financial Times

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/9e4a72a2-2f8c-11e5-91ac-a5e17d9b4cff.html#axzz3mPGibw7b

September 23, 2015 5:42 pm
Volkswagen’s deception is a warning to every company
John GapperJohn Gapper

Suddenly, behaviour that was common practice is judged to be improper and possibly illegal

The most dangerous three-word phrase in business is: “Everyone does it.”
However conventional it is to bend the industry’s regulations, however great an advantage your rivals gain, however much pressure you face to do so too, there is a simple test for deciding whether to succumb to temptation. What would happen if the world found out? How great would the damage be?

Volkswagen’s installation of software to make its diesel cars emit more pollution on the road than in official tests is a disaster that has forced the resignation of Martin Winterkorn, chief executive. It could tarnish the entire European auto industry, which has invested heavily in diesel technology. But it is hardly the first time that a vehicle manufacturer has behaved sneakily.
It has become so common to game European fuel efficiency tests with tricks such as taping up doors and overinflating tyres to curb drag that most diesel cars are less fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly than claimed. In the US, Ford was found to have fitted an illegal “defeat device” — the charge facing VW — to vans in 1997, and Hyundai and Kia were fined $100m last year for fixing their tests.
The car industry is not alone in such behaviour. The same thing happens in many industries, from banking to pharmaceuticals. A few companies decide gently to bend the rules and stretch regulations and others soon follow. They know it is a little dodgy but it becomes normal practice and regulators turn a blind eye. Then, one day, someone goes too far and scandal erupts.
“Although I was operating within a system . . . in which it was commonplace, I was someone who was a serial offender,” Tom Hayes, the former UBS banker jailed for 14 years last month for rigging Libor benchmark rates, told the UK Serious Fraud Office. Mr Hayes was talented at it and at enlisting other traders to co-operate. An official investigation eventually ensued.
When the backlash comes, it comes with a vengeance. Suddenly, behaviour that was common practice, passed over with a nod and a wink, or secretly condoned to keep up with rivals, is judged to be improper and perhaps illegal. “Everyone did it” is no defence. Once it has been exposed to public gaze, and regulators have been shamed for failing to stop it, there is no forgiveness.
Amid an angry search for who was responsible within a company, senior executives are hastily drilled to face official inquiries and media briefings and answer the question: “Why did you do it?” There is no good response to it, although Michael Horn, VW’s US chief executive, had an accurate one: “We have totally screwed up.”
The key to getting away with bending rules is that it needs to be done subtly and discreetly. Abuse may be common but it cannot become too blatant, or it will alert regulators that tolerate some grey areas. The car industry is a prime example: it was public knowledge that the gap between the official fuel economy data and actual performance was wide but VW stupidly took the deception to a higher level.

Frauds often start in laboratories, where the outcome is bound to be artificial. A certificate attesting that a product works a certain way in a company’s laboratory — even if no one has cheated — cannot guarantee the same of its real-world performance. Inevitably, companies tend to focus on hitting the laboratory targets they are set, just as students cram for examinations.
The gap between a well-designed test and reality need not be huge. But bright minds will soon work out how to arbitrage the two, just as banks calculated how to meet regulatory capital standards with the minimum amount of equity capital in the run-up to the 2008 crisis. Hyundai and Kia cherry-picked the best mileage tests, achieved with a following wind and special tyres.
Crowd psychology rapidly takes hold. Company X knows what Company Y is doing to game its results without being punished by the regulator, and realises it cannot compete if it does not do the same. The tests are officially sanctioned, after all, and customers are not likely to question them. Any executive or engineer who tries to resist is overruled as naive or difficult.
Rivalry creates evermore ambitious attempts to gain an advantage, and greater reputational risk. VW contrived to fit its rule-breaking gadget to 11m cars under the noses of regulators before it was discovered. Even researchers at the International Council on Clean Transportation, which identified the deception in Europe, did not believe that it would be so blatant.
Sooner or later, one company goes too far. There is bound to be a Libor super-rigger, a VW, or a GlaxoSmithKline in China, which flouts the law to such an extent that it cannot be concealed. Many companies had paid bribes to doctors and hospitals in China, but its government was bound one day to make an example of a western company doing it so systematically.
The head of a Wall Street bank once told me the lesson he had learned from financial scandals was that ethics are absolute, not comparative. “We don’t behave as badly as our rivals” was a tempting but dangerous attitude. Many companies imperil themselves by clinging to this mantra.
Volkswagen wins the dubious honour of being the worst-behaved company in its industry, but it was a contest.
john.gapper@ft.com

Russia to deploy 2,000 in Syria air base mission’s ‘first phase’ - Financial Times

September 22, 2015 at 9:17pm

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September 21, 2015 9:08 pm
Russia to deploy 2,000 in Syria air base mission’s ‘first phase’
Kathrin Hille in Moscow and John Reed in Jerusalem

Russia is to deploy 2,000 military personnel to its new air base near the Syrian port city of Latakia, signalling the scale of Moscow’s involvement in the war-torn country.
The deployment “forms the first phase of the mission there”, according to an adviser on Syria policy in Moscow.

The force will include fighter aircraft crews, engineers and troops to secure the facility, said another person briefed on the matter.
The pair declined to confirm whether Moscow had sent surface-to-air missiles and fighter jets, as alleged by Washington at the weekend.
But Russian and western military experts said surface-to-air missiles were an integral part of the defences of any air base.
The comments are unlikely to allay fears in the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis), that Russia’s military involvement in Syria could escalate the country’s bloody civil war or risk incidents between Russian and other forces active in the country.
A Russian official on Monday dismissed as “disingenuous” comments by John Kerry, US secretary of state, that the presence of Russian air-to-air combat capacity and surface-to-air missiles in Syria “raises serious questions”, since the capabilities are of little military use against jihadi groups such as Isis, which is Moscow’s stated reason for its increased intervention in the Syrian conflict.
“You know as well as we do that anyone building an air base will put in such air defences, so there’s no reason to use this to cast doubt on our initiative to fight the Islamic State,” he said.
Three western defence officials agreed that the Russian deployment tallied with the numbers needed to establish a forward air base similar to those built by western militaries in Afghanistan.
Podcast

Benjamin Netanyahu is on a lightning visit to Moscow to discuss Russia’s military deployments in Syria in a sign of Israel’s growing unease over arms transfers in the region. Siona Jenkins talks to John Reed, Financial Times Jerusalem correspondent, about the Israeli prime minister’s concerns.
Fears that Russia’s ramped up military presence could further complicate the balance of forces in Syria prompted Israel’s prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to travel to Moscow for a meeting with President Vladimir Putin on Monday.
After the meeting, Mr Netanyahu told Israeli media that he and Mr Putin had agreed on a mechanism to co-ordinate the two countries’ military actions in Syria and prevent Israeli and Russian troops from accidentally exchanging fire.
“Israel and Russia share a common interest to ensure stability in the Middle East,” Mr Netanyahu said.
Mr Putin condemned attacks against Israel but said they were carried out by “internal elements” rather than the Syrian army, which he described as incapable of opening a new front.
“Our main goal is to defend the Syrian state,” Mr Putin said.
We must compromise with evil in Syria
Daniel Pudles illustration
Overriding goal must be to end the war and persuade outside forces to back a peace settlement
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The Israelis have warned repeatedly about the transfer of what they call “game-changing” weapons to Hizbollah. The Iran-backed militant group — which supports Moscow’s ally, Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad — has shelled Israel in the past. Israel has targeted suspected weapons convoys or caches inside Syria in several unacknowledged air strikes since 2013.
In a sign of the risks this could entail, Moscow on Monday accused Syrian rebel forces of shelling its embassy in Damascus and demanded that their western and regional allies take steps to rein them in.
The Russian foreign ministry said a shell, which landed near its embassy on Sunday but caused no casualties, came from Jobar, which is held by anti-Assad fighters who were not allied with Isis and had “external sponsors”.
“We expect a clear position with regard to this terrorist act from all members of the international community, including regional players,” the ministry said. “This requires not just words but concrete action.”
It added that the fighters’ “foreign sponsors” were responsible for using their influence on “illegal armed formations”.