For Hunt, this accident was particularly
poignant: She calls it the second of two “lightning strikes” in her life. She
is a DES daughter who had multiple abnormal Pap smears in her youth and is also
a breast cancer survivor (cancer runs in her family, but there is also evidence
that DES daughters get more breast cancer). “It’s very ironic,” Hunt explains.
“BPA was studied as a synthetic estrogen in the 1930s and abandoned in favor of
DES, which was more potent. Yet both of them found their way into my life. A
lot of the abnormalities turning up in DES sons and daughters can be reproduced
in mouse experiments. And that’s one reason I’m concerned about BPA. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
The effects we see in our mice are
pretty significant,” Hunt says.
Hunt’s research on BPA and the fetal
ovary shows that “one exposure can hit three different generations. It hits the
mom, crosses the placenta, and affects the fetus, but it also affects that
fetal ovary that is busy producing the eggs that will make the next generation.
So the mom’s exposure is impacting the genetic quality of her grandchildren.
We’re dealing here with multigenerational changes.”
Through studies like these, Jirtle
says, “we’re beginning to understand how a molecule present at the very
earliest stages after fertilization can in effect be remembered into your
twenties and thirties and maybe give rise to diseases. You can’t do toxicology
anymore without that insight.”
While chemists, biologists,
geneticists, and toxicologists are piecing together the puzzle, some consumers
have concluded they should simply try to limit exposure to plastics in their
own lives. “But how do you do that?” asks Soto, who herself uses glass
containers at home. “For instance, the milk you’re drinking was pumped through
plastic tubes. And you can’t store milk in permeable paper cartons—they have
plastic linings. Even if you try, you don’t know whether you’re limiting your exposure
by 5 percent or 95 percent.” BPA has been found in drinking water, in 41.2
percent of 139 streams sampled in 30 states, even in house dust. Even if we
could regulate BPA to levels that were safe, Soto cautions, “zero plus zero
plus zero is actually not zero. By that I mean you can take 10 estrogenic
chemicals at doses that on their own don’t have an effect, but if you add them
together, you end up with problems. BPA is only one of many estrogenic
chemicals in our environment.”
Krimsky favors legislation based on an
entirely new way of thinking. “We should base legislation on two rules,” he
explains. “One, if a synthetic chemical accumulates in your body and is not
metabolized, let’s ban it unless we need it for survival. Why? On the
precautionary notion that it can’t be good for the body to be a storage site
for junk chemicals with no known physiological purpose. Two, if a chemical is
biologically active and interacts with our receptors, it’s probably not good.
Ban it. Maybe it’s OK in very small doses, but it’s going to take you 50 or 100
years to figure out those doses, if you can even do it. We put a human being in
prison for life based on circumstantial evidence. Yet we’re looking for more
than circumstantial evidence in order to ban these chemicals.”
Hunt and other scientists hope their
research will catch the attention of the public even more so than industry or
policymakers. “I’m struck by how fast companies respond to consumer demand,”
Hunt says. “When our study broke in 2003 and the media came calling, I kept
saying that what concerns me the most are baby bottles. They’re polycarbonate,
and it doesn’t stand up well. I got a call from a baby bottle manufacturer one
day, and he said, ‘What’s going on? We’re getting all these calls from
consumers.’ And I was amazed to see how rapidly new polymers came on the market
for baby bottles.” Indeed, sales of glass and non-polycarbonate baby bottles
are rising. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
In turn, when consumers are charged
for plastic bags at the supermarket, they tend to bring their own. Ireland’s
“plastax,” launched in 2002, has resulted in a 90 percent voluntary reduction
in plastic bag use. Finally, corn-based, biodegradable plastics are beginning
to surface, and though these polymers are not yet as durable as current
plastics, the technology is advancing.
“We have no choice,” Soto says. “If
reproduction is being affected, the survival of the species is compromised.
Sooner or later we have to regulate it. And what constitutes proof? In the
1950s a woman’s lifetime risk of breast cancer was 1 in 22; today it’s 1 in 7.
A threefold increase cannot be genetic, it is most likely environmental, and
many of us believe it is due to endocrine disrupters. To know whether fetal
exposure to BPA is producing breast cancer in humans, you have to collect blood
from the mother and the newborn, bank it, and follow that cohort for many, many
decades. One generation of researchers can’t do it. This is painful, and the
public should know about it.”
Determining the long-term consequences is
difficult, because early exposure can have effects observed only much later in
life.
How do I love thee, plastic? Let me
count the ways. I wake up and glance at my plastic digital cable box to check
the time. I go to the bathroom to use my plastic toothbrush, shaking a bit of
my “nontoxic” tooth powder from a plastic bottle. I fill the plastic container
of my Waterpik with mouthwash from another plastic bottle. I step into the
shower—my lacy white curtain is protected by a plastic liner, and my
chlorine-free shower water comes to me through a plastic-encased filter.
Ah, but in the kitchen I am a bit
freer of you, plastic. When I learned that my plastic bowls, dishes, and
containers could leach harmful chemicals—especially the ones with that sneaky,
practically invisible little recycling triangle embossed with the number 7—I
bought Pyrex. My soft-boiled eggs are served up in a Pyrex glass dish. A moment
of rebellion against thee, plastic! But the microwave in which I heat water for
tea is made of plastic as well as metal. And the refrigerator shelf on which I
store my eggs is plastic.
The coaster on my desk, on which I
place my steaming, oh-so-healthy green tea, is plastic. The 22-inch
liquid-crystal computer monitor that seems to be the fulcrum of my entire
existence is made of plastic. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
My keyboard, my mouse, my computer speakers, the CD cases for
my music collection, my polycarbonate reading glasses, the remote control for
my stereo, my telephone—all plastic. The sun shines through my window onto a
riot of green plants in … plastic pots. (I could switch to ceramic, but it’s so
heavy and hard to heft when I want to water them.) And I’ve been up for only an
hour.
The second USS Thresher (SSN-593) was
the lead ship of her class of nuclear-powered attack submarines in the United
States Navy. Her loss at sea during deep-diving tests in 1963 is often
considered a watershed event in the implementation of the rigorous submarine
safety program SUBSAFE.
The contract to build Thresher was
awarded to Portsmouth Naval Shipyard on 15 January 1958, and her keel was laid
on 28 May 1958. She was launched on 9 July 1960, was sponsored by Mrs.
Frederick B. Warder (wife of the famous Pacific War skipper), and was
commissioned on 3 August 1961, with Commander Dean L. Axene in command.
Thresher conducted lengthy sea trials
in the western Atlantic and Caribbean Sea areas in 1961 and 1962. These tests
provided a thorough evaluation of her many new and complex technological
features and weapons. Following these trials, she took part in Nuclear
Submarine Exercise (NUSUBEX) 3-61 off the northeastern coast of the United
States from September 18 to September 24, 1961.
On October 18 Thresher headed south
along the East Coast. While in port at San Juan, Puerto Rico on 2 November
1961, her reactor was shut down and the diesel generator was used to carry the
"hotel" electrical loads. Several hours later the generator broke
down, and the electrical load was then carried by the battery. The generator
could not be quickly repaired, so the captain ordered the reactor restarted.
However, the battery charge was depleted before the reactor went critical. With
no electrical power for ventilation, temperatures in the machinery spaces
reached 60 °C (140 °F), and the boat was partially evacuated. Cavalla (SS-244)
arrived the next morning and provided power from her diesels, enabling Thresher
to restart her reactor.
Thresher conducted further trials and
fired test torpedoes before returning to Portsmouth on November 29. The boat
remained in port through the end of the year, and spent the first two months of
1962 evaluating her sonar and Submarine Rocket (SUBROC) systems. In March, the
submarine participated in NUSUBEX 2-62 (an exercise designed to improve the
tactical capabilities of nuclear submarines) and in antisubmarine warfare
training with Task Group ALPHA.
Off Charleston, SC, Thresher undertook
operations observed by the Naval Antisubmarine Warfare Council before she
returned briefly to New England waters, after which she proceeded to Florida
for more SUBROC tests. However, while moored at Port Canaveral, Florida, the
submarine was accidentally struck by a tug which damaged one of her ballast
tanks. After repairs at Groton, Connecticut, by the Electric Boat Company,
Thresher went south for more tests and trials off Key West, Florida, then
returned northward and remained in dockyard for refurbishment through the early
spring of 1963.
On April 9, 1963, after the completion
of this work, Thresher, now commanded by Lieutenant Commander John Wesley
Harvey, began post-overhaul trials. Accompanied by the submarine rescue ship
USS Skylark (ASR-20), she sailed to an area some 350 kilometers (220 statute
miles or 190 nautical miles) east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and on the
morning of April 10 started deep-diving tests. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
As Thresher neared her test depth,
Skylark received garbled communications over underwater telephone indicating
"... minor difficulties, have positive up-angle, attempting to blow."
When Skylark's queries as to if Thresher were under control were answered only
by the ominous sound of compartments collapsing, surface observers gradually
realized Thresher had sunk. All 129 officers, crewmen and military and civilian
technicians aboard her were killed.
After an extensive underwater search
using the bathyscaphe Trieste, oceanographic ship Mizar and other ships,
Thresher’s remains were located on the sea floor, some 8,400 feet (2560 m)
below the surface, in six major sections. The majority of the debris is in an
area of about 134,000 m²
(160,000 yd²). The major
sections are the sail, sonar dome, bow section, engineering spaces section,
operations spaces section, and the stern planes.
Deep sea photography, recovered
artifacts, and an evaluation of her design and operational history permitted a
Court of Inquiry to conclude Thresher had probably suffered the failure of a
weld in a salt water piping system, which relied heavily on silver brazing
instead of welding; earlier tests using ultrasound equipment found potential
problems with about 14% of the tested brazed joints, most of which were
determined not to pose a risk significant enough to require a repair. High-pressure
water spraying from a broken pipe joint may have shorted out one of the many
electrical panels, which in turn caused a shutdown ("scram") of the
reactor, with a subsequent loss of propulsion. The inability to blow the
ballast tanks was later attributed to excessive moisture in Threshers
high-pressure air flasks, which froze and plugged its own flowpath while
passing through the valves. This was later simulated in dock-side tests on the
Thresher's sister ship, USS Tinosa (SSN-606). During a test to simulate blowing
ballast at or near test depth, ice formed on strainers installed in valves; the
flow of air lasted only a few seconds. (Air driers were later retrofitted to
the high pressure air compressors, beginning with Tinosa, to permit the
emergency blow system to operate properly.)
Unlike diesel submarines, nuclear subs
relied on speed and deck angle (that is, driving the ship towards the surface)
rather than deballasting to surface. Ballast tanks were almost never blown at
depth; this could cause the ship to rocket to the surface out of control.
Normal procedure was to drive the ship to periscope depth, raise the periscope
to verify the area was clear, then blow the tanks and surface the ship.
At the time, reactor-plant operating
procedures precluded a rapid reactor restart following a scram, or even the
ability to use steam remaining in the secondary system to "drive" the
ship to the surface. After a scram, standard procedure was to isolate the main
steam system, cutting off the flow of steam to the turbines providing
propulsion and electricity. This was done to prevent an over-rapid cool-down of
the reactor. Thresher's Reactor Control Officer, Lt. Raymond McCoole, was not
at his station in the maneuvering room, or indeed on the ship, during the fatal
dive. McCoole was at home caring for his wife who had been injured in a freak
household accident — he had been all but ordered ashore by a sympathetic
Commander Harvey. McCoole's trainee Jim Henry, fresh from nuclear power school,
probably followed standard operating procedures and gave the order to isolate
the steam system after the scram, even though Thresher was at or slightly below
her maximum depth and was taking on water. Once closed, the large steam system
isolation valves could not be reopened quickly. In later life, McCoole was sure
he would have delayed shutting the valves, thus allowing the ship to
"answer bells" and drive herself to the surface, despite the flooding
in the engineering spaces. Admiral Rickover later changed the procedure,
allowing steam to be withdrawn from the secondary system in limited quantities
for several minutes following a scram.
There was much (covert) criticism of
Rickover's training after Thresher went down, the argument being his
"nukes" were so well conditioned to protect the nuclear plant they
would have shut the main steam stop valves by rote — depriving the ship of
needed propulsion — even at great depths and with the ship clearly in jeopardy.
Nothing enraged Rickover more than this argument. Common sense, he argued,
would prove this to be untrue.
It's more likely that the engine room
crew was simply overwhelmed by the flooding casualty, or took too long to
contain it. In a dockside simulation of flooding in the engineroom, held before
Thresher sailed, it took the watch in charge 20 minutes to isolate a simulated
leak in the auxiliary seawater system. At test depth, taking on water, and with
the reactor shut down, Thresher would not have had anything like 20 minutes to
recover. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
Even after isolating a short-circuit
in the reactor controls it would have taken nearly 10 minutes to restart the
plant.
Thresher imploded (that is, one or
more of her compartments collapsed inwards in a fraction of a second) at a
depth somewhere between 1,300 and 2,000 feet (400 and 600m). All on board were
killed nearly instantly (1 or 2 seconds at most).
Over the next several years, the Navy
implemented the SUBSAFE program to correct design and construction problems on
all submarines (nuclear and diesel-electric) in service, under construction,
and in planning. During the formal inquiry, it was discovered record-keeping at
the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard was far from adequate. For example, no one could
determine the whereabouts of hull weld X-rays made of Thresher's sister ship
Tinosa, nearing completion at Portsmouth, or, indeed, whether they had been
made at all. It was also determined Thresher 's engine room layout was awkward,
in fact dangerous, as there were no centrally-located isolation valves for the
main and auxiliary seawater systems. Most subs were subsequently equipped or
retrofitted with flood control levers, which allowed the Engineer Officer of
the Watch in the maneuvering room to remotely close isolation valves in the
seawater systems from a central panel, a task necessarily performed by hand on
Thresher. Hand-power valves might not even have been accessible during a flooding
casualty: at such depths, the blast of water from even a small leak (a
"water spike") can dent metal cabinets, rip insulation from cables,
and even cut a man in half. (Water pressure at 1,000 feet (300 m) is about 450
psi (3,100 kPa).)
SUBSAFE would prove itself to be a
crucial part of the Navy's safe operation of nuclear submarines, but was
disregarded just a few years later in a rush to get another nuclear sub,
Scorpion ready for service as part of yet another program meant to increase
nuclear submarine availability. The subsequent loss of Scorpion reaffirmed the
need for SUBSAFE and apart from Scorpion, the U.S. Navy has suffered no further
losses of nuclear submarines.
The Navy has periodically monitored
the environmental conditions of the site since the sinking and reported the
results in an annual public report on environmental monitoring for U.S. Naval
nuclear-powered ships. These reports provide specifics on the environmental
sampling of sediment, water, and marine life which were taken to ascertain
whether the submarine has had a significant effect on the deep ocean
environment. The reports also explain the methodology for conducting deep sea
monitoring from both surface vessels and submersibles. The monitoring data
confirms that there has been no significant effect on the environment. Nuclear
fuel in the submarine remains intact.
U.S. submarine classes are generally
known by the hull number of the lead ship of the class - for instance, Los
Angeles-class boats are called 688s because the hull number of USS Los Angeles
was SSN-688. The Thresher-class boats should thus be called 593s, but since
Thresher's sinking they have been referred to as 594s (Permit class).
* 07:47: Thresher begins its descent
to the test depth of 1,300 feet (400 m).
* 07:52: Thresher levels off at 400 feet (120
m), contacts the surface, and the crew inspects the ship for leaks. None is
found.
* 08:09: Commander Harvey reports reaching half
the test depth.
* 08:25: Thresher reaches 1,000 feet (300 m).
* 09:02: Thresher is cruising at just a few
knots (subs normally moved slowly and cautiously at great depths, lest a sudden
jam of the diving planes send the ship below test depth in a matter of
seconds.) The boat is descending in slow circles, and announces to Skylark she
is turning to "Corpen [course] 090." At this point, transmission
quality from the Thresher begins to noticeably degrade, possibly as a result of
thermoclines.
* 09:09: It is believed a brazed pipe-joint
ruptures in the engine room. The crew would have attempted to stop the leak; at
the same time, the engine room would be filling with a cloud of mist. Under the
circumstances, Commander Harvey's likely decision would have been to order full
speed, full rise on the sail planes, and blowing main ballast in order to
surface. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
Due to Joule-Thomson effect, the
pressurized air rapidly expanding in the pipes cools down, condensing moisture
and depositing it on strainers installed in the system to protect the moving
parts of the valves; in only a few seconds the moisture freezes, clogging the
strainers and blocking the air flow, halting the effort to blow ballast. Water
leaking from the broken pipe most likely causes short circuits leading to an
automatic shutdown of the ship's reactor, causing a loss of propulsion. The
logical action at this point would have been for Harvey to order propulsion shifted
to a battery-powered backup system. As soon as the flooding was contained, the
engine room crew would have begun to restart the reactor, an operation that
would be expected to take at least 7 minutes.
* 09:12: Skylark pages Thresher on the underwater
telephone: "Gertrude check, K [over]." With no immediate response
(although Skylark is still unaware of the conditions aboard Thresher), the
signal "K" is repeated twice.
* 09:13: Harvey reports status via underwater
telephone. The transmission is garbled, though some words are recognizable:
"[We are] experiencing minor difficulty, have positive up-angle,
attempting to blow." The submarine, growing heavier from water flooding
the engine room, continues its descent, probably tail-first. Another attempt to
empty the ballast tanks is performed, again failing due to the formation of
ice. Officers on the Skylark could hear the hiss of compressed air over the
loudspeaker at this point.
* 09:14: Skylark acknowledges with a brisk,
"Roger, out," awaiting further updates from the SSN. A follow-up
message, "No contacts in area," is sent to reassure Thresher she can
surface quickly, without fear of collision, if required.
* 09:15: Skylark queries Thresher about her
intentions: "My course 270 degrees. Interrogative range and bearing from
you." There is no response, and Skylark's captain, Lieutenant Commander
Hecker, sends his own gertrude message to the submarine, "Are you in
control?"
* 09:16: Skylark picks up a garbled transmission
from Thresher, transcribed in the ship's log as "900 N." [The meaning
of this message is unclear, and was not discussed at the enquiry; it may have
indicated the submarine's depth and course, or it may have referred to a Navy
"event number" (1000 indicating loss of submarine), with the
"N" signifying a negative response to the query from Skylark,
"Are you in control?"]
* 09:17: A second transmission is received, with
the partially recognizable phrase "exceeding test depth...." The leak
from the broken pipe grows with increased pressure.
* 09:18: Skylark detects a high-energy
low-frequency noise with characteristics of an implosion.
* 09:20: Skylark continues to page Thresher,
repeatedly calling for a radio check, a smoke bomb, or some other indication of
the boat's condition.
* 11:04: Skylark attempts to transmit a message
to COMSUBLANT (Commander, Submarines, Atlantic Fleet): "Unable to
communicate with Thresher since 0917R. Have been calling by UQC voice and CW,
QHB, CW every minute. Explosive signals every 10 minutes with no success. Last
transmission received was garbled. Indicated Thresher was approaching test
depth.... Conducting expanding search." Radio problems meant that
COMSUBLANT did not receive and respond to this message until 12:45. Hecker initiated
"Event SUBMISS [loss of a submarine]" procedures at 11:21, and
continued to repeatedly hail the Thresher until after 17:00.
On April 11, at a news conference at
10:30, the Navy officially declared the ship as lost.
* Just outside the main gate of the Naval
Weapons Station, Seal Beach, California, a Thresher-Scorpion Memorial honors
the crews of the two submarines. [2]
* In Carpentersville, IL the Dundee Township
Park District named a swimming facility in honor of Thresher.
It is located outside the USS Albacore museum.
* A Joint Resolution was introduced in 2001
calling for the erection of a memorial in Arlington National Cemetery, but this
proposal has yet to be adopted.[3]
* On April 12, 1963, President John Kennedy
issued an Executive Order (No. 11104) paying tribute to the crew of Thresher by
flying flags at half-staff. [4]
* The musician Phil Ochs composed a song
detailing the vessel's demise. Pete Seeger also composed a song inspired by the
vessel.
* The Thresher's hull number, 593, can be seen
on the sailfin of the fictional USS Wayne in the movie The Spy Who Loved Me.
Sometime in August 2011, a boxy space
probe called Dawn will settle into orbit around one of the most underrated and
overlooked objects in the solar system, a giant oblong asteroid named Vesta.
After lingering for almost 10 months of study, Dawn will depart for Ceres, the
biggest asteroid of all. Ceres is so large that it was recently promoted to the
rank of dwarf planet, putting it on a par with Pluto and highlighting its
status as a key planetary missing link.
Vesta and Ceres are the big enchiladas
of the asteroid belt, a loose collection of rubble left over from the earliest
days of the solar system. They are interesting because they’re like time
capsules. “These two bodies are building blocks,” says Chris Russell, the
principal investigator for the Dawn mission. It was asteroids like these that
“came together to make the rest of the planets. It might have taken millions of
Vestas and Cereses to make Earth. We want to understand how the building blocks
were different from one another and how they came together to build the
planets. Vesta and Ceres represent an important stage in the history of the
solar system.”
Vesta and Ceres, along with the rest
of the material in the aster–oid
belt, would have coalesced into a planet too, were it not for Jupiter’s
powerfully disruptive gravity. Ceres is 585 miles wide and contains more than a
quarter of all the mass in the asteroid belt. It was the first asteroid
discovered, spotted by Italian astron–omer Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
Vesta, the second-largest asteroid,
was discovered six years later. For a few years, both were regarded as bona
fide planets, but scientists soon discovered many more small bodies in similar
orbits. In the mid-1800s these objects were reclassified as “asteroids” and
largely dismissed as bit players. It has taken a century and a half to shift
that view.
Although Vesta is just under one-third
the mass of Ceres, in some ways we know it much more intimately. Vesta’s
composition closely matches that of a group of common meteorites that have been
found on Earth, called HED meteorites; these are literally chips off Vesta’s
block. Blurry but tantalizing images from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest
where those space rocks came from: A massive crater dominates Vesta’s southern
hemisphere, testifying to a powerful collision that gouged out nearly 1 percent
of its volume a billion years ago. From studies of the HED meteor–ites and from measurements of light
reflected off the asteroid’s surface, scientists have concluded that Vesta has
a very planetlike nickel-iron core. And its surface is basaltic—largely formed
by lava flows from below.
Ceres, by contrast, is a far more
mysterious body that could yield more profound discoveries. Its dark surface
(Ceres reflects just one-fourth as much light as Vesta) indicates a water-rich
interior; some researchers even speculate that it could have a mile-deep ocean
under a frozen surface. Water raises the possibility of life, which
automatically elevates asteroids in the cosmic pecking order. It also implies
that Ceres is the largest intact piece of the raw material that built Earth
into the wet, living world it is today. But without close-up observations,
these ideas remain hypothetical.
“Its surface looks like clay, which is
the result of an interaction between water and rock. Where do you get clay on
Earth? In riverbeds! Why would the surface of this asteroid be like the clay we
see on Earth when we look at riverbeds? That is a mystery to us.”
Russell has spent much of the past 15
years fighting to get the crucial close-up of these two forgotten miniplanets.
When a Delta II rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral (video) shortly after
sunrise last September 27 and shoved Dawn onto its 3.2-billion-mile journey, he
finally let out a deep sigh of relief; for a long time it had not been clear
that NASA could muster the money and the technology to make the mission happen.
To conduct meaningful studies of both
Vesta and Ceres, Dawn will be the first spacecraft to orbit two
extraterrestrial bodies in a row, a major engineering challenge. Entering and
leaving orbits require a lot of energy—too much energy, in fact, for a
conventional rocket. What makes Dawn’s mission possible is a type of propulsion
known as an ion engine.
Ion engines work by stripping electrons
from the atoms of an inert gas such as xenon, making them positively charged. A
negatively electrified grid at the back of the engine attracts the ions,
accelerating them backward. The ions fly past the grid and out the back of the
rocket, pushing the rocket forward. A typical ion engine provides 10 times the
specific impulse of a conventional solid-fuel booster (specific impulse can be
thought of as a spaceship’s miles-per-gallon rating). In gaining fuel
efficiency, ion engines sacrifice thrust, the ability to deliver strong
acceleration. On Earth they are useless because they are too weak to get off
the ground. But in space they can slowly but steadily—and very
efficiently—build up to extremely high velocities.
Russell got interested in ion engines
in 1992, when he met Scott Benson, an engineer at NASA’s Lewis Research Center
in Cleveland (now the Glenn Research Center), who had recently begun
experimenting with ion propulsion. In fact, NASA had explored the technology as
far back as the 1960s but lost interest as the agency’s focus shifted to the
space shuttle; ion engines had been developed only to make minor adjustments in
the paths of Earth-orbiting satellites
When NASA started its New Millennium
program in the 1990s to develop innovative spaceflight technologies, research
on ion thrusters began again, this time in earnest. “One of the features of ion
propulsion is that it essentially allows you to fly on a smaller launch
vehicle, at lower cost, to destinations that would require a larger vehicle
with chemical propulsion,” says Benson. At first Russell’s instinct was to use
ion propulsion to go back to the moon. As a postgraduate researcher on the
Apollo program, he had developed instrumentation for the command module that
measured the lunar magnetic field. With Benson he spent two years on a sequel
of sorts, a lunar orbiter that used an ion engine, but the idea was passed
over. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/He next worked up a proposal to go to Vesta but again failed to
win backing from NASA. Russell suspects that ion propulsion was deemed too
risky—it had never been used on a space probe. He tried to be philosophical:
“Each time you lose,” he says, “you learn something.”
The challenge was to turn an engine
intended for occasional use on a satellite into a trustworthy interplanetary
thruster. Deep Space 1, an engineering test mission launched by NASA in 1998,
demonstrated that an ion engine could be used to move around the solar system.
“That excited people,” Russell says. “That was a winner.” In December 2001,
NASA gave Dawn a green light.
“Dawn really reflects a big departure
from what we used to do in planetary exploration,” Russell adds. “The way we’re
probing these bodies is very cost-effective.” NASA considered the cost of
exploring both Vesta and Ceres with chemical rockets and concluded that it
would have required two missions at $750 million each, as opposed to Dawn’s
sub-$500 million price tag. “We’re saving a billion dollars compared with what
it would have cost us to do it any other way,” Russell says.
In Russell’s proposal, Dawn used the
same basic engine design as Deep Space 1 but needed a larger xenon fuel tank
and other changes to ensure the system would survive its eight-year mission.
Making these alterations nearly doomed the project, forcing it way over its
$373 million budget. “The design parameters of Dawn were ambitious,” says Tom Jones,
a former shuttle astronaut and now a consultant to NASA. “No probe had ever
gone to one body, slowed down and achieved orbit, and then turned around and
gone to a second body. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/That puts a lot of stress on an engine, and you have to make it
reliable.”
By October 2005 Dawn was $73 million
over budget. That, combined with concerns over the fuel tank’s design and the
mission’s management, prompted NASA to pull the plug, canceling the project
altogether in March 2006. NASA was also scrambling for funds to cover President
George W. Bush’s moon program. Despite having already spent hundreds of
millions of dollars, administrators may have been willing to scrap Dawn to
avoid spending any more. Russell insists the project’s technical troubles were
nothing out of the ordinary for such a complicated mission, and that NASA’s
decision to cancel the project was foolhardy. “I don’t have any logical reason
for why they did that,” he says. “To throw away the roughly $300 million that
had been invested was crazy. Why not just finish off the project and get a
return on this investment?” Fortunately, NASA’s chief administrator, Michael
Griffin, allowed an appeal, and the mission was reinstated.
Now journeying outward, Dawn is
following a flight plan unlike that of a conventional spacecraft. To set course
for Vesta, a chemical rocket would burn for a few minutes near Earth, putting
it on a path that intersected Vesta’s orbit, and then burn again to enter that
orbit. Dawn’s ion engine, by contrast, has to accelerate the spacecraft
continuously for months on end, spiraling outward until its trajectory matches
Vesta’s orbit. The thrust from each of Dawn’s three ion engines is minuscule, a
force equivalent to that of the weight of a piece of paper resting on the palm
of your hand. But an engine will be firing during 90 percent of the trip,
building up a speed as high as that attained by any chemical rocket.
A Mars flyby in February 2009 will
help things along, giving Dawn a gravitational kick. In August 2011 it will
begin slowing down as it approaches and then settles into orbit about Vesta.
The craft will fire up its engines again in May 2012 to set course for Ceres.
It will arrive in February 2015, once again slowing down to enter orbit and
snap photos.
Taking snapshots will be a major part
of its mission, because Dawn is not exactly a flying lab bristling with
instruments. It has only three—part of the trade-off necessary to keep its
weight and cost under control. A camera will create detailed maps of the two
asteroids, with a resolution of about 225 feet for Vesta and 400 feet for
Ceres. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/A spectrometer will measure the light absorbed by the asteroids’
surfaces, which will tell much about their composition. And a gamma ray and
neutron detector will measure cosmic radiation bouncing off the surface of the
asteroids. (It will be able to scan several yards below Ceres’ surface,
searching for ice or liquid water.) In addition, variations in Dawn’s radio
signal will be monitored to provide information about the gravitational
pull—hence the internal structure—of the asteroids.
During the years of proposals and
rejections, Russell had plenty of time to think about what Dawn might find when
it finally reached its mystery worlds. His interests naturally led him to
McCord, another asteroid hunter, who had gotten into the business indirectly.
At Caltech in the 1960s, McCord helped develop instruments for remote
spectrometry—analyzing the light coming off planets and stars. The first thing
McCord and his colleagues trained their new instruments on was the moon, but
soon they began measuring everything in sight. They worked their way through
the planets and down to the asteroids, and eventually Vesta found itself in
their crosshairs.
“It doesn’t sound like exploration,
but that’s the way it really works,” McCord says. “You’ve got an instrument and
you just go out and do everything you can with it. New data are power in
science, and if you can measure something 10 times better than somebody else
can, you’re going to learn a lot of exciting things.”
McCord didn’t get around to looking at
Vesta until the early 1970s, and even then he didn’t give it much thought until
his team got around to processing the data. “I was in the lab one day and one
of the guys pulled the Vesta spectrum out of the computer, which we had
observed a week or a month before,” he says. “And my God, it had one of the
most beautiful absorption features you ever saw on a planetary object.” The
data indicated that Vesta was basaltic, which suggested that Vesta’s rocks had
been heated to melting at some point and then cooled. The discovery also
established that the HED meteorites and Vesta shared the same composition.
McCord and his researchers also looked
at Ceres but didn’t get far. Ceres was darker and murkier, and it didn’t have
the clearly identifiable spectrum of Vesta. McCord’s grad students set to work
on the data and came up with some preliminary findings: Ceres was a
carbonaceous chondrite (a type of asteroid composed of water locked in minerals
and carbon-based materials), and it had not been thermally altered. In other
words, it had never melted and cooled, as Vesta had. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/This posed more questions than it answered. How did a large
asteroid evolve and retain significant amounts of water? Nobody had any
theories to explain it, and the researchers dropped the subject.
When the Dawn mission was approved,
much of the focus was on Vesta. “You’re human, so you’re generally interested
in things you know about,” Russell admits. “If you don’t have any information,
you don’t have that thing to grab your interest.” That attitude began to shift
in 2002, when McCord took a sabbatical to Nantes, on France’s west coast. “I
got to thinking about Ceres, and I learned that the people who had been doing
the most careful orbit and mass determinations were at the University of
Bordeaux, a two-hour drive to the south.” McCord went down and learned that
researchers there had been able to make accurate estimates of Ceres’ density.
Pure water has a density of 1 (measured in grams per cubic centimeter). A
conventional dry asteroid, made of silicates with some iron mixed in, would
have a density of 3 or 3.5; Vesta’s is thought to be in this range. Ceres has a
density only slightly higher than 2. That means there is a lot of water in the
mix.
McCord found the work of Christophe
Sotin and his graduate students at the University of Nantes even more
intriguing. Sotin had developed a computer model of how Saturn’s biggest moon,
Titan, could have formed without its liquids boiling off. Although Titan is
chemically very different from Ceres, it too contains a lot of water. Perhaps,
thought McCord, some version of Sotin’s model could explain how Ceres could
have formed with its water intact. “We began to see that it was easy for Ceres
in the early, early history to have created a liquid ocean,” McCord says.
Here’s how the theory goes: In the
early solar system, dust particles glommed together to form bigger dust
particles, which formed pebbles, then rocks, and so forth, until they combined
into an object up to several hundred miles in diameter. The original dust
particles were made largely of silicates mixed with other materials, including
water and aluminum 26, a radioactive isotope with a half-life of about 700,000
years. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/That’s just long enough to make a big difference in how an
asteroid evolves. Vesta and most other asteroids, the theory goes, accreted
quickly and accumulated a lot of aluminum 26 that had not yet decayed. The
aluminum 26 produced so much heat inside the asteroid that any water evaporated
into space. Ceres, by contrast, accreted more slowly, so by the time it formed,
the aluminum 26 had already mostly burned itself out. As a result, Ceres
retained most of its water—and a memory of the solar system’s original composition.
These findings ignited McCord’s
interest in Ceres, to the point where “I kept demanding we go to Ceres first,”
he says. Russell sympathizes. “If we had to pick which was the most
interesting, Ceres or Vesta, it’s not clear which one would win,” he says.
The argument is moot: Vesta is closer
than Ceres, and therefore it must be Dawn’s first stop. But Ceres may make the
bigger headlines. Vesta seems like Mercury or the moon, writ on a smaller
scale. Ceres is unique. Imaging of the surface may reveal whether there is
indeed an ocean beneath an icy crust. Observing the surface should allow
scientists to glean some idea of how the interior behaves—if there’s volcanic
activity that could provide the heat to sustain life, for instance. Dawn’s
spectrometer will be able to detect the presence of organic molecules.
Unfortunately, Dawn isn’t equipped to
search for past or (dare we dream?) present life on Ceres. That would require
penetrating the surface and taking and analyzing samples. “To detect life, you
need a pretty sophisticated lab on the surface or in the interior or wherever
the environment is,” McCord says. “That’s technically a major challenge and
virtually impossible—nobody’s willing to spend the amount of money to do that.”
For now, at least. After Dawn’s visit,
attitudes might change.
No one expects a 3-year-old who loves
to dress like a princess to swear like a sailor.
But early exposure is not so uncommon.
Who's to blame? Well, there's a pretty apt quote from a 1970 Pogo cartoon:
"We have met the enemy, and he is us."
The "us" are parents. . http://louis-j-sheehan.org/A few weeks ago, I put a question out to hundreds of mothers on a
local list-serv asking for anecdotes about the first time they heard their
children use inappropriate words.
Many responses were similar to mom
Julia Gordon of Silver Spring, Md. She was in her car, in a hurry and trying to
park.
"The parking lot was crazy,"
says Gordon, a lawyer and mother of a four-year-old daughter. When someone sped
into a parking space she had been waiting for, Gordon said under her breath,
"He totally screwed me."
And a few minutes later, she heard her
daughter parrot back the same phrase.
"I have to admit I did laugh at
first," says Gordon. "Then I immediately stopped and told her, 'We
don't say that word!'"
The Worst Swear Word of All
Psychologists say it's no surprise
that children mimic words and phrases.
"That's just language learning.
These words have no special status as taboo words," says Paul Bloom,
Ph.D., of Yale University. "Learning they're taboo words is a later
step."
Bloom explains that children are using
words to communicate instinctively. They don't yet have the judgment to take a
step back and think about whether a word is appropriate for a given situation.
Bloom remembers one day when his son
Max, then 6, came home from school.
Max asked in a hushed voice:
"Dad, do you know what the worst swear word of all is?"
His son then went on to explain that
"damn" must be the worst. When Bloom asked why, his son said, "I
listen to my babysitter talk on the phone, and she uses the 'f' word, and the
's' word, but she never says 'damn!'"
A study by the Parents Television
Council found that about once an hour children watching popular children's
networks will hear mild curse words such as "stupid,"
"loser" and "butt." The scope and frequency can rise
immeasurably with exposure to adult programs and popular music.
As an experiment with his children,
Bloom and his wife tried their hand at creating their own family curse words.
"So one of them was 'flep,'"
says Bloom. Whenever someone would bang their foot or hurt their toe, they'd
scream "flep" as if it were an obscenity.
The experiment was very short-lived.
"It was a total failure," says
Bloom. "The children looked at us as if we were crazy."
The story gives one of Bloom's
mentors, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, a chuckle.
"Children are far more influenced
by peers," says Pinker. "That's why kids of immigrants end up with
the accent of their peer group rather than their parents."
Particularly once they've entered
elementary school.
When it comes to choosing words, our
society has a bent toward novelty. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/ Pinker explains we're forever coming up with new ways to express
that things are "good" or "bad." He says there's always a
little "semantic inflation" going on.
For instance, if members of Generation
X hear a song they like, they may say, "It's awesome." A teen of
today may say, "It's bitchin'." If the song is lousy, they may say,
"It sucks."
"When I was a kid and you said
something sucks," says Pinker, "it was pretty clear what sexual act
they were referring back to." But today kids have no idea. The term is just
part of their common language.
Frequent use, over time, has stripped
away the original connotation. Pinker says the evolution of "sucks"
is similar to that of "jerk" or "sucker."
"Suck" may sound edgy or
obnoxious to middle-aged ears, but parents may be at a loss to explain why it's
a bad word, especially to an 8- or 9-year-old. "It brings up a
conversation you might not want to have right now," says Sheidlower.
Not everyone's on the same page about
what constitutes offensive language. The boundaries of what's acceptable vary
from community to community and family to family.
Some moms listen for attitude and
intention in their children's words. Chevy Chase, Md., resident Sarah Pekkanen
is the mother of two boys, ages 6 and 8, and she has found her dividing line.
"I would be much quicker to jump
on my kid for saying an unkind thing," says Pekkanen, "even if he
used perfect language to do so."
Pekkanen says a borderline phrase
like, "it sucks," isn't as offensive if it's not intended to insult
anyone.
A clear message about respect may be
more fruitful than trying to police every word. By the time kids enter the teen
world, swearing is almost a rite-of-passage.
"It's hard sometimes," says
pediatrician Monika Walters. "As parents, you worry that they're going to
grow up and be vagrants or a menace to society."
When parents like this come to see her
or pull her aside after an office appointment, worried about vulgar words they
spotted in their teens' text messages, she asks them to remember how they
talked when they were 15.
"Obscenity is a sure ticket to
adulthood," says Paul Bloom.
Or at least a way for teenagers to
perceive that they sound older.
Bloom says he doesn't want to control the
words his children choose to use with their friends. "That's part of
growing up," he says.
Another part of growing up is knowing
how to speak with adults and in formal situations. "So we'd like our
children to grow up knowing when it's appropriate to use these words,"
Bloom says.
As most parents come to recognize,
teaching good judgment is not a one-time event; it's a process.
Piaśnica Wielka (German: Groß Piasnitz; Kashubian: Wiôlgô Piôsznica)
is a village in Poland in Puck rural commune, Puck County, Pomeranian
Voivodeship.
In the forest next to the village
during World War II, German Schutzstaffel executed about 12,000 people, mainly
Polish and Kashubiann intelligentsia from Gdańsk Pomerania. Among the victims were approximately 1,200 mentally
ill persons from local hospitals.
The mass executions began in October
1939 and lasted until April 1940. An exhumation of mass graves was carried
after World War II in 1946. Out of total number of 35 graves, 30 were localised
of which 26 were exhumed. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
Only 305 bodies (in two mass graves)
were found, the rest of the bodies was burnt by Germans in August-September
1944. Forced prisoners from Stutthof concentration camp were used to cover up
the tracks and were later executed.
After World War I
o 1919:
Treaty of Versailles, most of West Prussia (including Pomerelia or Gdańsk-Pomerania) becomes part of the Second Polish Republic
o 1939: Nazi
Germany annexes the territories lost in 1919
o 1945:
Soviet capture, Oder-Neisse line becomes new border between Poland and Germany,
the historical duchy / province of Pomerania ceases to exist
o 1945/46:
Pomeranian population form Farther and Eastern Hither Pomerania, except for
Polish and Kashubs, is expelled to post-war Germany, as well as the German
population of all other "German territories under Polish and Soviet
control". The area is resettled and rebuilt by Polish who were expelled
from Polish settlement areas annexed by the Soviets. Hither Pomerania without
the Stettin/Szczeczin area and Wollin/Wolin was fused with Mecklenburg to form
the (East-) German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the former Farther
Pomeranian area is roughly represented by Polish West Pomerania
20,000 years ago the territory of
present-day Pomerania was covered with ice, which did not start to recede until
the late period of the Old Stone Age or Paleolithic some 10,000 years BC, when
the Scandinavian glacier receded to the north. Various archaeological cultures
developed in the Mesolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, and Iron Age.
Initially at least part of Pomerania
was dominated by Baltic tribes. Since around 500BC and before 500 AD Pomerania
was dominated by East Germanic tribes including several tribes of Goths, who
according to archeological evidence and their own tradition have come from
Scandinavia. Goths and Rugians are recorded by Roman historians in the areas of
Pomerania in 98 AD. The Veneti, non-Germanic tribe, which later assimilated
with Slavs, are recorded by Ptolemy and Pliny the Elder around Vistula in first
century AD. By the 7th century Slavic tribes (Wends) such as the Pomeranians
settled the area.
Pagan uprisings in 1005 and 1038
resulted in independancy for Western Pomerania and Pomerelia, respectively.
Regained by Poland in 1116/1121, the Polish could not hold the Pomeranian duchy
longer than 1135, whereas Pomerelia after the 1138 partition of Poland among
the sons of Boleslaus Wrymouth became a part of the Polish seniorat (see Map of
Poland before the fragmentation period) which was declared fief of the Holy
Roman Empire in 1156.
The Western part, the Duchy of
Pomerania, was declared part of the Holy Roman Empire (1181). After a brief
period of Danish rule (1168/1186-1227), it remained part of Holy Roman Empire
of the German Nation until 1806.
The Eastern part, Pomerelia, which was
directly part of Kingdom of Poland, was disputed by Brandenburg and conquered
by the Teutonic Knights in 1309, becoming part of the Teutonic Order state.
After the rebellion of the Prussian Confederation, it was then annexed by the
Kingdom of Poland in 1466 as a province with considerable autonomy. This part
of Pomerelia and Prussia was centuries later referred to as "Royal
Prussia". In the Union of Lublin of 1569 the province agreed[citation
needed] to sacrifice part of its autonomy to join the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
as the new entity to unify lands of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy
of Lithuania.
Since ~1200, a steady influx of German
settlers had been arriving in Pomerania. One of the first recorded German
settler came to Stettin (Szczecin) in 1187. Some rural parts of Pomerania were
however still predominantly Slavic in character before the advent of
Protestantism. Later though the duchy of Pomerania became German by ethnicity,
language and culture, whereas Pomerelia still preserved a Slavic character.
In 1425, conflict with Brandenburg
about the rule of the Uckermark and Pomerania resulted in a war of Brandenburg
against Pomerania,
The total number of Kashubians varies
depending on one's definition. A common estimate is that over 300,000 people in
Poland are of the Kashubian ethnicity. The most extreme estimates are as low as
50,000 or as high as 500,000
In the Polish census of 2002, only
5,100 people declared Kashubian nationality, although 51,000 declared Kashubian
as their native language. Most Kashubians declare Polish nationality and
Kashubian ethnicity, and are considered both Polish and Kashubian. However, on
the 2002 census there was no option to declare one nationality and a different
ethnicity, or more than one nationality. Some claim that the census was
misleading and inaccurate, or even falsified.
Kashubians are the direct descendants
of an early Slavic tribe of Pomeranians who took their name from the land in
which settled, Pomerania (from Polish Pomorze, "the land along the
sea"). http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
It is believed that the ancestors of
Kashubians came into the region between the Odra and Vistula Rivers during the
Migration Period. The oldest known mention of the name dates from the 13th
century (a seal of Duke Barnim I of Pomerania), when they ruled areas around
Szczecin (Kashubian: Szczecëno).
Another early mention of the
Kashubians from the 13th century saw the Dukes of Pomerania including
"Duke of Kashubia" in their titles. From the Treaty of Westphalia in
1648, after the Thirty Years' War, parts of West Pomerania fell under Swedish
rule, and the Swedish kings titled themselves "Dukes of Kashubia"
from 1648 to the 1720s.
The Landtag parliament of the Kingdom
of Prussia in Königsberg changed the official church language from Polish to
German in 1843, but this decision was soon repealed. In 1858 Kashubians
emigrated to Upper Canada and created the settlement of Wilno, in Renfrew
County, Ontario, which still exists today. Kaszub immigrants founded St.
Josaphat parish in Chicago's Lincoln Park community in the late 19th century.
In the 1870s a fishing village was established in Jones Island in Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, by Kashubian and German immigrants. The two groups did not hold
deeds to the land, however, and the government of Milwaukee evicted them as
squatters in the 1940s, with the area soon after turned into industrial park.
Many Pomeranians in the former Duchy
of Pomerania, most of them Lutheran Protestants (including the Slovincians),
were Germanised between the 14th and 19th centuries in the wake of the Prussian
political program of Germanisation. Some communities in Pomerelia (Eastern
Pomerania) have survived and today regard themselves as Kashubians in modern
Poland, although others were expelled by Poland's Communist government as
"Germans" after World War II. Most Kashubians in Eastern Pomerania,
unlike Slovincians and Pomeranian Slavic Wends, remain Roman Catholic. During
the Treaty of Versailles, Kaszub activist Antoni Abraham in agitating for
Cassubia's integration into Poland issued his famous quote Nie ma Kaszub bez
Polonii a bez Kaszub Polski" which translates into English as- There is no
Cassubia without Poland, and no Poland without Cassubia.
During the Second World War thousands
of Kashubians were mass murdered by German forces, particularly those of higher
education. The main place of executions was Piaśnica.
About 50,000 Kashubians speak
Kashubian, a West Slavic language belonging to the Lechitic group of languages
in northern Poland. Many Polish linguists formerly considered Kashubian to be a
Polish dialect, though most now believe it is a separate Slavic language.
There are other traditional Slavic
ethnic groups inhabiting Pomerania, such as the Kociewiacy, Borowiacy,
Krajniacy and others. These dialects tend to fall between Kashubian and the
Polish dialects of Greater Poland and Mazovia. This might indicate that they
are not only descendants of ancient Pomeranians, but also of settlers who
arrived to Pomerania from Greater Poland and Masovia in the Middle Ages. http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
However, this is only one possible
explanation.
The earliest surviving example of
written Kashubian is Martin Luther's 1643 Protestant catechism (with new
editions in 1752 and 1828). Scientific interest in the Kashubian language was
sparked by Mrongovius (publications in 1823, 1828) and the Russian linguist
Hilferding (1859, 1862), later followed by Biskupski (1883, 1891), Bronisch
(1896, 1898), Mikkola (1897), Nitsch (1903). Important works are S. Ramult's, Słownik jezyka pomorskiego, czyli
kaszubskiego, 1893, and F. Lorentz, Slovinzische Grammatik, 1903, Slovinzische
Texte, 1905, and Slovinzisches Wörterbuch, 1908.
The first activist of the
Kashubian/East Pomeranian national movement was Florian Ceynowa. Among his
accomplishments, he documented the Kashubian alphabet and grammar by 1879 and
published a collection of ethnographic-historic stories of the life of the
Kashubians (Skórb kaszébsko-slovjnckjé mòvé, 1866-1868). Another early writer in
Kashubian was Hieronim Derdowski. The Young Kashubian movement followed, led by
author Aleksander Majkowski, who wrote for the paper "Zrzësz
Kaszëbskô" as part of the "Zrzëszincë" group. The group would
contribute significantly to the development of the Kashubian literary language.
In 2005, Kashubian was for the first
time made an official subject on the Polish matura exam (roughly equivalent to
the English A-Level and French Baccalaureat). Despite an initial uptake of only
23 students,[citation needed] this development was seen as an important step in
the official recognition and establishment of the language.
Today, in some towns and villages in
northern Poland Kashubian is the second language spoken after Polish, and it is
taught in regional schools.
Kashubian presently enjoys legal
protection in Poland as an official minority language.
Disputes with Brandenburg continued.
These were partially agreed at the Conference of Juterbog (1527) between
Joachim I Nestor, Elector of Brandenburg, and the Duke of Pomerania. As the
Protestant Reformation gathered pace, Pomerania also converted to Lutheranism,
but the process was slower than in Brandenburg.
In 1637 the last of the Dukes of
Pomerania, Boguslaw XIV, died without direct male successor. During the Thirty
Years' War, King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden occupied Pomerania. In the
negotiations between France, Brandenburg, and Sweden following the Northern War
the Brandenburg diplomats Joachim Friedrich von Blumenthal and his son
Christoph Caspar obtained the rights of succession for Brandenburg, though the
argument with Sweden, especially over Hither Pomerania, continued to the end of
the 17th century and beyond, until the Treaty of Stockholm in 1720.
Prussian noblemen began to acquire
estates in Pomerania, while Pomeranian noblemen were integrated into Prussian
society. Thus originally Wendish noble families such as the von Lettows, von
Strelows, von Peglows, von Zitzewitzes and von Krockows intermarried with
German families from Brandenburg such as the von Blumenthals, who possessed
great estates at Quackenburg, Varzin, Dubberzin, Schlönwitz and elsewhere. By
the nineteenth century Pomerania was mostly Germanised, and was a popular place
of retirement for the well-to-do such as Bismarck, who bought Varzin.
After the defeat of Germany in World
War II in 1945, the Potsdam Conference placed most of Pomerania under Polish
administration. The German population of the transferred territories fled, was
expelled, or lost their lives. Some Germans were retained by Soviet authorities
to do forced labour in the Soviet exclaves for a number of years after 1945.
The now Polish parts of Pomerania were resettled with Poles.
Doctors and politicians in search of
the magic bullet to solve the so-called medical malpractice crisis have focused
on a pie-in-the-sky solution that won’t fly politically or constitutionally –
the $250,000 cap on pain and suffering. That would take a constitutional
amendment, which requires something close to a political consensus. That
political consensus will never happen due to the determined and effective
opposition of the trial lawyers and most consumer organizations, and the
difficulties inherent in passing any constitutional amendment at the state or federal
level. What’s worse, the public, even if half-informed, would reject the
concept, of a cap on damages. It is obviously unfair and off the wall.
In the process of primary focus on a
solution that will never happen these interest groups are missing the more
obvious, the more practical and the more immediate solutions that may produce
bigger and quicker premium reductions. To find these solutions all the doctors
and politicians would have to do is to read a memo dated February 28, 2002,
entitled “Suggestions to Effect Immediate Premium Savings for Health Care
Providers.” The memo was written by John H. Reed, then the Director of the Cat
Fund (now an attorney in private practice in Sellingsgrove, Pennsylvania), and
his Deputy Director, Robert W. Waeger.
Here are a few of their
recommendations, which should be given immediate and serious consideration, but
which have been ignored by doctors and politicians and legislators and by the
insurance commissioner and the insurance industry (the latter two groups being
in perpetual hibernation when it comes to new ideas or basic reforms of the
present system).
LET STATE PROVIDE MEDICAL MALPRACTICE
COVERAGE THROUGH CAT FUND. Now doctors have to go to commercial insurers for
the first $500,000 of coverage (the excess over that $500,000 primary limit is
now provided by the CAT Fund).
The commercial insurance companies
don’t want to write the business. Fine. They should have no complaints when the
state of Pennsylvania fills the vacuum. As the memo in question indicates, the
Cat Fund could provide the first $500,000 coverage for 40 percent less than the
commercial insurance industry. That would be possible, as the state through the
Cat Fund, would have a lower expense ratio. They would not have to pay
commissions to agents or support a major marketing structure. The Cat Fund
would not have to earn and pay a profit to shareholders. It would not have to
pay taxes. It would not have to support the corporate structure that goes with
any commercial insurance operation. The CAT Fund pays out in claims 99 cents on
the dollar of collected premiums; commercial insurers, in contrast, pay out 60
to 65 cents on the dollar in claims, with 35 to 40 cents going for marketing,
commissions, profits, etc.
CUT REQUIREMENT OF $500,000 IN PRIMARY
COVERAGE TO $200,000. Now each doctor must buy $500,000 in commercial insurance
and the rest if sold by the state-operated CAT fund. If this $500,000
requirement were cut to $200,000, the Reed-Waeger Memo estimates premiums would
be reduced by at least 25 to 35 percent. This would also increase the market
for malpractice as commercial insurers would have to shoulder less risk, and
that in turn would improve the competitive environment. It would also make it
easier for doctors to use self-insurance, risk retention groups (RRGs), fronted
captives and other alternatives to commercial insurance (see next reform on
RRGs). This change could come about without adoption of the first recommended
change.
PROMOTE USE OF RRGs. The Risk
Retention Group is a self-insurance device, which involves doctors banding
together in non-profit groups to self-insure their coverage. It is a
min-insurance company. The reduction of the primary requirement from $500,000
to $200,000, as suggested above, would make this approach easier to undertake.
Although not mentioned in the MEMO, Reed recommends that a solvency fund be
created to cover RRGs for medical malpractice. This was a recommendation he did
make in testifying before the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce on
February 10, 2003. Now RRGs are not so covered, and this means that doctors
would have a dangerous exposure if the RRG would go under. With commercial
insurance companies, there is a solvency fund back-up and if this were extended
to RRGs, they would become more popular and could make a larger contribution to
the solution of any problems in obtaining reasonably priced medical malpractice
insurance. The MEMO estimates that some specialists could cut their premiums by
60 to70 percent with RRGs.
COMPRESS RATE SCHEDULE. Now there is
incredible variation in premiums between so-called high-risk specialists and
lower-risk categories of doctors. Premiums are so tailored to each category of
doctors that the insurance function of spreading risk does not work as
effectively as it might. Compressing rate schedules means that the differences
between the highest and lowest risk categories would be reduced, thus lowering
the burden on the higher risk specialties and spreading risk more evenly. The
Memo says, if the lowest risk groups paid $1,000 more, the higher risks groups
could be cut by up to l/3rd.
CONCLUSION. The MEMO has a good
summary of what these recommended changes might do: “What now seems to be a
looming crisis can be averted. All of the above options … will immediately
reduce malpractice premiums to health care providers. Most importantly, they
can accomplish that result without taking money from taxpayers, without
triggering the additional expense of borrowing, without burdening future
generations of health care providers, and without having to bar the door of the
courthouse to those individuals having legitimate claims.” (c)2003 Herbert S.
Denenberg All Rights Reserved.
When it comes to trade, chimps are far
from venture capitalists. Our closest relatives almost always prefer a sure
bet, according to a recent study, choosing value in hand over risk for higher
returns. The finding brings us closer to understanding chimps’ trading habits
and gives us precious insight into how trade, an essential cooperative behavior,
works for humans.
To conduct the study, researchers
started with two groups of chimps: one with little exposure to social and
cognitive testing and no trading experience, and one with extensive bartering
practice and language training. The scientists determined which food each chimp
liked best. Then they assigned values to the foods. Finally, they taught the
inexperienced chimps how to trade with tokens and food.
The results? When chimps possessing
items of medium-high value, such as carrots, were offered high-value items,
like grapes, they kept the lesser food. This tendency held true for both
groups, despite different rearing histories, suggesting that their
disinclination to barter is innate, says Sarah Brosnan of Georgia State
University, the lead researcher in this study.
The chimps’ risk-averse behavior,
Brosnan speculates, is attributable to a lack of language skills. “If one chimp
could say to another, ‘OK, you crack nuts while I hunt meat, and then we’ll
trade,’ they’d be able to specialize and have a developed economy,” Brosnan
says. Because humans can specialize, she adds, we can generate surplus to
purchase or barter for better foods from one another.
There's no other major item most of us
own that is as confusing, unpredictable and unreliable as our personal
computers. Everybody has questions about them, and we aim to help.
Here are a few questions about
computers I've received recently from people like you, and my answers. I have
edited and restated the questions a bit, for readability.
Q. I have moved from a PC to the iMac.
In the Windows environment, I felt a need to run utilities to clean out the
registry and defragment the hard disk frequently. Is this also needed on the
iMac? If so, what programs are recommended?
A. The Mac operating system, called OS
X Leopard, doesn't include a registry, which is a feature of Windows that holds
information that programs need to operate properly. So there's no need to clean
or maintain any registry on a Mac.
Mac hard disks, like those on Windows
computers, can get fragmented -- a condition in which parts of files are so
scattered around on the disk that the disk runs slowly. However, the operating
system has some under-the-covers features that generally obviate the need to
run a defragmentation utility. In fact, Apple, which calls defragmenting a disk
"optimizing" it, flatly claims that "You probably won't need to
optimize at all if you use Mac OS X." There are some Mac defragmentation
utilities, but I don't believe you will need them unless you have large numbers
of extremely large files and almost no free disk space.
Q. My son's computer frequently gets
infected with adware, pop-ups. Recently it was hit with a continuing pop-up ad
called VirusHeat that touted itself as a solution to the computer's problems.
When I paid for VirusHeat, the problems went away. Is it legitimate?
A. According to numerous reports on
the Web, including some from security companies, VirusHeat is a form of
malicious or misleading software. It falls into a category that attempts to
scare people into thinking their computers are badly infected, or exaggerates
any problems you may have. This is a common tactic now used by creators of
malware.
Some of these fake or misleading
"security programs" may be designed merely to make you pay. Others
may even be designed to install the very kinds of viruses, spyware or adware
that they claim to fight.
Q. I have updated to a new PC. My data
are on a floppy disc. There is no floppy disc drive on this new computer. How
can I transfer my data?
A. For around $25, you can buy an
external floppy disk drive that plugs into a new PC using its standard USB
port. If you do so, and connect it to the new PC, you should be able to copy
your data to the new computer's hard disk.
Louis Sheehan 1019
Cans of Four Loko are seen on display at a liquor store in Palo Alto, Calif., on Oct. 18, 2010. After students at northern New Jersey's Ramapo College were hospitalized because of the effects of Four Loko --which contains caffeine, other common energy-drink ingredients, and as much alcohol as four beers -- the college president ordered that it and similar drinks be banned. (Paul Sakuma/AP)
