Category Archives: Current Events

Kansas tries harder to drown the beast.

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I know there are a lot of smart people in Kansas. It’s just that they tend not to end up in elective office there. The latest examples of Kansas-being-Kansas are staggering. Take for example the matter of Gov. Brownback’s massive tax cut on business profits.  From what I understand by reading news material from the corporate controlled news media, Kansas, under Brownback and the GOP controlled legislature, have managed to end taxes on business income.  The fact that Koch Industries is based in Wichita is more than a little coincidental, I’m guessing.

Evidently the GOP “leaders” in the KS legislature have been dueling it out with Missouri, awarding tax incentives for companies to move across the border to the Kansas side. This kind of fratricidal fiduciary hijinks is not uncommon. All states are eager to raid other states for businesses.  Tax concessions are the pieces-of-eight in this interstate piracy. Our states are in a race to the bottom in their pursuit of business transplants.

Of interest relating to Kansas is this little nugget.  AMC Entertainment Inc. announced that it is moving to Leawood, KS, from the Missouri side. But, about the same time it was announced that the Dalian Wanda Group would buy AMC Entertainment. Dalian Wanda Group is about to reap the benefits of Brownback’s tax policy by operating in KS.  A Chinese company makes one of the largest buyouts of a US company and lands just in time in the Kansas tax haven.

Let me speak plainly. A Chinese company owns a largish US company headquartered in Kansas will be taking advantage of infrastructure put in place over generations by hard working Kansans and US citizen taxpayers. All have contributed in many ways to Kansas infrastructure by way of grants for electrification, roads & highways, universities, military bases, as well as protection by all of the branches of the US military.  This Chinese company will enjoy greatly reduced tax liabilities by operating in Kansas. The controlling stockholders are Chinese and will benefit from operation within US borders at the expense of Kansans as a result of the Kansas GOP. These foreign owners will instead allow their employees to contribute to the public coffers.

The burden for expenses related to responsibilites previously administered by the state will be unpooled and relocalized.  The purpose and benefit of taxation has been that pooling funds can bring the benefits of civilization to the state without having to rely on the Darwinistic forces of the market. It is ironic that a state so rabidly against evolution has embraced such a Darwinistic approach to social policy.

The stated intent of GOP leaders (like Dick Army, etc.) cloaked  behind the curtain has been to “drown the beast”. That is, kill federal and state government by unfunding it. You do that by electing serial government haters like Gov. Brownback and possibly by having the Koch boys behind the scenes pulling strings. Not only has Kansas stuffed a dagger in the chest of civic administration of government services, they have opened the pipeline for profits to stream out of the US from a state tax haven from the operation of a corporation by a Chinese conglomerate.

The Kansas GOP has accelerated the transition of power from a constitutionally backed system with structural transparency to the private concentration of power with no transparency and no civic obligation.  Way to go boys. The full import of this should be evident in a generation when most of the GOP legislators who enacted this shit sandwich will be long gone.

Make no mistake. The GOP euphamism of “drowning the beast” is really about the transfer of power from the many to the few. The slogans about liberty and freedom are a plush teddy bear for the masses of low information voters to embrace. Power is in the ability to allocate resources. As the public loses its ability to allocate resources, it loses power. As private or corporate interests accumulate resources, their ability to exercise power rises.  There is nothing new here. Power always concentrates.

[Note:  A copy of this essay appears in the Daily Kos.]

Facebook IPO- Not a banner day

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The IPO of Facebook stock on friday was a bad business day on two accounts.  Most obviously, the anticipated share price “pop” didn’t happen by the end of the trading day. FB shares opened at $38.00 per share and ended the day at $38.23 per share.  According to Andrew Bary at Barron’s, early investors paid an average of $1 per share. With lockup provisions on 1.8 billion shares expiring in the August to November time-frame, large scale selling could drive down share prices later in the year.

The Barron’s article quoted a tech trader who said

“Like most IPOs in tech land, Facebook is geared toward enriching early investors and employees while sticking public investors with shares burdened with poor voting rights and high growth expectations.”

There is nothing new in this statement of condition. Cashing in one’s shares in a risky investment of time and money in a startup is a commonly executed means of capturing reward. Risk takers are entitled to a payoff when a venture achieves success.

But this trader’s sentiment reveals something deeper about business and it’s role in our culture. This was a public offering of fractional ownership whose sole means of income is advertising. It is clearly designed to transfer future risk to public investors who have precious little voice in corporate governance.

Facebook has offered public investors a kind of sh*t sandwich: A chance to buy into a public corporation that is structurally configured to retain controlling interest by one of the founders.

Has Facebook created wealth or is it just capturing the market share of other advertisers? Facebook, like Google, is a creature of advertising. And, like Google, it is a magic version of the Yellow Pages that automatially anticipates or finds the listings you may want. But it is more than that. It is a directory that supplies the listings it wants you to have. Instead of the full page ads of the advertising print period where trees were actually pulped to provide something called “paper”, today’s ads are hot links to the advertisers website.

Facebook and Google are really just newer versions of the old circus of broadcasting. Broadcasters supply eyeballs and ears to adverisers who then have tens of seconds to mesmerize viewers and listeners with their magic. It is like rattling a stick in a bucket of swill. Facebook supplies amusement as a so-called social network and Google supplies entertainment as well as utilitarian services.

It was also a bad business day for broadcasters covering the FB IPO.  All of the cable television business progamming was set on this blessed and much anticipated initial public offering. Regrettably, the event was delayed for technical reasons until mid day EDT. When the stock was finally released, “experts” were standing by to render their opinion on the last 20 seconds of market activity.  Like all stock market data, it is marked by a jittery, noisy curve, sometimes trending upwards and then downwards.  Over one minute anything looks like a trend.

Faced with the possibility of hours of air time to fill before something exciting happens, the CNBC talking heads natter on and on with a variety of experts who natter on and on. All-the-while stock footage of the NYSE floor and the post-pubescent hoodie-boy CEO of FB loop cycles endlessly. For this we allocate broadcast spectrum?

In the end, there was no excitement. FB closed the day pennies above to where it started. I like to think this is because investors aren’t as foolish as the cynical people who are behind the offering believe on the opening day, at least.

An excellent analysis of Facebook valuation has been posted by Aswath Damodaran, Professor of Finance at NYU.

Research Squatters. When Universities and Corporate Behemoths Collaborate.

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Recently I had the good fortune to get to meet for a consultation with a young and talented chemistry professor (Prof X) from a state university elsewhere in the US. Prof X has an outstanding pedigree and reached tenure rather rapidly at a young age. This young prof has won a very large number of awards already and I think could well rise to the level of a Trost or a Bergman in time.

Not long ago this prof was approached by one of the top chemical companies in the world to collaborate on some applied research. What is interesting about this is that the company has begun to explore outsourcing basic research in the labs of promising academic researchers. I am not aware that this company has done this to such an extent previously.  They do have an impressive corporate research center of their own and the gigabucks to set up shop wherever they want. Why would they want to collaborate like this?

R&D has a component of risk to it. Goals may not be met or may be much more expensive that anticipated.  Over the long term there may be a tangible payoff, but over the short term, it is just overhead.

The boards and officers of public corporations have a fiduciary obligation to maximize the return on investment of their shareholders. They are not chartered to spread their wealth to public institutions. They have a responsibility to minimize their tax liability while maximizing their profitability. Maximizing profit means increasing volume and margins. Increasing margins means getting the best prices at the lowest operating expense possible.

Corporate research is a form of overhead expense. Yes, you can look at it as an investment of resources for the production of profitable goods and services of the future. This is what organic growth is about. But that is not the only way to plan for future growth. Very often it is faster and easier to buy patent portfolios or whole corporations in order to achieve a more prompt growth and increase in market share.

The thing to realize is that this is not a pollenization exercise. The company is not looking to just fertilize research here and there and hope for advances in the field. They are a sort of research squatter that is setting up camp in existing national R&D infrastructure in order to produce return on investment. Academic faculty, students, post-docs, and university infractructure become contract workers who perform R&D for hire.

In this scheme, research groups become isolated in the intellectual environment of the university by the demands of secrecy agreements. Even within groups, there is a silo effect in that a student working on a commercial product or process must be isolated from the group to contain IP from inadvertant disclosure. The matter of inventorship is a serious matter that can get very sticky in a group situation. Confidential notebooks, reports, and theses will be required.  Surrender of IP ownership, long term silence on ones thesis work, and probably secret defense of their thesis will have to occur as well.

While a big cash infusion to Prof X may seem to be a good thing for the professor’s group, let’s consider other practical problems that will develop. The professor will have to allocate labor and time to the needs of the benefactor. The professor will not be able to publish the results of this work, nor will the university website be a place to display such research. In academia, ones progress is measured by the volume and quality of publications. In a real sense, the collaboration will result in work that will be invisible on the professors vitae.

Then there is the matter of IP contamination. If Prof X inadvertantly uses proprietary chemistry for the professor’s own publishable scholarly work, the professor may be subject to civil liability. Indeed, the prof may have to avoid a large swath of chemistry that was previously their own area.

This privatization of the academic research environment is a model contrary to what has been a very successful national R&D complex for generations. Just have a look in Chemical Abstracts. It is full of patent information, to be sure, but it is full of technology and knowledge that is in the public domain. Chemical Abstracts is a catalog and bibliography that organizes our national treasure. Our existing government-university R&D complex has been a very productive system overall and every one of us benefits from it in ways most do not perceive. We should be careful with it.

Tempest in a Teapot. Philosophy-v-Physics.

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A minor snit has broken out between outspoken physicist Lawrence Krauss of Arizona State University and, well, the philosophers of the world. Krauss has become a darling of the cable TV world of NatGeo and the Science Channel. It seems that you can’t swing a dead cat without knocking over the same dozen television astronomer/cosmologists and quantum physicists. This rotating crew of scientists are filmed on various locations straining to explain the universe in terms of string theory, dark matter, and quantum wierdness using language with a Fog Index of 8 or less.

I’m not slighting these folks in the least. Using the English language to convey the essence of these concepts is difficult, as is preventing the reflexive use of the remote control by viewers with the attention span of a house cat.

Anyway, Krauss has managed to inflame those philosophers who pay attention to popular science.  His latest book, A Universe from Nothing: Why there is Something Rather than Nothing, has precipitated this argument. I don’t care about the merits of his argument here. The reader is invited to dive in.

What I am writing about is the social and intellectual mistake Krauss made. Like all physical scientists, he is a reductionist. The drive for a ToE, Theory of Everything, is the ultimate act of reductionism. His assertion that philosophy is obsolete in the face of discoveries in physics and the emergence of big subassemblies of a ToE has been received with dismay by philosophers.  A large fraction of people (adults, anyway) are hardwired to be receptive to mysticism and no amount of handwaving, no matter how logical and crisp, is going to cause the bell curve to skew substantially away from cherished mystical beliefs.

Krauss has fallen into the same trap as those in the 19th century who may have declared that physics was pretty much complete with Newtonian mechanics. While quantum mechanics provides a template for the description of how particles behave constrained to a region of space, it fails as a replacement for philosophy. That is, quantum mechanics and cosmology do not provide any concise analysis on how people should treat each other, how to conduct a worthwhile life, or how to interpret what the meaning of quantum mechanics is in your life.

This is the realm of philosophy and religion and these kinds of questions must be freshly examined by each generation born into this strange universe. The meaning of existence is not yet settled science.

Mining Asteroids

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The founders of the Silicon Valley startup, Planetary Resources, have announced plans for mining asteroids for valuable metals. Peter Diamandis, Eric Anderson and investors including director James Cameron and Google CEO Larry Page are behind this venture.

I’m trying to be positive here. Perhaps these fellows should visit some earthly mines and see what it takes to break actual rock and extract the value from it.

Earth bound ore bodies near the surface are commonly the result of concentration by hydrothermal flows. In the absence of water-based geothermal concentration processes, or recrystallization of PGM’s in magma chambers, the reality of economically viable ore bodies in asteroids is an open question. A lot of survey work needs to be done to answer this question.

Oh, and one more thing. When you blast rock on a largish planet like earth, the fragments fall back to the ground. This won’t happen on an itty bitty asteroid.

The talk about recovering water from asteroids to subsequently crack and make propellant is a large challenge all by itself.

I predict that civilization will slump back to a 19th century Dickensian-style world of robber barons and sharecroppers before any hardware gets to an asteroid.  Children will ask “Momma, what’s an iPad?” as they walk from their rundown subdivision to a quonset where they strip insulation from wire for copper to barter for food. It’s all so clear now …

Time to Leave Afghanistan

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It is time to withdraw our soldiers from Afghanistan. The latest example of moral depravity exhibited by members of our armed forces shows the effects of prolonged war on our citizens. The US is at war with not so much an insurgency as an idea. An idea is not a form of concentrated power. It is a form of distributed power. You can’t take out a popular idea with a bomb or a 50 cal round.  We are occupying a “country” which exists by default as a void between other countries. Afghanistan is a collection of districts occupied by a weak confederation of tribes who adhere to seventh century cosmology and religion.  A coalition of like minded religious zealots are in the process of retaking the political void which is only weakly occupied by a corrupt, reluctant and treacherous Afghan government.

These latest instances of outrageous and indefensible behavior with Afghan corpses by US forces completely negates whatever moral high ground we once occupied. We have put our troops in a place and circumstance which is unwinnable. We have exposed good men and women to unspeakable horrors and memories.  There are too many public dots to connect now that outline our own corruption in the execution of foreign policy in Afghanistan.

War inevitably corrupts its participants. Our own enthusiasm for war reflects poorly upon us and we must get a grip on this.

Thorium power. Will the US get on board?

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Everybody knows by now that China is flush with rare earth elements (REE’s), or at least to the uppermost extent that any country can be. And, everybody knows the market hijinks that China has planned with REE’s, namely, buy all the REE’s you want from them, as long it is in a value-added manufactured good.

What most folks are probably not aware of is that the ore bodies that carry the REE’s (Sc, Y, and the Lanthanides) are usually enriched in thorium and/or uranium.  So much so that no little amount of skill and equipment is needed to separate Th & U from the REE’s. The US and USSR developed much of this separations technology post WWII and for decades thereafter. Much of this art is in the US patent literature. The rest of it is buried in dusty, obscure volumes on library shelves.

The art of REE separation is arcane and somewhat isolated from the rest of inorganic chemistry owing to its specialized nature. Most of the separations art relies on leaching and elaborate solvent exchange schemes.  Ion exchange technology is also highly represented in this domain.  Few chemistry students are exposed to this science and most of the cold war era practitioners are retired, ailing, or deceased.

Chemistry students rarely see this art for another reason. It is generally practiced by engineers and metallurgists who seem to be in a perpetual phase separation from the standard chemistry curriculum. I would argue that this distinction is mainly cultural.

Back to the Chinese. While Americans have been busy yammering about drill-baby-drill, or following the escapades of reality show imbeciles or a thousand other idiotic distractions, we have failed to focus pressure on our government to consider technologies like thorium power or molten salt reactor technology.

While a gullible and frankly, cognitively impaired, vocal minority in the US accept that we have a right to $<3.00/gal gasoline, we are being distracted into the warm feather bed of self-congratulation and delusion about our supposed exceptionalism. I sense that our culture is beginning to show a type of exceptionalism that is not very admirable.

While American voters are being spun up into a frenzy again about commodity oil prices, China has been promulgating its national industrial policies. American industrial policy seems to be about lining the citizens up for accelerating consumption. China’s industrial policy emphasis seems to be about putting infrastructure and capacity in place for exports as well as anticipated internal consumption.

China has a substantial presence in mineral rich Africa. China imports copper ore from Peru and Chile. Not finished copper- but copper ore. China keeps the value added steps for its own coffers. Most distressingly, China is busily working on copper mining in Afganistan while our kids fight and die there in an intractable cultural shooting war. Did you get that?

China is mining in Afganistan and Americans are paying to die there.

While the US pays to make the world safe for commerce, China is spreading out over the world looking for scarce resources like copper under the umbrella of stability.  While China mines copper in Afganistan, the USA consumes copper in Afganistan in the form of brass bullet casings ejected over the landscape. Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc.

Is this a diatribe against all things Chinese? Absolutely not. If anything, China has skillfully mastered it’s range of control and made purposeful, long term plans to reach its goals. Like its plans for Thorium-based molten salt reactors. Thorium power is undergoing a bit more examination now, as described in this Forbes article.

Here is a point I’d like to get across. The present boom in REE exploration and mining is in a good place for thorium extraction. If thorium were to be part of the extracted value rather than a costly sidestream in need of segregation and remediation, then the subsequently improved economics of REE extraction and greater availability might translate to lower REE costs for users of rare earth metal technology.

There is a crucial synergy here that the US would do well to exploit. But it requires vision, long term planning, and regulatory flexibility in the handling, accumulation, and processing of thorium.  These attributes the US now lacks. The current lead pipe doctrines of American politics represents a critical systems failure of our culture. We cannot continue to regard middle-ground compromise as total forfeiture.

Fear and Loathing with Frac Fluids

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There is considerable handwringing over hydraulic fracturing fluids and their potential effects on “the environment”. I use quotes in ironic fashion because I see very little parsing of the issue into relevant components. The chemical insult to the environment is highly dependent on both the substances and the extent of dispersion. But I state the obvious.

There are surface effects at the drill site and there are subsurface effects. A spill on the surface is going to be relatively small due to the limited size of the available tankage on site. I drive by these sites almost daily and can see with my own eyes the scale of the project. A surface spill of materials will be limited in scope.

The subsurface effects are complex, however, and the magnitude of consequences will depend on both the extent of the fluid penetration into aquifers and the nature of the materials in the fluid. Much criticism has been dealt, rightfully I think, over the secrecy claims on the composition of these fluids. The default reply from drillers has rested on trade secrecy. To be sure, the matter of government forcing a company to reveal its art is a serious matter. But the distribution of chemical substances into the environment requires some oversight. Especially when substances are injected into locations where they cannt be readily remediated. The remediation of an aquifer is a serious undertaking which may or may not be effective.

If you want to see what is potentially in frac fluids, go to Google Patents and search “hydraulic fracturing fluid”. A great many patents will be found. This will give the length and breadth of the compositions patented. Of this large list only a few are used in current practice. The potential carrier fluids vary from water to LPG (!). Water is a common component, but brine is said to be preferred. Additives include hydrochloric acid and surfactants. The MSDS documents may be a good source of info. Consider that a substantial threat to ground water may be that it is rendered non-potable rather than outright  toxic.

Academic Lab Due Diligence Post-Sangji

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A colleague and I were discussing the Sangji case off-line and I did what I am pathologically prone to do which is to blurt out suggestions.  I’m passing them along to my other friends out in the ether as a rough guideline to thinking about training and due diligence. My suggestions are merely a watered down version of a typical industrial EH&S SOP.

Due Diligence

Your university EH&S department no doubt has some some form of written policy, but having your own arrangement with your student workers will accomplish two things for you- 1) you will have written and signed documentation on having trained your students to use what you might call, if not “best practices”, then “reasonable and ordinary practices” in the lab, and 2) you will have made it perfectly clear to them what kind of expectations you have in regard to their work practices, open lab times, types of activities they may perform unsupervised by you, and your absolute dedication to lab worker safety.

In a civil or criminal action you will be under court order to surrender your documents in a process called “discovery”. Your attorney, being an officer of the court, is legally obligated to ensure that you surrender all of your documentation related to the action.

So, wouldn’t it be useful to surrender documentation of your diligence in all matters of safety?

Making a student or other lab worker’s activity in your lab contingent upon some basic operating rules is not at all unreasonable. And, if the rules are clearly written with consequences for violation of policies, then everyone knows the expectations.

No one can predict the future. But what you can do is some due diligence. Have a written training program with goals and scope. Run your research students and other coworkers through it every year and have them sign off on their attendance. Put it in a file and hope that you never have to pull it out in self-defense.

Such a program would be a solid basis for your defense attorney to argue that you went to reasonable measures to train students on escape plans, shower and eye wash use, sharps, proper PPE, fire extinguisher use, lab hygiene, proper storage, and special techniques to use when handling reactive/toxic/corrosive/flammable materials.

A policy on the amount of flammable materials you have in your lab space is a good thing as is a policy of segregating chemicals in storage according to their flammability and corrosiveness.

Get a signature from coworkers on the policies as well and file it away. I think this is critical. Give a copy of your policies and training plan to the department chairman.

Possible Blowback

Once you have given instruction on your policies, collected all of the signatures, and neatly filed them away, the hard part begins. You must be consistent in enforcing the policies. You have to tear yourself away from the word processor and make periodic safety inspections. If you’re off to a week-long NSF study session, a proxy should be appointed to monitor your labs.

The last thing you want is to have a plan that crumbles under scrutiny. You want to have a gap free history of due diligence.  Former coworkers may be called to testify as to your enforcement of safety rules. Nothing rings hollow like a safety plan that was constructed only for show.

Benefit

A benefit to all of this due diligence is that you may have actually made your lab a safer place to work and have instilled a level-headed safety mentality in your coworkers. Fancy that.

The Sheri Sangji Case

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Many readers know that research assistant Sheri Sangji died from burns sustained in a laboratory fire in the lab of UCLA professor Patrick Harran. Harran and university Regents are up on felony charges for their part in the incident. I understand that the charges are based on occupational health and safety violations related to the incident.

[The excellent blog Chemjobber has been following this story.  I might add that this blog should be put on your Favorites list if it isn’t already there. The author puts a lot of work into it and it shows.]

Sangji was transferring t-butyllithium when her plastic syringe came apart and a quantity of the pyrophoric solution was splashed on her and ignited. She sustained fatal burns when her clothing caught fire and she died 18 days later.

Syringe techniques are common and the use of plastic syringes in such transfers of lithium alkyls is not unusual or automatically over-dangerous. However, some syringes have what is called a Luer tip where a syringe needle is attached solely by friction.

Another design has a Luer lock where the needle is affixed with a twist of the needle into a friction lock.  The former design, with the tubular tip and no locking mechanism is prone to disconnection under tension and on withdrawl of the needle from the septum on a pressurized bottle, the needle is likely to squirt bottle contents onto the worker. The Luer lock largely prevents this type of accident.

Another failure mode is when the plunger is inadvertantly withdrawn completely from the barrel of the syringe. Minimally, this would release the contents from the barrel, possibly on the operator. If the plunger is pulled completely out while the needle is still in a pressurized bottle, a fountain of liquid may discharge, possibly on the operator.

Syringe plungers with a rubber tip are prone to swelling in organic solvents and may become difficult to move during a single use. If the plunger is pulled with great force, it might release suddenly causing it to come out of the barrel along with the contents.

Other syringes have plungers that provide a seal by plastic-on-plastic pressure. The seal depends on the elasticity of the barrel to accomodate the slightly oversized plunger. These syringes do not come with Luer locks and as such, are not forgiving of less than skillful use.

I do not know exactly what technique Sangji was using. Aldrich distributes literature on the use of a cannula in the transfer of air sensitive liquids. That is fine, but if you want 0.1 to 60 mL of RLi, a syringe is the most expeditious method for delivering a precise aliquot in my opinion.

Experimentalists are often stricken with a cowboy mentality. If you have never had a serious incident with a material, it is easy to get a bit cavalier. But handling metal alkyls is a lot like handling rattle snakes- you have to be careful every single time.

A subsequent post offers suggestions on due diligence for ressearch professors.