Category Archives: Current Events

China to Demand “IT Accreditation” from Foreign Manufacturers

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Yomiuri Shimbun, September 19, 2008. The Chinese government will soon oblige foreign companies to disclose source code in IT products for sale in China. Foreign manufacturers will be allowed to sell their IT-based products to the Chinese market only after an accreditation body examines the code and finds that it passes unspecified tests.

Products expected to be subject to examination include smart cards, digital copiers, and computer servers. China claims that this activity is needed to shut out viruses and stymie hackers. Companies that decline to cooperate can be barred from both sales and manufacture of the product in China.

I would suggest to China that they spend more of their energies keeping better track of melamine and lead.

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

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Pity Larimer County in northern Colorado. We poor sods who live here find ourselves sandwiched between two unexploited deposits of natural mineral wealth. To the east of Fort Collins, near the hamlet of Nunn, is a fairly large uranium ore body. In the northwest, there may be an exploitable diamond deposit. Perhaps hundreds of Kimberlite pipes may be lying in the CO/WY region waiting to be exploited.

Diamonds have already been mined in northern Colorado, near the Wyoming border. The Kelsey Lake diamond mine closed in 2002 due to bankruptcy. The Kelsy Lake mine produced the 5th largest diamond ever found. The yield of the formation is reportedly 4 carats per 100 metric tons of ore.

Given that the Colorado Front Range has been substantially gentrified, the discovery of mineral wealth in the vicinity of hobby ranchers and McMansions will make for some interesting times for the county commissioners. Uranium and Diamonds. NIMBY.

Stealers Wheel Video 1972.

BASF Offers to Buy Ciba

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According to the on-line publication Chemical Engineering, German chemical giant BASF has made an offer to buy Ciba Holdings AG, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland. In the public takeover, BASF has offered CHF 50.00 for each nominal share of Ciba stock.  The agreed upon price represents a 32 % premium above the Sept. 12, 2008, closing price. The acquisition will help BASF strengthen its hold on specialty chemicals, particularly in the area of coatings.

A Case of the Vapors

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There is an interesting debate happening in the weather and climate modeling wing of the blogosphere. Seems that over at Wattsupwiththat someone has pointed out the significant part water vapor may play as an absorber of solar energy. All you have to do is look at the absorbance spectrum of water vs CO2 and you’ll see that the game is suddenly more complex than the incessant drum beating about CO2 would suggest.

There are a number of good websites on weather and climate out there. Rabett Run seems well centered in terms of the science.  If you are interested in the level of play happening in the real, behind the scenes debate, check out the references to Kirchoff’s law.  Physical meteorology is at the center of the whole debate. Assumptions about the applicability of certain laws, assumptions about the value of key variables, and other details of equation building can drive the nature of the conclusions. Planetary atmospheres are really quite complex!

I think it will be several more solar cycles before the right modeling assumptions shake out.

Are B-Schools Paying Attention to this Fiasco?

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The dam burst of banking disasters and federal bail-outs of firms “too big to fail” has brought to light the fragility of our banking and investments system. Like a tropical depression that forms in the eastern Atlantic ocean and gradually feeds on the warm waters and moist air until it makes landfall as a rampaging storm, the combination of greed, financial deregulation, and enthusiastic liquidity on the part of the Fed has now spun up into a full fledged economic storm.

In an essay posted on CNN.com, Columbia Professor Joseph Stiglitz, among others, points to some causes of the present calamity on the banking and financial businesses. Stiglitz says-

“One can say the Fed failed twice, both as a regulator and in the conduct of monetary policy. Its flood of liquidity (money made available to borrow at low interest rates) and lax regulations led to a housing bubble. When the bubble broke, the excessively leveraged loans made on the basis of overvalued assets went sour.” 

“The new “innovations” simply hid the extent of systemic leverage and made the risks less transparent; it is these innovations that have made this collapse so much more dramatic than earlier financial crises …”

The mess that taxpayers and investors are left with is the result of greed and recklessness on the part of elite “business leaders” in conjunction with Federal officials only too anxious to deregulate and discount. This is not a failure based on physical reality. It is a failure based on greed and poor judgement. It rests on a morally shallow and sadly misguided philosophy that mere acquisition of currency is reason enough for being and is the sole measure of success.

As a start, it is my hope that the Deans and faculty of our business schools can summon some kind of movement to reform their admissions standards and refine their ethics curricula.

Perhaps certain finance practitioners need to be trained and certified in a manner similar to actuarial professionals?  Seems to me that the people who launch financial instrument schemes with the potential to collapse an economy should be at least as well trained in risk management as an actuary.

A firm proposing a financial instrument for sale to the public should be required to prepare a mathematical model with macroeconomic inputs to model the potential for instability. The kind of discipline needed to do this modeling could help people refine the fund structure so it remains manageable in a broader range of economic conditions. This would also provide for a real transparency to regulating agencies and possibly even investors.  But most importantly, if you want to model it, then you have to understand it. And that is part of what has been lacking.

Fast Food Munching Criminals Leave Corrosive Fingerprints

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University of Leicester, UK.  John Bond, a reseacher at the University of Leicester and consultant to the Northamptonshire Police, suggests that criminals who consume fast foods leave fingerprints that are corrosive. Dr. Bond says that enhanced levels of salt in processed foods can lead to sweaty fingerprints that are more corrosive to metals.

Dr Bond said: “On the basis that processed foods tend to be high in salt as a preservative, the body needs to excrete excess salt which comes out as sweat through the pores in our fingers.

“So the sweaty fingerprint impression you leave when you touch a surface will be high in salt if you eat a lot of processed foods -the higher the salt, the better the corrosion of the metal.”

Dr. Bond went on to say that there was an “indirect link” to obesity and the chances of being caught in a crime. Bond says that corrosion due to fingerprints may be helpful in the tracking of terrorists whose bombs are fragmented from the explosion.

The Chemical Entrepreneur. Part 1.

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The modern mythos of 20th century American industry includes many stories of businesses being founded in a garage. As the stories go, a few plucky founders will construct a widget in their garage and, with prototype in hand, look for a way to get the product to customers. Famously, Apple computer and Hewlett Packard were founded in this manner.

What you don’t often hear about is the extent to which the founders might have performed a market study to ascertain the potential demand in the market. Possibly because the frequency of this ground work is near zero. Certainly the founders had some sense that like-minded folk would want copies of their products. In other words, if you build it, at least a few will come.

Similarly, one doesn’t hear so much about the rate of failure either. How many storage lockers are crammed with the remains of a failed business plan?  Probably more than a few.

What every technological entrepreneur eventually has to come to grips with is this- who are the customers and how can you get the message of new capability to them? Seth Godin has some interesting ideas about this. Godin suggests that in todays information saturated market place, the critical customers are the innovators and the early adopters.

So here is the big question- Why don’t we hear more about chemists launching businesses out of a garage?  Better yet, how might the chemical industry be different if more chemists did start a chemical business in this celebrated manner?  Most might agree that the culture of entrepreurialism that Wozniak, Jobs, Packard, Hewlett, and Gates picked up and ran with dramatically accelerated the growth of the electronics industry. But fewer might agree on what clues these founders took as their cue to risk everything. How does a fledgeling chemical entrepreneur know if the idea, process, or material of interest is worthy of risking the family nest egg?

On the next posting, we’ll talk about some of the factors that a chemical entrepreneur might face in getting started.

CERN to Light Up Large Hadron Collider

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CERN has announced that the first injection of particles into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will occur between 9:00 and 10:00 Wednesday, September 10th, 2008.  Fears of spurious black hole formation have been discounted. The final synchronization was a success. Safety has been reiterated.

This is big time science, man. While in Geneva you won’t be able to spit without hitting a particle physicist.

How do they keep the superconducting magnets chilled? Air Liquide was selected to provide the liquid helium supply to maintain the 1.8 K operating temperature of the magnets over the 27 km length of the LHC.

According to CERN, the cool down phase of LHC preparation required 10,000 tonnes of liquid nitrogen and 130 tonnes of liquid helium to fill the 8 magnet sectors.

The peak beam parameters are quite interesting. Check out this link to PhD Comics.