Tuesday, December 17, 2013
CONTACT ME AT: manessmorrison2@yahoo.com



News Clips For The Day

'Small world of murder': As homicides drop, Chicago police focus on social networks of gangs
By Tony Dokoupil, Senior Staff Writer, NBC News

CHICAGO — It was an overcast noon, and 12 miles from the city’s sparkling core, Police Commander David McNaughton was ready for murder. His district on the southwest side responded to 39 killings last year, among the highest body counts in the city, which itself recorded 506 murders, the most in the nation. But instead of another bloody year, McNaughton has had to contend with a new surprise: peace and quiet.
“When people say stop and frisk is bad, well, no it’s not,” said the white-haired commander, handpicked to police the rancid, tumble-down stretches around Midway Airport. “We’re going to save their lives by talking to them.”

With days left in 2013, McNaughton would seem to be right: Murders are down this year by almost half in his district and about 20 percent citywide, according to department data. It’s the equivalent of more than 80 lives “saved,” as the commander puts it, and the lowest Chicago murder toll in a half century. But these happy new trend lines come with nettling questions about how they were accomplished, and grave doubts about whether the good times can continue in 2014.

During the course of two days this month, NBC News toured the new Chicago way and the science behind it, encountering an almost buoyant Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, the top cop in America’s reigning “murder capital.” He smiled as he raised the blinds in his fifth floor office on South Michigan Avenue. “I’ve never stood by these windows before,” he said, waiting a beat before explaining why. “It’s too dangerous.”

He was joking, of course. But it’s easy to understand McCarthy’s light-minded mood once you understand the almost-magical promise of his approach.

Policing ‘hot people,’ not ‘hot spots’
The switch was thrown quietly in May 2012, hidden inside a 16-page directive, “Gang Violence Reduction Strategy,” and largely ignored amid a 60 percent rise in murders in the first quarter alone. With less than a year on the job, McCarthy had already disbanded two special task forces, roving teams that muscled neighborhoods into submission. Now he was betting on what he calls “the next phase of community policing in this world”: an emphasis not on the traditional “hot spots” for crime, but on the “hot people” who commit most criminal acts.

Rather than merely responding to crimes or swarming bad neighborhoods, the Chicago Police Department committed to using the new science of social network analysis — the same tools that allow Silicon Valley to predict who you know and what you might like to buy — to detail the city’s “small world of murder,” as one researcher put it, and use that knowledge to stop the next bullet before it's fired.

This is a profound, first-of-its-kind shift in strategy, albeit reliant on old-school intelligence and similar methods for gathering and acting on it. About 80 percent of the shootings in Chicago are gang related, according to police, so the city organized a closed-door, maps-out, all-hands “gang audit.” That identified about 60 active gangs, 600 factions, and the linguini of social and geographic lines that tie and divide them.

But the audit is perpetually refreshed, augmented by new intelligence from each district and flowed back into a master system, which spits out gang bulletins in close to real time. Now when there’s a shooting, police don’t just converge on the crime scene — they get reports that predict the next scene, the next victim, and even the next likely shooter, allowing them to converge on those locations as well.
“We got a pre-crime unit now,” McCarthy told NBC, making a favorite joke of the moment. It’s a nod to the sci-fi of Philip K. Dick, whose agents in “Minority Report” eliminated criminals before they broke bad. As a description of Chicago’s police work in 2013, however, “pre-crime” reduction is less a joke than a reality decades in the making, and now seemingly here.

If the progress continues, it could mean an end to the city’s legacy of gang warfare, and a preview of the future of police work nationwide.
Officer Chris Kaloudis greets an incoming inmate at the Cook County Jail in Chicago. Kaloudis is an intelligence officer here, the largest jail in America and a destination for gang members arrested in Chicago--most of whom are frisked for actionable info by Chris or one of his colleagues. "I get to know them," said the smiling, 15-year veteran of the County Sheriff's office, and what he learns helps Chicago Police to know the streets.

Civil liberties advocates raise concern
But civil libertarians and neighborhood activists are already alarmed. While McCarthy arrived to trumpet blasts about rebuilding community relations, he risks the opposite happening, and for a simple reason: His social network approach is data heavy and dependent on knowing the streets — which means questioning a lot of people, regardless of guilt or innocence.  

“Chicago is the new New York when it comes to stop-and-frisk,” said Harvey Grossman, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union in Illinois.

He’s the architect of an intensifying ACLU inquiry into the police department’s use of “contact cards,” detailed forms that document police engagement, including names, ages and associates, all of which adds to the department’s reservoir of actionable information.

While contact cards pre-date McCarthy, who for years was in charge of police strategy in New York City, they have nearly doubled since Mayor Rahm Emmanuel appointed him superintendent in mid-2011. This year, according to an analysis by the Chicago Tribune, McCarthy’s cops are on pace to engage 650,000 residents. The city doesn't track how many of their interactions are voluntary or what portion resulted in frisks.
But if the ratios match McCarthy's alma mater, Chicago will stop about 100,000 more people than New York City did in an average year in the last decade. “We’re alarmed,” said Grossman, who suspects many of these stops failed to meet standards for “reasonable suspicion” of wrongdoing.  

Adam Collins, a spokesperson for the police department, says the contact cards reflect an increase in "positive" interactions with the community. But McCarthy says that frisks are part of police work. “Everything will improve if we just get out of the cars and put our hands on people,” he boomed at a meeting with a deputy chief last January, according to the Chicago Tribune.

“It’s not a practice that’s randomized and you just walk up to people and start stopping them,” he explained to NBC. “None of this is by accident.”

Stopping a war before it starts
Down the road from McCarthy, in the 8th District, along a stretch of barred and barricaded corner stores, the even more cheerful and unapologetic Commander McNaughton invited a visitor around to his side of the desk to show-off what Chicago’s network-based police work looks like in action. Since he hasn’t had gang murders in his area for months, he called up on his computer an incident from late May, a drive-by shooting that wounded a teenager on the 2700 block of West 64th Street.

Even before the kid was in an ambulance, McNaughton got a flash message from a first responder, a dispatch telling the force that the victim had ties to two gang factions, the Sixth Ward and Lex City. He clicked on the document, his screen blinked, and up popped a report with pictures of four young black faces — “Rockwell Boys/Hit Squad” emblazoned above them.

Without a lick of physical evidence, these four kids, aged 15 to 17, were suspects in the shooting, their pixellated images on every terminal. They were profiled as potential murderers — in other words, known gang members, according to the bulletin, with a reported beef with the victim and a history of settling scores with triggers and clips.

But they were also potential victims. Below their head shots and names the report listed their hangout and noted ominously that “retaliation can be expected” there.
McNaughton dispatched police to this next potential scene. Then he called up another longer intelligence report, showing eight more young black faces, “Sixth Ward/Lex City” emblazoned above them. These kids were profiled as the next potential shooters, a murder squad in waiting, all of them friends and associates of the victim, all of them with known whereabouts. McNaughton dispatched more of his troops to find these kids, and stop a war in the making.

“It’s a cycle that just keeps feeding itself,” he explained, radiating the same optimism as his boss, a glow more often found onstage at TED talks. “We’re not waiting to see a pattern. We’re catching the first one, and taking immediate steps.”

Less than two weeks later, those steps led to the arrest of one of the Rockwell Boys for the shooting. It wasn’t a kid from the original four, but an associate police found through the same network. At the same time, in the days the case was open, McNaughton’s cops were all over the predicted scenes. They made a dozen more arrests than in the same period the year before, catching one of the Rockwell Boys with a gun a block from where they expected the next spree — a shootout that McNaughton says never did happen.

The social world of Chicago gangs
Such predictive work is possible thanks to the research of Chicago-born sociologist Andrew Papachristos, the son of a diner owner from a gang-plagued community on the North Side. Papachristos resolved to go into law enforcement. But he balked at the way police tried to anticipate crime with near-ubiquitous “risk factors” — generic qualities like poverty that turned millions of black or brown people into targets while doing little for public safety. He thought he could do better.

Papachristos, 37, now a professor at Yale, is a pioneer in the application of social network science to shooting patterns. His first peer-reviewed papers on the issue were published only in the last year, but back in 2011, he got the chance to brief McCarthy on the promise of his findings.

Using arrest records, he mapped the social world of Chicago gangs and demonstrated death’s narrow path through this community. People within two handshakes of a murder victim, for example, were 100 times more likely to be involved in a future murder than a stranger.

Most dramatic of all, he showed that people inside this closed circle of violence were about as likely to pull the trigger as they were to take the bullet. They weren’t predators or prey, in other words: They played both roles at once. If police could intervene, he thought, they could save not just one life but also a series of lives.

McCarthy has run with this insight. Oakland and Boston, among other cities, have incorporated social network science into a program called “Operation Ceasefire,” which reaches out to gang members and targets them for social services. Only Chicago, however, has made “two degrees of association,” as the department calls it, the backbone of a comprehensive policing strategy — and a strategy that has in some ways only just begun.

Last year, instead of policing an estimated 100,000 gang members citywide, McCarthy’s department used social mapping to scrutinize the 14,000 or so most likely to fire a bullet or take one. This year McCarthy and his department have refined their focus even more, generating a “heat list” of ranked individuals in every district. The higher the ranking, the greater the risk of the person dying or killing — a risk at least 500 times that of a person not on the list.  

'We will stop you if you make us'
The next step, now underway in two pilot districts, is a “custom notification”: a friendly visit from an officer, bearing a gun, badge and bulletproof vest but also a message of warning, worry, and the potential for reform. The general message, McCarthy says, is “we will help you if you let us, but we will stop you if you make us.”

So far none of the young men visited have accepted city help, he says, but at the same time none committed a violent crime — and, unfortunately, at least one helped proved the apparent precision of the heat list. He was killed in August, shot after leaving a party in an area known as “Terror Town.”  

That kind of accuracy, and the potential for better outcomes, has the superintendent feeling hopeful as he heads into 2014, a crossroads year for the emerging guru of national law enforcement. Another four quarters of downward-trending violence would help prove that the last five were more than a statistical fluke, as some criminologists claim.

But McCarthy’s toughest critics are still in the community, where the drop in murders may fail to translate into feelings of greater safety. None of the more than half dozen people NBC spoke with on 63rd Avenue between murder-plagued Englewood and Chicago Lawn knew of the drop in crime and when told, most spluttered at the idea — along with the future-shock strangeness of McCarthy’s techniques.

Still, as the sun set in Chicago, Superintendent McCarthy remained upbeat about his influence, drawing visitors to a long cabinet crowded with pictures and mementos. Most were from his days in New York. But one item stood out from his time in Chicago, a profile of him in the Tribune, his first big interview after he took the job, pledging to “change the way we do police work in this country.” Whether crime goes up or down, that’s one promise he’s already made good on.


Eighty percent of murders in Chicago are gang-related. Social mapping has led the police to the 14,000 gang members who are most likely to be involved in a murder. Without computers using social network analysis, the police could hardly have produced a gang audit like the one used here. This is better than “profiling” by poverty, this article points out, as it identifies the path of actual crime through the city.

The police are identifying those most likely to murder or be murdered and talking to them to try to lead them to getting help. “So far none of the young men visited have accepted city help, he says, but at the same time none committed a violent crime.” According to this article, murders are down by almost half in the district where this policy has been in effect.

This looks like intelligent policing to me. The fact that the gangs are so overwhelming in Chicago is the reason the social network works so well, but in many cities there are such gang numbers. As long as innocent people are not arrested, this addition of people to the data banks is not, I don't think, harmful, and it seems to be effective as a predictor of crime.





After latest shooting, murder manual author calls for book to be taken 'immediately' out of print – NBC
By Tony Dokoupil, Senior Staff Writer


It was an accessory in the arsenal of Karl Pierson, the student who opened fire last week inside a Colorado high school, leaving one girl in a coma before taking his own life.

“The Anarchist Cookbook,” which Pierson read in the days before his rampage, isn’t a guide to culinary revolution. It’s the original how-to of homicide and mass murder — and sales are still raging, with distribution from the likes of Amazon and Barnes & Noble, even as the work is linked to terrorist acts around the world.
Now, in rare interviews with NBC News, the publisher and the author of the "Cookbook" are trading blows about the book’s future.

“'The Anarchist Cookbook' should go quietly and immediately out of print,” says William Powell, who wrote the book as a stern 19-year-old, an opponent of the Vietnam War who felt violence was justified if it could prevent even greater violence in the process. He has since renounced that position, but never so forcefully, telling NBC in an email that “it is no longer responsible or defensible to keep it in print.”
Published in 1971, the book has sold more than two million copies and influenced hundreds of malcontents, mischief makers, and killers. Police have linked it to the Croatian radicals who bombed Grand Central Terminal and hijacked a TWA flight in 1976; the Puerto Rican separatists who bombed FBI headquarters in 1981; Thomas Spinks, who led a group that bombed 10 abortion clinics in the 1980s; Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995; the Columbine High School shooters of 1999; and the 2005 London public transport bombers.

Just in the last two years, law enforcement has tied the volume to Arizona shooter Jared Loughner, the Boston Marathon bombers, and at least a half dozen alleged terrorists and school shooters.

Powell, meanwhile, has apologized for the destructive cultural force that bears his name, and posted an eight-paragraph warning to would-be buyers on the book’s Amazon page. But Powell has no say: the rights belong to the publisher and always have — and the publisher has never wavered in his commitment to selling.

“You know, we don’t ban books in America,” says Billy Blann, who bought the rights to the "Cookbook" in 2002, just as digital sales took off. Blann is the founder of Delta Press, “the world’s most outrageous catalog,” as he calls it, and the purveyor of guides on “Justifiable Homicide,” “The Poor Man’s Nuclear Bomb,” and “The Butane Lighter Hand Grenade.”

Of hundreds of titles offering frank tips on bombs, bullets and blades, however, "The Anarchist Cookbook" remains his most-asked-for volume, he says, contributing largely to his $3 million in annual revenue and supporting a semi-retired life in a 6,000 square foot home in southern Arkansas.

“I’m sure I got my money back,” he says of the deal.
Web searches for the "Cookbook" have grown “more than 5,000 percent” in the last decade, according to an estimate by Google Trends. At the same time sales of the book have surged past the Penguin and Signet editions of Moby Dick, according to Amazon rankings, and Blann has no plans to pull back now.

When told of this latest school shooting, he goes silent a moment on the phone. “I feel bad about that,” he says at last. “But there’s victims of almost anything and everything, and I just don’t think we need to start banning books in America.”
This isn’t Blann’s first public fight over violent literature. A little more than a decade ago, a former police chief and several preachers in his hometown of El Dorado, where he serves on the city council, tried to shutter Delta Press, calling it a “satanic stronghold” and a cesspool for violence and subversion. “God showed me the city of El Dorado,” said Dwain Miller, a pastor at Second Baptist Church, waving a copy of the Delta Press catalog, “and he said, ‘there is a dark cloud over the city.’” Blann said his books were for “entertainment” and “academic” use only, a line he echoes today.

But what about Amazon and Barnes & Noble? Neither bookseller responded to NBC’s requests for comment. Both companies show the "Cookbook" in stock and ready to ship in time for Christmas. Both will even gift-wrap it, and ship some of Blann’s other titles — including primers on how to garrote, stab, and burn — in the same bundle for free.

Legally, this is all protected, says Christina Wells, a First Amendment scholar at the University of Missouri Law School. As public expression, a book can only be prohibited or punished if it “is likely to incite imminent lawless action,” according to a 1969 Supreme Court ruling.

It’s hard to prove that an act was aided or abetted by a given book, or that the influence was imminent, so there’s never been a successful lawsuit against "The Anarchist Cookbook"—or any how-to guide to violence for that matter. Corporate booksellers have escaped legal action as well. “Their First Amendment defense is pretty strong,” says Wells.

In 2010, after a father-son team of British white supremacists drew on "The Anarchist Cookbook" to make a jar of ricin, a London judge joined police in calling for a ban on the title. But Amazon said the law could not compel them to stop selling the book. “Our goal is to support freedom of expression and to provide customers with the broadest selection possible so they can find, discover and buy any title,” a spokesperson for the bookseller said at the time, adding that they would only remove a book if the law specifically found it to be illegal.

On Monday the parents of Colorado school gunman Karl Pierson said they were "shattered" by their son’s actions. They don’t understand why he made three Molotov cocktails, grabbed a shotgun and a machete, and slipped into a side door of his high school, gun drawn. Perhaps the "Cookbook" wasn’t pivotal, although machetes and Molotov cocktails are included. It’s a mystery and a tragedy for everyone.
But for William Powell, it’s also an opportunity, a chance to make the two chapters of his life into one. In the 40-plus years since he wrote "The Anarchist Cookbook," he has reinvented himself as an educator on the international stage, running a series of elite schools abroad, before settling in Malaysia. There he owns a teacher training center and writes books on pedagogy for the State Department.
One of his fundamental ideas is that schools need to be made safer, and, ironically, a way to move toward that goal is to pull "The Anarchist Cookbook" out of print.
“I hope this helps,” he says.


This article states that the Anarchists Cookbook was the book which Timothy McVeigh read. It is not. That was The Turner Diaries. The following is about that book from Wikipedia.

“The Turner Diaries is a novel written in 1978 by William Luther Pierce (former leader of the white nationalist organization National Alliance) under the pseudonym "Andrew Macdonald".[1] The Turner Diaries depicts a violent revolution in the United States which leads to the overthrow of the United States federal government, nuclear war, and, ultimately, to a race war leading to the extermination of all groups deemed by the author as impure such as Jews, gay people, and non-whites.[2] The book was called "explicitly racist and anti-Semitic" by The New York Times and has been labeled a "bible of the racist right" by the Southern Poverty Law Center.[3”

William Powell, this author, now wants the book to be withdrawn from publication, but the publisher is not willing to stop selling it. It apparently makes too much money. It's interesting that Powell is now, after so many years, wishing he hadn't written the book. Again from Wikipedia, this is about the author. “William Powell (born 1949) is the author of The Anarchist Cookbook, which he has since disowned. He and his wife are currently the co-directors of Education Across Frontiers, an organization aimed at the professional development of international school teachers and administrators.” The Wikipedia article titled William Powell Author gives many excepts from the book, and it is radical, even for the Vietnam era. I wonder how he went from radical to teacher, and how his organization Education Across Frontiers is related to the State Department.

Two other books were written by this author – Saudi Arabia and Its Royal Family, 1982, and The First Casualty, 1979, and are available on Amazon. I found no description of either book, or biography giving the educational background of the author under any source on the web. His organization's website is www.educationacrossfrontiers.com/‎ and is located in Malaysia, a nation which is given as being closely linked with the US in education and counter-terrorism on the State Department's page for Malaysia.




Pope Francis: Out with the conservative cardinal, in with the moderate – NBC
By Tracy Connor and Aaron Mermelstein

Four years ago, the former archbishop of St. Louis, Raymond Burke, was caught on tape saying that the head of the Washington archdiocese, Donald Wuerl, and other moderates were "weakening the faith" by refusing to ban pro-choice politicians from receiving communion.

Burke had to apologize for the remark, but it didn't diminish his profile in Rome under former Pope Benedict, who had appointed him head of the Vatican's equivalent of the supreme court and given him a coveted spot in the influential Congregation of Bishops.

Now, there's a new pontiff in town.
Pope Francis this week shook up the bishops panel, replacing the conservative Burke, now a cardinal, with none other than the moderate Wuerl, also a cardinal, in a move that could have a far-reaching effect on church leadership.

"This is one of the most significant moves so far," the Rev. Thomas Reese, author of "Inside the Vatican: The Politics and Organization of the Catholic Church," said of Monday's big announcement. "This is a clear signal of change among the bishops."
Dr. Michael Higgins of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., agreed, saying, "I think we're seeing the beginning of more radical reforms."

Francis, the former archbishop of Buenos Aires, has made it clear that he is taking a more pastoral approach to the papacy with less of a focus on hot-button issues like abortion and gay marriage.

Just this month, in a television interview, Burke made it equally clear that those issues remain a priority for him. "We can never talk enough about that," he said.
Jaime Allman, Burke's chief spokesman when he headed the St. Louis archdiocese, said he worries that the church is being "cleansed" of opposing views.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, seen as a moderate, will replace Burke.
“I think the pope is under a lot of pressure from certain people to quiet individuals who are perceived to be more focused on the orthodoxy, the tougher line than the softer line, and that’s Cardinal Burke," Allman told NBC News.

“There is some perceived effort that somehow the more activist members of the Catholic Church somehow need to be removed from influence."
The Congregation of Bishops oversees the selection of bishops around the world, giving its recommendations to the pope, who ultimately makes the call.
Higgins noted that Francis did not boot Cardinal Marc Ouellet of Canada, the Benedict confidante who heads the congregation and was seen as a papal contender during the last conclave.

"He doesn’t want to do a scorched earth policy," said Higgins. "It's more like, 'These are the people I can work with and these are the people who can temper the conservative influence.'"

By global standards, Wuerl — along with the rest of the U.S. bishops and cardinals — leans more conservative than many of his counterparts around the world, Higgins said.
But there is no question that Burke draws the harder line on divisive issues like contraception, abortion and embryonic research — the very type of topics that Pope Francis has complained are an obsession among some church leaders.

In recent years, Burke has banished a nun who spoke out for the ordination of women, resigned from the board of a hospital that hosted pro-choice singer Sheryl Crow at a fund-raiser, referred to President Obama as an "agent of death," and repeatedly called for clergy to deny communion to public figures who support abortion rights.

Wuerl is less scolding and has steadfastly opposed from-the-top bans on the sacraments for lawmakers whose political views diverge from church teaching.
"Incrimination of others has become a hallmark among some groups and individuals in the Catholic Church in our country today," Wuerl wrote in a 2009 editorial titled "Casting the First Stone" that reads like Pope Francis could have penned it.
Burke has not been completely cast from the Vatican hierarchy; he's keeping his job as Prefect of the Supreme Tribunal of the Apostolic Signatura — for now, anyway.
But as a member of the Congregation of Bishops, Wuerl will have a say in which bishops lead the church into the future. Reese noted that the Archdiocese of Chicago — the third largest in the U.S. — will soon have a vacancy when Cardinal Francis George reaches mandatory retirement age of 75.
"The pope has shown he does not want canon lawyers, he wants pastors," Higgins said.


The denial of sacraments to politicians who are pro-choice has been bothering me since the last few years when it first came into the news. One thing I don't like to see is any religious group becoming too political in their orientation. That includes Protestant Christians, as well as Catholic. My Unitarian Universalist Church is slightly active, on the part of the poor, immigration, and other liberal causes, but they have a worship service which is based on spiritual and ethical goals, and would never put pressure on their Republican members or anyone else to vote for any one candidate over another – and we do have some Republicans in the group.

The list of Burke's highly contentious actions is enough to make me think, again as in the last few actions of Pope Francis, that he will end up with a cleaner and more equitable church, perhaps in history. If he will tackle the church's passing of the pedophile priests on to other parishes that will be great. The sexual abuse of children is not a disciplinary matter that the church should administer, but a crime and one that should bring a lengthy prison term.





Algae converted to crude oil in less than an hour, energy department says
By John Roach


This concentrated goo of algae can be converted into a bio-crude in less than an hour, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.
The day when planes, trucks and cars are commonly revved up on pond scum may be on the near horizon thanks to a technological advance that continuously turns a stream of concentrated algae into bio-crude oil. From green goo to crude takes less than an hour.

The goo contains about 10 percent to 20 percent algae by weight. The rest is water. This mixture is piped into a high-tech pressure cooker where temperatures hover around 660 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures of 3,000 pounds per square inch in order to keep the mixture in a liquid phase.

Inside the cooker are "some technology tricks that other people don't have" that help separate the plant oils and other minerals such as phosphorous from the water, Douglas Elliott, a fellow at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash., explained to NBC News.

An hour after being poured into the cooker, gravity separates the crude oil from the water as it flows out the other end. "We can clean up that bio-crude and make it into liquid hydrocarbons that could well serve to displace the gas, diesel, and jet (fuel) that we make from petroleum now," he added.

What's more, a further water-processing step recovers methane — essentially natural gas — from the leftover plant material. The remaining nitrogen-rich water and recovered phosphorous can be recycled to grow more algae.

Elliott and colleagues describe the process in a paper accepted for publication in the journal Algal Research. Utah-based biofuels company Genifuel Corp. has licensed the technology and is working with an industrial partner to build a pilot plant.
The process takes raw algae slurry and converts it into a bio-crude that can be further refined into gasoline.

Revisited technology
The so-called hydrothermal liquefaction technology that Elliott and his colleagues used to create the bio-crude was pioneered in the 1970s, but fell out of favor as researchers focused on developing algae strains that yield high amounts of oil in the form of lipids.

To recover the oil from these high-yielding plants, the algae is dried and the oils extracted in a process that that is energy intensive and thus expensive. 
Hydrothermal liquefaction "has the advantage that it makes use of the whole algae, therefore it has the significant advantage that there is no need to promote lipid accumulation or indeed to extract lipids," Aris Karcanias, an energy analyst at FTI Consulting in London, explained to NBC News in an email.

"Furthermore," he added, "there is no need to expend energy for the algae drying process."
Despite the advantages, until now, Elliott explained, most demonstrations of the technology have been at the lab scale and done in so-called batch reactors. That is, the teams can only produce one batch of crude at a time. In addition, they use chemical solvents to separate the water from the oil.

Using the continuous process described in Algal Research, "we find that, if we do it the right way, we don't need those chemical steps," Elliott said.

Challenges ahead
Among the remaining challenges to make algae-derived biofuels a contender in the global energy marketplace is the ability to efficiently grow a sufficient amount of the plant for conversion into biofuels, according to Elliott.

There are also regulatory hurdles such as rewriting standards and specifications to allow the plant-derived oils to be blended into, or used in lieu of, petroleum-based fuels. "The fact is, they do look a little bit different and they have slightly different properties," he explained. 

In addition to Genifuel, who is collaborating with the Department of Energy on this process, other companies pursuing algae-based biofuel technology worth watching include Sapphire Energy, Cellana, and Synthetic Genomics, according to energy consultant Karcanias.

Throughout the industry, he said, "further research is required to enhance algal oil productivity on a continuous basis, ability to demonstrate wastewater treatment and optimize nutrient cycle." If that's achievable on a commercial scale, he added, "It will be an important and indeed useful step forward."


This looks like a breakthrough, though it will presumably burn “dirty” with CO2 emissions just like natural oil does. It does beat oil spills on our oceans and making an industrial site out of our Alaska wildlife environments, and maybe it will prevent the need for fracking. I hope all goes well with the project.




Fla. school named for Ku Klux Klan leader to be renamed – NBC
By Eric M. Johnson, Reuters


A Florida high school that for 54 years has borne the name of a leader of the Ku Klux Klan is to be renamed, officials said. The Nathan Bedford Forrest High School in Jacksonville, Fla., where more than half the students are black, will change its name from that of the man who allegedly was the Ku Klux Klan's first grand wizard.
A new name will be proposed in January.

"We recognize that we cannot and are not seeking to erase history," said Constance Hall, a board member for the Duval County school, which was founded 54 years ago.
"For too long and too many, this name has represented the opposite of unity, respect, and equality," Hall said in a statement.

Forrest was an innovative cavalry leader and a lieutenant general in the Confederate Army during the Civil War. He  joined the Ku Klux Klan after the war; there remains a dispute over his role.

With its roots in the Civil War era, the Ku Klux Klan has long been associated with hooded, white-robed night riders who menaced blacks with cross burnings, lynchings and other acts of violence.

The honoring of Confederate heroes and emblems has been a divisive issue in the United States, with proponents saying it pays homage to regional history and opponents saying it amounts to racism.

Memphis, Tenn., in February this year dropped Confederate names from three city parks. One was named after Forrest.

Omotayo Richmond, who moved to Jacksonville from New York, wrote in a Change.org petition that garnered more than 160,000 signatures in support of changing the school's name that doing so would go toward healing "so much racial division" in Florida.

"African American Jacksonville students shouldn't have to attend a high school named for someone who slaughtered and terrorized their ancestors one more school year," Richmond wrote.

The 1,300-student public school, which became racially integrated in 1971, had voted some five years ago to keep the name, but those officials had been replaced, the petition said.


This is one more step toward a peaceful relationship between the races in Jacksonville, which has 30.7% blacks as of the census estimate of 2012. Our current mayor is a black man. See this from Wikipedia:

“Alvin Brown (born December 15, 1961) is an American politician who is Mayor of Jacksonville, Florida. The first African American elected to the position, he succeeded John Peyton on July 1, 2011.[1][2] He is a member of the Democratic Party. Brown became the first African American ever elected Mayor of Jacksonville, as well as the first Democrat elected since Ed Austin in 1991.[2] The win was considered a major upset in light of the momentum gained by the Republican Party and the conservative Tea Party movement in the 2010 elections, and a significant victory for the Florida Democratic Party.[9]
Brown was sworn in as mayor on July 1, 2011.[2]





Charity raffle tickets for $1 million Picasso painting will cost you just $137 – NBC
By Henry Austin, NBC News contributor

Christmas could come early for the lucky winner of a Wednesday charity raffle. They could scoop up a Picasso worth $1 million for just $137.
Entitled “L’Homme au Gibus,” or Man with Opera Hat, the artwork painted with gouache on paper was done by the famous Spanish artist in 1914. He clearly signed “Pablo Picasso” in the upper right hand corner of the 12 by nine inch work.

Maya Widmaier-Picasso, the artist's daughter with the French model Marie-Therese Walter, and his son Claude Ruiz-Picasso, whose mother is the painter and author Francoise Gilot, “both attest to the painting’s authenticity,” according to the 1picasso100euros.com website which is selling the tickets for 100 euros (approximately $137).

Picasso's grandson Olivier, said of the raffle that his grandfather, "would have been amused to be involved in such an operation." 
Pablo Picasso's grandson Olivier, poses with the painting L'homme au Gibus or Man with Opera Hat.

“Everything innovative would interest him," he said. "I think that Pablo Picasso was a pioneer, pioneer in his personal life, in his sentimental life, in his creation." 
Some 50,000 tickets were made available for the painting which was bought by an anonymous donor at a New York gallery. It given to a charity working to save the ancient city of Tyre in southern Lebanon.

The UNESCO-registered International Association to Save Tyre charity is hoping to raise about $5 million at the auction at Sotheby’s in Paris, according to spokeswoman Liliane Assi.

“We are very excited,” she said, "Who can get a Picasso usually? Or a piece of art? Not a lot of people at that value. So we have seen a lot of people buying three and four and five tickets."

She added that the money would go towards creating an institute for Phoenician studies and creating a handicraft village to provide employment for local women, young people and the disabled in Tyre.
“The person who donated the painting is very generous,” she said.  


This is interesting. I hope the charity for the people of Tyre can fulfill their goals and help the disabled there. If they sell all 50,000 tickets for $137.00 each they should raise enough to do a lot of good and the winner of the Picasso will have something that he can sell for a million dollars or more.



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Concussion Research Slowed By Shortage Of Donated Brains – NPR
by Alan Yu
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Former NFL linebacker Jovan Belcher's body was exhumed last week so doctors can perform tests on the remains of his brain. The family hopes to find out if a degenerative brain disease played a role in Kansas City Chiefs veteran's death last year, when he shot his girlfriend then killed himself.

The tests probably won't give a lot of answers, considering how long Belcher has been buried, says Dr. Daniel Perl, who runs a brain bank and is a professor of pathology at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. "I'm not at all certain the diagnosis can even be made on this specimen," Perl tells Shots.

The disease that Belcher's remains will be tested for is chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. At the moment, doctors can only definitively diagnose CTE after a person has died, though new research funded in large part by the NFL and announced by the National Institutes of Health on Monday could change that someday.
CTE occurs in people with a history of concussions, notably boxers and professional football players. The brain trauma appears to cause a buildup of abnormal protein, which is associated with memory loss, bad judgment, aggression and dementia. The NIH will fund eight projects to study the long-term effects of repeated head injuries and to come up with better tools for diagnosing CTE and concussions. The NFL is donating $30 million for the work.

Perl is working on one of those projects with brain imaging specialists at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Washington University in St. Louis. The specialists will study brains with CTE under a microscope and with high-resolution scans of the brain. The researchers hope to identify find features of CTE that they can detect on brain scans in living brains.

One limiting factor is a lack of brains, says Dr. Walter Koroshetz, deputy director of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. A diagnosis can only be made after death, so scientists have to study brain samples from people who donate them.

"We're really stymied in our ability to make progress just because there's not that much brain tissue," Koroshetz says. "We're really very dependent upon people who donate their brains."

The NIH has established a network of brain banks to help researchers get access to tissue samples. Koroshetz says this problem applies to autism research as well, though he is confident of progress with time and more brains.


I'm glad that the NFL is donating money for this research. Football is a real problem, I my opinion. I object to the psychology of violence that is a part of the game, and some coaches were caught within the last few years telling their players to hit the other team hard, which is how some of the concussions happen, I am sure.

Now the scientists just need for more athletes to donate their brains for the research. Of course, I wonder if they will be able to find any cure, even if the research is helpful. At least, maybe they can pinpoint the changes in the brain while the patient is alive and allow them to stop playing to avoid making the damage worse.