Saturday, October 26, 2013

Speaking to Young Latinos, in English

Fusion Sets Its Sights on a Multicultural Generation

Cindy Karp for The New York Times
Jorge Ramos, a news anchor for Univision since 1986, will host a public affairs program on Fusion, a cable network founded by Univision and ABC that makes its debut on Monday.
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MIAMI — Since 1986, Jorge Ramos has anchored the Univision network’s 6:30 p.m. news broadcast, a vital source of information for the nation’s 50 million-plus Spanish speakers. But this week, his routine will change in a way that could have profound consequences not just for him but also for the American media landscape.
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Fusion’s newsroom in Miami.
At 5 p.m., Mr. Ramos will host a new hourlong English-language public-affairs program called “America With Jorge Ramos,” the highest-profile offering of a new cable network called Fusion, a venture of Univision and ABC. He will then walk a few steps into an adjacent studio, put on a tie and prepare to deliver the day’s news in Spanish, just as he always has.
“Everything is new,” Mr. Ramos, 55, said after a run-through this month for “America” at the vast newsroom and studio complex that Univision, flush with money from ratings in some categories that now surpass those of the four big English-language networks, has just finished near the airport here. “New language, new format, new studio, new lighting.”
In essence, Fusion can be seen as Univision’s response to the same demographic changes that are upending American politics and advertising. Latinos are the biggest ethnic minority in the United States, expected to reach 25 percent of the population by 2035. But with immigration down since the economic crisis of 2008, American-born Hispanics, who are English dominant, now represent the biggest chunk of that growth.
Initially, Fusion’s target audience was those young Hispanics, who constitute 20 percent of their age group. But after more research, Fusion’s management decided to aim for the entire millennial generation.
“We found that good content for Hispanic millennials is good content for any millennial,” Isaac Lee, Fusion’s Colombian-born chief executive and the president for news at Univision, said in an interview in his newsroom office. “You cannot treat young Hispanics as Hispanics. They want to be part of one conversation in one room. They don’t want to be ghettoized.”
In its effort to reach that coveted audience, Fusion has gone on something of a hiring binge, snatching up young bilingual and bicultural Hispanic talent. Alicia Menendez, a Cuban-American lately of The Huffington Post, has been given the 6:30 p.m. slot, and at 10, León Krauze, who began his career as a sports radio reporter in Mexico City and is now an anchor at KMEX, Univision’s Los Angeles affiliate, will host a show called “Open Source.”
Both Ms. Menendez and Mr. Krauze come from families known to Hispanics: Her father is Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, his the historian Enrique Krauze, perhaps Mexico’s most prominent public intellectual. But in a bet on the multiculturalism said to be second nature to millennials, Fusion has also recruited talent from outside the Latino orbit.
A program called “DNA,” for example, will be hosted by the musician and political activist of that nickname, Derrick Ashong, who was born in Ghana, raised in the Middle East and New Jersey, educated at Harvard and most recently hosted a program called “The Stream” for Al Jazeera English. And Yannis Pappas, a Greek-American comedian from Brooklyn, will be joining a Venezuelan and a Brazilian as hosts of the two-hour “Morning Show.”
Fusion’s strongest selling point, however, is Mr. Ramos, whom Ben Sherwood, president of ABC News, describes as “Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow wrapped into one.” Born in Mexico City, Mr. Ramos began his career as a radio reporter there, left in 1983 after chafing at political restrictions on his work, then worked at KMEX before moving east and emerging as the dominant figure in Spanish-language media in the United States. In 2008 he became an American citizen.
In addition to being co-anchor of “Noticiero Univision,” Mr. Ramos is the host of a Sunday-morning public affairs program, “Al Punto,” that focuses on issues of particular interest to him, most notably immigration. He also writes a newspaper column and is the author of nine books, including “A Country for All: An Immigrant Manifesto.”
At a time when the figure of the network anchor seems diminished, just like the audience for the nightly newscasts of ABC, CBS and NBC, Mr. Ramos stands out as an exception. So does his style: In contrast to his English-language counterparts, but in keeping with a certain Latin American tradition, his personal position on issues like immigration and scandals within the Roman Catholic Church — is often quite clear.
“Jorge Ramos enjoys enormous respect and credibility among his viewers, who feel a close connection with him,” said Armando Correa, the editor of People en Español magazine. “They don’t see him as a mask reading a teleprompter. But he’s more than a journalist. He’s also a celebrity, one of the most beloved by our readers. No other anchor has this power of communication at the emotional level.”
During the interview, conducted at his request in English, which he speaks fluently though with an accent, Mr. Ramos acknowledged that “America” will take him out of his comfort zone. Slim and graying with a determined, earnest manner, he cast the new venture as a battle for relevancy in the face of generational shifts.
“I have to reinvent myself to reach that market,” he said, referring to millions of young Hispanics who know his name but not his work. “These are kids who meet me and never say, ‘I watch your newscast.’ They say, ‘My mom and dad watch you,’ or ‘My grandparents watch you.’ “
Because of the growing importance of Latino voters, Univision is now an obligatory stop for candidates from both parties. To reach those voters, “you have to talk to us,” Mr. Ramos said. But he worries that Univision’s journalism does not resonate in the larger national conversation, and cited the network’s exclusion from the 2012 presidential debates as an example.
“It is incredibly frustrating to depend on translation to be relevant in this country,” he said. “Every single day, we have great stories, and nobody knows we are doing it, unless you speak Spanish.” With Fusion, no translation is necessary. “Language won’t be an excuse anymore not to pay attention to us,” he said.
Yet analysts caution that broadcasting in English does not guarantee success. The challenges start with persuading cable systems to carry Fusion and give it a good channel position, said Alan B. Albarran, director of the Center for Spanish Language Media at the University of North Texas.
“It sounds good on paper,” he said. “But can all these things be executed? And how long is it going to take? History tells us they don’t build an audience overnight. In some cases, it takes years, especially in the multichannel universe we are in. I think it’s going to be a slow, uphill battle, even for two companies with deep pockets.”
Mr. Correa said Fusion would be a test for all Spanish-language media. “So far, creating a product in English for Hispanics has not worked well, not as a magazine and not on TV,” he said. “My point is that if you are an English-dominant Hispanic, you have a lot of options. So if Fusion is going to work, and I hope it does, it has to have a different voice and take sides, have an opinion. If not, if it’s going to be impartial, then I’ll just watch CNN.”
Mr. Lee acknowledged the network’s practical challenges but said that Univision was counting on the muscle of the Walt Disney Company, the parent of ABC, to help it gain access to cable systems. Besides, Disney is aware of the potential of the Hispanic market, having developed stars like Selena Gomez (via the Disney Channel), Eva Longoria and Sofia Vergara (both on ABC). “They know how the future looks, and they get it,” he added.
Mr. Sherwood declined to discuss how much Disney was investing, saying only that “this network and service is going to start small and build over five years.” Initially, Fusion will be available to around 20 million cable subscribers, he said, a figure that he said is expected to rise to 60 million. (By comparison, CNN and Fox News are each in around 100 million households.) Some big systems, like Cablevision, Charter and Cox, will carry Fusion from the start, and some, like Time Warner, will not.
But in a cable news landscape where CNN, Fox, MSNBC and others already jostle, how does Fusion distinguish itself from the pack? In interviews here with on-camera staffers, producers and executives, all talked of the importance of infusing programming with humor — not just a sports comedy show to be called “Sports Talkers” but other offerings as well.
If that sounds like stealing a page from the Jon Stewart playbook, it is. Billy Kimball, who began his career writing for HBO’s “Not Necessarily the News” and has also written for “Saturday Night Live,” will be Fusion’s chief programming officer, and David Javerbaum, the former head writer and producer of “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” has also been brought on board as an executive producer.
“News as defined by young people is something very different from what we do,” Mr. Sherwood said. “They lump all nonfiction into a category called news,” he said, and expect providers of information to “bring that irreverent lens” to content.
Mr. Ramos is well aware that young viewers, Hispanic or otherwise, may not respond. Asked if it might not be too early for a network like Fusion, he agreed that this was a risk, but added: “The other risk is that we might be too late. The problem is that maybe they are not watching television anymore.” Nevertheless, he seems convinced that time — and numbers — are on his and Fusion’s side.
“All the talk of many years about the sleeping giant, well, he’s well awake and running now,” he said. “Eventually, I’ll be able to interview the first Hispanic president of the United States. That’s what’s coming, and I have to be part of that transformation.”

Bank's Midlevel Executive Becomes a New Face of the Housing Crisis - NYTimes.com

Bank's Midlevel Executive Becomes a New Face of the Housing Crisis - NYTimes.com:

 "More than five years after the housing bust, the roll call of banking executives who have been blamed by the public for the crisis has grown ever longer. But when it comes to top managers who have been hit with a jury verdict for pushing dubious mortgages, the list is small indeed."

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Reparations From Banks

The government’s attempts to hold banks accountable for their mortgage practices may finally be paying off. On Friday, JPMorgan Chase agreed to pay $5.1 billion to the regulator of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to resolve charges related to toxic mortgage securities sold before the financial crisis. That amount had been negotiated as part of a broader $13 billion settlement — yet to be finalized — between the bank and state and federal officials over the bank’s mortgage practices.

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Earlier in the week, a federal jury found Bank of America liable for mortgage fraud before the financial crisis. The jury also found a former manager specifically responsible for some of the wrongdoing. Prosecutors have asked the judge to impose a fine of $848 million on the bank.
These developments have come late in the game, more than five years after the start of the mortgage crisis from which the economy and millions of homeowners have yet to recover. And it may be too late for the government to pursue trials against other banks for similar misconduct, because of statutes of limitations.
A broad settlement with JPMorgan, however, could well be a template for other settlements in the near future. As the final pieces of the deal are put in place, it is crucial for the government to secure adequate redress for wrongdoing and clear accountability up the chain of command. (The bank manager in the Bank of America trial was small fry, relatively speaking.)
Of the $13 billion total settlement with JPMorgan — which would be the largest ever paid to the government by a single corporation — most would go to the housing regulator and to other investors who sustained losses on securities sold by JPMorgan and by two banks it bought during the financial crisis, Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual. Another $4 billion reportedly is earmarked for mortgage relief for homeowners. The only penalty would be $2 billion to $3 billion for the dubious securities sold by JPMorgan itself.
This hardly seems punitive; indeed, even with the settlement payments, JPMorgan is likely to come out way ahead, given the income and market clout that Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual have contributed to the bank since the end of 2008.
The real losers in the deal would be homeowners, because the $4 billion in relief does not appear to add to existing aid; rather, it is almost surely relief the bank would have provided anyway. JPMorgan also will be able to deduct most of the settlement from its taxes — for a tax savings of roughly $4 billion — unless the settlement forbids the write-off. (Memo to Justice Department: Forbid the write-off.)
Another problem is that the deal appears oddly short on accountability. Negotiators reportedly have not yet decided how much wrongdoing, if any, the bank will admit. If there is no admission of fault, that would imply the claims are meritless, though it is unfathomable that the bank would pay $13 billion if it had done nothing wrong.
Banks, however, are loath to admit wrongdoing in government settlements because they fear subsequent shareholder lawsuits. If the government accepts no admission, or an admission that is broad and nonspecific, it would be shielding JPMorgan — on the theory, presumably, that private lawsuits would imperil the bank and endanger the economy. But if the settlement, in effect, precludes private litigation, then $13 billion is not enough. The government has to require either a bigger settlement, which seems unlikely, or a clear and comprehensive admission of wrongdoing.
The settlement reportedly does not include a promise by the government to give up a federal criminal investigation currently under way into the bank’s mortgage practices. That is as it should be, but it is worth recalling that past indictments for banks’ violations have focused on lower-level bank employees or distant subsidiaries, while higher-level executives have remained immune.
The Bank of America trial, over actions taken at Countrywide Financial, the mortgage company that the bank bought in early 2008, shows what might have been possible if the government had taken action in a more timely way. Done right, the JPMorgan settlement and others patterned on it may be the last hope for some justice for the fraud and other wrongdoing that fueled the financial crisis.

Sunday, October 20, 2013

Lousy Medicaid Arguments - NYTimes.com

Lousy Medicaid Arguments - NYTimes.com:

"For now, the big news about Obamacare is the debacle of HealthCare.gov, the Web portal through which Americans are supposed to buy insurance on the new health care exchanges. For now, at least, HealthCare.gov isn’t working for many users."

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In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World: Ian Stewart: 9780465085989: Amazon.com: Books

In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World: Ian Stewart: 9780465085989: Amazon.com: Books:

 "In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations That Changed the World Paperback"



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Saturday, October 19, 2013

Lies, Damned Lies, and Fox News

Paul Krugman - New York Times Blog


The other day Sean Hannity featured some Real Americans telling tales of how they have been hurt by Obamacare. So Eric Stern, who used to work for Brian Schweitzer, had a bright idea: he actually called Hannity’s guests, to get the details.
Sure enough, the businessman who claimed that Obamacare was driving up his costs, forcing him to lay off workers, only has four employees — meaning that Obamacare has no effect whatsoever on his business. The two families complaining about soaring premiums haven’t actually checked out what’s on offer, and Stern estimates that they would in fact see major savings.
You have to wonder about the mindset of people who go on national TV to complain about how they’re suffering from a program based on nothing but what they think they heard somewhere. You might also wonder about what kind of alleged news show features such people without any check on their bona fides. But then again, consider the network.

Mapping 22 Different Latino Populations Across the U.S.A. - John Metcalfe - The Atlantic Cities

Mapping 22 Different Latino Populations Across the U.S.A. - John Metcalfe - The Atlantic Cities:

 "Where do America's Latino and Hispanic populations live? Let's start with where they're not living: in Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, and a whopping chunk of the Midwest that probably hears a sí as often as the cry of an Amazonian toucan."



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Friday, October 18, 2013

Lunch seminar - Jean Pestieau - One scalar boson and nothing more? (09 October 2013)

Lunch seminar - Jean Pestieau - One scalar boson and nothing more? (09 October 2013):

"After the discovery of the LHC, we ask:
- Isn't it time to re-apply Occam's razor to the physics of elementary particles?
- Supersymmetry, strings, anthropic principle: much ado about nothing for 30 years?
- Grasp all, lose all (Qui trop embrasse mal étreint)?"



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The Navy’s newest warship is powered by Linux | Ars Technica

The Navy’s newest warship is powered by Linux | Ars Technica:

"When the USS Zumwalt (DDG 1000) puts to sea later this year, it will be different from any other ship in the Navy's fleet in many ways. The $3.5 billon ship is designed for stealth, survivability, and firepower, and it's packed with advanced technology. And at the heart of its operations is a virtual data center powered by off-the-shelf server hardware, various flavors of Linux, and over 6 million lines of software code."

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Thursday, October 17, 2013

The Damage Done

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The government is reopening, and we didn’t default on our debt. Happy days are here again, right?
Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
Paul Krugman
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Well, no. For one thing, Congress has only voted in a temporary fix, and we could find ourselves going through it all over again in a few months. You may say that Republicans would be crazy to provoke another confrontation. But they were crazy to provoke this one, so why assume that they’ve learned their lesson?
Beyond that, however, it’s important to recognize that the economic damage from obstruction and extortion didn’t start when the G.O.P. shut down the government. On the contrary, it has been an ongoing process, dating back to the Republican takeover of the House in 2010. And the damage is large: Unemployment in America would be far lower than it is if the House majority hadn’t done so much to undermine recovery.
A useful starting point for assessing the damage done is a widely cited report by the consulting firm Macroeconomic Advisers, which estimated that “crisis driven” fiscal policy — which has been the norm since 2010 — has subtracted about 1 percent off the U.S. growth rate for the past three years. This implies cumulative economic losses — the value of goods and services that America could and should have produced, but didn’t — of around $700 billion. The firm also estimated that unemployment is 1.4 percentage points higher than it would have been in the absence of political confrontation, enough to imply that the unemployment rate right now would be below 6 percent instead of above 7.
You don’t have to take these estimates as gospel. In fact, I have doubts about the report’s attempt to assess the effects of policy uncertainty, which relies on research that hasn’t held up very well under scrutiny.
Yet it would be a mistake to conclude that Macroeconomic Advisers overstated the case. The main driver of their estimates is the sharp fall since 2010 in discretionary spending as a share of G.D.P. — that is, in spending that, unlike spending on programs like Social Security and Medicare, must be approved by Congress each year. Since the biggest problem the U.S. economy faces is still inadequate overall demand, this fall in spending has depressed both growth and employment.
What’s more, the report doesn’t take into account the effect of other bad policies that are a more or less direct result of the Republican takeover in 2010. Two big bads stand out: letting payroll taxes rise, and sharply reducing aid to the unemployed even though there are still three times as many people looking for work as there are job openings. Both actions have reduced the purchasing power of American workers, weakening consumer demand and further reducing growth.
Putting it all together, it’s a good guess that those estimates of damage from political hostage-taking understate the true harm done. Elections have consequences, and one consequence of Republican victories in the 2010 midterms has been a still-weak economy when we could and should have been well on the way to full recovery.
But why have Republican demands so consistently had a depressing effect on the economy?
Part of the answer is that the party remains determined to wage top-down class warfare in an economy where such warfare is particularly destructive. Slashing benefits to the unemployed because you think they have it too easy is cruel even in normal times, but it has the side effect of destroying jobs when the economy is already depressed. Defending tax cuts for the wealthy while happily scrapping tax cuts for ordinary workers means redistributing money from people likely to spend it to people who are likely to sit on it.
We should also acknowledge the power of bad ideas. Back in 2011, triumphant Republicans eagerly adopted the concept, already popular in Europe, of “expansionary austerity” — the notion that cutting spending would actually boost the economy by increasing confidence. Experience since then has thoroughly refuted this concept: Across the advanced world, big spending cuts have been associated with deeper slumps. In fact, the International Monetary Fund eventually issued what amounted to a mea culpa, admitting that it greatly underestimated the harm that spending cuts inflict. As you may have noticed, however, today’s Republicans aren’t big on revising their views in the face of contrary evidence.
Are all the economy’s problems the G.O.P.’s fault? Of course not. President Obama didn’t take a strong enough stand against spending cuts, and the Federal Reserve could have done more to support growth. But most of the blame for the wrong turn we took on economic policy, nonetheless, rests with the extremists and extortionists controlling the House.
Things could have been even worse. This week, we managed to avoid driving off a cliff. But we’re still on the road to nowhere.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Obama Signs Bill to Avert Default, Open Government - NYTimes.com

Obama Signs Bill to Avert Default, Open Government - NYTimes.com:

"WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama has signed a measure into law reopening the federal government and averting a potential default.

The White House says Obama signed the bill early Thursday, hours after the House gave final approval."

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Tuesday, October 15, 2013

JPMorgan Expected to Admit Fault in 'London Whale' Trading Loss - NYTimes.com

JPMorgan Expected to Admit Fault in 'London Whale' Trading Loss - NYTimes.com:

 "Updated, 10:00 p.m. | For JPMorgan Chase, fines totaling billions of dollars are no longer sufficient to placate the government. Now the bank’s regulators want something stiffer: a mea culpa."

"Even before a settlement, federal prosecutors and the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Manhattan have brought criminal charges against two of the traders: Javier Martin-Artajo and Julien Grout, who were accused of covering up the size of their losses. The traders deny wrongdoing. A third trader, Bruno Iksil, sidestepped charges, striking a nonprosecution deal."

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Michael Levitt - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Michael Levitt - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

"Michael Levitt, FRS (born 9 May 1947) is an American-British-Israeli[10] biophysicist and a professor of structural biology at Stanford University since 1987.[11][12] His research is in computational biology[13] and he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences."

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Without Test Tubes,3 Win Nobel in Chemistry

University of Southern California; Stephanie Mitchell/Harvard; Steve Fisch/Stanford University
From left: Arieh Warshel, Martin Karplus and Michael Levitt shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
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Chemistry, meet computer science.
This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three researchers for work that did not involve test tubes or lab coats. Instead, they explored the world of molecules virtually, with computers. Such numerical simulations enable the closer study of complex reactions like photosynthesis and combustion, as well as the design of new drugs.
Martin Karplus, 83, of the University of Strasbourg in France and Harvard University; Michael Levitt, 66, of Stanford University; andArieh Warshel, 72, of the University of Southern California, share the honor and the approximately $1.2 million that accompanies it. Their computer programs use the classical laws of motion dating from Newton to track the movement of a multitude of atoms, and quantum physics to describe the breaking and forming of chemical bonds.
All three winners are naturalized American citizens. Dr. Karplus, born in Austria, is also an Austrian citizen. Dr. Levitt, born in South Africa, also holds British and Israeli citizenships, and Dr. Warshel, born in Israel, is also an Israeli citizen.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, which awards the prize, cited the three “for the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.” As a news release explained it, “Chemists used to create models of molecules using plastic balls and sticks,” but “today the modeling is carried out in computers,” thanks in part to work done in the 1970s by the three new laureates.
Their work has long been supported by federal science grants, said Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, which has had to send home most of its scientists because of the government shutdown. Noting that Monday’s winners of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine were also underwritten by the N.I.H., Dr. Collins said in an e-mail to a reporter on Wednesday, “The irony continues.”
For Dr. Levitt, the unexpected phone call from Stockholm came at 2:15 in the morning. “It was an enormous shock,” he said, admitting that he had checked various Nobel predictions on the Internet. “You will not find my name on any of them. I’m not sure it was a good thing or a bad thing.”
With committee members he knew personally informing him that he had won, Dr. Levitt realized it was not a hoax.
“One of the members I promised to send a review to maybe a couple of years ago, but I haven’t done it yet,” Dr. Levitt said. “He said, ‘We haven’t gotten your review yet, but we’re still going to give you the prize.’ ”
Dr. Levitt then called his 98-year-old mother in London and told her to turn on the computer and watch the news conference on the Web. She asked him to spell the Web site — nobelprize.org. Dr. Levitt told her, “Just Google ‘Nobel Prize,’ and it’ll be the first hit.”
In the laboratory, experimental chemists can readily tell the beginning chemical ingredients and the final products. But the actual reactions usually occur very quickly. “It’s like seeing all the actors before Hamlet,” said Sven Lidin, chairman of the Nobel selection committee, during the prize announcement webcast on Wednesday, “and all the dead bodies after, and then you wonder what happened in the middle. And actually there is some interesting action there, and this is what theoretical chemistry provides us with — the whole drama.”
But in the 1960s, when a computer filled a room, computer programs had to be crammed into small slices of memory, limiting what could be done. At the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, Dr. Warshel, who was then a doctoral student, and Dr. Levitt, who worked with Dr. Warshel as a computer programmer, calculated the behavior of molecules, even very large biological molecules, although that early work used Newtonian physics and not quantum effects.
Meanwhile, at Harvard, Dr. Karplus’s research group developed computer programs that simulated chemical reactions and employed the full power of quantum physics, which looks at physical reactions at the microscopic level. After completing his doctorate, Dr. Warshel joined Dr. Karplus’s laboratory as a postdoctoral researcher, and in 1972, they published a paper that combined quantum and classical physics in describing the chemical behavior of certain molecules.
Later, Dr. Warshel renewed his collaboration with Dr. Levitt, who had completed his doctorate at the University of Cambridge in England, expanding their programs to tackle enzymes, which are proteins that govern chemical reactions in living organisms. From bouncing X-rays off proteins, chemists knew the shapes of some enzymes, but less about their functions.
“It’s like seeing a watch and wondering how it actually works,” Dr. Warshel said. “So in short, what we developed is a way, which required a computer, to take the structure of a protein and then to eventually understand how exactly it does what it does.”
They found that they could not understand the behavior of the enzyme without including the effects of the surrounding molecules — water, in particular. “This was really, in my view, the conceptual breakthrough,” Dr. Warshel said. “I realized that everything you want to do with computers could be done if you make it simple enough. We wrote in a way that did not require too much memory.”
Experimental scientists were slow to accept the new work, Dr. Warshel said. “When you do something on computer, it’s very easy to dismiss it and say you made it up,” he said. He said the experimentalists were happy when the calculations agreed with the experiments, but not when Dr. Warshel claimed to be describing phenomena not seen in the experiments.
“The last thing people want is that you will come and explain their system,” he said. “I never succeeded to convince anyone. I just made them angry.”
Today, Dr. Lidin of the Nobel committee said, computer simulations have become as informative as the experiments. “You still have to do the experiment,” he said. “But the predictions that theory make are becoming so much powerful these days that we can perhaps save 90 percent of the experimenting and concentrate on the 10 percent where we know that the most important results will lie.”
Lawrence K. Altman contributed reporting.

Sunday, October 13, 2013

Intel® NUC with Intel® Core™ i3 Processor

Intel® NUC with Intel® Core™ i3 Processor:

 "The Footprint is Small. The Potential is Anything But.

Intel® NUC powered by the Intel® Core™ i3 processor puts the world in the hands of both business and consumer clients. Extremely affordable and infinitely customizable, it comes ready for you to choose the features, components, and software that are right for you and the way you compute."

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Saturday, October 12, 2013

Binomial Option Pricing Tutorial and Spreadsheets

Binomial Option Pricing Tutorial and Spreadsheets:

"This tutorial introduces binomial option pricing, and offers an Excel spreadsheet to help you better understand the principles.  Additionally, a spreadsheet that prices Vanilla and Exotic options with a binomial tree is provided."

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Binomial options pricing model - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Binomial options pricing model - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

 "In finance, the binomial options pricing model (BOPM) provides a generalizable numerical method for the valuation of options. The binomial model was first proposed by Cox, Ross and Rubinstein (1979). Essentially, the model uses a “discrete-time” (lattice based) model of the varying price over time of the underlying financial instrument. In general, binomial options pricing models do not have closed-form solutions."

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