Obama wants new banking rules put in place soon

President Barack Obama waves as he walks from the White House in Washington, Friday, May 18, 2012, to board Marine One, as he travels to Camp David for the G8 Summit. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

President Barack Obama waves as he walks from the White House in Washington, Friday, May 18, 2012, to board Marine One, as he travels to Camp David for the G8 Summit. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

Pedestrians walk past JPMorgan Chase headquarters in New York, Wednesday, May 16, 2012. U.S. House Republican Rep. Shelly Moore Capito, chairman of the House Financial Services subcommittee, on Wednesday said that the $2 billion trading loss at JPMorgan Chase raises critical questions about how banks control their risks. But Republican lawmakers rejected calls from Democrats for stricter oversight of Wall Street. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Pedestrians walk past JPMorgan Chase headquarters in New York, Wednesday, May 16, 2012. U.S. House Republican Rep. Shelly Moore Capito, chairman of the House Financial Services subcommittee, on Wednesday said that the $2 billion trading loss at JPMorgan Chase raises critical questions about how banks control their risks. But Republican lawmakers rejected calls from Democrats for stricter oversight of Wall Street. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)

Protestors stand outside the gate of JPMorgan Chase after the annual stockholders meeting held Tuesday, May 15, 2012, in Tampa, Fla. CEO Jamie Dimon kept his job after he disclosed a $2 billion trading loss by the bank. (AP Photo/Scott Iskowitz)

A JPMorgan office building is shown, Monday, May 14, 2012, in New York. JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States, said Thursday that it lost $2 billion in the past six weeks in a trading portfolio designed to hedge against risks the company takes with its own money. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

WASHINGTON (AP) ? President Barack Obama says the big trading loss at JPMorgan Chase shows the need to finally put in place banking rules he signed into law two years ago. He also is calling on Congress to stop trying to weaken the regulations.

The $2 billion loss has renewed calls by Democratic lawmakers for tougher rules on major financial institutions.

"Without Wall Street reform, we could have found ourselves with the taxpayers once again on the hook for Wall Street's mistakes," Obama said in his weekly media address Saturday. He added: "We've got to finish the job of implementing this reform and putting these rules in place."

Obama promoted rules that would require big banks or financial institutions to have more cash on hand to cover losses and that would take away big bonuses and paydays from failed CEOs.

The president said financial institutions that "aren't cheating customers or making risky bets that could damage the whole economy" have nothing to fear from reforms.

"Yes, it discourages big banks and financial institutions from making risky bets with taxpayer-insured money. And it encourages them to do things that actually help the economy ? like extending loans to entrepreneurs with good ideas, to middle-class families who want to buy a home, to students who want to pursue higher education," he said.

Though Congress passed the tougher oversight of the financial sector in 2010, the law gave bank regulators time to write the new rules.

One focus of the financial oversight overhaul is a provision that restricts banks' ability to trade for their own profit, a practice known as proprietary trading. It is named for Paul Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman. But a draft of the rule has failed to satisfy either banks, which says it would disrupt some of their core functions, or advocates of stronger regulation who say it would have prevented JPMorgan's loss.

In the Republican's weekly address, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson faulted what he called a "do-nothing Senate" under Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada for the frustrations he said he has felt in his 16 months in Congress.

Noting that the Senate hasn't passed a budget in three years, Johnson said House Republicans have fulfilled their responsibilities by passing a budget but that Senate Democrats have not fulfilled theirs.

This past week, the Senate rejected by a 99-0 vote a budget that Republicans offered up based on an Obama proposal in February. Four other budget plans also were voted down.

___

Online:

Obama address: www.whitehouse.gov

GOP address: www.youtube.com/gopweeklyaddress

Associated Press

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Video: A cell's first steps: Building a model to explain how cells grow

Friday, May 18, 2012

A collaboration between Lehigh University physicists and University of Miami biologists addresses an important fundamental question in basic cell biology: How do living cells figure out when and where to grow?

The teams of Assistant Professor Dimitrios Vavylonis and Associate Professor Fulvia Verde discovered that protein Cdc42 oscillates throughout yeast cells, precipitating a ballet of proteins that change its polarity. By changing polarity, Cdc42 regulates shape, structure and function in yeast cells, starting the growth process by clustering in an area of the cellular membrane. The oscillatory mechanism they found may be a general strategy among all self-organizing biological systems, not just simple yeast.

"The research is fundamental because it provides science with an important answer to how a living cell controls its growth process," said Vavylonis. "Knowing how this particular protein controls growth could in the long run affect the search for drugs to control cell growth for tissue regeneration, organ development, and explain how neurons extend in different directions."

This work indicates how Cdc42 activates bipolar growth only once a minimal cell length has been achieved. At that point, Cdc42 begins to oscillate back and forth through the cell, as the two tips compete for it. Using fluorescent markers to tag each of the many proteins involved, researchers observed the Cdc42 protein oscillate from side to side within a cell, switching sides about every five minutes. The fluctuations provide an adaptable mechanism for cells to control their size and structure in the fast-changing environment within.

The study, Oscillatory Dynamics of Cdc42 GTPase In The Control of Polarized Growth, appears today in the journal Science.

The findings demonstrate just part of the complex process of cell growth and differentiation, but mark how advanced the science of biophysics has become. Only recently has the clear imaging and monitoring of protein activity become possible at the minute sizes and shortened time scales of individual cell maturation.

"Up until now, no one has ever seen the way this protein oscillates back and forth throughout the cell," said Tyler Drake, a Lehigh graduate student and co-author of the paper. "Looking at a simple system like yeast may allow us to understand the principles behind growth in other cells."

This video shows active Cdc42 oscillating through yeast cells.Credit: University of Miami Miller School of Medicine

The Lehigh team developed the mathematical model of this phenomenon by analyzing cell data collected by Maitreyi Das and Fulvia Verde at the University of Miami. Drake and Vavylonis used a Lehigh Class of 1968 Junior Faculty Fellowship and a Sigma Xi grant to visit the University, where they began to test their mathematical theory. According to the model, changes in abundance or activity of Cdc42, or of its regulators, can shift the system to more asymmetric or symmetric states. The model's conclusions were supported by biological observations of the Miami team, who genetically manipulated regulators of the protein and realized they could change cell shape and growth symmetry by adjusting Cdc42.

Vavylonis's research has for years explored the way the cellular cytoskeleton organizes and functions. In collaboration with biologists and computer scientists, his team uses physics to study, analyze, and model the physical properties of these adaptive biological materials.

###

Lehigh University: http://www.lehigh.edu

Thanks to Lehigh University for this article.

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NYT: Silicon Valley riches kept on the down low

MENLO PARK, Calif.?? Wealth is here if you know where to find it.

Fabulous home theaters are tucked into the basements of plain suburban houses. Bespoke jeans that start at $1,200 can be detected only by a tiny red logo on the button. The hand-painted Italian bicycles that flash across Silicon Valley on Saturday mornings have become the new Ferrari ? and only the cognoscenti could imagine that they cost more than $20,000.

Even at Facebook, ground zero for the nouveau tech riche, peer pressure dictates that consumption be kept on the down low.

?The message here is, ?Keep shipping product,? ? said a Facebook executive who requested anonymity while discussing internal matters. ?If someone buys a fancy car and posts a picture of it, they get ridiculed and berated.?

The company disclosed on Thursday that on the eve of its stock market debut it was inviting employees to a hackathon, or marathon programming session, bringing new meaning to the term overnight millionaire. The event is more likely to be fueled by Red Bull than Dom P?rignon.

Make no mistake. In this, Silicon Valley?s gilded age, money is chasing money. Lucrative salaries and stock options are dangled to recruit or hold onto engineers. The shares of established companies like Apple have soared. And Facebook itself has turned to Wall Street for a vast infusion of fresh funds.

But here in one of the richest corners of the country, the tech elite display an ambivalent, sometimes contradictory approach to wealth. Money, as one scholar of the Valley described it, is treated as a measuring stick, gauging the power of the companies that entrepreneurs have built, rather than a thing to display.

?They use it as a way of keeping score ? how disruptive can you be in reordering the market,? said Ted Zoller, a senior fellow at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a scholar of entrepreneurship.

Money, of course, still matters deeply to this crowd. ?It is a means to do more, to make more money and ultimately build more,? Mr. Zoller said.

The one money matter that most Internet millionaires talk about openly is what start-ups they are investing in next. Expect many more such investments from Facebook executives. Indeed, that might be where the biggest chunk of their new wealth will go.

Off the corporate campuses and out of public view, it seems, there is little anxiety about spending. Friends of Facebook employees say that they have talked about buying houses, of course, but also planes ? a seaplane even ? and works by popular artists like Banksy, whose pieces can sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Just do not expect them to post about any of that on their Facebook pages.

To understand the contradictions of moneymaking in the Valley, it is instructive to look at another landmark public offering: Google in the summer of 2004. Just before it went public, a senior manager holding a baseball bat lectured a roomful of Google employees: Anyone who dared show up to work in a flashy sports car would soon find its windows shattered. The story is part of Valley lore. But it is also well known that the company?s three top executives have a collection of eight private jets, parked in a NASA hangar.

Some tech celebrities, of course, are known for being flashy. Both Lawrence J. Ellison, chief executive of Oracle, and Sean Parker, an early Facebook executive, have storied, lavish lifestyles. But there are many more who stick with the conceit of understatement. Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of Twitter, favors $1,200 bespoke jeans from a designer called 3x1, with the subtle button logo. And Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook?s chief operating officer, is building a house in exclusive Menlo Park ? much of it underground, hidden from view.

Zuckerberg sets the tone
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook?s chief executive, sets the tone at the company with his trademark rumpled hoodies that display no obvious brand name. He spent $7 million on a large but nondescript home in Palo Alto, a suburb so expensive that even a small, no-frills house easily goes for $1.5 million these days.

In a letter to would-be shareholders when the company filed to go public, Mr. Zuckerberg summed up his corporate philosophy this way: ?Simply put, we don?t build services to make money; we make money to build better services.?

Although he has not articulated it with an office memo or a baseball bat, it is understood, say Facebook employees and their friends, that Mr. Zuckerberg would find it uncool for one of his underlings to drive a Lamborghini to the office.

?It?s almost an unspoken rule: spend your money, but do it privately,? said one person who knows Mr. Zuckerberg and others at Facebook socially but did not want to be named before the offering.

Andrew Rachleff, a former venture capitalist turned wealth manager, estimates that the Facebook offering will create somewhere around 1,000 millionaires, most of whom will make something in the $2 million to $5 million range. Much of the money he has gathered so far for his company, called Wealthfront, is from young techies at firms like Google, LinkedIn and Facebook, which ahead of its public offering has allowed employees to sell shares on secondary markets.

Mr. Rachleff?s aim is to reach out to that Valley demographic ? young, good at math, uncomfortable with professional money managers ? and make their money grow. He has already run into one glitch: ?They all hate that word, ?wealth.? If there was one thing I?d change, it would be our name.? (The company?s previous name, Ka-ching, as in the sound of an old-fashioned cash register, seems to have been just as ill-chosen.)

The two counties that make up Silicon Valley have some of the highest concentrations of wealth in the country, and the share of wealthy households is growing, according to the census. Nearly 14 percent of all households in Santa Clara and San Mateo Counties earn more than $200,000 a year, just below the 16 percent of households in Manhattan.

Still, one of the parlor games here is the effort by many to distinguish themselves from the much maligned coterie of bankers and other members of the 1 percent in places like New York and Boston. Wingtips and silk ties are rare. Cycling and kite-boarding are preferred over golf.

Bill Gurley, a venture capitalist in Menlo Park, tells what happened when he began working as a Wall Street analyst in Manhattan in 1993, fresh out of business school. A colleague turned his tie over to check the label. ?My first day at work,? Mr. Gurley recalled, ?I was told to replace all my ties with Herm?s and never to wear brown shoes again.?

He did not heed the advice. Nor did he last long on Wall Street. He is a partner now at Benchmark Capital, which recently profited handsomely from Facebook?s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram.

This story, "Reticent Rich: Preferred Style in Silicon Valley," originally appeared in The New York Times.

Copyright ? 2012 The New York Times

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Blind Chinese activist leaves Beijing for U.S.

BEIJING (Reuters) - China allowed a blind legal activist, Chen Guangcheng, to leave a hospital in Beijing on Saturday and board a plane bound for the United States, a move that could signal the end of a diplomatic standoff between the two countries.

Chen's escape from house arrest in northeastern China last month and subsequent stay in the U.S. embassy caused huge embarrassment for China and led to a diplomatic rift while U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was visiting Beijing for talks to improve ties between the world's two biggest economies.

The U.S. State Department said he was en route to the United States, along with his wife and two children. He boarded a United Airlines flight bound for Newark.

China's Foreign Ministry limited its commentary to an acknowledgement that Chen had left the country.

"Chen Guangcheng is a Chinese citizen. China's relevant departments have handled the procedures for exiting the country in accordance with the law," the ministry said in a faxed statement to Reuters.

New York University said in a statement on Saturday that Chen would study as a fellow at its School of Law.

"I am very happy to receive the news that Chen Guangcheng is on his way to the U.S. I look forward ... to working with him on his course of study," said Jerome Cohen, co-director of the U.S.-Asia Law Institute at New York University School of Law.

State news agency Xinhua said earlier that Chen had applied to study in the United States under legal procedures. The Foreign Ministry said this month that Chen could apply to study abroad, a move seen as a way of easing Sino-U.S. tensions on human rights.

Chen's friend, Jiang Tianyong, cited the activist, one of China's most prominent dissidents, as saying that he and his family obtained their passports at the airport hours before he was due to board a flight.

"I'm obviously very happy," Jiang said. "When he boards the plane, he can finally say: 'I'm free'. At the same time, I feel a sense of regret because such a large country like China can't even tolerate a citizen like him to exist here."

A statement by State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland struck a conciliatory note, saying Washington was "looking forward" to Chen's arrival.

"We also express our appreciation for the manner in which we were able to resolve this matter and to support Mr. Chen's desire to study in the U.S. and pursue his goals," it said.

U.S. President Barack Obama's administration had feared a standoff over Chen's fate could sour already strained ties with China and generate criticism of Obama's policies. Beijing has accused Washington of meddling in its affairs in the case.

Chen's abrupt departure for the airport came nearly three weeks after he arrived at the Chaoyang Hospital from the U.S. embassy, where he had taken refuge after an escape from 19 months under house arrest in his home village.

Chen, 40, who taught himself law, was a leading advocate of the rights defense movement. He gained prominence by campaigning for farmers and disabled citizens and exposing forced abortions.

He was jailed for a little more than four years from 2006 on what he and his supporters say were trumped-up charges designed to end his rights advocacy.

He had accused Shandong officials in 2005 of forcing women to have late-term abortions and sterilizations to comply with strict family-planning policies. Authorities moved against him with charges of whipping up a crowd that disrupted traffic and damaged property.

Formally released in 2010, he remained under house arrest in his home village, which officials turned into a fortress of walls, security cameras and guards in plainclothes guards.

POLICE AT THE AIRPORT

United Airlines flight UA 88 departed around 5.50 p.m. (0950 GMT), with police officers and plainclothes officers following passengers down the mobile corridor leading to the plane's door.

The cabin crew waited for passengers to take their seats before closing the curtain to the front section, where the business class seats were located, a Reuters witness said.

Chen had earlier told Reuters he was at the airport along with his wife, two children and hospital staff and he believed he would be put on a flight to the United States.

Two police cars were stationed below the walkway to the plane, and about 10 security officials in plainclothes circulated around the airport.

Passengers at the gate to Chen's flight appeared not to know that he would be on the same flight.

"If our country is a body, his plight is like a sickness that in the future will help the body to protect and strengthen itself," said Xi Jingwen, who was awaiting to board a flight to the United States, when asked about Chen Guangcheng.

Chen's confinement, his escape and the furor that ensued have made him part of China's dissident folklore: a blind prisoner outfoxing Communist Party controls in an echo of the man who stood down an army tank near Tiananmen Square in 1989.

The Chen case comes at a tricky time for China, which is engaged in a leadership change. The carefully choreographed transition has already been knocked out of step by the downfall of ambitious senior Communist Party official Bo Xilai in a scandal linked to the apparent murder of a British businessman.

On a number of occasions in recent years, authorities have relented to diplomatic pressure and allowed high-profile dissidents to leave China, knowing that its most vocal critics are effectively neutralized once they leave and are without support of friends.

At times, Beijing has appeared to use these deals as bargaining chips in broader diplomatic negotiations or to blunt criticism of its human rights record.

Chen's supporters, however, welcomed his departure, saying he had indicated that he would like to return to China.

"I even told him ... that he has to do a repeat of him scaling walls. If not, we wouldn't be able to believe it," Nanjing-based activist He Peirong said of her earlier conversation with Chen. She was one of six activists who drove Chen from Shandong to Beijing after his escape.

Phelim Kine, senior Asia researcher at New York-based Human Rights Watch, said "getting Chen Guangcheng and his family on a plane is the easiest part of this saga.

"The harder, longer term part is ensuring his right under international law to return to China when he sees fit," Kine said in an emailed statement.

Kine urged Western countries to ensure that Chen's relatives, friends and supporters secured due protection.

The U.S. embassy had earlier thought it had stuck a deal to allow Chen to stay in China without retribution, but that fell apart as Chen grew worried about his family's safety. He changed his mind about staying and asked to travel to the United States.

Human rights are a big factor in relations between China and the United States, even though Washington needs China's help on issues such as Iran, North Korea, Sudan and the global economy.

The village of Dongshigu, where Chen's mother and other relatives remain, is still under lockdown.

Chen's nephew, Chen Kegui, was denied his family's choice of lawyers on Friday to defend a charge of "intentional homicide", the latest in a series of moves to deny him legal representation, and underscores the hardline stance taken against the blind dissident's family.

(Additional reporting by Chris Buckley and Michael Martina in BEIJING, Arshad Mohammed in WASHINGTON, and Michelle Nichols in NEW YORK; Editing by Ron Popeski and Paul Simao)

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New generation challenges some blacks in Congress (The Arizona Republic)

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NBC & FOX Unveil Their Fall TV Lineups!

We've told you what to expect from this spring's season finales, which shows got the ax last week (bye-bye, Alcatraz!), and which were renewed (yay, Parenthood!). Now NBC and FOX have both revealed their full TV lineups for the fall, including some exciting new shows. Read on for details!

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Flat-front dive housing for GoPro cameras available now, ready for your Memorial Day diving trip

Anyone looking to capture their next deep-sea adventure in high-definition video is in luck, because GoPro's new dive housing is now available to buy at its online store. We got a peek at this one during NAB 2012 a few weeks ago and were told its flat lens should cut down on vignetting and blurring. Compatible with all of its HD Hero family, the casing will set you back $50 and also up for grabs in the bricks-and-mortar likes of Best Buy, Sports Chalet and several specialist sports stores. All that remains is to recall where we left that robot submarine.

Gallery: GoPro @ NAB 2012

Continue reading Flat-front dive housing for GoPro cameras available now, ready for your Memorial Day diving trip

Flat-front dive housing for GoPro cameras available now, ready for your Memorial Day diving trip originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 May 2012 19:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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