Soggy tundra emits carbon

Two of my friends – ecologists for the National Park Service in Alaska – have a pretty cool job. Every summer their field season rolls around, which means they spend the better part of four months in the glacier-rich wilderness in lieu of hot Fairbanks. But the signs of climate change they consistently see in the parks are not good. Permafrost melts and creates soggy tundra, while elsewhere lakes dry up and water chemistry levels change.

The arctic is important to global warming because the tundra locks up big stores of carbon. A new <a href='article‘ >articlepublished in Nature shows that the wetter the tundra becomes, the more carbon it’s likely to give off. The study took place at a big lake near Barrow on the arctic ocean. They split a lake into three parts. Lake 1 they left the same. From lake 2 they shoveled water into lake 3, making lake 3 extra wet and lake 2 extra dry. With instrument towers, they gathered emissions of CO2 and methane from the individual lakes.

Against researcher’s predictions, the flooded lake gave off the most carbon. They thought it would trap carbon better, since higher water levels drown aerobic – oxygen-consuming – microbes that release carbon while they’re busy decomposing plant matter. It turns out, anaerobic microbes – those that don’t need oxygen – survived underwater and continued to release carbon.

Plus, a positive feedback loop was created as permafrost under the flooded lake melted faster than permafrost underlying the crispier lake. The deeper the thaw, the more that old carbon (up to 1,000 years old) is released.

Dos and Don’ts of Writing

Have you ever heard of nounism? “This is a new American disease that strings two or three nouns together where one noun-or, better yet, one verb-will do. Nobody goe broke now; we have money problem areas. It no longer rains, we have precipitation activity of a thunderstorm probability situation. Please, let it rain.” These wise words come from William Zinsser in his book “On Writing Well,” which as a journalist I felt the pressure to read. Not only does he lambast the bad English habits we’ve picked up, he offers tips for avoiding them.

A few of the more salient ones:

• Make the subject of your sentence clear, and make people your subject whenever you can. As opposed to “The common reaction is incredulous laughter,” say “Most people just laugh with disbelief.” As Zinsser puts it, “Don’t get caught holding a bag full of abstract nouns. You’ll sink to the bottom of the lake and never be seen again.”
• When travel writing, spare us the cliches! “Eliminate every such fact that is a known attribute: don’t tell us that the sea had waves and the sand was white…Towns situated in foothills are nestled – I hardly ever read about an unnestled town in the hills” (so true!) and “This is a world where old meets new – old never meets old.” Don’t use words like charming and romantic – “Who will define ‘charm’ except the owner of a charm school? Or ‘romantic’?…One man’s romantic sunrise is another man’s hangover.” Ouch!
• On science writing: writers fear science like scientists fear writing. Really, you just have to explain a process in short, linear sentences, like you’re explaining to a friend how something works. Zinsser describes a writing assignment he gave his Yale journalism undergrads – describing how a process works so you make sure you know how it works and you learn to lead the reader through the same sequence of logic that made sense to you. “One student, a bright Yale sophomore still spraying the page with fuzzy generalities at midterm, came to class in a high mood and asked if he could read his paper on how a fire extinguisher works. I was sure we were in for chaos. But his piece moved with simplicity and logic…By the end of his junior year he had written a how-to book that sold better than any book I had written.” Juniors selling books? Must be a Yale thing. Another tenet of science writing is assume the reader knows nothing.
• Don’t forget even science stories are about people, not the science itself. A story about a nuclear weapons program in Iraq isn’t just about how uranium is enriched. And also, think like a scientist but write like a writer. After all, “About 98% of people who hold a doctorate in physics can’t write their way out of a petri dish,” says Zinsser. Not because they can’t; because they won’t.

Thanks for the sage tips Willy!

Thought Clouds

I’m spending so much time thinking about the clouds that I can feel a caricatured thought bubble bobbing above my head. I live in Boulder, which is supposed to mean sunny winters followed by sunny springs followed by sunny summers, etc. But do you know how many times I’ve seen the sun the past three weeks? Only a few fleeting flashes out the window during work! Then it’s swallowed by clouds, rain and lightning.

All of this Seattle-esque weather makes me to reflect  how spoiled I am in Colorado. Usually a cloudy day is a fun rarity. So we’ve built our lives around nice weather, post-work hikes and carefree camping. All these activities require not just sun but faith that you won’t get doused or, worse, zapped, when you’re out in the wilderness. After getting repeatedly caught in storms while running and biking, I must say my faith is waning just a tad.

Of course, I exaggerate that the weather is perfect here. It can turn on you quicker than you can say ‘Oh shit!’ as I’ve learned from countless jogs in Vail that turned into me spreeing from hail the size of Tootsie Pops. And the rain is actually pretty cool – I’d rather train for a marathon in cool, soggy weather than high-altitude heat.

But I hereby admit I’m addicted  to the sun’s Vitamin D and morale boosts. So is everybody else in Boulder, considering that “lousy weather” has overtaken rock climbing and microbrewing as No. 1 conversation topic around town. C’est la vie. The sun will come up tomorrow (I hope!)

SNAP – decisions about the opposite sex made behind the locked door

By snap I mean snap judgments, not SNAP – gangsta-speak for “So there!”

I’m reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell and really enjoying it. For a psychology book, it flows amazingly well and the pages turn themselves. No billion dollar words or that kind of nonsense you read in academic journals. Two years of journalism grad school has made me totally intolerant to that jibberish!

Anyway, Gladwell observes a speed dating group in Manhattan and picks up on some interesting things – the way laws of attraction sometimes override laws of logic.

“It was immediately clear that Mary liked John and John liked Mary. John sat down at Mary’s table. Their eyes locked. She looked down shyly. She seemed a little nervous. She leaned forward in her chair. It seemed, from the outside, like a perfectly straight-forward case of instant attraction. But let’s dig below the surface and ask a few simple questions.”

Quick aside: Two professors from Columbia are doing a type of experiment on this session. They made participants fill out questionaires before the speed dating about what they were looking for in a potential partner, ranking categories on a scale of 1-10. Anyway…

“What [the researchers] find when they compare what speed-daters say they want iwth what they are actually attracted to in the moment is that those two thigns don’t match. For example, if Mary said at the beginning of the evening that she wanted someone intelligent and sincere, that in no way smeans she’ll be attracted only to intelligent and sincere men. It’s just as likely that John, whom she likes more than anyone else, could turn out to be attractive and funny but not particularly sincere or smart at all.”

A good insight. We (girls) can’t necessarily predict what we like in men. What we say we want, after conscious consideration, isn’t what we may be attracted to. The kicker in the scenario:

“Second, if all the men Mary ends up liking during the speed-dating are more attractive and funny than they are smart and sincere, on the next day, when she’s asked to describe her perfect man, Mary will say that she likes attractive and funny men. But that’s just the next day. If you ask her again a month alter, she’ll be back to saying that she wants intelligent and sincere.”

My favorite part about this entire discourse? That Gladwell doesn’t blame this on female mysteries or hormones, but simply on the way humans make snap judgments that sometimes trump our conscious, calculated judgments. So true!

Lastly:

“Mary has an ide about what she wants in a man, and that idea isn’t wrong. It’s just incomplete. The description that she starts with is her conscious ideal: what she believes she wants when she sits down and thinks about it. But what she cannot be as certain about are the criteria she uses to form her preferences in that first instant of meeting someone face-to-face. That information is behind the locked door.”

And Gladwell’s stance is that sometimes decisions are better made behind the locked door. So I’m curious to find out, is this the case with choosing a mate? Then why are so many of us attracted to people that aren’t right for us? Snap versus conscious is equivalent to acting with your head versus your heart. Maybe the main takehome message is that you often don’t have a choice in the matter…

No Burqa, thank you

After reading 1000 Splendid Suns, I’m more thankful than ever for my female freedoms! The book – by Khaled Hosseini, author of Kiterunner – followed a couple of Afghani families through the 50s till present-day. This encompassed the Afghan government in the 1970s, then the Soviet occupation of Aghanistan in the 1980s, the  Mujahideen resistance to the Soviets (which splintered and caused  civil war), and the  guerrilla group the Taliban in the 90s (Muslim extremists backed by Pakistan.)

I mean, I’ve always been a fan of Title 9, having played college soccer. But it’s unthinkable that in today’s modern world, some (fundamental interpretations of) religions force women to cover their face. During Taliban rule early this century,  Afghani women couldn’t work, couldn’t leave home without a male escort or burqa (a mesh gridded headwrap), faced stoning to death for adultery, couldn’t refuse their husbands sex….etc.

It was a novel, of course. The main characters, Mariam and Laila, got to taste a morsel of female freedom (if not equality) during Soviet-backed rule, but then it was whisked away. Their husband punched them, kicked them, raped them, ripped their hair out, sent Laila’s daughter to an orphanage, stuck a gun in Laila’s throat, not to mention the mental abuse. Then Mariam was sentenced to execution by Kalashnikov when she murdered Rasheed (husband) in self defense.

The biggest shocker is that these monstrosities are happening in this age, over the same years I’ve been playing soccer, going to school, wearing short shorts, merrily contemplating a career…Meanwhile, halfway across the world women are being denied basic human rights and civil liberties in a society that allows barbaric behavior in the name of GOD!?!?!? How can any lucid being not see the pure insanity of that reasoning? Ok – my rant is over.

Chicken Breasts and Collateralized Debt Obligations

I’m really trying to understand what caused this economic meltdown. I’ve been reading a slew of articles in the New Yorker and Columbia Journalism Review. I think I may have finally cracked the code on CDOs and credit derivatives and securitization. Here are some tidbits that helped clear the fog:

Sensible bites

Debt – there is too much debt, which is causing banks to go under, the credit freeze, people to go bankrupt and their assets to fall…Ok, duh..

It’s like poultry – “You can turn a bunch of whole chickens into packages of chicken parts, of ascending quality, from gizzards to breasts, and chargea premium for the best cuts…(New Yorker, 5/18/09, Nick Paumgarten)

• CDOs – collateralized debt obligations – are packaged chicken parts, which have different ratings…
• chicken breasts were the AAA-rated credit risk – banks were hungry for them, but not that many companies qualified for AAA rating
• So traders created synthetic debt – credit-default swaps, which weren’t so much debt but bets on debt
• These were pooled and sliced like gizzards and legs and wings and packaged as valuable
• the problem was, eventually, that gizzards were packaged as breasts. And then there was the salmonella.”
• “the peddlers of the chicken shit paid to have it magically pronounced chicke nsalad, a conflict of interest that most investors ignored.”
• In the end, “you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit”

Banks become glorified hedge funds instead of doing their normal jobs – taking deposits and making loans

Government bonds delivered an 80 percent return in the last decade. “The real action over those ten years, however, took place in riskier bonds and the complicated “swaps” that gained and lost value in tune with the market’s perception of their creditworthiness and the direction of interest rates.” – per Columbia Journalism Review

Swift technology – if the numbers didn’t work in your data models, you made them work

Also, here’s a brief dictionary of terms I can turn to when I get turned around…

Personal Glossary

• boiler room – a fraudulent, corrupt brokerage firm, refers to the bad mortgage underwriting of borrowers with bad credit that led to subprime loans
• derivatives – unregulated securities that are difficult to invest in and get pricing data for
• CDOs – collateralized debt obligations, bets on credit, or as NYer calls then “formerly high-flying and now leaden assemblages of securitzed debt.”
• credit default swaps – a form of deritivate that rises and falls according to underlying bonds; there’s no exchange or clearinghouse for them, yet 100s of trillions of dollars in “notional” value were tied to tehm
• credit “swaps” – bets on the market’s perception of their creditworthiness and the direction of interest rates
• mortgage-backed securities – mortgage are sliced up and packaged and sold in securities
• Wall Street connection – all major investment banks bought a retail subprime operations and had in-house lending operations

twitter while you work

OOOh it feels good to stretch my legs and blog after final exams. School just finished last Firday. This was supposed to be my decompression week that I spent tanning at the reservoir, sleeping in and jogging and eating Moe’s bagels.  Instead, my hands are full with my two part-time jobs…

The transition from school to work is indeed interesting…now my hours are much more structured and come 5:00, work is behind me. But I miss the flexibility of my class schedule, which had holes here and there I could fill with running, doing homework and fooling around. But without school, I’ve reclaimed my weekends. Overall, I’d say I worked greater net hours and more intensively in school than at my job. Who cares anyway, right?

The fun perk is that I like my jobs – I work 10 hours at a magazine editing, writing and on other assorted chores. And my main duties at my campus job include facebooking, twittering, writing and helping edit video, and creating promotional materials for the school. It’s truthfully pretty fun. Then again, this is Week One. Check back with me later!

Sam Zell on how to be an entrepreneur

Sam Zell came to the University of Colorado at Boulder law school for a chat today. The man is founder and owner of The Equity Group investment conglomerate, 68th richest American worth $3 billion, real estate magnate , owner of the Chicago Cubs plus telecom, media and transportation companies. The medley of law and journalism students and businesspeople  wanted to know how he became so filthy rich. By never having a job, and being an entrepreneur. 

What makes a good entrepreneur?  

• The word failure is not part of your lexicon. Maybe things don’t work out, but there’s no such thing as failure.
• Entrepreneurs are people who see the problem, but also see the solution. 
• Enormous amount of self confidence (even if it’s unjustified). Have conviction that you can do it, that you can understand it, that you can handle it. 
• A gene that makes you think one step ahead, around the corner. Always think how to make a situation better.
• You have to be able to execute. Execute = sell. 

A couple more Zell-isms from today:

• If you can’t describe an idea in 3 sentences, I’m no longer listening.
• The shortest difference between two points is a straight line. Common sense is your BFF!
• “I’ve never had a job. Never worked for anyone, except five days at a law firm after law school writing a contract between a linen company and a dorm. I went to my supervisor and said ‘I don’t think this is the best use of my time.’ It didn’t occur to me at the time how ridiculous that must have sounded.” 
• What’s wrong with our economy? It doesn’t help we have a president-in-training (not that well-received in Boulder). “We’re doing everything at once without knowing what we’re doing. (Timothy) Geithner says we’re going to give the banks stress tests. No one has ever heard of stress tests. Then you say we can’t release the results of the stress tests, but most of the banks passed the test. Well, tell me WHICH ONE DIDN’T! That’s amateur.”

Sam Zell at CU

Sam Zell, real estate baron and owner of The Equity Group, which includes the Tribune Company, did a Q&A at CU’s law school today. People wanted to know what makes a good entrepreneur and a good businessman. They also asked him about his massive media subsidiary. Clearly, the Chicago Tribune has not been doing well lately (they filed for bankruptcy in December). So Zell, a master at making money, had some interesting insights into the newspaper industry. 

• “When we bought the Tribune (in 2007), we underwrote it with an erosion rate that was twice the rate of the past five years.” It turns out the true erosion rate was 10 times that much. “It was a tsunami from an economic point of view.” Oops.
• The metrics the news biz operates under don’t work. For example, it costs 75 cents to buy a paper on the street, and 45 cents to get it delivered 45 miles away at your house. “We’re losing on every subscription sale.” 
• People don’t realize newspapers have been a monopoly, with profit margins of 20% – 40% because there was NO competition. “Newspapers were impervious.” 
• This bred a culture of arrogance among journalists. “Journalism is about writing, not revenue,” he mocked. “Without revenue, there’s no writing! 
• This arrogance caused editors and journalists to stick to ideals rather than catering a product to their customers. “How do we fix this? The industry has to appeal to its customers. Can anyone in this room name me a company that’s successful by pissing on their customers?”  Point taken. 
• The Tribune, for one, ignored 10 years of focus groups that said people wanted 1)local,local,local news ;  2) easy navigation;   3) shorter stories (You won’t start reading a long story bc you feel guilty for not finishing it) 
• Lastly, newspapers made a grave error in putting content online for free. “Now they’ve got to fix it.” 

As a journalism grad student, I view the purpose of journalism differently than Zell. I see the service journalism provides as watchdog of power and gatekeeper of newsworthy info in a democracy. But it was awesome to hear an assessment from a purely capitalist, businessman’s point of view. The dynamic between the two is captured in this story from Zell: 

Today, the LA Times put an advertorial on the front page. Managers and editors balked at Zell’s proposal of placing sly advertising on the cover. “I thought God was gonna strike me down. Our revenue is down 30%. Do you want me to fire 20 reporters or print the advertorial?” 

Case in point: it’s great for journalists to have high standards, as they have an important job. But in a recession, or the industry meltdown journalism is experiencing, you have to make tough decisions. Zell, for one, has no qualms serving his highest calling – making money and maximizing shareholder value. 

I would love to think that journalists should cling to their principles. But our society dictates that you conform – or play – the market in order to succeed. And you can’t eat and pay the bills with principles.

The Associated Press declares war on copyright infringement

The Associated Press will use a stronger arm in defending the circulation of its content. This recent article from the Huff Post talks about AP’s plans to track down every piece of its content online and sue the wrongful publishers.

Writer Art Brodsky calls AP Chairman Dean Singleton clueless for trying to do this. I can sympathize for people in the news biz wanting to salvage their product. The media don’t make money from the unauthorized publication of their content. This outburst is similar to other media owners’ outcry that Google and Yahoo should have to share ad revenue (they already pay a fee) with publishing company for the stories they aggregate.

Brodsky’s article criticizes these types of tactics from the industry. “If newspapers don’t want their material searched or indexed, they can simply not do deals with web sites or block search engines. Let’s see how well things work out.” Not only is this comment dripping in sarcasm, it’s completely backwards. Of course they want their material searched and indexed. That’s why they asked Google to tweak its algorithm to boost their listings in searches.

Newspapers aren’t seceding from the online market. To block search engines would be to sabotage their businesses. They’re simply trying to figure out how to swim as the huge swell of technology crashes agains them again and again!

Maybe newspapers are guilty of protectionism. But can we blame them, given the flogging the industry is getting right now?

But back to Singleton’s plan of attack. My main question is: How does he plan to track down every copyright infringement? He runs a worldwide news service with thousands of lawful subscribers. As Brodsky says, “there’s no way any software can tell what is fair use.”

So I’m not sure it’s constructive for AP to chase down its pirated stories on the Internet massif. Its time would be better spent trying to negotiate better deals with search engines and aggregaters. They could also try to grow their product in the expanding market for media. The better their delivery, the more readership they’ll get. And the less they’ll have to worry about users hacking their stories.