Accidental Invention May End the Reign of the Light Bulb

By Bjorn Carey / LiveScience

The main light source of the future will almost surely not be a bulb. It might be a table, a wall, or even a fork.

An accidental discovery announced this week has taken LED lighting to a new level, suggesting it could soon offer a cheaper, longer-lasting alternative to the traditional light bulb. The miniature breakthrough adds to a growing trend that is likely to eventually make Thomas Edison's bright invention obsolete.

LEDs are already used in traffic lights, flashlights, and architectural lighting. They are flexible and operate less expensively than traditional lighting.

A happy accident occurred as Michael Bowers, a graduate student at Vanderbilt University, was just trying to make really small quantum dots, which are crystals generally only a few nanometers big. That's less than 1/1000th the width of a human hair.

Quantum dots contain anywhere from 100 to 1,000 electrons. They're easily excited bundles of energy, and the smaller they are, the more excited they get. Each dot in Bower's particular batch was exceptionally small, containing only 33 or 34 pairs of atoms.

When you shine a light on quantum dots or apply electricity to them, they react by producing their own light, normally a bright, vibrant color. But when Bowers shined a laser on his batch of dots, something unexpected happened.

"I was surprised when a white glow covered the table," Bowers said. "The quantum dots were supposed to emit blue light, but instead they were giving off a beautiful white glow."

Then Bowers and another student got the idea to stir the dots into polyurethane and coat a blue LED light bulb with the mix. The lumpy bulb wasn't pretty, but it produced white light similar to a regular light bulb.

The new device gives off a warm, yellowish-white light that shines twice as bright and lasts 50 times longer than the standard 60 watt light bulb.
This work is published online in the Oct. 18 edition of the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

Until the last decade, LEDs could only produce green, red, and yellow light, which limited their use. Then came blue LEDs, which have since been altered to emit white light with a light-blue hue.

LEDs produce twice as much light as a regular 60 watt bulb and burn for over 50,000 hours. The Department of Energy estimates LED lighting could reduce U.S. energy consumption for lighting by 29 percent by 2025. LEDs don't emit heat, so they're also more energy efficient. And they're much harder to break.

Other scientists have said they expect LEDs to eventually replace standard incandescent bulbs as well as fluorescent and sodium vapor lights.
If the new process can be developed into commercial production, light won't come just from newfangled bulbs. Quantum dot mixtures could be painted on just about anything and electrically excited to produce a rainbow of colors, including white.

One big question remains: When a brilliant idea pops into your mind in the future, what will appear over your head?

GOP Congress Rejects Raising the Minimum Wage

By Katrina vanden Heuvel / The Nation

Today's edition of the New York Times devoted exactly one sentence (on page 18) to one of the most important news stories of the day. "No Rise in Minimum Wage," the headline read. The nation's minimum wage has, shockingly, been stuck at $5.15 an hour since 1997.

Yesterday, two proposals--from both Democrats and Republicans--were rejected in the House.The Democrats' proposal, introduced by Edward Kennedy (MA), called for an increase to $6.25 over an 18-month period. A Republican proposal provided the same $1.10 increase and added various tax incentives for small businesses.

Both measures went down in flames as did the hopes of working people coast to coast that they might finally be more fairly compensated for their labor. Moreover, as Kennedy rightly insisted, it's "absolutely unconscionable" that in the same period that Congress has denied a minimum wage increase, lawmakers gave themselves seven pay raises worth $28,000.

www.thenation.com

Former Powell Aide Says Bush Policy Is Run by 'Cabal'

By Brian Knowlton / The New York Times

WASHINGTON - Secretary of State Colin Powell's former chief of staff has offered a remarkably blunt criticism of the administration he served, saying that foreign policy had been usurped by a "Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal," and that President Bush has made the country more vulnerable, not less, to future crises.

The comments came in a speech Wednesday by Lawrence Wilkerson, who worked for Mr. Powell at the State Department from 2001 to early 2005. Speaking to the New America Foundation, an independent public-policy institute in Washington, Mr. Wilkerson suggested that secrecy, arrogance and internal feuding had taken a heavy toll in the Bush administration, skewing its policies and undercutting its ability to handle crises.

"I would say that we have courted disaster, in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran, generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita - and I could go on back," he said. "We haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time."

Mr. Wilkerson suggested that the dysfunction within the administration was so grave that "if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence."

Mr. Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel and former director of the Marine Corps War College, said that in his years in or close to government, he had seen its national security apparatus twisted in many ways. But what he saw in Mr. Bush's first term "was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberration, bastardizations" and "perturbations."

"What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, on critical issues," he said.

The former aide referred to Mr. Bush as someone who "is not versed in international relations, and not too much interested in them, either." He was far more admiring of the president's father, whom he called "one of the finest presidents we've ever had."

Mr. Wilkerson has long been considered a close confidant of Mr. Powell, but their relationship has apparently grown strained at times - including over the question of unconventional weapons in Iraq - and the former colonel said Mr. Powell did not approve of his latest public criticisms.

The following are extracts from the presentation Col. Lawrence Wilkerson give Wednesday, Oct. 19 at the New America Foundation, a non-partisan Washington think tank.
------------------------------
"I would say that we have courted disaster in Iraq, in North Korea, in Iran. Generally with regard to domestic crises like Katrina, Rita - and I could go on back - we haven't done very well on anything like that in a long time. And if something comes along that is truly serious, truly serious, something like a nuclear weapon going off in a major American city, or something like a major pandemic, you are going to see the ineptitude of this government in a way that will take you back to the Declaration of Independence. Read it sometimes again.
... Read in there what they say about the necessity of the people to throw off tyranny or to throw off ineptitude or to throw off that which is not doing what the people want it to do. And you're talking about the potential for, I think, real dangerous times if we don't get our act together.
... The case that I saw for four-plus years was a case that I have never seen in my studies of aberrations, bastardizations, perturbations, changes to the national security decision-making process. What I saw was a cabal between the vice president of the United States, Richard Cheney, and the secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld on critical issues that made decisions that the bureaucracy did not know were being made. And then when the bureaucracy was presented with the decision to carry them out, it was presented in a such a disjointed, incredible way that the bureaucracy often didn't know what it was doing as it moved to carry them out.
Read George Packer's book, "The Assassin's Gate," if you haven't already. George Packer, a New Yorker -- reporter for the "New Yorker", has got it right. I just finished it, and I usually put marginalia in a book, but let me tell you, I had to get extra pages to write on. (Laughter.) And I wish I had been able to help George Packer write that book. In some places I could have given him a hell of a lot more specifics than he's got. (Laughter.)
But if you want to read how the Cheney-Rumsfeld cabal flummoxed the process, read that book. And of course there are other names in there: Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, whom most of you probably know (U.S. Army Gen.)Tommy Franks said was the stupidest blankety, blank man in the world. He was. (Laughter.) Let me testify to that. He was. Seldom in my life have I met a dumber man. (Laughter.)
And yet -- and yet -- and yet, after the secretary of state agrees to a $40 billion department rather than a $30 billion department having control, at least in the immediate post-war period in Iraq, this man is put in charge. Not only is he put in charge, he is given carte blanche to tell the State Department to go screw itself in a closet somewhere. Now, that's not making excuses for the State Department; that's telling you how decisions were made and telling you how things got accomplished. Read George's book.
In so many ways I wanted to believe for four years that what I was seeing -- as an academic now -- what I was seeing was an extremely weak national security advisor, and an extremely powerful vice president, and an extremely powerful in the issues that impacted him secretary of defense -- remember, a vice president who has been secretary of defense too and obviously has an inclination that way, and also has known the secretary of defense for a long time, and also is a member of what Dwight Eisenhower warned about -- God bless Eisenhower -- in 1961 in his farewell address, the military industrial complex - and don't you think they aren't among us today - in a concentration of power that is just unparalleled.
It all happened because of the end of the Cold War. ... How many contractors who did billion dollars or so business with the Defense Department did we have in 1988 and how many do we have now? And they're always working together.
If one of them is a lead on the satellite program -- I hope there's some Lockheed and Grumman and others here today, Raytheon -- if one of them is a lead on satellites, the others are subs. And they've learned their lesson; they're in every state. They've got every congressman, every senator. They've got it covered. Now, that's not to say that they aren't smart businessmen. They are -- and women -- they are. But it's something we should be looking at, something we should be looking at.
So you've got this collegiality there between the secretary of defense and the vice president, and you've got a president who is not versed in international relations and not too much interested in them either. And so it's not too difficult to make decisions in this what I call Oval Office cabal, and decisions often that are the opposite of what you'd thought were made in the formal process. Now, let's get back to Dr. (Condoleezza )Rice again (national security advisor thorough the first Bush administration and secretary of state in the second one).
For so long I said, yeah, Rich, you're right -- Rich being Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage (in the first Bush term) -- it is a dysfunctional process. And to myself I said, okay, put on your academic hat; who's causing this? Well, the national security adviser. Even if the framers didn't envision that position, even if it's not subject to confirmation by the Senate, the national security advisor should be doing a better job. Now I've come to a different conclusion, and after reading Packer's book I found additional information, or confirmation for my opinion, I think. I think it was more a case of -- in some cases there was real dysfunctionality -- there always is -- but in most cases it was Dr. Rice made a decision, she made a decision -- and this is all about people again because people in essence are the government. She made a decision that she would side with the president to build her intimacy with the president.
And so what we had was a situation where the national security advisor, seen in the evolution over some half-century since the act as the balancer or the person who would make sure all opinions got to the president, the person who would make sure that every dissent got to the president that made sense -- not every one but the ones that made sense -- actually was a part of the problem, and probably on many issues sided with the president and the vice president and the secretary of defense. And so what you had -- and here I am the academic again -- you had this incredible process where the formal process, the statutory process, the policy coordinating committee, the deputies committee, the principal's committee, all camouflaged -- the dysfunctionality camouflaged the efficiency of the secret decision-making process.
And so we got into Iraq, and so George Packer quotes Richard Haas in his book as saying, "To this day I still don't know why we went to war in Iraq." I can go through all the things we listed, from WMD (weapons of mass destruction) to human rights to -- I can go through it -- terrorism, but I really can't sit here and tell you, George, why we went to war in Iraq.
And there are so many decisions. Why did we wait three years to talk to the North Koreans? Why did we wait four-plus years to say we at least back the EU-3 approach to Iran? Why did we create the national director of intelligence and add further to the bureaucracy, which was what caused the problem in the first place?
The problem is not sharing information. The problem is not that we don't have enough feet on the ground or enough people collecting intelligence or enough $40 billion eyes in the sky -- national technical means. That's not the problem. The problem is our people don't share.
The problem is the FBI is over here in its niche, and the CIA is over here, and INR (State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research) is here, and Treasury is here, and the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) is here, and the NSA (National Security Agency) is here, and the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) is here, and God Almighty, they never talk to each other.
They don't share. They don't pass information around. They don't work in the same cultures. They don't have the same attitude about the information they're handling, sometimes for good reason. Some are domestic law enforcement; some are not.
There are all kinds of problems that need to be dealt with and we are not going to make it into the 21st century very far and keep our power intact and our powder dry if we don't start to deal with this need to change the decision-making process, and an understanding of that need, which, for whatever reason, intuitive or intellectual I don't know, I'll give credit to the Bush administration for, by suddenly concentrating power in one tiny little aspect of the federal government and letting that little cabal make the decisions.
That's not a recipe for success. It's a recipe for good decision-making in terms of the speed and alacrity with which you can make decisions, of course.
...What this administration did for four years. ... It made decisions in secret, and now I think it is paying the consequences of having made those decisions in secret. But far more telling to me is America is paying the consequences. You and I and every other citizen like us is paying the consequences, whether it is a response to Katrina that was less than adequate certainly, or whether it is the situation in Iraq, which still goes unexplained.
... my army right now is truly in bad shape -- truly in bad shape. And I'm not talking about the billions and billions of dollars of equipment it's burning up in Iraq at a rate 10 or 15 times the rate its life cycle said it should be burned up at, but I'm also talking about when you have officers who have to hedge the truth, NCOs who have to hedge the truth.
They start voting with their feet, as they did in Vietnam, my war. They come home and they tell their wife they've got to go back for the third tour and the fourth tour and the wife says, uh-uh, or the husband says, uh-uh, and all of a sudden your military begins to unravel. And the signs are very concrete right now that the Army and the Marine Corps -- to a lesser extent the other services because they're not quite as involved in the deployments that we're talking about here and the frequency thereof, the op tempo as we say it -- problems are brewing. Problems are brewing."

That Was a Short War on Povery

By E. J. Dionne Jr. / The Washington Post

It has long been said that Americans have short attention spans, but this is ridiculous: Our bold, urgent, far-reaching, post-Katrina war on poverty lasted maybe a month.

Credit for our ability to reach rapid closure on the poverty issue goes first to a group of congressional conservatives who seized the post-Katrina initiative before advocates of poverty reduction could get their plans off the ground.

As soon as President Bush announced his first spending package for reconstructing New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, the Republican Study Committee and other conservatives switched the subject from poverty reduction to how Katrina reconstruction plans might increase the deficit that their own tax-cutting policies helped create.

Unwilling to freeze any of the tax cuts, these conservatives proposed cutting other spending to offset Katrina costs. The headlines focused on the seemingly easy calls on pork-barrel spending. But some of their biggest cuts were in health care programs, including Medicaid, and other spending for the poor.

Thus, the budget Congress is now considering would cut spending by $35 billion and cut taxes by $70 billion. Excuse me, but doesn't this increase the deficit by a net of $35 billion?

Don't worry, said Rep. Mike Pence of Indiana, one of the leading House conservatives. Cutting taxes for the rich is the best antipoverty program. "I'm mindful of what a pipe fitter once said to President Reagan," Pence said, according to the New York Times. " 'I've never been hired by a poor man.' A growing economy is in the interest of every working American, regardless of their income."

In other words, the conservatives have moved the conversation to ideas that go back to Calvin Coolidge's low-tax economics from the 1920s. And they say liberals are the folks with the "old" ideas?

If it didn't matter, I'd be inclined to salute the agenda-setting genius of the right wing. But since we need a national conversation on poverty, it's worth considering that conservatives were successful in pushing it back in part because of weaknesses on the liberal side.

Right out of the box, conservatives started blaming the persistent poverty unearthed by Katrina on the failure of "liberal programs." If there was a liberal retort, it didn't get much coverage in the supposedly liberal media.
It's conservatives, after all, who spent almost a decade touting the genius of the 1996 welfare reform and claiming that because so many people had been driven off the welfare rolls, poverty was no longer a problem.
Yes, welfare reform worked better than some of us expected in the 1990s. But Katrina underscored the limits of welfare reform by showing how many people had been left behind. It also brought home the failure of conservative economics. The Clinton economy -- bolstered by balanced budgets, tax increases on the rich and the expansion of innovative programs such as the earned-income tax credit and health coverage for the poor -- cut the number of poor people by 7.7 million between 1993 and 2000. Between 2001 and 2004, on the other hand, the number of those in poverty rose by 4.1 million.

Or consider that a recent Census Bureau report found that the percentage of Americans getting private job-based health insurance fell from 63.6 percent in 2000 to 59.8 percent in 2004. What held down the number of Americans without insurance altogether? The proportion insured under government programs -- Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program -- rose from 10.6 percent in 2000 to 12.9 percent in 2004. A time when more Americans than ever need government-provided health insurance is when we should expand government assistance for health care, not cut it back. It's also a good time for raising the minimum wage and increasing the help the earned-income tax credit offers the working poor.

But liberals also need to seize the initiative by speaking candidly and not defensively about the social causes of poverty. These include family breakdown and the heavy concentration of very poor people in a small number of neighborhoods in our big cities. Just because some conservatives are tempted, wrongly, to blame all poverty on problems in the family doesn't mean that liberals should shy away from talking about the difficulties faced by children in fatherless homes.

I was naive enough to hope that after Katrina the left and the right might have useful things to say to each other about how to help the poorest among us. I guess we've moved on. You can lay a lot of the blame for this indifference on conservatives. But it will be a default on the part of liberals if the poor disappear again from public view without a fight.

www.washingtonpost.com

The Black Gold at Home

By Brian Schweitzer

HELENA, MT - America has a substance abuse problem, and Montana may have a cure.

It is easy to forget, but before the hurricanes bumped up already outrageous fuel prices, President Bush was forced to ask the royals of Saudi Arabia - the country that gave us 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers - to lower the price of oil so Americans could afford to drive. He was refused.
In truth, he had no choice. America is addicted to foreign oil, and like any addict we are at the mercy of the pushers and require an intervention. Montana, among other states, is trying to help America get clean by promoting a range of modern domestic energy strategies. Yet our biggest idea is actually a very old recipe: gasoline made from coal instead of oil.
Most people are surprised to learn that we can produce gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and other petroleum products out of coal. Indeed, the process was used in America as early as 1928. In World War II, 92 percent of Germany's aviation fuel and half its total petroleum came from synthetic-fuel plants. South Africa has used a similar technology for 50 years, and now makes 200,000 barrels per day of synthetic gasoline and diesel.

"Synfuels" have remarkable properties: they are high-performing substances that run in existing engines without any technical modifications, and they burn much more cleanly than conventional fuels. The synfuel process, which is nothing like conventional coal use, removes greenhouse gases as well as toxins like sulfur, mercury and arsenic. And the technology has other applications: a synfuel plant can generate electric power, make synthetic natural gas, and produce the hydrogen that many (including President Bush) believe is the energy source of the future.
Montana thinks synfuels make a lot of sense for America, especially since our state has 120 billion tons of coal, more than a third of America's reserves. That's the liquid fuel equivalent of one-quarter of the oil underlying the Middle East. Responsible development of even a small fraction of these reserves could give America control over the price of gas, dissolve the oil bonds that tie us to the Middle East, and create wealth and jobs that would remain on American soil.

Synfuel can also aid military security. The Department of Defense - America's largest consumer of foreign oil - has stated a desire to run all battlefield equipment on a single, multipurpose synthetic fuel. A Pentagon report released last year, which presciently warned of Gulf Coast hurricanes as a major threat to military fuel supply, says synfuel is ideal as a stable, clean, domestically made battlefield fuel.
So what are the drawbacks? The hurdle in making synfuel has always been the cost of production, about $35 a barrel, more expensive than oil has historically been. But as we all know, times have changed. Yes, there will be significant start-up costs for private companies, but risk can be alleviated with long-term buyers like the military and with new federal loan guarantees. And while Montana will do its part to help with appropriate transportation and other public facilities, a stronger federal investment - like the billions in annual subsidies and tax breaks big oil companies have long received - could really kick-start the industry.

Once, our government made such investments. In the 1930's and 40's, the United States made more than a million barrels of synthetic gasoline at several test plants. But the oil industry persuaded Washington to abandon the research. Ever since, presidents and Congresses have been unwilling, or unable, to combat Big Oil and make energy independence a top priority. The pattern continues. Four years after 9/11, Congress and the administration have given us an energy bill that by the president's own admission provides no relief from foreign oil any time soon. Meanwhile, less-advanced nations are passing us by. China, Malaysia and Qatar are building large synfuel facilities; Brazil has a new generation of cars that run on any combination of ethanol or gasoline in a single tank, allowing drivers to use whichever is cheaper that day.

Like all Americans, Montanans are tired of this nonsense. We are tired of paying $3 a gallon for gas, tired of watching third-world nations overtake us in energy innovation, and tired of supporting the kind of tyrants that young Americans have spent two centuries fighting and dying to defeat.
Synfuel, ethanol, biodiesel, wind power, solar power, hydrogen - these are no longer dreamy ideas. They are now real and ready solutions, and with a national committment behind them, America can kick the foreign oil habit for good.

Brian Schweitzer, a former soil scientist and a Democrat, is the governor of Montana.

Tales of Voter Suppression

By Paul Krugman / The New York Times
By running for the U.S. Senate, Katherine Harris, Florida's former secretary of state, has stirred up some ugly memories. And that's a good thing, because those memories remain relevant. There was at least as much electoral malfeasance in 2004 as there was in 2000, even if it didn't change the outcome. And the next election may be worse.

In his recent book "Steal This Vote" - a very judicious work, despite its title - Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, provides the best overview I've seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: "Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election."

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore. This was true despite a host of efforts by state and local officials to suppress likely Gore votes, most notably Ms. Harris's "felon purge," which disenfranchised large numbers of valid voters.

But few Americans have heard these facts. Perhaps journalists have felt that it would be divisive to cast doubt on the Bush administration's legitimacy. If so, their tender concern for the nation's feelings has gone for naught: Cindy Sheehan's supporters are camped in Crawford, and America is more bitterly divided than ever.

Meanwhile, the whitewash of what happened in Florida in 2000 showed that election-tampering carries no penalty, and political operatives have acted accordingly. For example, in 2002 the Republican Party in New Hampshire hired a company to jam Democratic and union phone banks on Election Day.

And what about 2004?

Mr. Gumbel throws cold water on those who take the discrepancy between the exit polls and the final result as evidence of a stolen election. (I told you it's a judicious book.) He also seems, on first reading, to play down what happened in Ohio. But the theme of his book is that America has a long, bipartisan history of dirty elections.

He told me that he wasn't brushing off the serious problems in Ohio, but that "this is what American democracy typically looks like, especially in a presidential election in a battleground state that is controlled substantially by one party."

So what does U.S. democracy look like? There have been two Democratic reports on Ohio in 2004, one commissioned by Representative John Conyers Jr., the other by the Democratic National Committee.

The D.N.C. report is very cautious: "The purpose of this investigation," it declares, "was not to challenge or question the results of the election in any way." It says there is no evidence that votes were transferred away from John Kerry - but it does suggest that many potential Kerry votes were suppressed. Although the Conyers report is less cautious, it stops far short of claiming that the wrong candidate got Ohio's electoral votes.

But both reports show that votes were suppressed by long lines at polling places - lines caused by inadequate numbers of voting machines - and that these lines occurred disproportionately in areas likely to vote Democratic. Both reports also point to problems involving voters who were improperly forced to cast provisional votes, many of which were discarded.

The Conyers report goes further, highlighting the blatant partisanship of election officials. In particular, the behavior of Ohio's secretary of state, Kenneth Blackwell - who supervised the election while serving as co-chairman of the Bush-Cheney campaign in Ohio - makes Ms. Harris's actions in 2000 seem mild by comparison.

And then there are the election night stories. Warren County locked down its administration building and barred public observers from the vote-counting, citing an F.B.I. warning of a terrorist threat. But the F.B.I. later denied issuing any such warning. Miami County reported that voter turnout was an improbable 98.55 percent of registered voters. And so on.
We aren't going to rerun the last three elections. But what about the future?

Our current political leaders would suffer greatly if either house of Congress changed hands in 2006, or if the presidency changed hands in 2008. The lids would come off all the simmering scandals, from the selling of the Iraq war to profiteering by politically connected companies. The Republicans will be strongly tempted to make sure that they win those elections by any means necessary. And everything we've seen suggests that they will give in to that temptation.

www.nytimes.com