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Paulson's Plan: Prevention, Prevention, Prevention

Saturday, March 15, 2008 by Unknown

From BusinessWeek:

Call it an attempt to lock the barn door before the next group of horses escapes. Even as criticism has mounted that the Bush Administration has moved too slowly to stem the slide in housing and credit markets, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on Mar. 13 announced a series of recommendations intended to prevent a recurrence of the lapses and errors that led to the meltdown in the first place.

"As we continue to address the current market stress, we must also examine the appropriate policy responses," Paulson said in a speech at the National Press Club in Washington. But he also sounded a note of caution aimed at heading off calls for more radical regulatory changes emanating from Congress, consumer groups, and others critical of the financial industry.

More here.

What's the Matter with Kids Today?

by Unknown

Nothing, aside from the panic that most older adults have that the Internet is turning their brains into gray goo.

From Salon.com:

The other week was only the latest takedown of what has become a fashionable segment of the population to bash: the American teenager. A phone (land line!) survey of 1,200 17-year-olds, conducted by the research organization Common Core and released Feb. 26, found our young people to be living in "stunning ignorance" of history and literature.

This furthered the report that the National Endowment for the Arts came out with at the end of 2007, lamenting "the diminished role of voluntary reading in American life," particularly among 13-to-17-year-olds, and Doris Lessing's condemnation, in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in literature, of "a fragmenting culture" in which "young men and women ... have read nothing, knowing only some specialty or other, for instance, computers."

More here.

Total Recall Machine

by Unknown

From CrunchGear:

Remember the X-ray technology from Total Recall? A British company has developed what it calls “ThruVision” — a similar technology that “uses what it calls ‘passive imaging technology’ to identify objects by the natural electromagnetic rays — known as Terahertz or T-rays — that they emit,” according to Reuters. “Depending on the material, the signature of the wave is different, so that explosives can be distinguished from a block of clay and cocaine is different from a bag of flour.”

More here.