Guy Berger

Grad school is a great place to meet intelligent, pretentious, weird-looking women. Guy

A more skeptical, though still sympathetic, review from Foreign Affairs magazine:

All nuclear reactors rely on nuclear fission, a process that was discovered in the 1930s. When certain heavy atoms are struck by a neutron, they absorb it, become unstable and split apart. This results in two lighter atoms, and two or three neutrons are ejected. The process releases large amounts of energy, much of it in the form of the kinetic energy of the fast-moving fission products. This kinetic energy is converted to heat as the fission products slow down. If the ejected neutrons go on to strike other unstable atoms nearby, those too can break apart, releasing further neutrons in a process known as a chain reaction. When enough of these neutrons produce further fissions—rather than escaping, bouncing off or being absorbed by atoms that do not split apart—the process becomes self-sustaining. An uncontrolled chain reaction within a large amount of fissionable material can lead to an explosive release of energy, as in nuclear weapons. But in nuclear reactors, which contain far less fissionable material, the chain reaction and the release of energy are carefully controlled. War and peace In 1942 the physicist Enrico Fermi led a group of scientists who built the first nuclear reactor as part of the Manhattan Project—America's effort to build the first atomic bomb. Although the reactor was simple in design, it included features that are part of almost every nuclear power plant today. The reactor core consisted of pellets of uranium fuel inside bricks made of graphite, which served as a “moderator”, reducing the speed of the neutrons in order to maximise their ability to cause further fissions. (Most reactors today use water as the moderator.) In addition, the set-up included “control rods” made of a material that absorbed neutrons. These rods could be inserted into the core to slow or shut down the chain reaction if necessary. Although all of this was done with a view to building an effective weapon, the scientists involved always knew that nuclear technologies also had promising peaceful uses. In 1953 America's president, Dwight Eisenhower, gave his famous “Atoms for Peace” speech before the United Nations General Assembly, in which he called for the controlled application of nuclear energy in a civilian context. In the mid-1950s the world's first civilian nuclear power stations appeared in America, Britain and Russia. America's first civilian nuclear power plant, of a type called a pressurised water reactor (PWR), was designed by Westinghouse and adapted from the reactors used in nuclear submarines. Inside a PWR, water—which is kept under high pressure to prevent it from boiling—has a double function. In a closed “primary” loop, it serves as a coolant for the reactor core and as a moderator, to slow down the fast neutrons created during fission. As the water in the primary loop circulates, it becomes very hot. This heat energy is then transferred to a secondary loop of water. The resulting steam is used to spin turbines that generate electricity. Nuclear's golden age In the 1950s the pursuit of atomic energy was viewed as a largely positive endeavour. In a speech in 1954 before a group of science writers, the head of America's Atomic Energy Commission, Lewis Strauss, even declared that one day nuclear power would be “too cheap to meter”. By the mid-1960s America's two leading reactor vendors, General Electric (GE) and Westinghouse, were involved in an intense competition. GE began to offer “turnkey” contracts to utilities, in which it delivered an entire nuclear plant for a fixed price. To keep up, Westinghouse followed suit, causing a surge in orders. But this sales ploy turned out to be a money-loser for both firms in the end. The boom in reactor construction coincided with the beginnings of America's environmental movement and a sense of growing unease about nuclear power. By the early 1970s uncertainties over radioactive-waste disposal, the effects of radiation and the potential consequences of a nuclear accident prompted a backlash. One frightening scenario was the “China Syndrome”: the idea that molten radioactive fuel undergoing a runaway reaction might burn its way through the bottom of the reactor's pressure vessel and containment structure, and then down into the Earth. Of course the fuel would never actually reach China, but were it to breach the containment structure, the result could be a huge release of radioactivity. As electricity demand levelled off and interest rates shot up, applications to build nuclear reactors started to decline, at least in America. Then in 1979 a serious accident occurred at a plant at Three Mile Island, near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. A combination of mechanical failures and operator errors caused a partial melting of the reactor core. Fortunately the pressure vessel housing the core held, and virtually no dangerous radioactive gases escaped from the plant, says J. Samuel Walker, the historian of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the agency that regulates America's nuclear power plants. Although the accident nearly killed off America's nuclear-power industry, it did not harm any people. But a few years later a true disaster occurred. In 1986 a reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine became unstable, and a power surge inside the core led to two explosions that destroyed the reactor and blew its roof off. As a result, significant amounts of radioactive material escaped into the environment. About 30 emergency workers died of radiation exposure shortly after the accident. Thousands more people who lived in contaminated areas developed serious health problems, some of them fatal. The cause of the accident was found to be a combination of operator errors and inherent flaws in the plant's design. Industry insiders pointed out that reactors based on this flawed design had not been deployed in Western countries. Even so, the accident further undermined public confidence in nuclear power. Although the nuclear industry faced decline or stagnation in many Western countries in the 1980s, it thrived in one of them: France. After the oil crisis of 1973, France decided to pursue the goal of fossil-fuel independence. With few energy resources of its own, pursuing nuclear power seemed like the best strategy. All the commercial nuclear plants operating in France today were based on technology devised by Westinghouse, which licensed its PWR design to France in the 1960s. Today the country has 59 nuclear reactors supplying 78% of its electricity. Nuclear has worked well in France in part because it is accepted by politicians and the public alike, so there are few delays due to protests or planning problems. Elsewhere, these have lengthened the construction period and enormously increased costs. Once up and running, however, nuclear plants have a distinct advantage over those run on coal or natural gas: they need comparatively little fuel to operate. Although the price of uranium jumped from about $70 per pound in January to about $130 in mid-July, operating costs of nuclear power plants have changed very little. (Construction accounts for as much as three-quarters of the cost of nuclear generation.) Moreover, the rise in the price has prompted an exploration boom that will ultimately lead to more mines and greater supply. Uranium is not thought to be particularly scarce—it has simply not been very profitable to look for it recently. The latest generation of reactors, which evolved from models constructed in the 1970s and 1980s, include important improvements over prior designs. Westinghouse's new AP1000, for example, has “passive safety” systems that can prevent a meltdown during an emergency without operator intervention. If the reactor loses pressure because of a loss of coolant, for example, pressurised tanks deliver water to the core, since the pressure in the tanks is higher than that in the core, explains Howard Bruschi, who has worked for Westinghouse since the 1960s and is now a consultant to the company. The new reactor's simplified design also means that fewer motors, pumps and pipes are needed, reducing not only the potential for mechanical errors, but also costs of maintenance, inspections and repairs. Westinghouse recently agreed to provide four new plants to China. Soul of a new reactor Meanwhile, Areva, a French nuclear company, is engineering ever more powerful plants. Its first reactor, which began operating in 1977, was rated at 900 megawatts; its latest model, the evolutionary power reactor (EPR), is a 1,600-megawatt design. The company has already begun building two such plants in Europe: one in Finland, which is now expected to start operating in 2011, about two years late, and another in France. Both the EPR and the AP1000, along with GE's latest design, are among the plants under consideration by American utilities. A demonstration plant of a completely different type, a “pebble bed” reactor, is scheduled to be built in South Africa starting in 2009. Based on technology that originated in Germany, its design is unique in several ways. For one thing, its small size (165 megawatts) should make it comparatively fast and cheap to build; depending on power needs, several units sharing a single control room could be constructed on one site. And the uranium fuel is encapsulated in rugged “pebbles”, the size of tennis balls, which are designed to withstand a loss of coolant without disintegrating, making the reactor extremely safe. Andrew Kadak, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who has been developing a smaller, alternative pebble-bed design with his students, is convinced that “these reactors cannot melt down.” Even though new designs for nuclear plants may be safer, they still generate toxic waste. After about three years of use, the fuel is depleted of most fissile uranium but has accumulated long-lived radioactive materials that cannot be burned in conventional reactors. At the moment most such waste is stored near the plant until it can be moved to a permanent facility. But no country is yet operating a final disposal site for highly radioactive nuclear waste. America's Yucca Mountain repository, for example, is not expected to be ready for use for many years, if ever. In some countries nuclear waste is “reprocessed”—a procedure in which plutonium is separated from the rest of the spent fuel, which can then be made into new fuel. Plutonium, of course, can be used to make nuclear weapons. Because of concern over nuclear proliferation, America has not engaged in civilian reprocessing since 1977. As part of a new multinational initiative called the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), however, America's Department of Energy is supporting a type of spent fuel reprocessing which does not separate the plutonium from other highly radioactive materials in the waste, thus making it more resistant to proliferation than traditional reprocessing. This mixture of plutonium and other radioactive elements could then be turned into fuel suitable for use in “fast” reactors. Most reactors in operation today are called “thermal” reactors, because they use a moderator to slow down the neutrons and promote fission. Fast reactors, in contrast, do not employ moderators and use much faster neutrons to produce fissions. So they can consume many of the long-lived radioactive materials that thermal reactors cannot. AP They don't build them like they used to This approach could extract far more energy from a given amount of nuclear fuel while at the same time reducing the volume and toxicity of nuclear waste. Proponents of fast reactors reckon that most of the remaining waste would need to be stored for only a few centuries, perhaps, rather than hundreds of thousands of years, once the most radioactive elements had been separated out. According to the Nuclear Energy Institute, a lobby group in Washington, DC, this could mean that America would need only one nuclear-waste repository. In the long term, a fleet of fast reactors could use nuclear fuel so efficiently that “for all practical purposes, the uranium would be inexhaustible,” says William Hannum, a nuclear physicist who used to work at America's Argonne National Laboratory. But opponents of this strategy call it a distraction that could hinder the renewal of the nuclear power industry. For one thing, many new fast reactors and fuel-reprocessing facilities would have to be built, adding billions of dollars to the enormous sums already required for new nuclear plants. In addition, some of the technologies in question have not been demonstrated on a commercial scale yet. And the GNEP reverses America's ban on civilian reprocessing, which critics say could encourage the proliferation of weapons-grade materials. In the end, the deployment of new nuclear reactors will depend on many factors, including successful waste and proliferation management, improved economics, and perhaps most important, convincing the public that nuclear reactors can be operated safely. Despite these obstacles, there is an undeniable mood of optimism in the industry. Whether that will be enough to spark the deployment of the hundreds of reactors that will be needed to help mitigate the effects of global warming remains to be seen, cautions Richard Lester, a professor of nuclear science and engineering at MIT. Were there to be another disaster like Chernobyl, or a successful terrorist attack on a nuclear plant, all bets would be off. But for now most people in the industry agree that nuclear power's prospects look brighter than they have in a long time.

Shana tova, fellas. Guy

Damn, that's horrible. The guy was a visionary. Guy

Dialogue is a great date and quite a showcase for Hill the composer, but it has less of Hill the pianist than albums under his own name. Guy

I should also add that Andrew's late 60s work tends to be more accessible than his mid 60s work. None of those seem to be on the list, but if you are interested check out Passing Ships or Dance with Death. Guy

Judgment and Smoke Stack are the most straight ahead on that list. However, Black Fire is the first thing I would get after Point of Departure. Guy

Interesting obituary. Anybody heard this guy's music?

Several times - I Senegal. And Dakar is like New York, only fast! and civilised. MG I'll have to get there some day, I'm sure it's fantastic. Some of my brother's friends were in Senegal (not sure if it was Dakar or elsewhere) for the Peace Corps and were foolish enough (after being forewarned) to speak Hebrew at a bar. They got beaten up really badly by some thugs, but I'm guessing it was for money (yay, foreigners!) rather than anti-Semitic reasons. I'm guessing few people in Senegal would even recognize the language. Guy

downtown Dakar: Anybody been there? Guy

Normally I would agree with you Chuck. I'm not wasting my money on the iPhone. I remember when I bought my first IPod, I tried my best to avoid buying an Apple product. However, I came to the conclusion that Apple was offering the best product in its class. Maybe that's changed since then. Guy ps I'm looking forward to the iTurd (new product that will make your shit come out in a glistening white color)...

My 20 gig ipod is slowly dying. I'm having battery issues (it occasionally shuts off due to "low battery" even when 75% charged) and 20 gigs isn't enough for all the music I want to put on there. I'm trying to figure out whether I should get the 80 or 160 gig, given the relatively small difference in price. I figure that while 80 gig will almost surely be sufficient, I could encode at 192 if I get the bigger one. Then again, with the cheapo head phones I use I probably won't be able to tell the difference. Even the 160 will be cheaper than the 20 gig, which I bought about 3 years ago. Guy

I think it's interesting to what degree Google's founders (and many, though not all, of its employees) believe in their company's "mission." We'll see if that persists once the company's growth slows and the endless gusher of money stops. (I'm a skeptic.) 9/4/2007

I went through some of the old Strong Bad emails. Still hilarious. Are they still making them? I quit sometime after "Dangeresque 3" because they stopped being funny, but maybe it's gotten better since then. Guy ps Strong Bad email favorites some kinda robot guitar viklas techno your friends kids book

I personally thought 40 Year Old Virgin was the weakest of the three. FWIW, though I enjoyed a lot of the movie, the McLovin gag was by the funniest thing in there. Followed by all the scenes with the cops.

Interesting article. Thoughts: 1) It probably played up the nanotechnology angle a bit too much. What I mean is -- even if nanotech is set back by two decades for whatever reason, others will still be able to collect ever-growing amounts of information about us. They already do. (eg Google) 2) While the possibility of government spying on us is scary and relevant, the problems most people encounter in such a system will be much more banal. Stuff like employers and insurers and spouses snooping on them, that kind of thing. 3) In addition to the potential solutions/counter-measures the author mentioned, I think transparency is important. Each of us should be able to find out with minimum difficulty/cost what information others have about us. (example: free credit reports) Guy

Does your dad know that a lot of "foreign" cars are actually manufactured here in the US? I'm not sure if that would change his mind, but just thought I'd throw that out there. Guy

This is the paper I was thinking about. It looks to me like there could be serious selection issues here (need to know more about their "comprehensive sample"), but it's impossible to judge without reading the paper. It doesn't say anything about the performance of such IPOs during recessions in the abstract; perhaps they discuss them in the paper. The "quick flip" bit might be relevant to EMI/Terra Firma. download paper

Can't say I'm crying any tears for CEOs lamenting their loss of privacy, though I agree that family members should be off-limits. It slid by about one-fifth, on average, in the two years after the death of a CEO's child, and by about 15% after the death of a spouse. As for an executive's mother-in-law, the old jokes seem to hold: The researchers found that profitability, on average, rose slightly after her demise. The study is part of an emerging -- and controversial -- area of financial research that delves into the lives and personalities of executives in search of links to stock prices and corporate performance. The trend is an outgrowth of the tendency to lionize CEOs as critical to the businesses they lead. If their performance is so vital, the researchers say, investors should want to know anything that could affect it. "When you go to the track, you study the horse," says David Yermack, a New York University finance professor. "Investing is not that different. You want to know as much as you can about the jockey." A study he co-wrote looked at executives' home purchases. It found that on average, the stocks of companies run by leaders who buy or build megamansions sharply underperform the market. The researchers don't claim to know why. They theorize that some of these executives might be focused more on enjoying their wealth and less on working hard. One CEO looked at was Trevor Fetter of Tenet Healthcare Corp., who bought a 10,057-square-foot manse in the Dallas area around the start of 2005. Since then, Tenet's stock is off more than 60%, while the broader market has risen. A spokesman for the hospital chain said it was aware of the study but had no comment. Other academics have found underperformance, in both profits and stock prices, at companies led by executives who received awards such as best-manager kudos from the business press. The theory: Once they become stars, some CEOs may pay more attention to writing memoirs and sitting on outside boards and a little less to running their companies. Two Penn State professors recently attempted to rate CEOs of technology companies on their degree of narcissism. They looked at things like the size of executives' photos in annual reports and how often they use the first person singular in press interviews. The authors concluded that narcissistic executives tended to take greater risks, leading to bigger swings in profitability of their companies. The study, called "It's All About Me," is to be published in Administrative Science Quarterly. The new line of research raises thorny privacy questions. If it intensifies, could CEOs' lives be plumbed like those of politicians and movie stars? Researchers say an area ripe for study is the possible effect of divorce and "trophy wives" on business success. "I find it hard to imagine if I had a sick child that would be anybody's business," says Jerry W. Levin, chairman of Sharper Image Corp. and former CEO of Revlon Inc. "To assume that because something is going on in my personal life it's going to affect my business -- it's crazy. I wouldn't even ask those kinds of questions about my own employees, my own executives." On the other hand, executives might be cheered to know the studies generally conclude CEOs do matter to their companies' performance. That might bolster their side in the great debate over the magnitude of executive pay. Some investors say they'd welcome personal data about CEOs if it weren't too intrusive. "Prying into people who have a kid with leukemia, that's a bit of an invasion," says Scott Black, president of Delphi Management Inc., a Boston money manager. But Mr. Black says he shies away from companies that spend lavishly on headquarters and furnishings. And if he found out a CEO had bought a mansion or yacht or a $20 million painting, he says, that "would be of interest" to him. The new research is part of a more nuanced approach to studying management. Instead of assuming all CEOs are devoted to maximizing wealth for themselves or shareholders, researchers posit that executives can have other aims, like building a legacy or showing off wealth through a mammoth house. These may be perfectly rational behaviors, but hardly ones that are in shareholders' interest. The Internet, of course, has made research into homes, marriages and deaths far easier. Thanks to commercial and government databases, this no longer means haunting dusty courthouse record rooms. Prof. Yermack and Crocker Liu of Arizona State University set out to find real-estate records on the CEOs who were running all of the S&P 500 companies at the end of 2004. They scoured electronic records of taxes and deed transfers. When they couldn't find a home address, they turned to databases on voter registration rolls and campaign contributions. Eventually they found the addresses of 488 of the 500 executives. The median size of their principal homes was a little over 5,600 square feet. Some were far bigger. A key finding was that stock performance tended to deteriorate after a CEO bought or built an extremely large or costly estate, which they defined as over 10,000 square feet or sited on more than 10 acres. On average, these companies' stocks underperformed the S&P 500 index by about 25 percentage points over the three years after the purchase. The researchers used aerial photos available on the Internet to find swimming pools, tennis courts, boathouses and other amenities. One such photo, of the home of Limited Brands Inc. CEO Leslie Wexner, clearly showed an equestrian ring. Mr. Wexner started buying the first part of the 300-plus-acre estate near Columbus, Ohio, in 1987, the researchers say. Limited stock fell slightly in the following three years, while the S&P 500 index rose about 15%. The estate now includes a 22,371-square-foot house, according to county records. A spokeswoman for Limited said the company and Mr. Wexner wouldn't comment. Government records show Stephen Bollenbach, chief executive of Hilton Hotels Corp., bought a 12,854-square-foot house in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles in January 1997. Over the following three years, the S&P 500 went up more than 75%, but Hilton's stock fell about 70%. The hotel company later rebounded, and recently agreed to be taken private by Blackstone Group. A Hilton spokeswoman declined to comment. The declines were averages. Some executives who bought mansions saw their stocks rise afterward. The researchers don't claim a direct causal link between a home purchase and a company's stock. "It's whatever is driving the CEO to want to live in a mansion, which to a certain extent is very hard to observe," says Prof. Yermack. The purchase might signal that the executive is entrenched in his position, he says, or may prefer leisure to work. Another speculation: In a few cases, costly real-estate purchases might provide cover that enables CEOs who are dubious about their companies' prospects to sell a lot of stock without arousing suspicion. To Frederick E. "Shad" Rowe Jr., a money manager and head of an activist-investor group called the Investors for Director Accountability Foundation, the real-estate study "makes perfect sense." A CEO buys a huge house, "then he needs to hire a decorator, then a landscape architect," Mr. Rowe says. "You spend a lot of time and energy that you could be spending running the company." Prof. Yermack says he has received numerous requests from investors for copies of the paper, titled "Where are the Shareholders' Mansions?" He and Prof. Liu say it would be easy to build a simple trading strategy to profit from the edifice complex. One could track CEOs' house purchases through public records, bet against the stocks of companies whose chiefs bought or built megamansions, and buy the stocks of firms whose executives have more modest housing tastes. The professors calculated that doing that would have outperformed the market by about 15 percentage points a year. In contrast to real estate, studying the effects of family deaths on performance might seem unusually intrusive. Three professors who did so were trying to figure out how much chief executives matter to their companies' performance, versus the many other factors. "The idea of this was to find a random event that hits a CEO and evaluate the performance of the firm before and after this shock," says co-author Daniel Wolfenzon, an associate finance professor at New York University's Stern School of Business. "You have exactly the same CEO and the same firm. The only difference is that there is a shock." Denmark's government collects large amounts of personal information on citizens, from job status to death records. It also requires every company, even private ones, to make some financial data public. After years of lobbying, the researchers gained access to Danish data, and identified CEOs who had faced a death in the family. They wondered if grief or distraction might have affected companies' subsequent profitability. The greatest change followed a death of a CEO's child. On average, profitability, as measured by operating return on assets, was roughly 21% lower in the two years after such an event than in the two years before it. The drop was sharper when the child was under 18, and greater still if it was the death of an only child. Gerald M. Levin was chief executive of Time Warner Inc. in 1997 when his grown son was murdered. "Of course I went into a tailspin," he said. "I made...I won't call it a mistake. I returned to what for me was a narcotic, I returned to work. I worked 25 hours a day." He said he couldn't judge whether his performance was affected but notes that he felt drained of emotion, as though "nothing that happened could affect me anymore." Mr. Levin's grief didn't correlate with a drop in Time Warner's stock price, which greatly outperformed the broader market during the three years after his son's murder. Asked about the study by Prof. Wolfenzon, who did it with Morten Bennedsen of Copenhagen Business School and Francisco Pérez-González of the University of Texas, Mr. Levin said it "sounds sensible," but "I'm still skeptical, because there are so many other factors." Mr. Levin said there is immense pressure on executives to hide personal problems, a situation he feels should change. He now helps run a holistic wellness center in California focusing on helping people recover from traumas and other upheavals. Although he isn't sure that grief would distract a top executive from his work, he said, "not enough attention is being paid to the personal situation of a CEO. These are individuals....It's important to understand they're not automatons." In the study, a CEO's parent's death also was followed by a decline in the company's return on assets, though a smaller drop than after the death of a spouse or child. Overall, the profitability drops were sharper at companies headed by female CEOs. The researchers say they're not clear why. Only a mother-in-law's death was correlated with an upturn, and it was too small to be statistically significant. Prof. Wolfenzon says they included the mother-in-law as a rationality check. "It's a little bit funny that the mother-in-law dying doesn't distract the CEO," he said -- hastening to add that his own mother-in-law is vitally important to his productivity: "As we speak, she's taking care of my kids." It isn't clear how applicable the study is to big public companies in the U.S. or elsewhere, the authors acknowledge. Most of those studied were small, family-controlled ones where a shock to the CEO might have more impact, though Prof. Wolfenzon said the effects appeared similar across all sizes of Danish companies. Could investors take advantage of the study's conclusions by watching death registries, or even spying on hospital admissions? Prof. Wolfenzon says such information is much tougher to find in most countries than in Denmark. But, he muses, "because the data is so difficult to get, it may not be factored into prices. That makes it a more attractive investment strategy."

That's blasphemy. Guy

Possible, but my understanding is that companies that get bought out by private equity firms tend to outperform those that don't. Guy Only for the money guys. I was talking purely about profits and shareholders; I didn't realize that was unclear. Guy

I take it your not on the 12 point? And I have a list of at least 60 more BN/EMI jazz CDs I plan to buy in the beginning of November. (Sooner, if it looks like Terra Firma is going to wield the ax immediately.) The way I see it, in the worst case that I don't like some of these CDs, I'll be able to sell them at a nice profit once they all go out of print. Guy

I thought this article was fascinating, as is the field of evolutionary psychology in general. Just don't show it to your wife...