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Technology Review: The Coming Wireless Revolution
Tags: wireless, technology, innovation, radio, infrastructure, internet, government, regulation on 2008-11-16 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (2) -About
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For years, researchers have been toying with radios that are smart enough to hop from one frequency to another, leaving occupied channels undisturbed--an approach known as cognitive radio. But until the FCC made its announcement, cognitive-radio research was a purely academic pursuit. "You could do all the research you wanted on it," Sahai says, "but it was still illegal."
Recipes for Recovery | The New America Foundation
Tags: economy, bailout, united_states, president_obama, video, taxes, infrastructure, government, regulation, transparency, model, automobile, industry, labor on 2008-11-13 -All Annotations (9) -About
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the only way to create economic growth is by increasing
productivity – and productivity can only be increased through more labor or
capital, or technological advancement. Because stimulus does nothing to change
these fundamentals, he suggested, it cannot create any real economic growth.
Riedl explained that stimulus is based on the theory that government can
stimulate demand; however, he argued, government cannot create money – only
redistribute it. -
She
argued that demand could be boosted somewhat, and that there would be a
psychological benefit to stimulus. MacGuineas also suggested that stimulus was
a political inevitability. However, she outlined a number of risks attached to
any package. First, stimulus might be overly expansionary, loosening credit
beyond where it should be. Second, stimulus might “rebalance the economy” incorrectly,
propping up industries and sectors which should either fail or be restructured.
Third, stimulus might be executed poorly, and include too many pork barrel
projects and unrelated expenditures. Finally, stimulus could involve too much
borrowing, which might lead to a federal debt bubble. -
“We have been,” he said, “living off of
grandpa’s investment in infrastructure for a while,” and we now face an
“infrastructure deficit.” Furthermore,
he argued that even if our aging infrastructure has so far mostly remained
functional, we are still “paying” for our underinvestment—for example, time
lost through traffic congestion on too-crowded highways. -
stronger
government intervention in the auto industry sounds great, but you still have
to get consumers to buy the more efficient cars -
the crisis had provided further evidence that
“people are not rational economic beings,” and that “the availability of data
does not lead to being informed.” -
the recent financial crisis was caused in part by “both
parties [in financial transactions] not having equal access to
information.” He cited two sources of
costly misinformation: over-reliance on rating agencies and outdated or
irrelevant financial modeling tools. -
the money from the $700 billion dollar
bailout package was not being efficiently allocated, because banks were taking
the equity they were given and “sitting on it” to fulfill regulatory
requirements, rather than feeding it back into the economy. -
Rosner hoped that
the practice of securitization itself would not be blamed for the financial
crisis, calling securities a vital instrument in modern financial markets. He also called for industry-wide standardization
of terms like “subprime” and “default,” because the complexity of modern
markets had caused their exact meanings to become less clear. -
First, he recommended that the
SEC be made into a self-financed institution like the Fed, so that it is less
susceptible to outside influence.
Second, citing the decline in professional standards among “gatekeepers”
for public corporations, Longstreth thought that bolstering these standards
could restore integrity to the system.
Third, he claimed that an audit of public corporations by federal
regulators might restore transparency and root out abuses. Fourth, Longstreth contended that government should
create a new entity or empower a existing entity to explicitly advocate for the
interests of investors. Finally, Longstreth
asserted that the US should “appoint highly qualified people to head regulatory
agencies.”
A National Mobility Project - David Brooks
Tags: economy, opinion, infrastructure on 2008-10-31 -All Annotations (1) -About
in list: watch for responses
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A major infrastructure initiative would create jobs for the less-educated workers who have been hit hardest by the transition to an information economy. It would allow the U.S. to return to the fundamentals. There is a real danger that the U.S. is going to leap from one over-consuming era to another, from one finance-led bubble to another. Focusing on infrastructure would at least get us thinking about the real economy, asking hard questions about what will increase real productivity, helping people who are expanding companies rather than hedge funds.
The Full Obama Interview - Swampland - TIME
Tags: obama, election, progressive, energy, infrastructure, economy, democrat on 2008-10-23 -All Annotations (7) -About
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in an environment like this one where people are really paying attention because they are worried and they are scared good policy will end up being good politics—more than I think might have been true during boom times in the nineties when people were just feeling like it was sport, it was a game.
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one thing I have become pretty confident about is being able to tap into the smartest people on any subject and to draw together a lot of contrary or contradictory perspectives. And push people’s arguments against each other, ask the right questions and figure out at a least a framework for solving problems.
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When those troops are attacked, they have a right to defend themselves. Period. Now I think that the most critical task that we have in Afghanistan is to not only strengthen the Afghan government, it's military capacity, it's ability to deliver services to its people, its capacity to work with the agricultural sector there to replace the poppy crop. But it’s to also work through a viable strategy for Pakistan.
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The biggest problem with our energy policy has been to lurch from crisis to trance. And what we need is a sustained, serious effort. Now, I actually think the biggest opportunity right now is not just gas prices at the pump but the fact that the engine for economic growth for the last 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20, and that was consumer spending. I mean, basically, we turbo-charged this economy based on cheap credit. Whatever else we think is going to happen over the next certainly 5 years, one thing we know, the days of easy credit are going to be over because there is just too much de-leveraging taking place, too much debt both at the government level, corporate level and consumer level. And what that means is that just from a purely economic perspective, finding the new driver of our economy is going to be critical. There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy.
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For us to say we are just going to completely revamp how we use energy in a way that deals with climate change, deals with national security and drives our economy, that's going to be my number one priority when I get into office, assuming, obviously, that we have done enough to just stabilize the immediate economic situation.
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Now, the one other point I want to make about this, though, we can't divorce the energy issue from what I believe has to be the dominant political theme underlying everything -- the economy, healthcare, you name it. And that is restoring a sense that we're growing the economy from the bottom up and not the top down.
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essentially what we should be doing is setting the rules, setting the incentives, pricing pollution accurately, and then letting technology catch up the same way it did with acid rain. And the one thing that we probably will have to do, and this is where the federal government expenditure side comes in, we've got to pump a lot of separate players to make the initial investment.
James Howard Kunstler dissects suburbia | Video on TED.com
must see
we're going to have to downscale, re-scale and re-size everything we do in this country, and we can start soon enough to do it
Tags: urban, suburban, architecture, public_space, video, infrastructure, community, group_as_organism on 2008-10-15 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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Scientists Seek to Mitigate Ecological Damage From Roads - NYTimes.com
Tags: border, migration, science_is_a_method, infrastructure, development, transportation, conservation on 2008-10-15 -All Annotations (2) -About
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Some experts believe that habitat fragmentation, the slicing and dicing of large landscapes into small pieces with roads, homes and other development, is the biggest of all environmental problems. “By far,” said Dr. Michael Soulé, a retired biologist and founder of the Society for Conservation Biology. “It’s bigger than climate change. While the serious effects from climate change are 30 years away, there’s nothing left to save then if we don’t deal with fragmentation. And the spearhead of fragmentation are roads.”
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The jury is still out on how well restored connectivity works to keep a diverse gene pool and maintain long-term viability. A study in California, along the 16-lane Santa Monica Freeway (one of the busiest in the country, with 150,000 vehicle trips per day), found that bobcats and coyotes used existing underpasses — not designed for wildlife — to get to the other side. The highway, however, crowded home ranges together; the newcomers were fiercely challenged and did not stay long enough to breed.
The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief - Michael Pollan - NYTimes.com
...Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change.
Tags: food, diet, meat, health, healthcare, agriculture, pollution, climate_crisis, energy, homeland_security, government, regulation, reform, technology, information, infrastructure on 2008-10-12 -All Annotations (17) -About
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several steps the government can take to nurture this market and make local foods more affordable. Here are a few:Add Sticky Note
- four season farmers' markets, agricultural enterprise zones, local meat-inspection corps, establish a strategic grain reserve, regionalize federal food procurement, create a federal definition of "food", benefit programs that provide incentive to support farmers' markets and CSAsposted by taryn930 on 2008-10-12
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The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic renewal in the countryside. And it will generate tens of millions of new “green jobs,” which is precisely how we need to begin thinking of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy.
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chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food.
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Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer.
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While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.
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Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor’s precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers
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It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage — indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.
It must be recognized that the current food system — characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table — is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.
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ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer — and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides.
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First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.
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Argentina. There, in a geography roughly comparable to that of the American farm belt, farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world’s best beef), farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any fossil-fuel fertilizer.
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The U.S.D.A. estimates that Americans throw out 14 percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers, wholesalers and institutions.
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in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food
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the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one’s family and community.
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When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.)
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The F.D.A. should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they’re eating. The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals’ diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the veil is another.
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the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it.
Not a Bit Surprised: The Financial Crisis, Reading Beyond the Mainstream, Real(?) Estate, Yankee Stadium, and Impeach Palin Now « Hak Pak Sak
Tags: bailout, economy, athletics, baseball, new_york_city, urban, development, infrastructure, poverty, video on 2008-10-04 -All Annotations (2) -About
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Rafi Kam and Dallas Penn, producers and presenters of “Bronx Bodega” and “Check Mate”
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The new stadium will occupy a larger footprint of Bronx territory than the old one did but will feed less back into the local economy
YouTube - Speaker Pelosi (D-CA) on Financial Rescue Bill
this is an important speech
Tags: nancy_pelosi, speech, video, bailout, infrastructure on 2008-09-29 -All Annotations (0) -About
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Op-Ed Columnist - Green the Bailout - Thomas Friedman
Tags: economy, bank_failure, credit, bailout, infrastructure, energy, innovation, united_states, opinion on 2008-09-29 -All Annotations (4) -About
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You have to save the system.
But that is not the point of this column. The point is, we don’t just need a bailout. We need a buildup. We need to get back to making stuff, based on real engineering not just financial engineering. We need to get back to a world where people are able to realize the American Dream — a house with a yard — because they have built something with their hands, not because they got a “liar loan” from an underregulated bank with no money down and nothing to pay for two years. The American Dream is an aspiration, not an entitlement.
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We are thrivers. Thrivers are constantly looking for new opportunities to seize and lead and be No. 1.” That is what America is about.
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launch an E.T., energy technology, revolution with the same urgency as this bailout. Otherwise, all we will have done is bought ourselves a respite, but not a future. The exciting thing about the energy technology revolution is that it spans the whole economy — from green-collar construction jobs to high-tech solar panel designing jobs.
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America’s No. 1 resource is not oil or mortgages. Our No. 1 resource is our people. Let’s put people back to work — retrofitting and repowering America
Douglas Rushkoff » Financial Melt Up
I’d rather spend these precious minutes explaining why the financial meltdown is not a bad thing for a lot of us. In brief: there’s a real economy, and a speculative economy. While they are usually related to each other - even dependent on each other - that relationship changed over the past twenty years.
Tags: bank_failure, economy, finance, wall_street, infrastructure, innovation, community on 2008-09-26 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (2) -About
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The opportunity here, while the big boys are down, is to rebuild the genuine, local commercial infrastructure. To make shoes, clothes, food, education, healthcare and everything else we can in a bottom-up fashion. While speculators enjoy the economy of scale, we inhabit an ecology scaled to the human being that was lost in the corporatist equation.
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Yes, this is a great opportunity for personal and community change. And even Republican voters participate in the ethical global order when they shop and sometimes (even) work Local and/or green.
Whether one believes in or practices top down thinking/acting or bottom up thinking/acting as a country we have to decide who can lead, inspire and get government responsive to the successful examples of both.
Op-Ed Columnist - The King Is Dead - Roger Cohen
Yes, the death of the old is also the birth of the new. In my end is my beginning. It’s time for the best and the brightest to step forth and rediscover the public sphere.
Tags: bank_failure, youth, education, finance, social_change, infrastructure, coldplay, opinion on 2008-09-18 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (1) -About
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beware of the “poverty of ambition” in a culture of “the big house and the nice suits.”
College seniors might start by reading “A New Bank to Save Our Infrastructure” in the current edition of The New York Review of Books, an impassioned plea from Felix Rohatyn (who knows something of financial rescues) and Everett Ehrlich for the creation of a National Infrastructure Bank, or N.I.B.
Its aim, at a time when the Chinese are investing $200 billion in railways and building 97 new airports, would be to use public and private capital to give coherence to a vast program of public works.
Answers About Development on the Hudson, Part 2 - City Room - Metro - New York Times Blog
Tags: hudson_valley, hudson_river, new_york, new_york_city, sustainable, development, public_space, transportation, infrastructure, bicycle, bridge, rail on 2008-07-18 -All Annotations (0) -About
in list: the hudson valley
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an opportunity for the Bloomberg administration, the M.T.A. and the Paterson administration to advance a “transit-oriented development.” This is the kind of development — walkable, easily accessible to the transit system, mixed-use — that makes sense in a world of escalating oil prices and global climate change.
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As the last huge undeveloped waterfront parcel in Manhattan, this property was ripe for thoughtful development. The mix of housing, offices, commercial space, parks and cultural facilities currently proposed are an attractive and exciting mix of uses that will cause less traffic problems than the original concept of a new stadium for the Jets.
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Right now there are at least four great places where you can plunge into the Hudson: Croton Point Park in Croton-on-Hudson (Westchester County), Kingston Point Park in Kingston (Ulster County) and Ulster Landing Park in the Town of Ulster (also Ulster County). While there also are informal swimming spots, these venues not only offer sandy beaches for sunbathing (and castle-making) but qualified lifeguards.
For something a little different, take a dip in the River Pool at Beacon in Dutchess County. A throwback to the floating bathhouses common in American and European riverfront cities in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the pool provides an enclosed space surrounded by netting through which the river flows
Answers About Development on the Hudson
Tags: hudson_valley, hudson_river, new_york, new_york_city, sustainable, development, public_space, transportation, infrastructure, bicycle, bridge, rail, airplane on 2008-07-18 -All Annotations (0) -About
in list: the hudson valley
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the idea that we have to give away our scenic beauty and quality of life for economic prosperity is an outdated notion
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Scenic Hudson supports redevelopment of Yonkers’ waterfront. We have a 20-year history of working with community members to help shape development that makes the waterfront a public resource for all residents, rather than just the private domain of those who can afford to live in expensive condos on the river. The public esplanades by the ferry pier, the sculpture garden the mix of uses and lower building heights in that area all reflect our input through an easement we won through litigation years ago.
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Eventually, Dutchess County plans to link the bridge with a new rail trail running a dozen miles from Poughkeepsie to East Fishkill. Links are in the works that could eventually lead to a continuous trail all the way to New York City. The Hudson Valley Rail Trail in Highland, Ulster County, is envisioned to connect with both the Walkway and the Wallkill Valley Rail Trail in New Paltz. Once this goal is realized, cyclists will be able to enjoy a 30-mile car-free ride through some of the Hudson Valley’s – indeed, the nation’s – most beautiful countryside.
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when roads or bridges are expanded, offering what appears to be greater ease in commuting, they actually generate increased development and, as a result, more traffic, straining new infrastructure much more quickly than expected.
Annals of Transport: There and Back Again
Tags: infrastructure, suburban, urban, transportation, rail, automobile on 2008-07-17 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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time is the vital currency: how much of it you spend—and how you spend it—reveals a great deal about how much you think it is worth.
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The two hours or more of leisure time granted by the introduction, in the early twentieth century, of the eight-hour workday are now passed in solitude.
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the driver’s seat is a lonely place. People tend to behave in their cars as though they are alone in a room. Road rage is one symptom of this; on the street or on the train, people don’t generally walk around calling each other assholes. Howard Stern is another; you can listen to lewd evocations without feeling as though you were pushing the bounds of the social contract.
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Commute time should be offset by higher pay or lower living costs, or a better standard of living. It is this last category that people apparently have trouble measuring. They tend to overvalue the material fruits of their commute—money, house, prestige—and to undervalue what they’re giving up: sleep, exercise, fun.
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Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can spend an hour or two travelling each side. “You live in Pasadena, work in North Hollywood, shop in the Valley,” Putnam said. “Where is your community?” The smaller the triangle, the happier the human, as long as there is social interaction to be had.
Train in Vain - Amtrak from Penn Station to San Francisco
Tags: rail, transportation, infrastructure, new_york_city, energy, san_francisco, chicago on 2008-06-20 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
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In Europe, reliable high-speed routes are now being connected across the continent: the French TGV regularly hits 200 mph; the Eurostar zooms the 300 miles from Paris to London in just 2 hours and 15 minutes; in Japan, the Shinkansen has been zipping along at 130 mph since 1964
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“In the near future,” says George Chilson, president of the National Association of Railroad Passengers, “road and air congestion, worldwide competition for oil, and growing environmental con-cerns will make four-dollar-a-gallon gas seem cheap, today’s traffic jams modest, and affordable flights a distant memory.”
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Per passenger mile, an Amtrak train uses about half the energy of an airplane, and can carry twice the number of people. It’s also the passenger-carrying equivalent of 16 lanes of highway.
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Amtrak faces an interesting challenge—to capture the nostalgic romance of the rails while offering a service fit for the 21st century
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“We figured we’d make the train a part of our vacation,” the mother tells me. Firs give way to spruce and then to ponderosa pine. The journey feels, at this moment, important. But the moment passes. “We’ve got a freight up ahead.” The voice over the loudspeaker is unfazed and unapologetic. “We should be moving again in a half hour or so.
The Island of Doubt : Amtrak: The 2008 election linchpin
Tags: rail, transportation, obama, election, energy, sustainable, climate_crisis, infrastructure on 2008-06-13 -All Annotations (0) -About
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There is simply no excuse for not putting passenger rolling stock on every rail line that hasn't deteriorated beyond the point of minor repair.
I'm not the only fan of rail. James Howard Kunstler, he of The Long Emergency, has long argued that reviving America's passenger rail network would be the single-most valuable thing we could do to get this country off oil. That's a worthy goal, one that would offer enormous benefits for national security, as well as the obvious advantages from a climate change mitigation point of view.
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we have got to revive, repair and restore the American passenger rail system. There's no project that would have a greater impact our our oil use; it would put tens of thousands of people to work at meaningful jobs; the technology already exists and doesn't have to be invented.
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We need to do a project as a nation that would demonstrate to ourselves that we're capable of facing the difficulties that are coming down at us in the future. And this is one that is at least doable because most of the infrastructure is still lying out there rusting in the rain. And if we fail to do this, we're going to find we're in a situation where not only are we faced with an array of much more difficult problems all converging and ramifying each other, but we're not going to have any confidence in facing these things.
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Obama, who wants to increase Amtrak funding, should be the favored candidate of rail advocates, and McCain, who in the past has blocked such attempts, should be shunned.
The Green Issue:Invent
Tags: climate_crisis, carbon, emissions, global_warming, nuclear, infrastructure on 2008-04-20 -All Annotations (0) -About
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for environmentalists, an increasing number of whom support nuclear power.
Pebble-bed reactors don’t solve every problem; they still produce small
amounts of nuclear waste. But they have other benefits. Pebble beds produce
very little of the weapons-grade fissile material that spooks terrorism experts.
Unlike the hulking, 1,000-megawatt nuclear plants of the 1970s and ’80s,
they do not require emergency water-cooling towers; small pebble-bed reactors
could be located in urban downtowns or rural communities -
Our infrastructure now loses about
8 percent of the electricity it transports from power plants to our homes and
businesses. Superconducting cables, by contrast, lose almost nothing (though
they do require some energy to keep them cold). More intriguing, superconducting
cables could eventually bring renewable power from remote places where it is
abundant —the windy plains of the Dakotas or the sun-drenched deserts of
Nevada
— to populous coastal cities. In theory, long distances mean nothing to
superconducting cables, and each superconducting cable can carry about five
times the current of a copper conduit -
Recent tests in Columbus,
Ohio,
and upstate New York have proved that superconducting wire can actually work
in urban power grids. An installation is planned forLongthis year and for Manhattan
Island
in 2010. -
a fleet of unmanned,
wind-powered, satellite-controlled oceangoing vessels that will spray precisely
calibrated droplets of seawater into the sky, so that stratocumulus clouds reflect
more solar radiation from the earth’s surface. He says that the idea of
“tarting up clouds” probably originated decades ago when he and
his 10-year-old son watched a sunset from a mountaintop in Wales
and peered down on quicksilver clouds over the Irish Sea. His son said the clouds
looked like “soggy mirrors.” -
Critics
deride sequestration as pie in the ground: ruinously expensive for the amount
of carbon being kept out of the atmosphere. -
microgenerators
A journey on China's controversial new train to Tibet
- The railway...cruises the highest elevations of any track in the world, offering a chance to meditate on the sweeping, wildlife-dotted grasslands of the massive Tibetan Plateau, with an average elevation of more than 13,000 feet. It ambles through the rugged, 16,640-foot Tanggula Mountain Pass, forcing passengers who aren't taking an altitude-sickness medication to grasp for the breathing tubes and oxygen distributed by train personnel, as bags of chips and toiletry bottles explode...if global warming continues its current trajectory, according to a climatologist quoted in China Daily, the melting permafrost will prevent the railway from operating safely by 2050.post by taryn930 on 2007-08-09