Monday, October 26, 2009
Walmart's Project Impact: A Move to Crush Competition
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Walmart loves to shock and awe. City-size stores, absurdly low prices ($8 jeans!) and everything from milk to Matchbox toys on its shelves. And with the recession forcing legions of stores into bankruptcy, the world's largest retailer now apparently wants to take out the remaining survivors.
Thus, the company is in the beginning stages of a massive store and strategy remodeling effort, which it has dubbed Project Impact. One goal of Project Impact is cleaner, less cluttered stores that will improve the shopping experience. Another is friendlier customer service. A third: home in on categories where the competition can be killed.
"They've got Kmart ready to take a standing eight-count next year," says retail consultant Burt Flickinger III, managing director for Strategic Resources Group and a veteran Walmart watcher. "Same with Rite Aid. They've knocked out four of the top five toy retailers, and are now going after the last one standing, Toys "R" Us. Project Impact will be the catalyst to wipe out a second round of national and regional retailers." (See 10 things to buy during the recession.)
Though that's bad news for many smaller businesses that can't compete, Walmart investors have clamored for this push. Despite the company's consistently strong financial performance, Wall Street hasn't cheered Walmart's growth rates. During the 1990s, the company's stock price jumped 1,173%.
In this decade, it's down around 24% (Walmart's stock closed at $51.74 per share on Sept. 3). "Walmart is under excruciating pressure from employees and frustrated institutional investors to get the stock up," says Flickinger. (Read "Can Toys "R" Us Sell Toilet Paper?")
Many analysts believe that the store-operations background of new CEO Mike Duke will keep investors quite happy. Though the recession finally caught up to Walmart last quarter, when the company reported a 1.2% drop in U.S. same-store sales, Walmart was a consistent winner during the worst days of the financial crisis, as frugal consumers traded down.
While most retailers are shutting down stores, Walmart has opened 52 Supercenters since Feb. 1. Joseph Feldman, retail analyst at Telsey Advisory Group, estimates that each store costs Walmart between $25 and $30 million. In order to continue the momentum that it has picked up during the retail recession, over the next five years the company plans to remodel 70% of its approximately 3,600 U.S. stores.
So what does a Project Impact store look like? One recent weekday afternoon I toured a brand new, 210,000-sq.-ft. Walmart in West Deptford, N.J., with Lance De La Rosa, the company's Northeast general manager. "We've listened to our customers, and they want an easier shopping experience," says De La Rosa. "We've brightened up the stores and opened things up to make it more navigable."
One of the most noticeable changes is that Project Impact stores reshape Action Alley, the aisles where promotional items were pulled off the shelves and prominently displayed for shoppers. Those stacks both crowded the aisles and cut off sight lines. Now, the aisles are all clear, and you can see most sections of the store from any vantage point.
For example, standing on the corner intersection of the auto-care and crafts areas, you can look straight ahead and see where shoes, pet care, groceries, the pharmacy and other areas are located. And the discount price tags are still at eye level, so the value message doesn't get lost. (See how Americans are spending now.)
"They are like roads," De La Rosa says proudly. "And look around, the customers are using them. We've already gotten feedback about the wider, more breathable aisles. Our shoppers love them."
The layout is also smarter. "You can kind of guess where everything is going to be," says Sharon Tilotta, 73, a shopper in the West Deptford store. The pharmacy, pet foods, cosmetics and health and beauty sections are now adjacent to the groceries. In the past, groceries and these other sections were often at opposite ends of the store, which made it more difficult for someone looking to pick up some quick consumables to get in and out of Walmart.
"Under Project Impact, Walmart is providing more of a full supermarket experience within its walls," says Feldman. "The biggest complaint against them has always been that it takes a long time to get through everything. This definitely improves efficiency."
De La Rosa also points out the party-supply section. Favors, wedding decorations, cards and scrapbooks are all in one area. "In the past, these products would be in three different places," he says.
And although Walmart won't admit to targeting specific competitors - "We're just listening to what our customers want," De La Rosa says - it's clear that, under Project Impact, Walmart will make major plays in winnable categories.
The pharmacy, for example, has been pulled into the middle of the store, and its $4-prescriptions program has generated healthy buzz. With Circuit City out of business, the electronics section has been beefed up. Walmart is also expanding its presence in crafts. Sales at Michael's Stores, the country's largest specialty arts-and-crafts retailers, have sagged, and Walmart sees an opportunity.
Stores are chock-full of scrapbooking material, baskets and yarns. "Look, they're selling the stuff that accounts for 80% of Michael's business, at 20% of the space," says Flickinger. "It's very hard for any company to compete with that." (Read "That Viral Thing: People of Walmart.")
Apparel, one of Target's traditional strengths, gets a prominent position at the center. The color palettes of the shirts and dresses are brighter and more appealing than they've been in the past. "Walmart has figured out fashion for the first time in 47 years," Flickinger says. "They've gone from a D to an A-minus." Briefs and underwear have been shuttled to the back. "That's a smart move," Flickinger says. "People know to come to Walmart for the commodity clothing.
Now, they have to walk past the higher margin, more fashionable merchandise to get what they need."
Of course, Project Impact isn't perfect. You'd think that if Walmart was going to open a massive new store with a cutting-edge layout, the company would at least put a sign up. In West Deptford, it's easy to miss the entrance to the Walmart - which is buried in the back of a parking lot - while driving along a main thoroughfare.
And of course, customers will always nitpick. One elderly shopper complained about a shortage of benches in the store (she needed a rest). Another had a more esoteric, yet legitimate, gripe. "Their meat is leaky," says Jeff Winter, 30, a West Deptford shopper. "And instead of giving you a wet wipe to clean it off, they give you a dry towel. How's that going to prevent E. coli or whatever?" (See which businesses are bucking the recession.)
What analysts really want to see from Project Impact, however, is a faster pace of implementation. "The biggest hurdle facing Walmart is the speed with which they can roll this out," says Feldman. As more Project Impact stores pop up, the existing stores appear worse by comparison.
For example, while the merchandise at the Project Impact store outside of Philadelphia really speaks to that particular market - there's tons of Eagles and Phillies gear - at one regular discount store outside New York City, Minnesota Twins and Seattle Mariners pajama pants wasted away on the racks.
There were plenty of associates staffing the electronics section at the Project Impact store; at the discount store, five frustrated shoppers waited in line for help from a customer-service rep. Soon, it was closer to 10.
What about the friendly service? In West Deptford, the associates were sunny and bright. At the New York–area discount store, not so much. "You'll notice we've been in the store for two hours, and no one has even said hello to us," Flickinger says after he and I toured that store.
He's right, we weren't feeling any love. But if Project Impact keeps picking up momentum, many more Walmart salespeople, and shareholders, should be smiling.
By SEAN GREGORY / WEST DEPTFORD, N.J.
Labels: Project Impact, trends newsletter, Walmart
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Friday, October 23, 2009
New wonder material, one-atom thick, has scientists abuzz
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WASHINGTON - Imagine a carbon sheet that's only one atom thick but is stronger than diamond and conducts electricity 100 times faster than the silicon in computer chips.
That's graphene, the latest wonder material coming out of science laboratories around the world. It's creating tremendous buzz among physicists, chemists and electronic engineers.
"It is the thinnest known material in the universe, and the strongest ever measured," Andre Geim , a physicist at the University of Manchester, England , wrote in the June 19 issue of the journal Science.
"A few grams could cover a football field," said Rod Ruoff , a graphene researcher at the University of Texas, Austin , in an e-mail. A gram is about 1/30th of an ounce.
Like diamond, graphene is pure carbon. It forms a six-sided mesh of atoms that, through an electron microscope, looks like a honeycomb or piece of chicken wire. Despite its strength, it's as flexible as plastic wrap and can be bent, folded or rolled up like a scroll.
Graphite, the lead in a pencil, is made of stacks of graphene layers. Although each individual layer is tough, the bonds between them are weak, so they slip off easily and leave a dark mark when you write.
Potential graphene applications include touch screens, solar cells, energy storage devices, cell phones and, eventually, high-speed computer chips.
Replacing silicon, the basic electronic material in computer chips, however, "is a long way off . . . far beyond the horizon," said Geim, who first discovered how to produce graphene five years ago.
"In the near and medium term, it's going to be extremely difficult for graphene to displace silicon as the main material in computer electronics," said Tomas Palacios , a graphene researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology . "Silicon is a multi-billion dollar industry that has been perfecting silicon processing for 40 years."
Government and university laboratories, long-established companies such as IBM , and small start-ups are working to solve difficult problems in making graphene and turning it into useful products.
Ruoff founded a company in Austin called Graphene Energy, which is seeking ways to store renewable energy from solar cells or the energy captured from braking in autos.
The Pentagon is also interested in this new high-tech material. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is spending $22 million on research to make computer chips and transistors out of graphene.
Graphene was the leading topic at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society - a leading organization of physicists - in Pittsburgh in April. Researchers packed 23 panel sessions on the topic. About 1,500 scientific papers on graphene were published in 2008 alone.
Until last year, the only way to make graphene was to mount flakes of graphite on sticky tape and separate a single layer by carefully peeling away the tape. They called it the "Scotch Tape technique."
Recently, however, scientists have discovered a more efficient way to produce graphene on an underlying base of copper, nickel or silicon, which subsequently is etched away.
"There has been spectacular progress in the last two or three months," Geim reported in the journal Science. "Challenges that looked so daunting just two years ago have suddenly shrunk, if not evaporated."
"I'm confident there will be many commercial applications," Ruoff said. "We will begin to see hybrid devices - mostly made from silicon, but with a critical part of the device being graphene - in niche applications."
By Robert S. Boyd, McClatchy Newspapers
Labels: graphene, Graphene Energy, trends newsletter
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Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Mich. cruisers worry days of classic cars are over
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ROYAL OAK, Mich. - Jack Beller's blue 1966 Corvette has the classic big-block engine and the enormous carburetor that make putting the keys in the ignition a roaring ode to muscle car history.
He and his classic ride have been coming to Saturday's Woodward Dream Cruise, billed by its sponsors as "the world's largest one-day celebration of car culture," since it began 15 years ago.
But this year, as he sat against his wife Marilyn's arrest-me-red '62 Corvette, there was a depressing realization setting in: There may not be a successor to his beloved fleet of classic cars.
"This is gone," said Beller, 68, sweeping his hand across a parking lot along the cruise's Woodward Avenue route, where 100 other classic cars were lined up. "This is gone forever."
In a year when General Motors and Chrysler have taken a quick trip through bankruptcy court and are being supported with taxpayer dollars, this cruise had participants feeling more nostalgic than ever about their vehicles. With GM now pushing cars like the whispery-quiet electric Volt, destined to get 230 mpg, the thundering, fuel-guzzling beasts that marked America's love affair with the car are a dwindling breed, and a rare sight on the road.
As the industry turns toward more fuel-efficient and even electric vehicles, classic car owners worry the soul of the cars that symbolized personal freedom, speed, status and sex appeal have been lost. In their place, the highways are filled with identical sedans that hum along, one just like the other, none more spectacular than the next.
For a day, though, Woodward Avenue was given over to the strutting cars of yesteryear. An estimated 40,000 Dream Cruisers slowly drove up and down the event's 16-mile stretch in Detroit's suburbs, classic big-body Cadillacs swimming by with a murmur. A fleet of hot rods, engines announcing their presence long before they came into view, roared out of red lights as patrons at local bars cheered, sipping beers mid-morning. And amid it all, a few strange gems like the original MonkeeMobile, from a goofy 1960s sitcom featuring the pop-rock quartet the Monkees, drew smiles from the hundreds of visitors sitting in folding chairs along the route.
As they cruised, the classic car enthusiasts discussed whether any contemporary vehicles will reach the iconic status of their trusty rides. Sadly, the drivers say, today's cars just don't measure up to the wonders of old — making the cruise a bittersweet journey back to the Motor City's golden years.
"They're bellybutton cars — everybody's got one," said Bob Patrick, 74, of Warren while sitting next to his glossy red 1947 Plymouth Special Deluxe.
There are a lot of reasons the classic car culture may fade. While modern versions of muscle cars such as the Camaro and Corvette retain a good deal of their aesthetic appeal, the design concerns of the contemporary carmaker — including government safety regulations regarding crash readiness and a car's aerodynamic profile — can lead to visual similarity across models.
That makes "everything looks like a jellybean. Period," Beller said.
It also makes identifying a future generation of classic cars difficult. While cars known as "tuners" — typically foreign model cars like whose mystique stems from souped-up engines and agile handling — are often put forward as heirs to the classics throne, their skeptics abound.
"They'll throw 'em away and play with something else. There's nothing out there today that anybody wants to save," said Dave Sandow, 62, who was showing off his red 1970 Chevy El Camino.
Some who adore their conventionally classic car believe the definition of a classic is captured in childhood — and thus will continue to evolve generation to generation. So if a child looks out the window and sees a parade of fuel-efficient Toyota Prius models driving down the street, he may begin to consider that a "classic" when he gets older.
"The cool guys always had the cool cars and that's what you try to emulate," said Joe Ramsey, 58, of Sterling Heights, a former GM designer who owns a 1932 Ford. "It's what you grew up with."
There are some signs automakers aren't giving up on the influence of classic cars completely. There has been some convergence between the classic car culture and a more modern, technological, tuner-influenced brand, said Richard Shi, an American cultural historian who has studied car culture. This union is on display with the Chevrolet Volt, GM's electric vehicle slated to be released in 2010, which has a profile much closer to the Camaro than the comparatively mousey hybrid Toyota Prius.
"In some respects, the Volt is trying to be the best of both — the physical appearance of an American car but with the drive train of an increasingly eco-conscious public," said Shi, the president of Furman University in Greenville, S.C.
Even if the glory days of muscle cars is waning, some, like 16-year-old Kevin Duby, are still buying into muscle car culture. Duby, of Livonia, spent four years of savings on his 1979 Camaro. And despite what his friends might value in a new car, the allure of a flashy ride is worth a heavy price.
"I would rather work two jobs to drive that than a Prius," he said.
By DAVID GRANT, Associated Press Writer
Labels: classic cars, Corvette, trends newsletter
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Monday, October 19, 2009
Is this cyber war? Possible U.S responses limited
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WASHINGTON - A lot of people are saying this is cyber war. But if the Internet attack on U.S. Web sites was an assault by North Korea or some other foreign government, what good responses are in America's arsenal?
"The short answer is probably 'Not a heck of a lot,'" says James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Defense and cyber analysts said Thursday that chances are high that very little eventually will be done to whoever orchestrated several days of attacks against Web sites including the White House and Pentagon as well as sites in South Korea. That's largely because the investigation is unlikely to figure out who did it.
But even if it's determined that another nation was behind the attacks, the possible responses are hardly warlike: trade sanctions, diplomatic protests or a complaint before the United Nations.
"You could eject an attache, recall your ambassador and throw out their ambassador," Lewis said. That's not possible with North Korea, he noted of a main suspect in the attacks, since Pyongyang doesn't have an embassy in the U.S.
But war? Military action? No one is talking about that. Any punishment needs to fit the crime, analysts said, and this doesn't meet the threshold of an act of war.
"I don't think this kind of attack merits the use of force," said Kristin Lord, national security expert at the Center for a New American Security.
"It's annoying, a little embarrassing, but it's not a big deal," Lewis said, meaning that no major damage was done.
But others think retaliation might be called for, strong enough to send a stiff message, perhaps even a similar dose of the U.S. military's secret offensive cyber capability.
U.S. officials routinely refuse to talk about either computer defenses or computer attacks America might have launched. But U.S. offensive cyber retaliation could range from a passive intrusion such as listening in on a foe's communications to an attack that cripples an enemy's air defense systems to clear the way for a bomber attack.
A counterstrike on an attacker's computer network could be launched, Lewis said, but it would be extremely difficult.
"This is a gray area," said Stewart Baker, who worked on cyber security at the Department of Homeland Security. "But if you know that the North Koreans were doing this, then at a minimum I would have thought you'd be entitled to do the same thing to them to show that you didn't like it."
If the attacks caused harm to anyone "you get more serious, and start thinking and talking about it as an act of war or at least state-sponsored violence," said Michael O'Hanlon, a defense analysts at the Brookings Institution.
Though the recent computer attacks are considered by many cyber experts to be little more than a nuisance to public Web sites, the incident raised anew old criticism that the U.S. government's policies on cyber warfare are shrouded in secrecy, ill-formed and require broad public debate.
"There's a lot of thinking that needs to be done about how to respond to attacks like this and what the threshold is for responding to cyber attacks, with other means, whether they be economic sanctions or even military force," Lord said.
The assault involved more than 100,000 "zombie" computers, used by someone without their owners' knowledge and linked together in a network known as a "botnet." Most of those computers were in South Korea, but others were in Japan, China, the U.S. and possibly other countries.
"If you shoot back at the computers that actually launched the attack, then you're hitting third parties who probably don't even know they were involved," Lewis said.
"And if you go out over the networks to strike back at Pyongyang, how can you be sure you're not accidentally going to also take down Japan at the same time?"
Said Lewis: "You could end up shooting the wrong guy."
By PAULINE JELINEK, Associated Press Writer
Labels: Center for Strategic and International Studies, cyber war, trends newsletter
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Friday, October 16, 2009
Hungary remembers picnic that cracked Iron Curtain
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SOPRONPUSZTA, Hungary - It was a picnic that changed the course of history.
Twenty years ago Wednesday, members of Hungary's budding opposition organized a picnic at the border with Austria to press for greater political freedom and promote friendship with their Western neighbors.
Some 600 East Germans got word of the event and turned up among the estimated 10,000 participants. They had a plan: to take advantage of an excursion across the border to escape to Austria.
Hungarian President Laszelo Solyom and German Chancellor Angela Merkel were taking part Wednesday in festivities Wednesday marking the 20th anniversary of the "Pan-European Picnic," which helped precipitate the fall nearly three months later of the Berlin Wall.
One of the key factors allowing the Germans to escape: the decision by a Hungarian border guard commander not to stop them as they pushed through to freedom.
Lt. Col. Arpad Bella and five of his men had been expecting a Hungarian delegation to cross the border at Sopronpuszta by bus, visit a nearby Austrian town as a symbol of the new era of glasnost - or openness - under reformist Soviet leader Mikail Gorbachev, and return to Hungary.
Instead, at the planned time of 3 p.m., Bella suddenly found himself face to face with 150 East Germans marching up the road to the border gate, which had been closed since 1948.
"I had about 20 seconds to think about it until they got here," said Bella, 63, during an interview where the gate once stood.
"Had the five of us confronted the Germans, they would have (overwhelmed us)."
Once the initial group got through hundreds more East Germans joined them. Still vivid in Bella's mind was the reactions of the Germans, including many young people and families with small children, once they were on the other side.
"They embraced, they kissed, they cried and laughed in their joy. Some sat down right across the border, others had to be stopped by the Austrian guards because they kept running and didn't believe they were in Austria," Bella said. "It was in incredible experience for them."
Laszlo Nagy, one of the organizers of the picnic, was startled by the East Germans' actions, who left behind hundreds of cars and other possessions near the border for the chance to make the short walk to a new life in the West.
"Some of them were waiting for this moment for 20 or 30 years," Nagy said. "They left behind everything ... because freedom has the greatest value."
Dirk Mennenga was one the "Ossies," a nickname for East Germans, who made it to Austria on that day. He had come to Hungary from Dresden.
"We had planned beforehand that we would try to cross the border through Hungary," Mennenga said. "We didn't know how easy or difficult it would be."
After seeing flyers promoting the picnic, Mennenga thought the event could provide an opportunity to escape West.
"It was a very emotional situation," Mennenga said. "There was a sole border guard. A young Hungarian man kept pointing the way and before we knew it we were in Austria."
While Bella was unaware of the East Germans' intentions, behind the scenes the Hungarian government had already decided that it would somehow let them go West.
Miklos Nemeth, Hungary's last prime minister of the communist era, said the picnic and the East Germans' breakthrough on that day was one in a series of steps that brought democracy to most of the Soviet bloc within a year.
"It was a planned process on behalf of the government, but it was a transition where everyone was also seeking to secure their own future," Nemeth said.
With 80,000 Soviet troops stationed in Hungary, Nemeth said it was difficult to know how Moscow would react to the unprecedented events.
"In my mind this was an important event, a test," Nemeth said. "And fortunately, Arpad Bella ... although he did not get any information, he decided in the right way."
Tens of thousands of East Germans had traveled to Hungary as expectations mounted that the more moderate Communist country might open its borders to the West.
They lived in makeshift shelters in Budapest on the grounds of the West German Embassy and at a tent city set up by a Catholic parish.
In the weeks after the picnic, East Germans continued to make attempts to cross the border, although many were still turned back. Then, on Sept. 11, Hungary began allowing all East Germans to travel West.
Bella continued his career as a border guard for several more years before retiring in 1996, later even working as a consultant on developing aspects of the Schengen agreement, which now allows for borderless travel within 25 European countries.
"I didn't think of myself as a hero. How could I? I wasn't even sure I'd be around for another week," Bella said. "If the Russians had wanted to come, they would have swept us aside like nothing."
For Nagy, the significance of the events of Aug. 19 has grown over the past 20 years.
"At the time, we didn't feel like we were making history," Nagy said. "It was the world's greatest garden party."
By PABLO GORONDI, Associated Press Writer
Labels: Arpad Bella, Laszlo Nagy, trends newsletter
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Wednesday, October 14, 2009
Hacked password list offers security insights
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Recently a niche programming-oriented website called phpbb.com had its user database hacked into and the passwords for 20,000 members stolen. The hacker who broke in then posted the account info and passwords online for the world to see. And while this is really bad news for those 20,000 unlucky souls, it offers an instructive lesson on password security for the rest of us.
InformationWeek analyzed the hacked password list and found a number of interesting trends in the data, primarily revolving around the fact that most people do exactly what they've been told not to do since passwords were first invented.
Author/analyst Robert Graham has tons of analysis on offer. I'm ordering my favorite/most enlightening data points from the piece here, starting with the most interesting. On thing to remember: These passwords are from a group of people interested in computer programming, so if anyone should know better, it's these guys.
- The most popular password (3.03% of the 20,000) was "123456." It's also generally considered the most common password used today.
- 4 percent used some variant of the word "password." Seriously, people, there's no excuse for this one. "password" was the 2nd most popular password used, also in keeping with historical trends.
- 16 percent of passwords were a person's first name. No word on if it was their first name, but someone's. Joshua is the most commonly used first-name password, a likely reference to the movie WarGames.
- Patterns abound. In addition to "123456," other pattens like "12345, "qwerty," and "abc123" were common, comprising 14 percent of the passwords used.
- 35 percent of passwords were six characters long. 0.34 percent were only one character long.
- For reasons no one can explain, "dragon," "master," and "killer" all crack the top 20 passwords. (On the top 500 password list linked above, "dragon" is #7.)
- One thing Graham doesn't discuss is that phpbb.com is really just a message board, and many users may simply have not cared about the security of their passwords here (unlike, say, with a bank account). In other words, they may very well have intentionally chosen something simplistic here to avoid re-using a password they save for an important login, just in case this site got hacked. Which, it turns out, it did.
I could go on, but Graham's post has way more detail than I can digest here and it's easy-reading too. Worth a close look for any citizen of the web.
Christopher Null: The Working Guy
Labels: hacked password, InformationWeek, trends newsletter
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Sunday, October 11, 2009
Green Day lashes out at Wal-Mart policy
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Green Day has the most popular CD in the country, but you won't be able to find it at your local Wal-Mart.
The band says the giant superstore chain refused to stock its latest CD, "21st Century Breakdown," because Wal-Mart wanted the album edited for language and content, and they refused.
"Wal-Mart's become the biggest retail outlet in the country, but they won't carry our record because they wanted us to censor it," frontman Billie Joe Armstrong said in a recent interview.
While Wal-Mart sells CDs from acts known for raunchy content, including Eminem's latest, they offer customers the "clean" version of those CDs, which are edited for content that may be objectionable. But in Armstrong's view, "There's nothing dirty about our record."
"They want artists to censor their records in order to be carried in there," he said. "We just said no. We've never done it before. You feel like you're in 1953 or something."
"21st Century Breakdown" contains curses and some references considered adult.
Wal-Mart said that it's the company's long-standing policy not to stock any CD with a parental advisory sticker.
"As with all music, it is up to the artist or label to decide if they want to market different variations of an album to sell, including a version that would remove a PA rating," Wal-Mart spokeswoman Melissa O'Brien said. "The label and artist in this case have decided not to do so, so we unfortunately can not offer the CD."
But bassist Mike Dirnt said: "As the biggest record store in the America, they should probably have an obligation to sell people the correct art."
Not being sold at Wal-Mart didn't stop the band — which kicks off a U.S. tour summer tour in Seattle on July 3 — from landing at the top of the album charts this week. "21st Century Breakdown" sold about 215,000 copies since it's debut on Friday.
The album is the follow-up to their multiplatinum, Grammy-winning CD "American Idiot," and like that album, deals with weighty topics. While "American Idiot" spoke to the frustration over the presidency of George W. Bush and the Iraq War, this CD speaks to the loss of innocence and confusion in today's society.
While Armstrong, Dirnt and drummer Tre Cool are still top-sellers without Wal-Mart, Armstrong said the store's policy is disappointing, considering it has become the dominant seller of CDs with the decline of traditional music stores.
"If you think about bands that are struggling or smaller than Green Day ... to think that to get your record out in places like that, but they won't carry it because of the content and you have to censor yourself," he said. "I mean, what does that say to a young kid who's trying to speak his mind making a record for the first time? It's like a game that you have to play. You have to refuse to play it."
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Friday, October 9, 2009
Global milk glut squeezes dairy farmers, consumers
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BARNHART, Mo. - A collapse in milk prices has wiped away the profits of dairy farmers, driving many out of business while forcing others to slaughter their herds or dump milk on the ground in protest. But nine months after prices began tumbling on the farm, consumers aren't seeing the full benefits of the crash at the checkout counter.
The average price for a gallon of milk at grocery stores last month is down just 19 percent from its peak of $3.83 in July. Farmers, on the other hand, got $1.04 a gallon in April - 35 percent less than they were paid last fall. This winter, wholesale prices were down as much as 45 percent.
Price disparities are a fact of life both for farmers and anyone who shops at a supermarket, but the nature of milk - how it's stored, priced and sold around the world - makes the gap all the more dramatic. In fact, the price that farmers get has been wildly volatile for years, creating a succession of booms and busts felt from pastures to the grocery store.
With each turn, proposals are floated to end the pricing seesaw, which at one extreme squeezes the profits of farmers and the other squeezes dairy processors. Any fix that boosts the price of milk runs the risk of bumping up how much consumers pay, too.
Today, frustrations are spilling over as the price crash creates widely divergent fortunes within the milk industry, boosting profits for the middlemen like dairy processors while pushing farmers to the edge of bankruptcy.
Darrell Kraus, a dairyman in Barnhart, spends almost as much today on hay and other supplies for his herd of 160 cows as he did a year ago, but he's getting paid less for a gallon of milk than his father in the 1970s. He blames middlemen who buy the milk from the dairies, process it and sell it to grocery stores at higher prices.
"Somebody's getting a cut of this, but it's not the dairy farmer," he said. "It's sad, but they're going to see a lot of dairy farms go out of business."
At a grocery store in Fayetteville, Ark., Katherine Thacker noticed how milk prices were slowly falling - but not as drastically as last year's price hikes. She was surprised to learn that the lower wholesale milk prices were being absorbed by dairy processors.
"That's kind of criminal, isn't it?" she said.
Milk processors and supermarkets see it differently.
Last fall and summer, they swallowed losses because of high wholesale milk prices and government-mandated ceilings on what they can charge. They're now recouping some of what they lost and anticipating a rise in prices this winter, said Mike Nosewicz, vice president of dairy operations at Cincinnati-based Kroger Co., which operates its own dairy processing division and sells milk through 2,400 supermarkets.
At the heart of the problem is the nature of milk. Unlike grain farmers who can hold out for better prices by storing crops in a silo, dairymen must sell raw milk to processors or else it spoils. And cows keep producing whether the economy's expanding or in recession.
The price paid by processors to farmers is set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture based on commodity markets, which rise and fall with global demand. Some of the raw milk is processed into milk for stores as well as butter, yogurt and other products for U.S. consumption. The rest becomes powdered milk, cheese and whey for international and domestic markets.
U.S. milk exports soared last year and demand grew in countries like China while supplies dropped from Europe and Australia. U.S dairy exports jumped to $3.82 billion, or 11 percent all milk production in 2008 according to the U.S. Dairy Export Council. Wholesale prices jumped.
Dairies responded to the demand by increasing production.
But once the global recession accelerated last fall, demand, particularly exports, fell off a cliff.
U.S. farmers were suddenly faced with too much milk and too many cows. Wholesale prices crashed. Farmers found themselves spending more to maintain their herds than they were being paid for raw milk.
"It's an inequity that cries out for attention, consideration and action," said Sen. Robert Casey, a Democrat from the dairy stronghold of Pennsylvania. Casey projects that 25 percent of his state's 7,400 dairy farms could disappear because of the crisis.
Casey said most lawmakers are focused on short-term solutions - loans or subsidies - to help farmers bridge the period of depressed prices. But he said Congress should also explore why processors and retailers are keeping their prices high while wholesale prices collapse.
Farmers also are lobbying for a bill that would change the USDA pricing system for milk so that wholesale prices reflect what they pay for feed, fuel and other supplies.
If that happens, milk would be the only commodity of its kind to have a government-set price determined in part by the cost of production, said Scott Brown, dairy analyst at The University of Missouri's Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute.
"Anytime you put in place a policy that raises farm-level prices, those are going to get passed along to the consumer," he said.
U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack also said he is not eager to remake the USDA milk pricing program. Instead, he wants to see if a range of recent actions might buoy wholesale prices. USDA recently donated 500,000 pounds of excess powdered milk to needy countries to reduce U.S. supplies, and a new program will pay farmers to slaughter more than 100,000 dairy cows.
Some farmers say faster action is needed. They're dumping their milk on the ground to draw attention to the crisis.
Jan Morrow, a farmer in Cornell, Wis., dumped milk on May 4 to protest the lowest whosesale prices she's seen in 25 years of farming. If prices don't rise, she says she may have to sell her cows.
Eddy Lekkerkerk, a 42-year-old dairy farmer outside Filer, Idaho, planned to participate in another milk dump on May 31. But he fears he may not be in business that long. For five months, he hasn't made payments on the roughly $800,000 he borrows annually to buy feed for his herd of 1,000 cattle. He said his bank is forcing him to sell his herd to pay his debt.
He predicted many of his neighbors will have no choice but to follow him off the farm.
"It's going to be ugly. This is historic stuff going on," he said. "The dairymen are nervous, and they are scared."
By CHRISTOPHER LEONARD, AP Business Writer
Labels: milk prices, trends newsletter
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Wednesday, October 7, 2009
German Geothermal Project Leads to Second Thoughts After the Earth Rumbles
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LANDAU IN DER PFALZ, Germany - Government officials here are reviewing the safety of a geothermal energy project that scientists say set off an earthquake in mid-August, shaking buildings and frightening many residents of this small city.
A quake shook Landau in der Pfalz and set off an inquiry.
The geothermal plant, built by Geox, a German energy company, extracts heat by drilling deep into the earth. Advocates of the method say that it could greatly reduce the world’s dependence on fossil fuels by providing a vast supply of renewable energy.
But in recent months, two similar projects have stirred concerns about their safety and their propensity to cause earthquakes. In the United States, the Energy Department is scrutinizing a project in Northern California run by AltaRock Energy to determine if it is safe.
(The project was shut down by the company last month because of crippling technical problems.) Another project, in Basel, Switzerland, was shut down after it generated earthquakes in 2006 and 2007 and is awaiting the decision of a panel of experts about whether it can resume.
The Landau project will be allowed to continue operating while the review panel, which held its first meeting last Friday, deliberates. Geox officials initially denied any responsibility for the temblor and continue to dispute the government’s data linking the project to the quake. The panel will, among other things, have to sort through the conflicting data presented by the company and government scientists.
But some experts in the field say they worry that projects like the one in Germany, if the managers deny responsibility for inducing earthquakes or play down the effects on people's lives, could damage the reputation of geothermal energy, even in highly environmentally conscious areas of the world like California or Western Europe.
"My concern is that the project leaders for different geothermal projects are about to waste public confidence as long as they don't talk openly about the seismic risks involved in their projects," said Rudolf Braun, who is the leader of the Basel study and is following events in Landau.
Like other earthquakes that have been attributed to geothermal plants, the Landau temblor was sudden and brief and was accompanied by a sound that in some cases has been likened to a sonic boom. There were no injuries and there was no known structural damage to buildings in the city. But the 2.7 magnitude quake has stoked fears and set off debate in the state Parliament, which subsidized the construction of the plant, about the method’s safety.
The police logged as many as 200 calls after the quake, which struck shortly after 2 p.m. on Aug. 15. Stefanie Schuster was at the local supermarket when she heard a loud bang. She said she wavered unsteadily on her feet “like when you feel dizzy.”
"My first thought was the geothermal plant," said Mrs. Schuster, 48, a clerk in the city government. "I thought, There's definitely a problem over there."
Citing an academic paper, officials of AltaRock, the company running the California project, claimed that the Landau plant caused no earthquakes — a claim that Geox says it never made. In fact, in May, the state geological survey for Rhineland-Palatinate, the state where Landau is located, concluded that four minor earthquakes, too small to be felt by residents, had been generated by the project.
Seismologists at the geological survey said that the larger Aug. 15 quake was also caused by the project. The epicenter was roughly 500 yards from a drill site at the plant and at about the same depth — 1.5 miles — as a steam bed that the plant was extracting heat from. “We are sure it’s from the geothermal plant,” said Harald Ehses, chairman of the geological survey.
In interviews last week, Geox officials conceded that the plant had set off tiny earthquakes and said that they were not certain what set off the Aug. 15 temblor. But consultants for the company dispute the data cited by government scientists to back up their conclusion that the project caused the earthquake: their own data, they said, proves that the quake originated more than two miles from the site of the plant and six miles below the earth's surface. Those figures would essentially rule out a connection with the plant.
"At this point we can neither deny nor confirm" that the power plant had anything to do with the earthquake, said Peter Hauffe, managing director of Geox.
The Landau plant, which cost $30 million, went into operation in 2007 and produces electricity for 6,000 homes by drawing heat from beneath the bedrock, nearly two miles beneath the earth’s surface. Geox said a coal-burning plant producing the same electricity would emit 30,000 tons of carbon dioxide annually.
Not everyone in town was troubled by the quake. "It's really not such a big deal," said Volker Weisenburger, 43. "Gas has its own set of risks."
But other residents said they were skeptical about the new technology. "The engineers always say that they have everything under control, until something happens that they never expected," said Sabine Hofmann, 47, who lives near the plant.
By NICHOLAS KULISH and JAMES GLANZ
Nicholas Kulish reported from Landau in der Pfalz, Germany, and James Glanz from New York.
Labels: geothermal energy, Geox, trends newsletter
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Sunday, October 4, 2009
Ancient Lefties: The History of Obama's Handedness
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Something sinister is going on, and newly-inaugurated President Obama is behind it.
From the Latin for left, "sinistra," southpaw Obama is another notch for the column of left-handed presidents, now totaling eight - a proportion (out of all 43 men who have been POTUS) that is well above their representation in the total population, which hovers around 10 percent.
(Let's count James A. Garfield as a lefty, although some say he was ambidextrous and others say he was a lefty; many ambis are lefties who learn to do some tasks with their right hands.)
In fact, every president since 1974 with the exception of Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush has been left-handed, as is Obama's former Republican opponent Sen. John McCain. Al Gore is too.
Is it just a coincidence, or is there something about being left-handed that can make for a more presidential demeanor?
Some evolutionary advantage, whether overall greater intelligence or language skills, has kept a stable group of lefties for at least the past 200,000 years, said Chris McManus, professor of psychology and medical education at University College London.
Left-handed tools chipped 500,000 years ago
There have been lefties for as long as there have humans, historians agree.
Some of the oldest evidence of left-handedness comes from Kenya, where of a 500,000 year-old cache of 54 stone tools made by one of our pre-human ancestors, six (or about 11 percent) were chipped using the left hand. Similarly, Neanderthals working with meat and stone tools more than 150,000 years ago left marks on their teeth at left and right angles - indicating opposite hand use - in almost perfect proportion with today's 9:1 ratio.
Paleolithic cave paintings from France and Spain also hint that lefties walked among our ancestors about 30,000 years ago. Studying a collection of so-called negative hand drawings on the cave walls - similar to tracing one hand with the other - scientists found that individuals drew their left hand much more frequently than the right.
The laundry list of lefties goes on through history, with records telling us that a number of famous ancient figures probably favored their southpaw as well, from Alexander the Great to Charlemagne, Holy Roman emperor.
Though ancient sample sizes are small and poor estimates of the exact proportion of lefties, the existence of left-handedness is clear even hundreds of thousands of years ago, McManus said.
Left tied to language
Despite its long history, left-handedness is a uniquely human trait. Chimpanzees and gorillas, with whom we share an ancestor and a number of common physical attributes, don't seem to favor one hand over the other.
Instead, left-handedness may have developed along with another characteristic known just to humans - language.
Most people process language in the left side of their brain, the hemisphere that also controls the right side of the body, and have done so presumably since humans started chatting a few hundred thousand years ago. Whichever gene made the left side of our brains responsible for language also played a role in making our right side dominant, experts such as McManus believe.
Though a specific left-handed gene has yet to be found, the trait to choose one hand over the other is likely inherited, agree scientists. Left-handed parents are far more likely to produce left-handed children, and those children appear to begin favoring that hand in the womb, according to a 2004 study on 10-week-old fetuses.
More recent research suggests that, while developing, the two sides of the brain actually "fight" for specialized control of certain functions, such as handedness, with the left side (which controls the right - are you following?) more often coming out on top.
Interestingly, even when the right side wins, the left brain often shares some of the duties, studies have shown. So while right-handed people usually process language exclusively in the left side of their brain, lefties process language mostly in the right but partly on the left as well.
That preferential wiring may make lefties more adept at certain skills required for leadership according to McManus, who wrote about his theories in his book "Right Hand, Left Hand" (Harvard University Press; 2002).
Heather Whipps, LiveScience's History columnist
Labels: left-handed, southpaw, trends newsletter
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Friday, October 2, 2009
Age Is Just A Number
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There's a 51-year age difference between the artists at #1 and #2 on The Billboard 200. Bob Dylan, 67, debuts at #1 with his latest album, Together Through Life. Miley Cyrus, 16, holds at #2 with her soundtrack to Hannah Montana: The Movie.
With this debut, Dylan regains the title of the oldest living artist ever to land a #1 album.
The rock icon, who turns 68 on May 24, takes the crown back from Neil Diamond, who was 67 when he debuted at #1 a year ago with Home Before Dark. Dylan was just 22 when he first hit the chart in September 1963 with The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. He was 24 years younger than the president at the time, John F. Kennedy.
Now, Dylan is 20 years older than President Barack Obama. One of Dylan's most prized songs is "Forever Young," but I guess this shows that nobody stays young forever.
Dylan first established the record of the oldest living artist to land a #1 album in September 2006, when, at 65, he opened at #1 with Modern Times. Only three other solo artists have had #1 albums past the age of 60- Louis Armstrong, who was 62 in 1964 when he topped the chart with Hello, Dolly!; Barry Manilow, who was 62 in 2006 when he topped the chart with The Greatest Songs Of The Fifties; and Rod Stewart, who was 61 in 2006 when he rang the bell with Still The Same...Great Rock Classics Of Our Time.
(Two pop legends were even older when they recorded their final albums, but the albums weren't released until after their deaths. Ray Charles' Genius Loves Company hit #1 in 2005, eight months after the R&B legend died at 73. Johnny Cash's American V: A Hundred Highways hit #1 in 2006, nearly three years after the country giant died at 71.)
There's no question that the pop scene is more receptive to older artists than it used to be. From 1966, when Frank Sinatra, then 50, landed his last #1 album, Strangers In The Night, until 1993, when Barbra Streisand, then 51, scored with Back To Broadway, not one artist over the age of 50 topped the chart.
But in the last 16 years, it's become commonplace. Baby boomers are staying connected to the pop scene much longer than their parents ever did. Also, older fans are proving to be the most reliable album buyers. They came of age buying albums and are proving to be the demo most committed to maintaining the habit.
Together Through Life is Dylan's fifth #1 album, following Planet Waves (with The Band), Blood On The Tracks, Desire and Modern Times. Dylan was at his commercial peak from 1965 to 1976, when every studio album he released made the top 10. He hit his commercial nadir from 1986 to 1993, when four of his studio albums didn't even make the top 50.
But things turned around for him in 1997, when he debuted at #10 with Time Out Of Mind. The album, which was his first to crack the top 10 since 1979, went on to win the Grammy for Album of the Year. Dylan has made the top five with all three of his subsequent studio albums.
Together Through Life sold 125,000 copies, the lowest tally for an album in its first week at #1 since Alan Jackson's Good Time debuted in the top spot in March 2008 with sales of 119,000. Dylan's album also debuts at #1 in the U.K. this week. It's his first British #1 since New Morning in late 1970. (New Morning peaked at #7 in the U.S.)
by Paul Grein in Chart Watch
Labels: Bob Dylan, Miley Cyrus, trends newsletter
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