March 24, 2010 12:11 PM PDT
GM floats autonomous two-seater city car idea
by Candace Lombardi
Artist's rendering of GM's new EN-V concept car in the Jiao (Pride) model
(Credit: General Motors) General Motors on Wednesday unveiled its Electric Networked-Vehicle (EN-V), a two-seater urban transport concept vehicle it's developing in conjunction with the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp. (SAIC).
The EN-V is not intended for highway driving, but for what GM refers to as "personal urban transport," an idea already taken up by several companies and academic research groups. Many feel there's a need for "last mile" transport or gap transport, a means of transportation that covers the area between where public transport drops off and an exact final destination.
General Motors
Walking is already the obvious solution in many cases. But in severe weather, when touting packages, or in cities lacking extensive public transport reach, people still tend to take a car over public transport. Providing another option could be the key to getting people to leave those cars outside the city.
The EN-V aims to offer a solution to city traffic congestion, parking, poor air quality, and affordability, according to GM. Using the same platform, the car could come in three distinct looks: the Jiao (Pride), Miao (Magic), and Xiao (Laugh).
The EN-V, which looks like a cross between a Smart Car and MIT's City Car, is actually a descendant of the Project PUMA (Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility) that GM unveiled in April 2009. The PUMA is a two-wheel car built with Segway technology.
The EN-V runs on lithium ion batteries that can recharge from a standard household outlet. Its global positioning system, vehicle-to-vehicle communications network, and a sensor and camera system would allow it to be driven manually, or operate autonomously once given a set destination. The combined technology would give it the ability to navigate the complicated urban atmosphere of constantly changing traffic and pedestrian situations, according to GM.
The EN-V concept car will be unveiled in the SAIC-GM Pavilion at the World Expo 2010 Shanghai, an expo showcasing tech products and ideas geared toward the goal of sustainable urban living. It runs May 1 through October 30
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Social Security to See Payout Exceed Pay-In This Year
By MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
Published: March 24, 2010
The bursting of the real estate bubble and the ensuing recession have hurt jobs, home prices and now Social Security.
Simple Steps to Fix Social Security
What Congress can do to keep the program stable.
Shrinking Sooner Than Expected
Related
Times Topic: Social Security (US)Readers' Comments
Read All Comments (363) »
This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Stephen C. Goss, chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, said that while the Congressional projection would probably be borne out, the change would have no effect on benefits in 2010 and retirees would keep receiving their checks as usual.
The problem, he said, is that payments have risen more than expected during the downturn, because jobs disappeared and people applied for benefits sooner than they had planned. At the same time, the program’s revenue has fallen sharply, because there are fewer paychecks to tax.
Analysts have long tried to predict the year when Social Security would pay out more than it took in because they view it as a tipping point — the first step of a long, slow march to insolvency, unless Congress strengthens the program’s finances.
“When the level of the trust fund gets to zero, you have to cut benefits,” Alan Greenspan, architect of the plan to rescue the Social Security program the last time it got into trouble, in the early 1980s, said on Wednesday.
That episode was more dire because the fund could have fallen to zero in a matter of months. But partly because of steps taken in those years, and partly because of many years of robust economic growth, the latest projections show the program will not exhaust its funds until about 2037.
Still, Mr. Greenspan, who later became chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, said: “I think very much the same issue exists today. Because of the size of the contraction in economic activity, unless we get an immediate and sharp recovery, the revenues of the trust fund will be tracking lower for a number of years.”
The Social Security Administration is expected to issue in a few weeks its own numbers for the current year within the annual report from its board of trustees. The administration has six board members: three from the president’s cabinet, two representatives of the public and the Social Security commissioner.
Though Social Security uses slightly different methods, the official numbers are expected to roughly track the Congressional projections, which were one page of a voluminous analysis of the federal budget proposed by President Obama in January.
Mr. Goss said Social Security’s annual report last year projected revenue would more than cover payouts until at least 2016 because economists expected a quicker, stronger recovery from the crisis. Officials foresaw an average unemployment rate of 8.2 percent in 2009 and 8.8 percent this year, though unemployment is hovering at nearly 10 percent.
The trustees did foresee, in late 2008, that the recession would be severe enough to deplete Social Security’s funds more quickly than previously projected. They moved the year of reckoning forward, to 2037 from 2041. Mr. Goss declined to reveal the contents of the forthcoming annual report, but said people should not expect the date to lurch forward again.
The long-term costs of Social Security present further problems for politicians, who are already struggling over how to reduce the nation’s debt. The national predicament echoes that of many European governments, which are facing market pressure to re-examine their commitments to generous pensions over extended retirements.
The United States’ soaring debt — propelled by tax cuts, wars and large expenditures to help banks and the housing market — has become a hot issue as Democrats gauge their vulnerability in the coming elections. President Obama has appointed a bipartisan commission to examine the debt problem, including Social Security, and make recommendations on how to trim the nation’s debt by Dec. 1, a few weeks after the midterm Congressional elections.
Although Social Security is often said to have a “trust fund,” the term really serves as an accounting device, to track the pay-as-you-go program’s revenue and outlays over time. Its so-called balance is, in fact, a history of its vast cash flows: the sum of all of its revenue in the past, minus all of its outlays. The balance is currently about $2.5 trillion because after the early 1980s the program had surplus revenue, year after year.
Now that accumulated revenue will slowly start to shrink, as outlays start to exceed revenue. By law, Social Security cannot pay out more than its balance in any given year.
For accounting purposes, the system’s accumulated revenue is placed in Treasury securities.
In a year like this, the paper gains from the interest earned on the securities will more than cover the difference between what it takes in and pays out.
Mr. Goss, the actuary, emphasized that even the $29 billion shortfall projected for this year was small, relative to the roughly $700 billion that would flow in and out of the system. The system, he added, has a balance of about $2.5 trillion that will take decades to deplete. Mr. Goss said that large cushion could start to grow again if the economy recovers briskly.
Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office’s projection shows the ravages of the recession easing in the next few years, with small surpluses reappearing briefly in 2014 and 2015.
After that, demographic forces are expected to overtake the fund, as more and more baby boomers leave the work force, stop paying into the program and start collecting their benefits. At that point, outlays will exceed revenue every year, no matter how well the economy performs.
Mr. Greenspan recalled in an interview that the sour economy of the late 1970s had taken the program close to insolvency when the commission he led set to work in 1982. It had no contingency reserve then, and the group had to work quickly. He said there were only three choices: raise taxes, lower benefits or bail out the program by tapping general revenue.
The easiest choice, politically, would have been “solving the problem with the stroke of a pen, by printing the money,” Mr. Greenspan said. But one member of the commission, Claude Pepper, then a House representative, blocked that approach because he feared it would undermine Social Security, changing it from a respected, self-sustaining old-age program into welfare.
Mr. Greenspan said that the same three choices exist today — though there is more time now for the painful deliberations.
“Even if the trust fund level goes down, there’s no action required, until the level of the trust fund gets to zero,” he said. “At that point, you have to cut benefits, because benefits have to equal receipts.”
Published: March 24, 2010
The bursting of the real estate bubble and the ensuing recession have hurt jobs, home prices and now Social Security.
Simple Steps to Fix Social Security
What Congress can do to keep the program stable.
Shrinking Sooner Than Expected
Related
Times Topic: Social Security (US)Readers' Comments
Read All Comments (363) »
This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
Stephen C. Goss, chief actuary of the Social Security Administration, said that while the Congressional projection would probably be borne out, the change would have no effect on benefits in 2010 and retirees would keep receiving their checks as usual.
The problem, he said, is that payments have risen more than expected during the downturn, because jobs disappeared and people applied for benefits sooner than they had planned. At the same time, the program’s revenue has fallen sharply, because there are fewer paychecks to tax.
Analysts have long tried to predict the year when Social Security would pay out more than it took in because they view it as a tipping point — the first step of a long, slow march to insolvency, unless Congress strengthens the program’s finances.
“When the level of the trust fund gets to zero, you have to cut benefits,” Alan Greenspan, architect of the plan to rescue the Social Security program the last time it got into trouble, in the early 1980s, said on Wednesday.
That episode was more dire because the fund could have fallen to zero in a matter of months. But partly because of steps taken in those years, and partly because of many years of robust economic growth, the latest projections show the program will not exhaust its funds until about 2037.
Still, Mr. Greenspan, who later became chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, said: “I think very much the same issue exists today. Because of the size of the contraction in economic activity, unless we get an immediate and sharp recovery, the revenues of the trust fund will be tracking lower for a number of years.”
The Social Security Administration is expected to issue in a few weeks its own numbers for the current year within the annual report from its board of trustees. The administration has six board members: three from the president’s cabinet, two representatives of the public and the Social Security commissioner.
Though Social Security uses slightly different methods, the official numbers are expected to roughly track the Congressional projections, which were one page of a voluminous analysis of the federal budget proposed by President Obama in January.
Mr. Goss said Social Security’s annual report last year projected revenue would more than cover payouts until at least 2016 because economists expected a quicker, stronger recovery from the crisis. Officials foresaw an average unemployment rate of 8.2 percent in 2009 and 8.8 percent this year, though unemployment is hovering at nearly 10 percent.
The trustees did foresee, in late 2008, that the recession would be severe enough to deplete Social Security’s funds more quickly than previously projected. They moved the year of reckoning forward, to 2037 from 2041. Mr. Goss declined to reveal the contents of the forthcoming annual report, but said people should not expect the date to lurch forward again.
The long-term costs of Social Security present further problems for politicians, who are already struggling over how to reduce the nation’s debt. The national predicament echoes that of many European governments, which are facing market pressure to re-examine their commitments to generous pensions over extended retirements.
The United States’ soaring debt — propelled by tax cuts, wars and large expenditures to help banks and the housing market — has become a hot issue as Democrats gauge their vulnerability in the coming elections. President Obama has appointed a bipartisan commission to examine the debt problem, including Social Security, and make recommendations on how to trim the nation’s debt by Dec. 1, a few weeks after the midterm Congressional elections.
Although Social Security is often said to have a “trust fund,” the term really serves as an accounting device, to track the pay-as-you-go program’s revenue and outlays over time. Its so-called balance is, in fact, a history of its vast cash flows: the sum of all of its revenue in the past, minus all of its outlays. The balance is currently about $2.5 trillion because after the early 1980s the program had surplus revenue, year after year.
Now that accumulated revenue will slowly start to shrink, as outlays start to exceed revenue. By law, Social Security cannot pay out more than its balance in any given year.
For accounting purposes, the system’s accumulated revenue is placed in Treasury securities.
In a year like this, the paper gains from the interest earned on the securities will more than cover the difference between what it takes in and pays out.
Mr. Goss, the actuary, emphasized that even the $29 billion shortfall projected for this year was small, relative to the roughly $700 billion that would flow in and out of the system. The system, he added, has a balance of about $2.5 trillion that will take decades to deplete. Mr. Goss said that large cushion could start to grow again if the economy recovers briskly.
Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office’s projection shows the ravages of the recession easing in the next few years, with small surpluses reappearing briefly in 2014 and 2015.
After that, demographic forces are expected to overtake the fund, as more and more baby boomers leave the work force, stop paying into the program and start collecting their benefits. At that point, outlays will exceed revenue every year, no matter how well the economy performs.
Mr. Greenspan recalled in an interview that the sour economy of the late 1970s had taken the program close to insolvency when the commission he led set to work in 1982. It had no contingency reserve then, and the group had to work quickly. He said there were only three choices: raise taxes, lower benefits or bail out the program by tapping general revenue.
The easiest choice, politically, would have been “solving the problem with the stroke of a pen, by printing the money,” Mr. Greenspan said. But one member of the commission, Claude Pepper, then a House representative, blocked that approach because he feared it would undermine Social Security, changing it from a respected, self-sustaining old-age program into welfare.
Mr. Greenspan said that the same three choices exist today — though there is more time now for the painful deliberations.
“Even if the trust fund level goes down, there’s no action required, until the level of the trust fund gets to zero,” he said. “At that point, you have to cut benefits, because benefits have to equal receipts.”
Monday, March 22, 2010
Nanotech robots deliver gene therapy
Published: 6:08PM Monday March 22, 2010
Source: Reuters
At a glance...
Human trial raises hope for promising RNAi therapyTreatment successfully delivered to tumours
Source:
Nano technology
US researchers have developed tiny nanoparticle robots that can travel through a patient's blood and into tumours where they deliver a therapy that turns off an important cancer gene.
The finding, reported in the journal Nature on Sunday, offers early proof that a new treatment approach called RNA interference or RNAi might work in people.
RNA stands for ribonucleic acid - a chemical messenger that is emerging as a key player in the disease process.
Dozens of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies including Alnylam, Merck, Pfizer, Novartis and Roche are looking for ways to manipulate RNA to block genes that make disease-causing proteins involved in cancer, blindness or AIDS.
But getting the treatment to the right target in the body has presented a challenge.
A team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena used nanotechnology - the science of really small objects - to create tiny polymer robots covered with a protein called transferrin that seek out a receptor or molecular doorway on many different types of tumours.
"This is the first study to be able to go in there and show it's doing its mechanism of action," said Mark Davis, a professor of chemical engineering, who led the study.
"We're excited about it because there is a lot of scepticism whenever any new technology comes in," said Davis, a consultant to privately held Calando Pharmaceuticals Inc, which is developing the therapy.
Other teams are using fats or lipids to deliver the therapy to the treatment target. Pfizer last week announced a deal with Canadian biotech Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp for this type of delivery vehicle for its RNAi drugs, joining Roche and Alnylam.
In the approach used by Davis and colleagues, once the particles find the cancer cell and get inside, they break down, releasing small interfering RNAs or siRNAs that block a gene that makes a cancer growth protein called ribonucleotide reductase.
"In the particle itself, we've built what we call a chemical sensor," Davis said in a telephone interview.
"When it recognizes that it's gone inside the cell, it says OK, now it's time to disassemble and give off the RNA."
In a phase 1 clinical trial in patients with various types of tumours, the team gave doses of the targeted nanoparticles four times over 21 days in a 30-minute intravenous infusion.
Tumour samples taken from three people with melanoma showed the nanoparticles found their way inside tumour cells.
And they found evidence that the therapy had disabled ribonucleotide reductase, suggesting the RNA had done its job.
Davis could not say whether the therapy helped shrink tumours in the patients, but one patient did get a second cycle of treatment, suggesting it might be.
Nor could he say if there were any safety concerns.
Davis said that part of the study will be presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in June
Source: Reuters
At a glance...
Human trial raises hope for promising RNAi therapyTreatment successfully delivered to tumours
Source:
Nano technology
US researchers have developed tiny nanoparticle robots that can travel through a patient's blood and into tumours where they deliver a therapy that turns off an important cancer gene.
The finding, reported in the journal Nature on Sunday, offers early proof that a new treatment approach called RNA interference or RNAi might work in people.
RNA stands for ribonucleic acid - a chemical messenger that is emerging as a key player in the disease process.
Dozens of biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies including Alnylam, Merck, Pfizer, Novartis and Roche are looking for ways to manipulate RNA to block genes that make disease-causing proteins involved in cancer, blindness or AIDS.
But getting the treatment to the right target in the body has presented a challenge.
A team at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena used nanotechnology - the science of really small objects - to create tiny polymer robots covered with a protein called transferrin that seek out a receptor or molecular doorway on many different types of tumours.
"This is the first study to be able to go in there and show it's doing its mechanism of action," said Mark Davis, a professor of chemical engineering, who led the study.
"We're excited about it because there is a lot of scepticism whenever any new technology comes in," said Davis, a consultant to privately held Calando Pharmaceuticals Inc, which is developing the therapy.
Other teams are using fats or lipids to deliver the therapy to the treatment target. Pfizer last week announced a deal with Canadian biotech Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp for this type of delivery vehicle for its RNAi drugs, joining Roche and Alnylam.
In the approach used by Davis and colleagues, once the particles find the cancer cell and get inside, they break down, releasing small interfering RNAs or siRNAs that block a gene that makes a cancer growth protein called ribonucleotide reductase.
"In the particle itself, we've built what we call a chemical sensor," Davis said in a telephone interview.
"When it recognizes that it's gone inside the cell, it says OK, now it's time to disassemble and give off the RNA."
In a phase 1 clinical trial in patients with various types of tumours, the team gave doses of the targeted nanoparticles four times over 21 days in a 30-minute intravenous infusion.
Tumour samples taken from three people with melanoma showed the nanoparticles found their way inside tumour cells.
And they found evidence that the therapy had disabled ribonucleotide reductase, suggesting the RNA had done its job.
Davis could not say whether the therapy helped shrink tumours in the patients, but one patient did get a second cycle of treatment, suggesting it might be.
Nor could he say if there were any safety concerns.
Davis said that part of the study will be presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting in June
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