Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Links of the day

Optical Fiber Conference 2007: 10 Things You Missed..."Many speculate 40G will be bypassed altogether in favor of 100Gb/s Ethernet using new modulation schemes"...wow...

Betting On Refiners: The Crude/Gas Price Disparity and the 3-2-1 Crack Spread..."
the 3-2-1 crack spread...is a very rough approximation of an oil refiner’s profit margin. Basically, 3 barrels of crude is assumed to produce 2 barrels of gasoline and 1 barrel of heating oil"...

Big Nikko Shareholder Signals Unwillingness to Accept Citi's Bid..."Orbis Investment Management, a 5.8% Nikko Cordial shareholder and among four non-Japanese funds owning a 25+ percent stake, placed a sell order today for 56.5 million shares on the Tokyo Stock Exchange at ¥1,900"...that is one honkin' big order...

Faith-based charity and crowd-out during the great depression...the title of a paper with the following abstract:


"Interest in religious organizations as providers of social services has increased dramatically in recent years. Churches in the U.S. were a crucial provider of social services through the early part of the twentieth century, but their role shrank dramatically with the expansion in government spending under the New Deal. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which the New Deal crowded-out church charitable spending in the 1930s. We do so using a new nationwide data set of charitable spending for six large Christian denominations, matched to data on local New Deal spending. We instrument for New Deal spending using measures of the political strength of a
state's congressional delegation, and confirm our findings using a different instrument based on institutional constraints on state relief spending. With both instruments we find that higher government spending leads to lower church charitable activity. Crowd-out was small as a share of total New Deal spending (3%), but large as a share of church spending: our estimates suggest that benevolent church spending fell by 30% in response to the New Deal, and that government relief spending can explain virtually all of the decline in charitable church activity observed between 1933 and 1939"...

The Daylight Saving change: no savings, no point...

"As it turns out, the US Department of Energy (and almost everyone else except members of Congress) was correct when they predicted that there would be little energy savings. This echoed concerns voiced after a similar experiment was attempted in Australia. Critics pointed out a basic fact: the gains in the morning will be offset by the losses at night, and vice-versa, at both ends of the switch. That appears to be exactly what happened. Reuters spoke with Jason Cuevas, spokesman for Southern Co. power, who said it plainly: "We haven't seen any measurable impact." New Jersey's Public Service Enterprise Group said the same thing: "no impact" on their business"...

From the DailyAviator..."A B-52 Stratofortress from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, is escorted by Hornets from the Royal Australian Air Force March 21 en route to the Delamere Bombing Range as part of the Green Lightning exercise that ended last week in Australia. The Delamere Bombing Range facility in the Northern Territory is a world class military exercise site that allows many skills to be honed and tested"

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