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How to Make a Risk-Free Fortune on Wall Street

Mother Jones

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Redline Trading Solutions recently allowed Berkeley professor Terrence Hendershott to conduct a study with its high-speed trading technology, which gave him access to stock prices a few milliseconds before everyone else. This meant that Hendershott knew, before he bought the stock, which way the price would move a fraction of a second later. As you might expect, this is a risk-free license to mint money:

According to his study, in one day (May 9), playing one stock (Apple), Hendershott walked away with almost $377,000 in theoretical profits by picking off quotes on various exchanges that were fractions of a second out of date. Extrapolate that number to reflect the thousands of stocks trading electronically in the U.S., and it’s clear that high-frequency traders are making billions of dollars a year on a simple quirk in the electronic stock market.

One way or another, that money is coming out of your retirement account. Think of it like the old movie The Sting. High-speed traders already know who has won the horse race when your mutual fund manager lays his bet. You’re guaranteed to come out a loser. You’re losing in small increments, but every mickle makes a muckle — especially in a tough market.

“It’s clear to us these guys are just raping, pillaging, and plundering the market,” as Joe Saluzzi, co-founder of agency brokerage Themis Trading put it.

Click the link for more details, along with a simple and interesting idea for putting an end to this. In practice, stock markets are never going to be fair to every participant, but at the very least, their rules are supposed to make them theoretically fair to all comers. High-speed trading makes a mockery of this.

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How to Make a Risk-Free Fortune on Wall Street

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Superstorm Sandy washed away half of Fire Island’s sand

Superstorm Sandy washed away half of Fire Island’s sand

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers

Cleaning up Fire Island after Hurricane Sandy.

It was obvious to locals that Fire Island, N.Y. — Long Island’s longest barrier island — lost a lot of sand during Superstorm Sandy. And now federal scientists have quantified the staggering loss: 54.4 percent.

The researchers warn that the disappearance of more than half of the island’s sand dunes and beachfront sand has left the tourist mecca more vulnerable to further storms and floods.

During winter storms that followed Sandy, the shoreline on the exposed island was sucked back a further 200 feet in one place, though most of the sand lost during those smaller storms washed back into place by April. Much of the sand lost during the superstorm, by contrast, is still missing.

From the U.S. Geological Survey report [PDF]:

Hurricane Sandy profoundly impacted the morphology of Fire Island and resulted in an extremely low elevation, low relief configuration that has left the barrier island vulnerable to future storms. The coastal system subsequently began to show signs of recovery, and although the beach is likely to experience continued recovery in the form of volume gains, the dunes will take years to rebuild. Events such as Sandy result in a coastal environment that is more vulnerable to future storm impacts, but they are an important natural process of barrier islands that allow these systems to evolve in response to sea-level rise.

The vast majority of the sand that Sandy purloined from Fire Island was washed offshore, where it is currently of little use to East Coasters eager for protection from future storm surges. The researchers calculated that just 14 percent drifted inland toward other area shorelines.

Randy Levine

Fire Island in July

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Superstorm Sandy washed away half of Fire Island’s sand

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Birther John Philip Sousa IV Wants a Tea Party Darling to Run For President

Mother Jones

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Dr. Ben Carson went from acclaimed Johns Hopkins neurosurgeon to conservative hero when, in February, he rebuked President Obama during a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. With Obama seated a few feet away, Carson blasted the “PC police,” stumped for a flat tax, and ripped the president’s positions on health-care reform and deficits. Overnight, Carson became a tea party hero. The Wall Street Journal editorial board headlined its write-up of Carson’s half-hour speech: “Ben Carson for President.”

A new super-PAC chaired by John Philip Sousa IV, the great-grandson of the man who wrote “Stars and Stripes Forever,” aims to do just that—nudge Carson into the 2016 race. The National Draft Ben Carson for President Committee recently filed papers with the Federal Election Commission to raise and spend unlimited amounts of money—as all super-PACs can—in an effort to convince Carson to launch a presidential run. On the super-PAC’s website, RunBenRun.org, you can sign a petition that begins, “You said that if the American people were still ‘clamoring’ for you to run for president, you would seriously consider doing so. Well, I’m clamoring for you to run for president of the United States.” As the Center for Public Integrity notes, the super-PAC’s creator is Vernon Robinson, a resident of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who has unsuccessfully run for Congress three times.

As for Sousa IV, this isn’t his first crack at rallying behind a tea party hero. As my colleague Tim Murphy reported in July 2012, Sousa helped bankroll Americans for Sheriff Joe, a political action committee devoted to electing controversial Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio:

Sousa, who has largely avoided politics since unsuccessfully running for Congress as a Republican 38 years ago, says he’s already raised $1 million from more than 40,000 individuals and businesses across the country. (A quarterly filing provided by the group reveals that most of that $1 million went to pay for direct-mail costs.) “I heard from the guy who filed the report for us that our report was almost the size of Obamacare, at 2,200 pages,” he says.

Sousa is an immigration hardliner who notes on his personal web site that “I am tired of pressing one for English, I am tired of looking for the English instructions on boxes. If you don’t speak English or you are not willing to learn English, I would strongly suspect that you should not be a permanent resident in the United States of America.”

In Arpaio, Sousa found an anti-immigration champion who’s not afraid to stand up for what he believes. “We had read lots about Hispanic civil rights group La Raza going after Sheriff Joe, about George Soros going after Sheriff Joe, about Eric Holder going after Sheriff Joe, about Obama not liking Sheriff Joe and wanting him replaced,” Sousa says in an interview, explaining the genesis of his PAC. “And the immigration issues of this country are not getting fixed—not that he can fix them, but at least he enforces the laws of this country.”

Sousa is also something of a birther. In an interview with Murphy, he said, “I mean, can you unequivocally say that Obama was born in the United States? I can’t!” He went on: “I don’t trust the documentation. I don’t distrust it. I don’t know.”

What’s been Carson’s response to the “Draft Ben” effort? Muted, so far. He told Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren that he loved John Philip Sousa’s music but he wasn’t going to “interfere” with Sousa IV’s effort. “I believe that god will make it clear to me if that’s something that I’m supposed to do,” he said. “It’s not something I particularly want to do. I find life outside of politics much more appealing.”

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Birther John Philip Sousa IV Wants a Tea Party Darling to Run For President

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Full Video: Obama Delivers Surprise Address on Race, #RealTalk Ensues

Mother Jones

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“If Trayvon Martin was of age and armed, could he have stood his ground on that sidewalk?” – President Obama, on Friday.

Watch:

Obama made a surprise address at Friday’s White House press briefing. He weighed in on the Trayvon Martin case, spoke about race issues in America, and called for an evaluation of the efficacy and wisdom of Stand Your Ground laws. “Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago,” the president said.

To read the full text of Obama’s remarks, click here.

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Full Video: Obama Delivers Surprise Address on Race, #RealTalk Ensues

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For Immediate In-the-Moment Happiness, Head Outdoors

Photo: Ian Britton

A wealth of studies have examined the hypothesis that spending time outdoors boosts our well-being, but until now not much was known about how being outside affects what researchers call “momentary subjective well-being,” a fancy term for how you feel in-the-moment. Unless scientists follow participants around with a clip board asking them “How do you feel?” every few minutes, collecting such fleeting data remains a challenge.

A new study on happiness conducted in the UK gets over this obstacle by using a specially-designed smartphone app. More than 20,000 people installed the app on their phone. At random intervals throughout the day, the app would pop up and ask them brief questions about what they were up to, who they were with and how they were feeling. At the same time, it registered the phone owner’s GPS coordinates.

All told, the team collected around 1 million datapoints from the app-wielding participants. The results were telling: even when the authors controlled for factors like weather, time of day, where people where, if they were with friends or family and what they were doing, being outside trumped all of that for predicting in-the-moment happiness. On average, they found, the participants were significantly and substantially happier when they were outside surrounded by green or in a natural habitat. This finding was especially true when compared with their happiness levels while in an urban environment.

The authors conclude, “This study provides a new line of evidence on links between nature and wellbeing, strengthening existing evidence of a positive relationship between [subjective well-being] and exposure to green or natural environments in daily life.”

So if you’re feeling down or unenthusiastic, head outside for a few minutes and soak up the sunshine in a local park or backyard. It might just provide the positive boost you need to turn your day around – or at least bring some emotional warmth for a fleeting moment.

More from Smithsonian.com:

We Have No Idea What Makes Us Happy  
The (Scientific) Pursuit of Happiness 

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For Immediate In-the-Moment Happiness, Head Outdoors

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Are Fungus-Farming Ants the Key to Better Biofuel?

green4us

Secrets from their underground fungus fields could help fight climate change. DavidDennisPhotos.com/Flickr “If you have ants in your house,” the great Harvard ecologist EO Wilson once said, “be kind to them.” Keep this in mind the next time you want to flick one off the kitchen table: The tiny critters, which collectively weigh about as much as all of humanity, could wield a big weapon in the fight against climate change. In the US, corn-based ethanol is a big business, consuming 40 percent of the domestic corn crop and providing roughly 10 percent of the fuel supply, which would otherwise be dirty fossil fuels. But the practice of topping your tank off with corn is fraught with problems: Some argue that the crop should be used for food; it’s sensitive to drought; and the ethanol-making process might be contributing to an E coli epidemic, to name a few. That’s why the Obama administration recently announced a plan to invest $2 billion in organic fuels that rely on things other than corn, including switchgrass and gas from cattle poo. But this weekend, a group of scientists discovered a chemical key that could revitalize corn-based ethanol by allowing it to be made from stalks, leaves, and other bits beside the cob itself. This won’t help much with the drought problem (less corn is still less corn), but it could alleviate the food-vs-fuel debate and the E coli problem as more kernels are saved to go straight to livestock. Turns out, the savior of ethanol could be the South American leafcutter ant. Leafcutter ants make some of the largest underground colonies in the world, some with as many as seven million residents. And, as the name suggests, many of them spend their days combing the rainforest for bits of leaves, gathering half the weight of a cow per colony every year. They carry this mass back into their tunnels and use as fertilizer for a crop of fungus, which they then eat. Ant experts (“myrmecologists,” if you care to know) have long believed that the fungus acts as a kind of external stomach for the ants, breaking down sugars in the leaves that the ants aren’t equipped to handle themselves. In fact, it’s not the fungus itself that breaks down the leaves, but chemical enzymes within it, and Frank Aylward, a microbiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says those same enzymes could be used to help break down corn byproducts to make fuel. In a new study, Aylward sequenced the genome of the leafcutter ant’s symbiotic fungus, and identified for the first time the exact enzymes that have evolved over millennia to efficiently break down plant material stored in the ant’s underground tunnels. For making fuel, Aylward asks, “why don’t we use the rest of the corn plant? It’s because the sugars are tied up in cellulose and other things that are hard to break down. So we’re looking for enzymes that can help.” Enzymes are already used for this purpose, and a crop of businesses have sprung up in the biofuel boom to manufacture them, but Aylward believes his could be among the most efficient ever discovered. And using every part of the corn plant, including parts that typically go to waste, could make ethanol production more sustainable and boost its climate benefits. To study the ants, Aylward and his team traveled to Panama and Costa Rica to collect specimens (“The trick is to get the queen,” he says), then brought them to a lab in Wisconsin where they could take samples of the fungus as the ants cultivated it. While there are many microbes that can break down tough plant matter, he says, the ants do it exceptionally well: Collectively, they’re the largest herbivore on the continent. “We wanted to see if there was something that allowed them to do that so efficiently,” he said. Aylward’s findings pinpoint that secret ingredient enzyme, and he says he’s already been contacted by private businesses looking to manufacture the enzymes and get an early start on applying them to biofuel production; they could even be mixed and matched with other enzymes to take the ants work even further. “The ants are really successful at this,” he said, “and that’s the exact thing we want to do with plant biomass.”

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Are Fungus-Farming Ants the Key to Better Biofuel?

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Are Fungus-Farming Ants the Key to Better Biofuel?

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