No more peanut butter in schools

No, seriously:

Like hundreds of other school districts across the country, Craneville Elementary is facing a student body that is more allergic to peanuts than ever before. “I have never seen anything like this,” says Bevan, a 25-year teaching veteran whose 489-student elementary school includes seven with peanut allergies this year. “These allergies came out of nowhere.” To protect vulnerable students, Craneville and many other schools are being forced to establish what educators are calling “peanut-free zones” — areas in the cafeteria and throughout the school where nut products are banned; some schools are going nut-free altogether.

…

According to the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, peanut allergies more than doubled between 1997 and 2002 in children under 5 and are now estimated to affect more than 1% of school age children. “It is like being in a minefield,” says Dr. Scott Sicherer, an associate professor of pediatrics, allergy and immunology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City.

Researchers don’t yet know why these allergies are blooming, but some experts think premature exposure to nut-based products in infancy may be to blame. Others believe the link is genetic. Still others cite the hygiene hypothesis — the idea that more and more parents are oversanitizing their kids with antibacterial agents, causing their immune systems to become more susceptible to allergies.

I – being brought up in a town/region/country where exposure to such things was more or less taken for granted (as were the attendant bumps, breaks and trips to the hospital) – go along with the hygiene hypothesis; MRSA is, of course, the most widely-known, to date, outcome. I’m sure super-strains of everything from Dengue to TB will scythe their way through our children, by and by. Grit is a good thing.

The former hypoethsis isn’t a bad one either, though: baby food is still baby food but, between the two towns in which I live (Bethlehem, Pa. and New York City), I see more than a sensible degree of parents pushing strollers containing toddlers eating shit that just isn’t food. The soy and high-fructose corn syrup in that stuff is probably doing God-knows-what to those kids.

There is, however, a social gradient to that sort of thing. Some decent social policy work and we might determing that social gradient, in the US, and perhaps even get a policy response. None of which will help kids whose lives are threatened by nuts, more-and-more. I’d also be interested to see someone track these kids and see how the percentage of those who mature out of the allergy changes (or not).

This article was also great for this line:

Whatever the cause, some parents — of nonallergic children — grouse that it’s unfair of the school to deprive healthy children of their favorite peanuty snacks. “Parents get very passionate and angry when their kids can’t bring peanut butter to school,” says Mike Tringale, director of external affairs at the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America. “But you wouldn’t throw razor blades all over the gymnasium. For these allergic kids, putting peanut butter in the cafeteria is the same thing.”

“Peanuty”?

I make a lot of strange analogies, when I teach, but I’m still amazed at the imagery that pops into some people’s minds (except Republican members of the Congress and Senate: those freaks are twisted, man).

The post, the founding fathers, the indies and the Republic

I don’t cover the US postal service, as a rule. I’m sure it’s interesting, but it’s no Royal Mail. This story, however, is both interesting and well-presented:

Postal Service Says Killing Small Periodicals Is a “Win-Win”

Cummings said. “You got a lot of businesses that put out publications that are saying that this is going to affect them in a negative way…. I’m asking you a simple question. If they go out of business, is it a win-win?”

“I would say if they cannot cover their costs, it is a win-win situation,” said Miller. “Let me tell you why I think that. Because other classes of mail would be covering their costs.” He went on to explain that every American letter writer pays 200 percent of the cost of shipping his or her letter because small magazines and periodicals don’t pay their fair share.

Neat. Apparently there’s a very good reason for why ‘we’ pay more than we need to – and it’s for precisely the purpose of cross-subsidisation of small periodicals.

Since the 1970s, all classes of mail have been required to cover the costs associated with their delivery, what’s called attributable cost. But periodicals, as a class, get favorable treatment: They don’t pay overhead, meaning that they don’t foot the bill for the Postal Service’s infrastructure, employees, and so on.

That’s a tradition that goes back to the origins of the nation. The founding fathers saw the press as the lifeblood of democracy—only informed voters could compose a true democracy, they believed—and thus created a postal system that gave favorable rates to small periodicals. (George Washington actually supported mailing newspapers for free.) For 200 years, small periodicals and journals of opinion were given special treatment.

Good for George Washington.

The 2007 rate hikes, which went into effect this summer, changed that. Now, periodicals are still expected to cover attributable costs and pay no overhead, but because the cost of delivering mail has gone up, rates within the class have gone up as well. In advance of the rate hike, the Postal Service submitted a proposal to the Postal Regulatory Commission that would have raised the rates in the class more or less evenly. The PRC rejected the proposal in favor of a rate package put forward by Time Warner that, unsurprisingly, hands small periodicals much steeper rate hikes than their large counterparts.

Small periodicals in some instances face a rate hike of up to 50 percent.

Mother Jones magazine, of course, has a vested interest in this debate – being a periodical themselves. So smaller periodicals still do not contribute to overhead, etc., but it seems they are not benefitting as much big periodicals. This would explain why the article also points at Bush appointeeship as a contributing factor (it’s like they already heard about, say, almost every other policy over the last however many years – but I suspect they’re being kind to Democrats in their soft implication that only Republicans would act like this).

Anyway.

“If we’re going to entertain such massive measures, they need to be informed by scientific fact and experimentation, and less by opinion and profit motivations,”

A rare (these days) environmental story – a weird one (interesting piece of trivia, Australians: when you call things “weird”, here, Americans will think, quite often, that you said “weed” – even if that interpretation renders your statement utterly non-sensical).

Via Wired magazine:

An Australian company is injecting urea into the ocean, hoping to sequester greenhouse-gas pollution and cash in on carbon credits.

If all goes according to plan, oceanic plankton will thrive on the nitrogen-rich urea broth and absorb carbon dioxide. When the plankton die, they’ll sink to the bottom of the sea taking the carbon dioxide with them. The business plan: Companies licensing the technology can sell carbon offsets.

But some scientists worry the technique hasn’t been rigorously studied. The nitrogen injections, they say, could feed toxic algae, disrupt poorly understood ecosystems and ultimately release more carbon dioxide than is deep-sixed.

“If we’re going to entertain such massive measures, they need to be informed by scientific fact and experimentation, and less by opinion and profit motivations,” said ocean fertilization researcher Kenneth Coale, director of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California.

People think up crazy shit, these days. I rank this one up with the big mirrors in space. Here is quite an interesting detail:

To produce urea, the company would need to build natural-gas-burning factories. Whether plankton blooms would offset the carbon dioxide released by those factories is unknown. Ocean Nourishment factors urea production into its carbon equations, but commercial pressures threaten the integrity of companies pursuing climate modification, Coale said.

He said that people pursuing climate-engineering projects for profit need to be separated from those who decide whether the projects are a good idea. “Right now, they’re the same.”

If we’re going to pretend we learned anything at all from Iran-Contra, the K-Street project, Enron/WorldCom/Arthur Andersen, Sub-prime and CDOs… we’re going to need to separate the people deciding that a project is profitable from those deciding whether it makes any other kind of sense. Same for, on that score, tar sands and oil shale. The fact that it makes financial sense, with oil heading to the magic USD100 a barrel, doesn’t make it a good idea: the return on the energy expended to get the energy from the oil found should be the guiding criterion – and no, the fact that oil can go into our cars most easily is not supposed to be a factor in that decision.

It seems that this plan will suffer from any accounting oversight anyway: I sense a consensus that actually measuring the carbon sequestered thus is difficult to impossible – not considered a ‘plus’ for something with investment vehicles still to be attached.

“Brutal moves are never welcome”

Interesting term of art, such as it is (having been employed thus, previously):

The European Central Bank threw its weight Thursday behind attempts to rein in the euro, reflecting concern that the currency’s rapid ascent against the dollar was making life harder for European businesses.

The bank president, Jean-Claude Trichet, made his verbal intervention after announcing that interest rates were being held steady amid continued turbulence in financial markets.

…

…the effectiveness of Trichet’s verbal intervention remains to be seen. The euro strengthened slightly Thursday, hovering near the record high slightly above $1.47 that it had reached in frenzied trading Wednesday. Downbeat comments by Ben Bernanke, chairman of U.S. Federal Reserve, about the state of the U.S. economy also weighed on the dollar.

Analysts pointed out that the ECB’s effort in 2004 to talk down the euro eventually bore fruit, although the unwinding of speculative bets against the dollar also played a role.

The verbal-interventionist approach to Euro-bolstering (verbal interventions not restricted to central bankers and ForEx markets) has been studied, previously. In their study, published in the European Journal of Political Economy, Jansen and de Haan (2007) found little support for the idea.

Based on a direction, a smoothing and a volatility criterion, we find little evidence that ECB verbal interventions were effective. The most important determinant of effectiveness is whether or not the verbal intervention is captured in the news report headline. Verbal interventions that coincide with releases of macroeconomic data are followed by lower exchange rate volatility.

The trouble with verbal interventions is that the market absorbs them, and their effectiveness subsequently declines, over time.

Facing a liquidity problem, more than a generic macroeconomic problem (Bernanke must be jealous), the ECB has rather more tools at its disposal, i.e.

Although it is keeping an eye on rapidly rising oil and food prices, the ECB has apparently concluded that raising borrowing costs at a time when many major banks are still reeling from losses incurred through bets on mortgage-backed securities would be too dangerous. Still, Trichet is not hiding the bank’s preference to tighten when markets calm down, and he repeated a promise to act “in a firm and timely manner.”

The ECB also announced Thursday that it would conduct two new liquidity injections worth €115 billion, or $168 billion, into the euro money markets, an apparent indication that it still saw credit tighter than normal and that it was determined to nurse the markets back to normality.

They have an advantage in the inflation-squashing game, relative to the US: their appreciating currency helps to keep down the effects of appreciating food and energy prices. The US is having both go gang-busters at it. Even BusinessWeek’s attempt at making lemonade barely rates as optimism of almost any kind (actually it comes across as more of a need to write something, fulfilled – but they should have just run a paid advertisement or something).

It strikes me as a decent attempt at slowing the appreciation of the Euro, or at least keeping speculators thinking twice before pushing the price up further with their nonsense (possible throwing the dollar a line, in the process). It’s certainly in their interests – given that inflation is their job first, before employment – to let the current trend hold, until a better long-term picture of food and energy prices emerges.

TRASH”E” AND TALK

My blogstats put me on to the fact that I am (not surprisingly) not the only person blogging at/from my university. I recommend to you that of a (possibly one of my?) student(s): TRASH”E” AND TALK.

I haven’t been able to decide whether I will sound more out of touch pretending to understand what that might be a reference to, or admitting that I have no idea (not true: I have no idea).

She (or so I am led to believe) writes, however, quite well. Although she should understand that, with the appropriate quantitative skills (far moreso than a mere Finance major) there is, in fact, little difference between fashion forecasting and predicting how much steel you need for a Boeing aeroplane. She is right that accounting is shit, though (two semesters, my first year as an undergrad, and I’d learned to avoid it like the plague). I hope I gave her an A.

What does BHP Billiton chasing Rio Tinto mean for the future of iron ore pricing?

BHP Billiton Ltd., the world’s biggest mining company, plans to pursue a takeover of Rio Tinto Group after an earlier approach was rejected, in what would be the largest acquisition in history.

A purchase of Rio, which has a market value of $159 billion, would create a company that controls more than a third of the iron-ore market, supplies the most energy coal and copper, and owns mines and oilfields in six continents. Rio, the third-largest miner behind Anglo American Plc, surged 21 percent in London trading.

“If the name of the game at the moment is resources in the ground, then why pussyfoot with junior or medium-size miners when you can go to the top?” said Stephen Pope, chief global market strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald Europe in London. “This deal will happen, it’s just a question of time.”

…

The combination would raise antitrust issues, particularly in the iron-ore market, said Charles Bailey, an analyst at Brewin Dolphin Securities in London. BHP, Rio and Brazil’s Cia. Vale do Rio Doce control about 80 percent of seaborne trade in the ore.

Rio, the world’s second-largest iron-ore exporter after Vale, may now decide to combine with its Brazilian rival, according to Ian Henderson at JPMorgan Asset Management in London.

I’m curious about what this means for the future of the bench-mark pricing of iron ore. BHP (if you recall ), the smaller of the Big Three (relative to Rio and CVRD) want a spot-price/futures market; the bigger two do not. If BHP secures Rio Tinto, I would expect that process to accelerate (China, are you paying attention?). If, on the other hand, Rio Tinto were to merge with CVRD, I would expect the bench-mark approach to remain.

Given a merger of Rio Tinto and CVRD, one also wonders what would become of the standardisation of the bench-mark. Australian ore is closer to Asia, and deserves a premium for that expediency; Brazilian ore is of a higher quality, and deserves a premium for that. If one firm was extracting ore of both types, would we be more likely to see two prices emerge, or still just the one? It seems to me that a merged Rio Tinto/CVRD would see an advantage in price differentiation – even if they retained an annualised bench-mark pricing mechanism. The monopsony power would also be likely to put a stop to China’s pressure for discount-pricing.