But several major cities in Europe have embraced the idea of shared bikes. Shared bikes are low-cost rental bikes parked at stations across the city, optimized for one way trips. For-profit companies like Cyclocity or SmartBike work in conjunction with city planners to help link transportation nodes that are too close for a bus or car, but too far to walk. And unlike shared cars which must be returned to the same parking space, bikes can be returned to any station in the system.

Members provide a refundable deposit (~$200) and pay a nominal annual fee (~$15).  Whenever they need a bike, they simply swipe a card to release an available bike. Rides under 30 minutes are usually free, with increasing fares after that. Most bikes have internal gears and solid tires minimizing muss and fuss - ideal for commuters.

Paris announced this week that it is introducing 20,600 shared bikes at more than 1,400 stations across the city by July 15. The idea has been popular in other European cities, from Lyon to Munich, but with nearly one shared bike for every thousand Parisians, the Bastille Day rollout is nothing less than… revolutionary (see statastic below).

Several US cities including San Francisco, Portland, and Chicago are studying the idea of shared bikes, but it looks like Washington DC will be the first American guinea pig. Early indications are that the DC plan will initially be modest. Like shared cars, shared bike systems greatly benefit from network effects. But now that the planet is heating up, this is no time to be modest. The more shared bikes, the more locations near potential riders, and the users more likely to give it a try, the more profitable, etc.

So can DC match the French passion for shared bike? Not just yet. In order to have the same density of shared bikes in DC as in Paris, Washington would need 5,700 bikes or about 80 Smart Bikes per square mile. And if shared bikes help gets tourists off of those goofy Segways, all the better.

Previously, I hypothesized that widespread adoption of the shared cars would decrease demand for streetside parking (especially with this concept), allowing for more, safer bike lanes. Shared bikes and shared cars could easily work in harmony with one another - there are certainly times when you need a car. But it is time for local leaders to shun the one-car, one-driver paradigm and shared bikes are a great way to start.

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But the market for e-paper and flexible displays extends far beyond e-books. Imagine instantly customizable billboards, or ever-changing e-paper facades that wrap the outside of skyscrapers.

Perhaps the promise of a new advertising medium will finally drive the development of e-paper; e-books sales certainly haven’t. While Sony keeps pitching its rather pedestrian $300 black and white 7″ e-reader, LG Philips taunts us with a 14″ flexible e-paper display featuring more than 4000 colors. Fujitsu and HP are even jumping into the fray with e-reader prototypes. Unfortunately, these new e-readers likely won’t be ready for the consumer market until well into the Gore-Obama administration.
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Chart courtesy of Tech-On based on research from Displaybank.

So are the forever stamps a bargain for consumers or the Postal Service? A little of both. They eliminate those annoying 1 and 2 cent stamps for consumers and smooth revenue for the USPS. Maintaining consistent pricing has been a challenge for the Postal Service. Looking back at the inflation-adjusted price of stamps since 1945 (for nominal prices, check out spudart), stamps have ranged from $.22 in 1956 and 1957 to $.49 in 1975.

Historically it was difficult to hone price increases to match inflation for one simple reason: we don’t have a currency smaller than the penny. Raising the price from $.03 in 1957 to $.04 in 1958 constituted a nominal 33% price increase. Today a 1 cent increase only means a 2.4% price increase. The implication is that with more expensive stamps, it has become easier for the USPS to track inflation keeping the real cost of stamps more consistent. Expect this to continue in the future as the USPS ties the price of the forever stamp as closely as possible to inflation. Regardless of their effort, it seems likely that a secondary market in forever stamps will crop up. Why? Arbitrage.

According to the USPS web site, there is no limit to number of forever stamps you can buy. So someone playing in the futures market of stamps (statastic is not promoting this) would wait until the day before the next forever stamp price increase. An investor would fork over $4.1 million to buy ten million forever stamps the day before the next penny price hike. By holding a futures contract guaranteeing a buyer for all of the stamps at 41.9 cents each, the speculator could turn an overnight profit of $90,000 - assuming the USPS doesn’t make this illegal first.

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A recent national poll showed that Obama was narrowing his lead with Clinton (see Wall Street Journal graph to right). But do these early polls of scarcely informed voters merely reflect the media’s obsessions with a horse race rather than candidates’ policy nuances?

One of the major horse stories driving whipping the media into a frenzy is the fund raising race. The media – especially the Washington Post – seem to use these financial disclosures as a proxy for voter intentions come November 2008. And so the cycle begins. “Obama Exceeds Expectations!” “Hillary Harnesses Bill’s Fund Raising Network!”  Perhaps these headlines simply keep the rich candidates’ names in the minds of would-be voters.

But if we’re going to talk about the fund raising race, we should examine the three states that will have a disproportionate effect on the national electorate: Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. So where are their campaign contributions going? By examining the campaign contributions to each candidate by state, we see that three Democratic candidates emerge: Clinton, Obama, and Edwards.

Edwards has pulled in 1 in 3 dollars given to Democratic candidates in from donors in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, 50% more than Obama and almost double the contributions to Clinton.

This contrasts sharply with national contributions. Is Edwards the dark horse that the media has forgotten? In South Carolina he still trails by a wide margin to Clinton and Obama. Tune in tonight to see whether his fund raising stacks up to his policies.
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By order of the Federal Aviation Administration, the weight of a kite must not exceed 5 pounds and altitude of flight must not exceed 500 feet. When informed that a Presidential helicopter is approaching, all kites must be pulled down immediately, and not re-flown until the all-clear announcement.

Kites have been a pastime since 3,500 years when they were invented in China. There is also some evidence that Malaysia, Indonesia and South Pacific islands developed kites for a more practical purpose: fishing. This clever technology mashup - still practiced today - enabled them to reach fish in shallows where there boats could not.

But fisherman weren’t the only ones to recognize the utility of kites - so did surfers. Kite surfing, also known as kite boarding, powers surfers through and above the water with a large inflatable kite usually attached to the user by a harness. Although the sport is only 13 years old, there are now more than 200,000 kite surfers around the world.

And if you’re more likely to pilot a large boat rather than a surfboard, you can just attach a Sky Sails to your ship. Cheaper than retrofitting large ships with sails and masts, these enormous kites can help reduce energy costs by taking advantage of ocean surface winds.

While the average five & dime kite is lucky to use all 500 feet of its discount cotton string, more serious kite enthusiasts upped the ante a few years ago. They started with a kite 30 feet in width, tethered it to a 3 inch thick Kevlar line and flew it to a record-setting height of 13,500 feet - more than two and a half miles in the atmosphere.

But recent research into using kites as a renewable energy source would shatter that world record.

Environmentalists were quick to hail wind turbines as a viable alternative to our reliance on fossil fuels, but bird lovers hated them. It seems that Don Quixote’s giants were swatting down some of their favorite feathered friends. So why not build the windmills farther from the ground?

Indeed there are several companies considering this. Treehugger reported that a Canadian company called Magenn has invented a wind-powered generator that is a cross between a kite and a helium balloon. Held aloft by helium 1000 feet in the air, winds cause the Magnus effect where “rotation increases, lift increases, drag will be minimized because of reduced leaning, and stability increases.” Electricity generated by these floating turbines is then sent to the ground via an electrical line.

Another idea takes windmills and attaches kites. The Italian company Kite Wind Generator uses kites 1000 meters in the troposhere that “are anchored to a revolving structure on a vertical axis, analogous to a giant merry-go-round, which conveys the energy… (to a) power-plant.”

And if kites pulling a merry-go-round isn’t innovative enough, imagine if Thomas Edison invented a kite today. Recent research proposed that flying electric generators (FEGs) could harness kinetic energy in jet stream winds. These winds more than six miles above the surface of the earth produce up to 100 times more energy than winds on the ground. According to the Washington Post, “just tapping into 1 percent of the energy in high altitude winds would be enough to power all of civilization.”

Of course, if none of these other kite-based solutions solve U.S. energy problems, President Bush can just go fly his What Would Jesus Do? kite.

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Today the fifteen countries that once constituted this superpower stand at odds with one another in terms of economic opportunity, human rights, and development. The Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania are soaring as members of the European Union and NATO. Estonia was ranked top in the World Liberty Index, with its Baltic neighbors not far behind. Meanwhile Turkmenistan’s eccentric (and recently deceased) President Niyazov spent his country’s resources cultivating world class repression, bested only by North Korea.

Elsewhere, oil resources elsewhere combined with a bungled move to private markets after the fall of communism have produced a kleptocracy across the former Soviet states. Outside of the Baltics, all of the former Soviet states now rank amongst the most corrupt countries in the world. On the bright side, communism does seem to have some positive lasting effects when it comes to equality. Five of the top ten most equal countries are from the former USSR.

Having shed the planned economy, these countries have all taken wildly different paths. But what if the USSR existed today? Statastic used several different development indicators and weighted them for each country based on population (one caveat: Russia constitutes 50% of the population of the former USSR). These statistics were combined into a new rating for USSR based on the latest survey data for various development indicators.

Taken as a whole, the USSR is not a very nice place to live 16 years after the fall of communism. Corruption in the USSR is comparable to that in Libya or Rwanda. The countries of the USSR today have less economic and individual freedom than the Democratic Republic of Congo. Even the USSR’s crumbling socialized medicine contributes to a mediocre score in the United Nations Human Development Index. Today the USSR ranks at the same level as its long-forgotten communist friend, China.
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Experts and politicians have been a little divided over the past four years about exactly how long this war would last. If Dick Cheney had been right when he notoriously predicted in March 2003 that it would be over in a matter of “weeks rather than months,” then the perishable dragonfly could have outlived this war. Or if Donald Rumsfeld’s most pessimistic estimation of a 6 month war had been correct, a monarch butterfly could have outflown the conflict.

We even had a chance of keeping your pet hamster alive if Ohio had tipped John Kerry’s way. He would have started withdrawing troops at about this time in 2005. Now it’s up to a new crop of Democrats to make promises, underbid one another on withdrawal timelines, and hope that the public notices that’s we’re 2 hamsters into this war when they got to the polls next fall.

Today’s statements from President Bush that “success will take months, not days or weeks,” indicate that this war will likely continue through 2008. Three Republican frontrunners [Giulliani, McCain, Romney] have all supported the president, proposing that we maintain or increase current troop levels. It seems that if Americans elect another Republican president, the War in Iraq may have the same life expectancy of the Tasmanian Devil it has come to resemble.

Unfortunately, the war has proven capable of outlasting our own species. More than 60,000 Iraqi civilians and 3,217 U.S. troops have died since the beginning of the war.

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PBS among many others has been lamenting the decline in foreign correspondents at national and local newspapers. While on a fellowship at Harvard last fall, Christian Science Monitor journalist Jill Carroll studied the state of foreign journalism. She found that the number of foreign newspaper correspondents had decreased by more than a quarter between 2002 and 2006. Many of the familiar reasons are to blame such as the proliferation of blogs or the uptick in foreign news sources like Al Jazeera that can be called upon. But it also reflects ruthless, short-sighted cost cutting. As Frontline noted, whether your consider bloggers journalists or not 80% of the blogs aren’t producing original research. We depend as much on the newspapers as anyone.

So which cities are best served by their newspaper’s foreign desks? Using the data in Carroll’s working paper (no longer online, I’m afraid), I calculated the number of foreign correspondents per million residents of the metro areas served by the newspaper or newspapers. Although I did include the Washington Post and NY Times, this measure does not count newspapers such as USA Today or Wall Street Journal which have a national or international audience.

Big cities do well, but big cities do not necessarily devote more resources per capita to foreign desks. Although Philadelphia has the fourth most populous metro area, the Philadelphia Enquirer halved the number of foreign correspondents from 4 to 2 between 2000 and 2006. Dallas reduced its staff from 7 to 3 and Houston eliminated all 3 of its foreign correspondents over the same period. Freelance reporting is not picking up the slack. According to anecdotal accounts, freelance budgets for foreign news have been slashed at mid-sized papers across the country.

More surprising is that intellectual San Francisco lags far behind glitzy L.A. and that gritty Baltimore employs as many foreign correspondents per capita as Miami. One note is that the mid-sized market of Tampa/St. Petersburg is well served by the St. Petersburg Times. It not only boasts the largest circulation in Florida, it is also the only newspaper that has not cut its foreign staff in the last six years. One reason may be that it is run by a non-profit foundation and not by a company listed on the NYSE.

Of the 754,000 homeless, about 45% are do not find shelter each evening. The report also reveals the demographics behind homelessness: 65% are male, 45% are black, and a very high percentage of the homeless suffer from mental illness and/or substance abuse.

Perhaps the most surprising finding is the number of veterans who seem to be falling through the cracks. 18.7% of America’s homeless are veterans of war, and veterans are more than twice as likely to be homeless as those in the general population. With 141,000 homeless veterans in America, there are more troops living on our own streets than serving in Iraq.

In the wake of the uproar over the treatment of veterans at Walter Reed, perhaps we should look to the future homeless the Iraqi War will create. According to salon.com, more than 1 million have already served in our various wars on terror since 9.11.01. That means 6,000 of those who have served will be homeless in the future (see statastics below). Because veterans have a higher rate of homelessness, the war in Iraq will produce 3,000 more homeless than had we not gone to war.

Add the homeless to the casualties of war.

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Sources: Percent of homeless veterans, exhibit 3-5 (page 31) of HUD report; U.S. population of veterans: U.S. Census Bureau.

Over the past five years (2001-2005), Wimbledon Men’s Champions - usually Roger Federer - have played 53% more sets (and 66% more games) en route to the championship than the women’s champions during the same period. If the averages hold up for 2006, the Gentlemen’s Champion will have earned $51,376 per set played while the Ladies Champion would take home $75,126 per set played at Wimbledon. There you have it: women earn 46% more than men at Wimbledon.

Yesterday, Wimbledon announced that it will pay equal prize money to men and women. While I support equal pay for men and women, I also support equal play. Women should play best of five sets just as men do. It makes for some of the most exciting, suspenseful tennis matches on the men’s side. And too many women’s tennis matches are lopsided 45 minute affairs - hardly ideal for the TV ratings. Introducing the stamina factor might even out the women’s field.

There is no physiological reason that female tennis players couldn’t pull through a grueling five hour match as some men do. Women run the same marathons that men run, play on the same sized soccer fields, and work the same 40 hour week that men work.

But what if the Wimbledon standard were applied to life? What if equal pay could be earned by someone even though it only required 66% less work? Or put another way, what if women paid the same amount but received 51% more in services or products? Courts would be smaller, hoops wider, bank lines shorter, sandwiches more delicious. The world would certainly be easier (I especially support the new Wimbledon holidays and the longer Wimbledon hot dogs), but would it be fair?

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