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Neuse cleaner than in 1998
Strict state rules given some credit
Five-legged
dog gets surgery
Donors touched by Popcorn's plight
Television
Clip
Iams Pet Imaging Center
Iams to
build animal MRI center at NCSU
The Iams Co., which makes pet food and pet-care products, will open a new
magnetic resonance imaging center at North Carolina State University's Centennial
Biomedical Campus in spring 2004.
Gift of
MRI center will help treat pets
Area veterinarians will have a new way to diagnose health problems in dogs
and cats next year.
Area
home sales strengthen
Mike Walden, agricultural and resource economics
Unemployment
drops; job hunting is mixed bag
Unemployment is dropping in North Carolina, but the latest state figures show
a mixed bag when it comes to job hunting.
SUMMARY
JUDGMENT ; A WEEKLY SCORECARD OF HITS AND MISSES MAKING LOCAL NEWS
DOWN - Online music heists
Penn
State pesticide education efforts garner national recognition
Penn State's Pesticide Education Program recently was one of four such state
programs to be recognized as models by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
N.C.
State diving coach placed on leave
North Carolina State University's diving coach is on paid administrative leave
while the school investigates allegations of misconduct 37 years ago, university
officials said.
Editorial:
Get the students back home
With the University of North Carolina sytem bureaucracy moving so slowly that
mold could grow on it, Gov. Mike Easley took action Friday to make dorms at
N.C. Central University fit for human habitation.
Housing
Market Brings Change for Building Industry in Raleigh, N.C., Area
Mike Walden, agricultural and resource economics
Hepatitis
outbreak a sobering reminder of vulnerability
Lee-Ann Jaykus, food science
Breeds
Apart: Wild and domestic turkeys are facing genetic challenges
Jean-Pierre Vaillancourt, farm animal health and resource management
Some
Shops Offer A New Kind of Clean
Joe DeSimone, chemical engineering
Fantasy
as the facts of life
Men are forever dreaming of ways to seduce women. Bettina Arndt finds some
not-so-urbane myths are based on truth.
Nov. 25, 2003
News & Observer
By Wade Rawlins, staff writer
© Copyright 2003
NEW BERN -- The 248-mile Neuse River is significantly cleaner, scientists say, five years after precedent-setting rules dictated a reduction in the river's nitrogen content.
The river, which stretches from Falls Lake Reservoir in Wake County to the Pamlico Sound, provides drinking water and carries human and animal waste discharged to the sound.
The scientists don't know how much of the river's improved condition stems from changes in human behavior and how much is due to fluctuations in weather patterns.
Responding to a series of massive fish kills in the Neuse River in the 1990s, the state Environmental Management Commission adopted a set of rules aimed at reducing by 30 percent the amount of nitrogen reaching the Neuse River by 2003. The rules affect logging, development, sewage plants, factories and farms.
Nitrogen is good in limited amounts as fertilizer, but too much of it creates ecological havoc. Researchers identified nitrogen as the cause of an explosion of harmful algal blooms that use up dissolved oxygen and led to fish kills.
Last week, five years after the rules took effect, scientists, state officials and environmentalists gathered in this former colonial capital, where the Neuse broadens into a tidal estuary, to reflect on the change.
For the first time, those rules not only required sewage-plant operators to control what they dumped into the river but also made farmers control how much fertilizer ran off their fields into creeks and streams.
The rules also required developers to leave buffers along streams and creeks. Similar protections have since been put in place for the Tar-Pamlico River basin.
Ken Reckhow, director of the University of North Carolina Water Resources Research Institute, said there had been a downward trend in nitrogen concentrations in the river since 1997.
But Reckhow said it was hard to pinpoint whether that decline was due to improvements in wastewater-treatment plants, to major hurricanes flushing the river system followed by drought, to the planting of vegetative buffers along streams to capture runoff, or to all of the above.
"They are all candidates and they all may contribute," Reckhow said. "Nature is exceedingly complex."
Shifting crops helps
Today, the biggest threats to water quality in the Neuse River estuary come from fertilizer and animal waste, particularly industrial hog farms. There are roughly 1 million acres of farmland in the river basin.
Farmers in the 17 counties in the Neuse River basin report an overall average 37 percent reduction in nitrogen fertilizer.
In some counties, including Wake, Orange,and Johnston, farmers reduced nitrogen use by more than 40 percent. Only two counties, Granville and Pitt, have not met the goal. Subtracting the number of acres that went out of production, the reduction is closer to 31 percent.
That exceeds the 30 percent reduction goal, but the figure may be misleading. Other factors such as a switch attributed to market demand from corn to cotton, a crop that uses less nitrogen fertilizer, also contributed.
"We must recognize that crop shift has played a role in reduction of nitrogen," said Natalie Jones, Neuse River Basin coordinator for the state Division of Soil and Water Conservation.
With rapid development in Wake County and farther downstream, runoff pollution and sediment keep the Neuse River under pressure.
Nearly 400 big and small sewage-treatment plants are permitted to discharge treated wastewater into the Neuse and its tributaries.
The 30 largest wastewater- treatment plants, including Raleigh, Cary and Kinston, reduced nitrogen discharge by 48 percent -- exceeding the goal of a 30 percent reduction.
Some communities along the river such as Johnston County have tried innovative approaches to reduce nitrogen being dumped into the river. They've built a distribution system to pipe highly treated wastewater, called "reclaimed water," to irrigate the golf course at Johnston County Country Club and to spray at the landfill.
"If I had a glass of reclaimed water and drinking water, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference," said Ken York, the county's project coordinator. "There's no odor, no difference in clarity."
York said the county justified the $7 million cost of the project, paid for partly by a Clean Water Trust Fund grant, because its rapid population growth meant it would need to reduce pollutants from its discharge as the volume of waste increases.
"When the population grows and municipalities increase the amounts of waste discharged into the river, they will need to make further efforts to reduce the amount of nitrogen," said Lin Xu, an environmental engineer with the state Division of Water Quality. "We need to continue to maintain a 30 percent reduction."
'Running to stand still'
JoAnn Burkholder, director of the Center for Applied Aquatic Ecology at N.C. State University, said the volume of nitrogen flowing into the Neuse has declined in the past 10 years.
But Burkholder said that when she examined data from 1993 excluding the drought years 2000 through 2002, the nitrogen levels remained flat, neither better nor worse.
"Folks might be tempted to say that we've made wonderful strides in the last decade," Burkholder said. "This drought makes us look better than we are."
Burkholder said with a 25 percent increase in human population and 277 percent increase in the swine population in the Neuse River basin, it's something of an accomplishment that nitrogen concentrations had remained the same.
"We're running to stand still," she said.
Burkholder said there were other troubling signs: a drop in dissolved oxygen in the water, which fish and plants need, and a 60 percent increase in the level of ammonia, an indicator that poorly treated waste is going into the Neuse.
Marion Smith, an environmental consultant to the Neuse Basin Oversight Committee and an aide to former Gov. Jim Hunt, credited riverkeeper Rick Dove with focusing enough attention on the river's problems in the mid-1990s to build political momentum to clean up the river.
Dove, now southeastern representative of the Waterkeeper Alliance, an environmental group, said he was hesitant to reflect on victories in battles when the war to recover the Neuse was far from won. More than a million fish died in early September, he said.
"The signs of pollution spike up and down," Dove said. "At best, we can hope we have maintained an even level of river health.
Nov. 25, 2003
News & Observer
By Ryan Teague-Beckwith, staff writer
© Copyright 2003
Popcorn the five-legged dog now has three legs.
During a 2 1/2-hour operation Monday morning, a veterinary surgeon removed the dog's back two left legs, which resulted from an extremely rare genetic anomaly.
The Maltese-and-terrier mix created quite a stir in the local dog-lover community when she was found near Umstead State Park. Experts said it was unheard-of for such an animal to live long past birth.
Popcorn is believed to be between 9 months and a year old.
The extra, or supernumerary, leg was removed because it was hampering the dog's movement. The more fully developed leg was also removed because it was rotated at a 90-degree angle, rendering it useless as well.
Dr. Rebecca Tudor, who performed the amputations with an assistant, said Popcorn faced severe arthritis without the surgery. Because of the abnormalities, surgery took longer than expected, she said.
"It was a little hard to determine where the muscles and blood vessels would be because they were not in the normal spot," she said. "But it went very smoothly."
Popcorn required seven stitches and will have a 4-inch scar on her hip. After further recovery Monday night at the animal hospital, she was expected to return home today.
Dr. Frank Ansede, who runs the Raleigh animal hospital where Popcorn is being treated, received more than $3,000 in donations from more than 50 donors living as far away as Wisconsin, Louisiana and Florida.
The surgery cost about $1,200, including donated services by Tudor, an anesthesiologist from N.C. State University and a fourth-year veterinary student who plans to do a report on it.
Ansede said the remaining money would pay for spaying and further medical visits. The rest will be donated to an animal welfare charity, he said.
Nov. 24, 2003
UNC-TV
WUNC-TV's North Carolina Now news program ran footage of the announcement at the vet school of a new magnetic resonance imaging center - the Iams Pet Imaging Center - to be built on Centennial Biomedical Campus in spring 2004.
Iams to build animal MRI center at NCSU
Nov. 24, 2003
Triangle Business Journal
By staff writer
© Copyright 2003 American City Business Journals Inc.
The Iams Co., which makes pet food and pet-care products, will open a new magnetic resonance imaging center at North Carolina State University's Centennial Biomedical Campus in spring 2004.
The 3,348-square-foot Iams Pet Imaging Center will be the region's first MRI facility dedicated solely for use on pets and domestic animals. It will provide area veterinarians with diagnostic tools designed to help doctors detect and begin treatment of hard-to-diagnose health conditions earlier, more accurately and with less need for exploratory surgery, NCSU said in a release.
Iams is the first corporate partner to locate a facility on NCSU's Centennial Biomedical Campus, a 70-acre research and development "neighborhood" anchored by the university's College of Veterinary Medicine.
Veterinarians and technicians working at the new pet imaging center will be employed by the Iams Co. and also will have clinical faculty status at the College of Veterinary Medicine's Teaching Hospital.
Construction of the facility is expected to begin this fall.
The facility at NCSU will be Iams' second pet imaging center. The company opened its first in Vienna, Va., in 2002.
Gift of MRI center will help treat pets
Nov. 25, 2003
News & Observer
By staff writer
© Copyright 2003 News & Observer
Area veterinarians will have a new way to diagnose health problems in dogs and cats next year.
The Iams Co., a maker of pet foods, aims to open a magnetic resonance imaging center for animals at N.C. State University in the spring. The 3,348-square-foot center, to be next to the College of Veterinary Medicine's Teaching Hospital, will be the first pet MRI facility in the region.
Using MRIs, veterinarians can determine the cause and location of diseases in animals and can treat them efficiently.
Iams opened its first pet imaging center in Vienna, Va., in 2002.
Unemployment drops; job hunting is mixed bag
Nov. 24, 2003
Associated Press; WCNC-TV
By staff writer
© Copyright 2003 Associated Press
Unemployment is dropping in North Carolina, but the latest state figures show a mixed bag when it comes to job hunting. The state says the October jobless rate was 6.1 percent, the third straight month of a decline.
The state manufacturing industry saw a loss of 3,200 jobs last month, while 4,000 North Carolinians dropped out of the labor market. Still, an N.C. State University economist predicts the state will add up to 70,000 jobs in the next year.
SUMMARY JUDGMENT ; A WEEKLY SCORECARD OF HITS AND MISSES MAKING LOCAL NEWS
Nov. 24, 2003
Greensboro News & Record; ProQuest
By staff writer
© Copyright 2003 ProQuest
DOWN - Georgia's blatant attempt at Petty theft - Dangling tax incentives, the state of Georgia attempts to outbid Richard Petty's home county, Randolph, for a $75 million Disney movie about the NASCAR legend. What's next, a biopic on Andy Griffith set in Manhattan?
UP - Triumphs for "Triadism" - In a welcome, if long-overdue, outbreak of collaboration, the Greensboro, High Point and Winston- Salem Chambers of Commerce pool resources to devise a regional strategy for economic development. Meanwhile, the arts councils in Greensboro, High Point and Winston-Salem join forces to solicit artwork that will be displayed on area billboards. Good news comes in threes.
DOWN - Online music heists -- The recording industry gets up- close and personal in its crackdown on music pirates, requesting by subpoena the identities of two computer users at N.C. State and UNC- Chapel Hill, respectively, who allegedly are sharing R&B and rap tunes illegally. "Cadillacman" and "Hulk," beware. The Music Police are hot on your e-trails.
UP AND DOWN - Just saying no to tolls - Gov. Mike Easley makes himself perfectly clear: He does not want to make I-95 a toll road. Less clear is where else the governor proposes to get the money to upgrade the dangerous, outdated stretch of highway.
UP - Can you hear me now? - Well, finally, yes, but what took you so long? The Bush administration at long last listens to the desperate cries of the textile industry and imposes quotas on foreign imports.
UP - Shocking news for bad guys - The Greensboro City Council makes electric fences legal in the city limits, bad news for anyone who attempts to go where he shouldn't be and to take what isn't his. Caption: Photo and Mug Photos; Richard Petty Easley BILL COOKE/ The Associated Press Actor Dennis Quaid climbs into a race car before taking a few practice laps around the Homestead MotorSports Complex in 1999 in Homestead, Fla. A film of Richard Petty's life and racing career will soon appear on the big screen. Whether the film showcases the North Carolina landscapes where "The King" became famous remains uncertain. Quaid is expected to portray Richard Petty's father, Lee. The role of Richard Petty is still in casting, according to Petty Enterprises.
Penn State pesticide education efforts garner national recognition
Nov. 25, 2003
Penn State Live
By staff writer
© Copyright 2003 Penn State Live
University Park, Pa. -- Penn State's Pesticide Education Program recently was one of four such state programs to be recognized as models by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
In its publication, "Helping People Use Pesticides Safely," USDA's Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service highlighted the pesticide safety education programs at Penn State, Purdue University, North Carolina State University and Washington State University, saying that the programs "demonstrate the commitment to excellence shared by most pesticide safety education programs."
Nationally, pesticide safety education training is coordinated by USDA-CSREES at land-grant universities. Funding is provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, state governments and other sources.
Led by John Ayers, professor of plant pathology, the Penn State program was cited for making "great strides in addressing urban concerns about pesticide issues." The publication noted the program's outreach initiatives and its leadership of Penn State's West Nile Virus educational efforts.
The program also was lauded for producing a series of consumer fact sheets, and for creating educational materials aimed at children -- including a computer-based game -- featuring the cartoon character, D.B. Pest. Kerry Richards, manager of the program's Pest Management Information Center, developed D.B. Pest to teach such concepts as integrated pest management, alternatives to pesticide use and safe use of pesticides when necessary.
In 2002, Penn State's Pesticide Education Program trained more than 5,200 new pesticide applicators and recertified another 25,600. In addition, the program reached more than 45,000 people through educational sessions for consumer groups, 4-H youth, school children, educators, Master Gardeners and others.
N.C. State diving coach placed on leave
Nov. 24, 2003
Associated Press; NBC-17; Wilmington Morning Star; Greensboro News & Record; Winston-Salem Journal; News 14 Carolina; WTVD-11; WRAL-TV; Charlotte Observer; MLive.com, MI; Biloxi Sun Herald, MS; Duluth News Tribune, MN; Myrtle Beach Sun News, SC; Bradenton Herald, FL; Fort Wayne News Sentinel, IN; Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, GA; San Luis Obispo Tribune, CA; Monterey County Herald, CA; Macon Telegraph, GA; WVEC.com, VA; Sarasota Herald-Tribune, FL; St. Paul (MN) Pioneer Press
By staff writer
© Copyright 2003 Associated Press
North Carolina State University's diving coach is on paid administrative leave while the school investigates allegations of misconduct 37 years ago, university officials said.
John Candler, who has coached 16 All-Americans, 49 Atlantic Coast Conference champions and one Olympian in his 35 years at N.C. State, will remain on leave until the investigation has been completed, a spokeswoman for Chancellor Marye Anne Fox said.
The investigation was triggered by an e-mail message sent Wednesday to Fox's office by Jane Schneider, 53, of East Lansing, Mich. Candler met with university athletics director Lee Fowler the next day.
According to circuit court records from Washtenaw County, Mich., a John Candler from Columbia, S.C., and formerly from Ann Arbor, Mich., was sentenced on Nov. 30, 1966, after pleading guilty to indecent liberties with a 12-year-old girl. He served five years of probation.
It wasn't clear if that John Candler was the same person as the John Candler who coaches at N.C. State. "That's probably one of the things that we will be looking into," NCSU spokeswoman Debbie Griffith said Monday.
In 1985, N.C. State's Candler was charged with taking indecent liberties with a 15-year-old Wake County girl. According to Wake Superior court records, Candler pleaded guilty and received a suspended sentence. He served three years of probation and was ordered to undergo therapy.
Schneider said Monday she knew the victim in the Michigan case. She told The News & Observer that she wanted to make sure that N.C. State knew about that conviction.
"People should be entitled to make an informed decision when someone has a history like this and they're going to be coaching young people," she said. "If they knew they were hiring a man with this criminal background, is this the type of man they want coaching their students?"
Candler has been coaching either part-time or full-time at N.C. State since 1968. According to an online biography, Candler was an All-America diver at the University of Michigan.
Debbie Griffith, N.C. State's associate vice chancellor for public affairs, said that Fox has shared the contents of Wednesday's e-mail with Fowler.
"We want to make sure that we investigate this fully," Griffith said.
Candler, 63, could not be reached for comment. His attorney, Jack Nichols, said that all they know at this point was that Candler had been placed on leave after N.C. State officials received an e-mail. Nichols declined to comment further.
Editorial: Get the students back home
Nov. 25, 2003
The Wilmington Star-News
By staff report
© Copyright 2003 The Wilmington Star-News.
With the University of North Carolina system bureaucracy moving so slowly that mold could grow on it, Gov. Mike Easley took action Friday to make dorms at N.C. Central University fit for human habitation.
It was the right thing to do, as well as a well-deserved poke in the ribs for the university system, which is – let us say – not always brilliant and expeditious in its management of building projects. (For example, how come four-year-old dorms got moldy in the first place?)
This one needed to move, and move fast. It's been more than three months since 500-plus students were evicted from dorm rooms blighted by mold. Ever since, the refugees have been living in motels and apartments.
University officials take umbrage at the notion that they could have moved in faster in hiring consultants, making plans, holding meetings, etc., etc., etc.
Perhaps. But as the governor noted, it's hard to believe things wouldn't been farther along if the problem had cropped up in Chapel Hill.
As a graduate of N.C. Central's law school, Gov. Easley is well aware that the historically black campus has not always gotten its fair share of attention, not to mention money.
In any case, black legislators wanted action, and so did he. So he bypassed the university and asked the State Construction Office to take the job. The goal is to get the dorms gutted and cleaned at least a semester sooner than the university would have.
Maybe Gov. Easley didn't have the legal power to do what he did. But it was doubtful university officials wanted a public fight with the governor over whether they could take even longer to clean up moldy dorms.
The Trouble With Timing We're always told to buy low and sell high. Sounds simple and it makes sense. So why is such an easy rule so hard to follow?
Nov. 24, 2003
CNNMoney; Black Enterprise Magazine
By staff report
© Copyright 2003 CNN
Market timing. Those two words used to make most professional investors scoff. Now, in the wake of this fall's mutual fund trading scandal, they make nearly every investor shudder.
But that's because today's headlines have changed the meaning of the term. In its new usage, market timing describes how speculators rapidly trade mutual funds to cash in on small pricing gaps between markets. In the original definition, market timing means shifting your money into cash or bonds when you think stocks are overpriced and moving back into stocks when you think they have gotten cheap.
Most pundits insist that traditional market timing is the investing equivalent of chocolate-covered arsenic--seductive but lethal. Conventional wisdom is so negative that whenever you hear "market timing," the next two words are almost always "doesn't work."
But if the whole point of investing is to buy low and sell high, what's so bad about refusing to buy stocks when they are overvalued? Isn't that exactly what Warren Buffett did in 1969 when he liquidated his Buffett Partnership Ltd.--and similar to what he did in the late 1990s when he went into a virtual moratorium on buying stocks? Isn't it what the great Benjamin Graham advocated in his book The Intelligent Investor when he wrote that "sound procedure would call for reducing the common-stock component below 50% when in the judgment of the investor the market level has become dangerously high"? In short, as is so often the case with conventional wisdom on investing, the truth about market timing is more complex than either its proponents or its opponents care to admit.
WHAT DOES "WORK" MEAN?
Let's start by asking whether market timing really works. To paraphrase Bill Clinton, the answer depends on what the meaning of the word work is. Professional market timers say they seek to capture most of the upside of stocks while avoiding most of the downside. They are trying to smooth the ride by reducing the volatility of daily returns. In that narrow sense, there's no doubt that market timing works. Taking your money out of stocks some of the time is virtually guaranteed to make your return less volatile.
Let's say you time the market by flipping coins: On heads, you sell your stocks and keep the proceeds in cash; on tails, you get back into stocks. Since stocks often produce short-term losses, while cash never does, your market timing by coin flips will ensure that you make money during at least some of the stock market's biggest downswings. So your return will almost certainly be smoother--but it's unlikely to be higher. After all, your coin flips will lead you to miss many of the market's biggest upswings as well.
So the intelligent investor should concede that market timing "works" only if it can lower your risk and raise your returns. And in that sense, the question of whether market timing works is much less clear-cut.
HISTORY IN FORESIGHT
The key to market timing is finding a valuation tool that can reliably tell you, not in hindsight but in real time, when the stock market is overvalued. And many of the world's best investing minds--including Nobel-prizewinning economist William Sharpe, plus finance professors Robert Shiller of Wharton, John Campbell of Harvard, Jeremy Siegel of Yale and Elroy Dimson of the London Business School--have put market history under a microscope, looking for just such a measure.
I spent days plowing through research papers and books bristling with polynomial equations, and by the end I had two results: a bad headache and a clear consensus. Price/earnings ratios, price-to- book value, dividend yields and even the ratio of stock prices to the replacement value of corporate assets (called the q ratio) can all be used to show, with perfect reliability, when the stock market was overvalued. Unfortunately, it does not appear that any of them can be used to indicate, with reasonable reliability, when the stock market is or will be overvalued.
Price-to-book value, for instance, turns out to have been a great way to forecast what the market was going to do up until about 1960; then it stopped working. For years, dividend yields predicted future returns quite well; then along came the 1990s, when nobody gave a hang about dividends. These valuation ratios never send investors a singing telegram announcing, "I'm not gonna work anymore for you! It's time to time the market with something new!" Instead, the power of these measures to predict the market's next turn just withers away.
What about price/earnings ratios? They do have some predictive power. Finance professors Jack Wilson and Charles Jones of North Carolina State University have created a definitive record of P/E ratios on Standard & Poor's 500-stock index (and its predecessors) all the way back to 1871. Their results enable us, for the first time, to look back at a continuous series of market valuations. When the market's P/E ratio is below 10, Wilson and Jones' numbers show, you should definitely buy: From such levels, stocks produce extraordinarily high future returns. But the opposite is not true: According to Wilson and Jones' data, when the market's P/E is at 20 or above--up in nosebleed territory, well beyond its long-term average of 16--stocks still generate fat gains over the years to come (see the chart at right).
So history shows something profoundly strange: Investing in stocks can pay off not just when the market appears to be undervalued but also when it seems overvalued.
HISTORY IN HINDSIGHT
Yet the temptation to time remains powerful. You're probably still kicking yourself for not selling your stocks at the end of 1999, when you knew the market was overpriced. The truth is, if you're kicking yourself, you're kidding yourself. You've fallen into one of the worst pitfalls for an investor. It's called hindsight bias. In a series of brilliant experiments, Carnegie Mellon psychologist Baruch Fischhoff has shown that once we discover how things turned out, we not only feel that no other outcome was possible, but that we knew precisely what would happen all along.
In 1972, Fischhoff asked several dozen people to forecast the outcomes of President Richard Nixon's upcoming trips to China and Russia. Few of them expected the country's relationship with these two historical enemies to improve. Nixon's trips, however, went very well. Then Fischhoff went back to the people that he had surveyed and asked them to repeat their earlier predictions. More than three-quarters of them "remembered" having been more optimistic than their original forecasts showed they had actually been.
It's obvious in late 2003 that in late 1999 the market was about to crash, but it was far from obvious at the time. Back then, most people--probably including you, no matter how you remember it now-- were bullish.
How could it be otherwise? After all, if everybody and his brother had known that a crash was coming, then the market would never have been at those record levels in the first place.
TIMING BY AUTOPILOT
The ideal solution to timing the markets already exists--but so far mainly in theory. Someday all mutual fund companies will offer an automatic rebalancing program that will systematically sell whatever has gone up the most and buy whatever has gone down the most. In a retirement account, auto-rebalancing will have no tax consequences and will keep you on target to hit your goals.
Let's say you've chosen to keep 70% of your money in stocks and 30% in bonds. Now assume that stocks lose a fifth of their value while bonds stand still, leaving you 65% in stocks and 35% in bonds. Auto-rebalancing would sell your bonds down to 30% and put the proceeds in stocks, getting you back to your 70-30 target. You wouldn't have to touch the money or make a decision.
Graham wrote that because human nature inevitably makes investors hanker to buy in bull markets and sell in bear markets, "we favor some kind of mechanical method for varying the proportion of bonds to stocks in the investor's portfolio. The chief advantage, perhaps, is that such a formula will give him something to do."
Until auto-rebalancing becomes available, you have to rebalance by hand. Every six months, on dates you can easily remember, smooth out your retirement accounts--sell what's up and buy what's down until your asset allocation is back to your target level. Do it twice a year, every year; it's market timing that works, in every good sense of the word.
T. Rowe Price recently introduced quarterly auto-rebalancing for its 401(k) investors. Let's see if other fund companies have the gumption to implement one of Graham's most underappreciated brainstorms.
E-mail Jason Zweig, editor of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor, at investor@moneymail.com.
The problem with P/E
Buy stocks when P/Es are extremely low, and you're likely to do quite well. Oddly, you can also get decent returns if you buy when P/Es are unusually high.
AVERAGE ANNUAL RETURNS
After years when the After Years when the market P/E is below 10 market P/E is above 20 All Years
1 year 16.2% 11.6% 10.2% 3 years 14.8% 9.6% 9.4% 5 years 15.1% 10.3% 9.3% 10 years 14.2% 8.2% 9.1%
What's wrong with shunning stocks when the market appears overvalued?
Housing Market Brings Change for Building Industry in Raleigh, N.C., Area
Nov. 25, 2003
CNNMoney; News & Observer; Knight-Ridder; Black Enterprise Magazine
By staff report
© Copyright 2003 News & Observer
Nov. 25--With Triangle home sales surging at record levels, you'd think the real estate industry would be in full rapture.
Sales of homes in Orange, Durham, Johnston and Wake counties are up 18 percent in the first 10 months of the year. Last month, almost 1,823 homes changed hands -- a 21 percent increase over October 2002.
After two years of sluggish sales, brokers say they are again seeing a volume of business similar to the late 1990s when the market set records for seven consecutive years.
But that's where the similarities between this year and the previous boon -- when dramatic job growth brought thousands of buyers into the Triangle -- end.
"This market is a lot different from the one we had a few years ago," said Ida Terbet, an agent for Re/Max United in Raleigh. "It's taking a lot longer to sell houses, and we don't have nearly the buyers moving into the area like before -- the majority of buyers are local."
Brokers aren't the only ones feeling the effects of a housing market fueled largely by local buyers moving out of rental housing or shopping for a larger house to take advantage of historically low mortgage rates. With more buyers choosing to buy existing homes rather than new ones, builders, suppliers, landscapers and home furnishing retailers are being left out of this sales boom.
"Everything else being equal, you'd rather have new construction benefiting because it employs so many more people, and there's a multiplier effect that comes with purchasing a new home that spreads to other businesses," said Michael L. Walden, an economics professor at N.C. State University.
Two factors help define this year's Triangle housing market. Unlike the late 1990s, when job growth topped 6.5 percent a year, job creation this year is just 1 percent ahead of 2002 -- when the area lost jobs. Fewer new jobs means that fewer people are moving to the Triangle looking for housing.
The industry also is saddled with an inventory of unsold housing well above levels during the last real estate bull market. Those homes, many of which were listed in 2001 when large scale layoffs peaked, are stiff competition for new home builders.
"The notion is that what's happened this year has more to do with interest rates," Walden said. "It's causing a reshuffling of people already in the community."
When buyers trade up from an apartment or to a larger home across town, they may take most of their furniture and appliances with them. Outfitting a new house has many more costs, which pump money into hundreds of area businesses.
Local buyers may also be in less of a hurry to move, pushing sellers to lower their asking price.
Three years ago, James Campbell hoped to move out of his Garner apartment and buy a home, but he decided against buying until his wife, Abi, could find a new job and they could pay down their credit card debt.
This year, Campbell said he's searching for a home in a much different market.
"Everybody has been willing to pay the closing costs ... the ones that's not willing, I won't even consider their house," said Campbell, who works at Pepsi's bottling plant in Raleigh. "For everyone that says they won't negotiate with us, there's 10 that will."
Without the boost from new buyers moving to the area, many builders of new homes are suffering. Housing starts in the Triangle have fallen since 1999, and new home sales have hovered at roughly 12,000 per year since 1999.
Sales of new homes in the Triangle for the first nine months are less than 1 percent ahead of last year's pace, according to Market Opportunity Research Enterprises, a Rocky Mount company that tracks residential trends.
Even with a smaller amount of new home inventory this year than last, several builders have begun advertising incentives to buyers that take $10,000 off the sales price of homes.
Centex Homes, one of the nation's largest builders, expects to sell about 800 homes in the Triangle during its fiscal year, about 11 percent more than a year ago. Hampton Pitts, head of Centex's Triangle operations, said his company is using its access to financing to buy land and build while other companies are stalled.
But Pitts said there is no comparison between his business in the late 1990s and what he's doing now.
"The dynamics of selling to an in-town buyer are totally different; one is a need-based purchaser who is moving into the area, and the other is a want-based purchaser who could walk away from a sale," Pitts said. "It's a tougher sale, and they take more time."
Strong sales this year are chipping away at the supply of homes seeking buyers. In October, the Triangle Multiple Listing Services had roughly a 5.9-month supply of homes on the market. A year ago, the supply of homes seeking buyers was worth 6.9 months of sales. Nationally, the supply of homes on the market is about four months.
Rising numbers of buyers this year are a welcome change for real estate agents whose commissions are coming back from the slow fade of the past two years.
Phyllis Wolborsky, an agent with Coldwell Banker Howard Perry & Walston in Raleigh, said she is working with more buyers who are confident enough about the market to buy a home before their current house sells. Wolborsky said she sees other positive signs.
"I've also had many more relocation buyers, and I see more coming, and there's not as much inventory out there," Wolborsky said. "But I'm not breaking out the noisemakers yet."
Hepatitis outbreak a sobering reminder of vulnerability
Nov. 24, 2003
Scripps Howard News Service, Times Record News (PA); Knoxville News Sentinel, TN; Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Rocky Mountain News (Denver), Memphis Commercial Appeal, Birmingham Post-Herald, Knoxville News-Sentinel, Albuquerque Tribune, Cincinnati Post, Corpus Christi Caller-Times, Bremerton Sun, Evansville Courier & Press, Ft. Pierce Tribune, Abilene Reporter-News, Ventura County (Cal.) Star
By Byron Spice, staff report
© Copyright 2003
The hepatitis A outbreak that has killed three in Pennsylvania has provided a sobering reminder of just how vulnerable the world's food-distribution system is to either intentional or inadvertent tainting.
New federal regulations regarding the transportation and distribution of fresh produce, designed to address food-terrorism concerns, will take effect next month. Nevertheless, many food-safety experts maintain that the supply chain will continue to be vulnerable.
The outbreak, which sickened patrons of a Chi-Chi's restaurant near Pittsburgh, has been traced to contaminated green onions shipped from Mexico.
Only a month ago, the Food and Drug Administration issued a report assessing the risk of food terrorism and concluded "there is a high likelihood, over the course of a year, that a significant number of people will be affected by an act of food terrorism, or by an incident of unintentional food contamination that results in serious food-borne illness."
Given the frequency of food-borne disease - the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates about 1 in 4 Americans is sickened by food each year - anticipating a significant outbreak of food-borne illness in a year's time is akin to predicting the Pittsburgh Steelers will field a football team next season.
But with a new and evolving threat such as bioterrorism, FDA officials insist, any kind of prediction must be dubious.
"Can (food terrorism) happen? Yes," said Ted Labuza, a professor of food science and technology at the University of Minnesota. "Will it happen? I don't know."
Hepatitis A virus is an unlikely agent of bioterrorists. Growing this or any other intestinal virus in sufficient quantity for sabotage is all but impossible technically, said Lee-Ann Jaykus, a food scientist at North Carolina State University who studies hepatitis A in produce.
Hepatitis A is endemic in much of the world, but that doesn't make it easy to gather fresh virus. The only way Jaykus can do her own research, she noted, is by collaborating with physicians who can provide her virus from their hepatitis patients.
Hepatitis A nevertheless is a prime example of how devastating a food-borne disease can be. In what may be the largest food-borne disease incident in history, almost 300,000 people in China were sickened with hepatitis A caused by tainted clams in 1991.
"If an unintentional contamination of one food, such as clams, can affect 300,000 individuals, a concerted, deliberate attack on food could be devastating, especially if a more dangerous chemical, biological or radionuclear agent were used," according to the FDA's risk assessment.
Food solves one of the biggest hurdles facing potential bioterrorists: a delivery system.
Placing anthrax spores in postal envelopes killed five people and sickened 17 in fall 2001 and created a panic in places like Washington. If a terrorist intended to kill or disable large numbers, a more efficient delivery system would be needed.
CDC officials say sabotage of food and water would be the easiest way to launch a bioterror attack.
Anthrax and botulism are often cited as possible bioterror weapons because they can be deadly; both can contaminate food. Other likely bioweapons are less deadly, but perhaps easier to disperse - agents like salmonella, shigella, E. coli 0157:H7 and ricin.
Large-scale food terrorism is speculation today, but it may not be for long. U.S. troops in Afghanistan, for instance, found U.S. agricultural documents that had been translated into Arabic and training manuals in al Qaeda safe houses that included extensive sections on agricultural terrorism.
Early this year, the CIA investigated a possible al Qaeda plot in London to use ricin to poison the food of British troops. And in September, the FBI issued a warning that terrorists might be using two toxins, nicotine and solanine, to poison food and water.
Many acts of food sabotage have been reported through the years, though many seem to have more to do with disgruntled employees than international terrorists. For instance, a supermarket employee in Michigan last December mixed an oily insecticide including nicotine into 250 pounds of ground beef. More than 100 people fell sick.
In a celebrated example of bioterrorism, a religious cult used salmonella to contaminate salad bars to disrupt an election in a small Oregon town in 1984. More than 750 people were sickened and 45 hospitalized.
Breeds Apart: Wild and domestic turkeys are facing genetic challenges
Nov. 25, 2003
Salt Lake Tribune
By Greg Lavine, staff report
© Copyright 2003 Salt Lake Tribune
With the approach of Thanksgiving, you may wonder why all those plump turkeys neatly arranged in your grocer's refrigerated meat section look exactly alike.
There's a good reason for that uniform appearance -- the turkeys are almost carbon copies of one another. Decades of specialized breeding has focused on creating traits that consumers desire, such as extra breast meat.
In the process, these grocery-store-bound birds have lost the genetic diversity found in their ancestors. But that doesn't mean that today's wild turkeys are in the clear, as they face their own set of genetic woes.
Without enough genetic diversity, populations may be less able to deal with emerging diseases or climate changes. If a deadly disease strikes a genetically varied group, some creatures may survive and help future generations adapt.
Wild turkey researchers seek ways to improve genetic diversity in the remaining populations. On the other side of the turkey spectrum, poultry scientists are trying to defend against risks faced by genetically similar domesticated birds.
A vast majority of the turkeys destined for Thanksgiving meals this week are from a single breed: Broad Breasted White. According to Slow Food U.S.A., close to 400 million of these birds grace U.S. dinner tables through the year. Roughly 10,000 turkeys eaten each year are known as heritage breeds.
Don Bixby, of the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy, said there was a time when Broad Breasted White was not such a poultry powerhouse.
Before World War II, small farms raised flocks of turkeys for local consumption, he said. These turkey lines sported names such as Jersey Buff, Blue Slate, Narragansett and Bourbon Red.
In the 1950s, turkey breeding began moving to an industrialized model as companies sought more uniform products. In the mid-1960s, the Broad Breasted White emerged as the breed that ruled the roost.
Broad Breasted Whites are primed to develop quickly, which cuts down on feeding costs, and produce more breast meat, said Jean-Pierre Vaillancourt, a professor of veterinary medicine at North Carolina State University.
Meticulous breeding led to this turkey transformation.
"They've built them more like a soccer ball than a torpedo, which is their natural shape," Bixby said.
The American Livestock Breeds
Conservancy helps preserve lines of commercial breeds that are no longer economically
viable. These heritage breeds not only offer consumers a choice for Thanksgiving
dinner, they also serve as a genetic safety net in case the industry needs to
alter Broad Breasted White traits.
Global turkeys: Today, three international corporations control nearly 90 percent
of the world's turkey breeding market. No matter what brand you pick at the
supermarket, chances are your bird is a product of Nicholas Turkeys, Hybrid
Turkeys or British United Turkey.
Government researchers, academic scientists and poultry industry experts conduct research to help maintain and improve the Broad Breasted White. "The number one priority of this research is to ensure the health and well-being of the flocks," said Sherrie Rosenblatt of the National Turkey Federation.
Vaillancourt, the North Carolina State University poultry scientist, said some genetic diversity remains in modern commercial turkeys. Each leading breeding company maintains at least two different genetic lines of turkey. The industry takes precautions against the threat that a disease could wipe out a genetic line of turkeys. Each major breeding operation splits its turkey stocks across two continents, reducing the risk that a U.S. disease outbreak could affect turkeys in Europe, said Vaillancourt, whose funding comes from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the U.S. Poultry and Egg Association and the National Turkey Federation, among other sources.
Turkey-breeding operations also provide veterinary services and other support to family farms, which are contracted to raise the turkeys. While steps are taken to prevent turkeys from coming into contact with diseases in the first place, some companies maintain a small stock of turkeys with more genetic diversity than the Broad Breasted White.
"You never know when you're going to need some of those characteristics," Vaillancourt said, adding that it can take up to three years to breed in a new trait.
Bixby, of the livestock conservancy, said today's industrial turkeys can no longer run and need help to mate. Breeders rely on artificial insemination to keep these lines going.
Industry officials argue
that artificial insemination allows companies to more closely control the uniform
look of the product.
Wild birds: While domesticated turkeys intentionally have less genetic diversity,
their wild counterparts face a similar, though less drastic, set of genetic
problems.
The United States' wild turkeys were nearly plucked out of existence in the 1900s thanks in part to habitat destruction and overhunting. During the Great Depression, an estimated 30,000 wild turkeys remained nationwide, according to the National Wild Turkey Federation. Today, the North American population has climbed to about 5.6 million.
"They came back with a fury," said Karen Mock, a wildlife scientist at Utah State University in Logan.
While these populations are in no danger of extinction, there has been a significant decrease in genetic diversity among the birds, said Mock, who studies wild turkeys among other creatures.
Mock has investigated relic turkey populations in almost a dozen states from Alabama to Florida to New Mexico. Some of these populations have been separated from one another for hundreds of years. Each of these source populations have limited genetic diversity.
The remaining wild turkey sub-species are Eastern, Florida, Rio Grande, Merriam's and Gould's. Another original turkey sub-species from southern Mexico is thought to have disappeared. Utah today supports populations of Merriam's and Rio Grande.
"If it gets severe enough," Mock said of low genetic diversity levels, "you can get inbreeding depression."
These sorts of reproductive problems can range from hens producing fewer eggs to laying less viable eggs, said Mock, whose funding sources include USU's Berryman Institute and the National Wild Turkey Federation.
Wildlife managers have introduced turkeys into new areas, she said. The process, known as translocation, involves taking 10 or 20 birds from source populations and letting them found a colony elsewhere.
In some cases, the birds experience a population boom. Experts may then take a few birds from the translocated population and plop them down in a new region. This cycle can continue indefinitely, though part of Mock's research investigates the soundness of the practice.
From a sheer numbers standpoint, it appears to be a successful operation. Genetically speaking, it may be more of a flop.
"You're founding a population on a very low number of individuals," she said.
When a group is picked to settle a new area, those settlers take only part of the source population's genetic diversity. If you keep taking birds from translocated populations, it's like making a copy of a copy of a copy -- each new version is more faded than the last.
Wild turkey researchers hope these studies will one day offer clues for restoring genetic diversity.
As wildlife scientists continue to help wild populations, industry researchers will seek to keep Broad Breasted Whites on your dinner table for many Thanksgivings to come.
Some Shops Offer A New Kind of Clean
Nov. 25, 2003
Washington Post
By staff report
© Copyright 2003 Washington Post
Normandy Cleaners is a small shop, barely noticeable in the stretch of storefronts at the Potomac Promenade Shopping Center in Potomac. Even its new white neon "Natural CO 2 Cleaners" sign gets too washed out to read on bright days.
"It's hard to see," says Gongsan Park, vowing to change the sign so customers will know this is now an environmentally safe, health-conscious "alternative dry cleaners."
Two months ago, Gongsan and her husband, Jaeman Park, who have owned and operated Normandy Cleaners for nearly six years, invested in cutting-edge cleaning technology to replace the standard but controversial dry cleaning method. The Parks are among the first cleaners in the metropolitan area to offer the liquid carbon-dioxide cleaning method.
The standard solvent used in dry cleaning is perchloroethylene, commonly known as "perc." More than 90 percent of the nation's 33,000 cleaners use the chemical, which the Environmental Protection Agency lists as a pollutant of air and groundwater. Cleaners are required to follow EPA regulations in handling perc and disposing of its byproducts at hazardous waste facilities.
Perc also is considered a health risk: Laboratory studies on animals have found high-dose exposure to be toxic and possibly carcinogenic. Studies have shown that exposure even at lower levels can cause headaches, nausea and dizziness.
The Parks decided perc is no perk for their customers. "Now we don't worry about our health or the environment," says Gongsan Park of their new CO 2 system. They chose it after traveling to New York, New Jersey and California over the past year to see available CO 2 machines and other promising environmentally safe cleaning alternatives, such as wet-cleaning and silicone-based systems. "Now we smell some detergent, some soap, but no chemical smell with CO 2 ," she says.
Joe DeSimone, professor of chemistry and chemical engineering at the University of North Carolina and North Carolina State University, says CO 2 doesn't beat up clothes like perc does.
"Perc is a hell of a degreasing solvent and it will strip everything off a garment. It is something that should be in a garage washing engine parts," says DeSimone, who designed the first biodegradable CO 2 -soluble detergent and launched the first CO 2 commercial cleaning technology company in 1998.
Consumer Reports conducted a study for its February issue that compared the cleaning of all alternative technologies with conventional perc-based dry cleaning. The CO 2 method, it concluded, "gave the best results. . . . The clothing didn't change shape, shrink or stretch. There was little or no change in the color or the texture of the fabrics."
But DeSimone says dry cleaning owners are slow to change over to CO 2 systems because of cost -- the Parks invested more than $200,000 for theirs. Cleaners nationwide using CO 2 systems still number in the dozens instead of hundreds.
"It's just a matter of time," says DeSimone of the hope that environmentally safe technology will one day replace perc.
Meanwhile, environmental and health advocates are pressing the dry-cleaning industry to rid itself of perc. Last week, environmental groups filed a suit asking a federal court to order the EPA to review the health risks from perc emissions from dry cleaners and to set new standards. Southern California became the first region in the country to ban perc by 2020. Other states have passed regulations imposing fees on dry cleaners to help pay for cleaning up perc-contaminated sites.
"We don't endorse one solvent over another," says Nora Nealis, spokeswoman for the National Cleaners Association, a trade group that embraces a 2001 report by the American Council on Science and Health which concluded perc is not hazardous to humans when used according to regulations.
Meanwhile, the Parks, who emigrated from Seoul in 1996, believe the CO 2 system will pay back their investment. "We believe people will want to come here because of this," Gongsan Park says.
Nov. 25, 2003
Sydney Morning Herald
By staff report
© Copyright 2003
'Fellatio reduces risk of breast cancer." It was hardly surprising that last month's CNN health bulletin made news around the world. The story was published in newspapers from Chile to Croatia, reporting that women who swallow semen on a regular basis may reduce their risk of breast cancer by up to 40 per cent. This was according to a North Carolina State University study.
One of the researchers, Dr Helena Shifteer, was quoted saying that, since the results have been known: "I try to fellate at least once every other night to reduce my chances." You're right. It was a spoof. And a mighty successful one.
The web site which posted the original article received more than 667,000 hits on a single day soon after the story broke. But within a week Brandon Williamson, the honours student who wrote the story, responded to legal threats by apologising for the false report to his university and to CNN and to "all men who did not take advantage of this article in time ..."
Williamson wasn't the first. While the internet has greatly increased the exposure of such stories, there's a long history of such false reports appearing in the press.
My favourite was a story three years ago, claiming to be from The New England Journal of Medicine, entitled "Ogling breasts makes men live longer".
The main thrust of these stories is that sex is good for you. That oral sex is good for you and swallowing is even better. I have no doubt that the driving force behind this cheerful mischief-making is the eternal supply and demand problem - with men always on the lookout for good excuses to lure women into the cot.
Back in the real world of proper science, there is a growing evidence that supports some of these fantasies. For a start: "Oral sex makes pregnancies safer." It's true, research by Professor Gus Dekker, a maternal-fetal medicine specialist at the University of Adelaide, shows. Dekker compared 41 pregnant women with pre-eclampsia - a condition where the mother's blood pressure soars during pregnancy - to 44 without.
He found 82 per cent of those without the condition practised fellatio compared with 44 per cent of those with it. The explanation? Semen contains a growth factor which helps persuade a mother's immune system to accept sperm. Regular exposure before pregnancy helps her immune system get used to her partner's sperm.
As for the link to cancer, it's just possible that semen could have some effect on cancer of the cervix or ovaries. There's research showing oral delivery of TGFbeta (transforming growth factor beta), one of the key molecules in semen, can increase the number and activity of "natural killer" cells which are important in recognising and killing aberrant cells that give rise to tumours.
An Adelaide University researcher, Dr Sarah Robertson, a leading Australian scientist working in the fertility area, is involved in animal research showing TGFbeta activates an inflammatory response in the cervix and ovaries after intercourse, which may lead to increased activity in these killer cells, guarding against cancer.
Yet Robertson suggests women may not need to swallow semen to gain these benefits - should the scientific research ultimately confirm this possible link. An alternative source of TGFbeta is cow's milk, which for many women is a far easier act to swallow. Plus there are pharmaceutical companies working on freeze-dried semen products, in tablet form.
But an even stronger link between sex and cancer has been found in recent work by a Melbourne research team led by Graham Giles, from the Cancer Council Victoria. Giles's team has found men can reduce their risk of prostate cancer through regular ejaculation.
Comparing the sexual habits of a group of 1000 men who had developed prostate cancer with 1250 who had not, they found men who ejaculated more than five times a week were a third less likely to develop prostate cancer later in life. Regular ejaculation may prevent carcinogens accumulating in the prostate gland, suggest the researchers.
Then there's a study showing women are less depressed if they have sex without condoms and another showing regular sex helps to avoid colds. While the research method used for the depression study is rather shaky, both studies, Robertson says, are based on legitimate scientific reasoning. There's also research suggesting regular sex can improve sense of smell, reduce risk of heart disease, aid in weight loss, pain relief and soothing PMS symptoms and even help people live longer.
The work never stops. Across the world male scientists beaver away trying to prove to women that they need it. Often.