Wednesday, March 9, 2011
Edward Glaeser’s T
Walgreens to sell it
Walgreens to sell its pharmacy benefit management unit for $525 million
Walgreen Co. is selling its pharmacy benefit management business, as the Deerfield-based drugstore giant pushes to get consumers to the pharmacy counter and away from mail order.
The nation's largest drugstore chain said Wednesday that it will sell Walgreens Health Initiatives for $525 million in cash to Catalyst Health Solutions Inc., of Rockville, Md. The deal is expected to close in June.
Walgreens and other retailers are working hard to increase foot traffic into their stores by adding medical services such as vaccinations and primary care from nurse practitioners. But owning a pharmacy benefit manager is contrary to that strategy.
Edward Glaeser's Triumph of the City and how to save dying cities. - By Witold Rybczynski - Slate Magazine
I don't know if Edward Glaeser, whose father was born in Berlin, had Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 propaganda film in mind when he titled his book Triumph of the City, but his stirring subtitle, "How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier," suggests that he may. Glaeser's thesis is simple: The chief role of cities is to magnify human strengths. This is true in commerce, science, technology, and the arts; indeed, it is easy to argue, as Jane Jacobs did, that civilization and cities are synonymous.
"To thrive, cities must attract smart people and enable them to work collaboratively," Glaeser writes. The Harvard economist uses the insight that human capital is a key ingredient to a city's success to explain why some old industrial cities like Detroit have continued to decline, while others like Boston have rebounded. From its founding, Boston emphasized education, which helped the city reinvent itself several times: as a trading port with the West Indies and Europe in the 17th century; as a manufacturing center in the 1850s; and as a financial, biotechnology, and hi-tech center a century later. New York is another example of a city that has recently made a successful transition based on human capital, replacing shipping, manufacturing, and the garment industry with global finance.
While urban failure is dismally similar—high poverty rates, abandoned buildings, decaying infrastructure—success takes many forms, which is why Los Angeles, London, and Singapore are physically so different. In fact, some of the most creative urbanized areas in the United States—Silicon Valley and Boston's Route 128—don't look like traditional cities at all. Neither does Houston (the nation's fourth-largest city) which, Glaeser compellingly argues, offers middle-income Americans something missing in more glamorous cities: jobs and affordable housing.
Glaeser defines the city as a "mass of connected humanity." His emphasis on human capital is important because politicians and planners tend to overvalue the physical environment. They encourage cities to look for the Next New Thing, whether it's pedestrian malls, downtown stadiums, iconic museums, or light rail. It is as if 13th-century European cities, envious of Venice's great commercial success, had said "Oh, that's the trick—we just have to turn our streets into canals." The conflict between people and places is currently playing out in the plans to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Glaeser questions the wisdom of this strategy. "It never made sense to spend more than $100 billion putting infrastructure in a place that lost its economic rationale long ago," he writes. It would be better, he argues, to simply distribute the money directly to the people affected in the form of checks or housing and school vouchers, and let them decide how—and where—to spend it.
AdvertisementHuman capital does not always benefit cities. While successful cities attract smart people, sometimes smart people institute not-so-smart policies. Glaeser is critical of thriving cities that impose arcane building regulations, complex zoning, and restrictive conservation rules to limit new construction. Curtailing the building supply simply raises real-estate prices and drives growth into surrounding suburbs, as it has done in New York, San Francisco, and Paris. Also in Mumbai, which surprisingly has some of the most expensive urban real estate on the planet. What is the alternative? Encourage cities to densify. Glaeser proposes replacing the current regulatory maze with a sort of congestion tax: developer fees on the negative effects of new construction such as increased traffic, blocked views, and so on. According to him, a straightforward tax would not only be more transparent—and more speedy—it would also benefit the community directly. He also proposes limiting the powers of historic preservation boards and community groups to block new building. Such an immodest proposal would take a triumph of the will, indeed.
Full disclosure: Glaeser provided an endorsement for my latest book.
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Witold Rybczynski is Slate's architecture critic. His latest book is Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities. Visit his Web site. Follow him on Twitter.
Rivals Battle Over S
Charlie Sheen tells magazine “I’m really starting to lose my mind” « Entertainment
In what appears to be a 180 degree turn around from his daily proclamations of having “tiger’s blood” and “Adonis DNA,” Charlie Sheen admitted “I’m really starting to lose my mind” in the new issue of “Life & Style.”
The recently fired “Two and a Half Men” star also reveals his desperation to regain custody of his two young twin sons, Bob and Max.
ARTICLE: Charlie Sheen Attacks Jon Cryer.
“She can’t keep them from me,” Sheen says of his estranged wife, Brooke Mueller. “I won’t let her—I’ll do anything to get them back.”
Sheen, 45, who has made four disturbing live web broadcasts from his compound in Sherman Oaks, CA, admits that even his lawyer, Marty Singer, has expressed concern about him.
PHOTOS: Charlie Sheen's Long List of Lady Friends.
“My lawyer wants to come over to my house and take the bullets out of my gun," he told the magazine.
A party pal of Charlie’s tells the magazine, "It's crazy over here at the house—Charlie's losing it. He's really mad about the show, and dealing with the kids and Brooke is getting to be too much. Charlie is a ticking time bomb, and we all fear he could do something drastic like committing suicide or falling back on hard drugs."
ARTICLE: 'Tiger Blood' Drink Goes On Sale.
Sheen, who appeared on a Beverly Hills rooftop Monday, brandishing a machete, realizes that his bizarre behavior has many concerned.
"I'm really trying to contain myself right now," he said.
ARTICLE: 'Men' Co-Star Is Sheen's Lone Defender.
If that's true, he's not doing a good a job of it, because Sheen widened his list of targets to include his former "Two and a Half Men" co-star, Jon Cryer, on Tuesday.
Cryer had managed to stay out of the fray during Sheen's fall from grace at CBS, but his luck ran out.
ARTICLE: Can 'Two and a Half Men' Survive? Just Ask 'Three's Company.'
"Jon has not called me. He's a turncoat, a traitor, a troll. Clearly he's a troll," Sheen told E! News. "He issued a statement. Is it gonna take me calling him a 'traitor, juvenile and scared' for him to get it?"
Cryer has actually not issued an official statement since Sheen was fired from the hit CBS sitcom “Two-And-A-Half Men” on Monday. But he may want to issue one now, because Sheen has not stopped ranting about his enemies since his dismissal, and once you are on his crosshairs, it seems you never escape.
ARTICLE: Sheen's Kids Could Be Next on Reality Show.
Tuesday night was the latest case in point, as Sheen blasted his list of hated CBS executives one by one with yet another nonsensical, barely decipherable scripted screed on Ustream.
"A high treason has occurred. The scales of justice are in a state of radical disarray. Together we must right this infantile wrong… What happened yesterday was completely and entirely illegal, unconscionable and to quote my lawyer 'really shi**y shi**y suck suck'," Sheen, the self-proclaimed “Malibu Messiah,” said before launching into a strange diatribe in his fourth "Sheen's Korner" webcast, in which he saved his most savage attacks for producer Chuck Lorre – calling him everything from a “silly clown,” to “little worm” and “loser.”
The Associated Press: 82 percent of US schools may be labeled 'failing'
82 percent of US schools may be labeled 'failing'(AP) – 2 hours ago
An estimated 82 percent of U.S. schools could be labeled as "failing" under the nation's No Child Left Behind Act this year, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday.
The Department of Education estimates the number of schools not meeting targets will skyrocket from 37 to 82 percent in 2011 because states are toughening their standards to meet the requirements of the law. The schools will face sanctions ranging from offering tutoring to closing their doors.
"No Child Left Behind is broken and we need to fix it now," Duncan said in a statement. "This law has created a thousand ways for schools to fail and very few ways to help them succeed."
Duncan delivered the news in remarks to a House education and work force committee hearing, in urging lawmakers to rewrite the Bush-era act. The law was established in 2002 and many education officials and experts argue it is overdue for changes.
President Barack Obama has highlighted reforming the act as a priority for his administration, and both Democrats and Republicans have agreed that it needs to be changed — though disagreements remain on how.
The current law sets annual student achievement targets designed with the goal of having all students proficient in math and reading by 2014, a standard now viewed as wildly unrealistic.
Duncan said the law has done well in shining a light on achievement gaps among minority and low-income students, as well as those who are still learning English or have disabilities. But he said the law is loose on goals and narrow on how schools get there when it should be the opposite.
"We should get out of the business of labeling schools as failures and create a new law that is fair and flexible, and focused on the schools and students most at risk," Duncan said.
The Department of Education said its estimate was based on four years of data and the assuming all schools would improve at the same rate as the top quartile.
"Even under these assumptions, 82 percent of America's schools could be labeled 'failing' and, over time, the required remedies for all of them are the same — which means we will really fail to serve the students in greatest need," Duncan said.
Copyright © 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
Post Now - Post political columnist David Broder dies
By Adam BernsteinDavid S. Broder, 81, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post and one of the most respected writers on national politics for four decades, died Wednesday in Arlington of complications from diabetes.
Mr. Broder was often called the dean of the Washington press corps — a nickname he earned in his late 30s in part for the clarity of his political analysis and the influence he wielded as a perceptive thinker on political trends in his books, articles and television appearances.
In 1973, Mr. Broder and The Post each won Pulitzers for coverage of the Watergate scandal that led to President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation. Mr. Broder’s citation was for explaining the importance of the Watergate fallout in a clear but compelling way.
A full obituary is available here.
Here is Mr. Broder's last Post column, which ran on Feb. 6. Here also is a collection of his columns.
HP planning to put W
HP planning to put WebOS on every PC it ships in 2012
HP is getting serious about WebOS integration with plans to have the formerly mobile operating system extend to all of its PCs starting next year.
Hewlett-Packard’s chief executive officer Leo Apotheker announced that WebOS will be on every PC that HP ships in 2012. A move to attract more developers and push the operating system from mobile devices onto desktops. Apotheker made the announcement during a presentation to HP’s staff in India, according to a report by Bloomberg.
HP acquired WebOS last year following its purchase of Palm for $1.2 billion. Apotheker said that WebOS will be offered on HP PCs in addition to — and not in place of — Microsoft’s Windows operating system. The move is in intended to help WebOS become a multi-platform operating system that runs on devices from smartphones to tablets to PCs.
It’s not likely that WebOS will supplant existing operating systems on PCs, but rather would run on top of Windows to be able to launch WebOS apps. HP had previously announced its plans to push WebOS on to PC’s last month, but, at the time, the company didn’t reveal the scope of its commitment to the operating system. We now know that HP means each and every PC it sells starting in 2012 will have WebOS installed.
The move could be crucial in extending WebOS’ viability as a platform. Its major weakness right now is a lack of software supporting the platform. For comparison purposes consider that Apple’s iOS currently has around 350,000 apps, Android has more than 250,000. WebOS has around 6,000.
Expect to hear more about HP’s plans for WebOS on March 14 at a company event in San Francisco.
California Hispanics
Cartridge World Prin
Google Chrome Gets U
Google Chrome Gets Updates: New Interfaces, Faster Browsing
Tuesday, Google announced a few changes to Chrome, its engineered-for-speed web browser.
The super-fast beta version that was announced a few weeks ago has already been updated to a stable version. For the Googlers working on Chrome, speed entails not only faster code (the latest version of Chrome boasts a 66% improvement in JavaScript performance) but also easier-to-navigate interfaces.
With that in mind, the company is rolling out a new Settings interface for all Chrome users. One major change is that Settings are now presented in a Chrome tab rather than a dialog box — a change that will seem familiar to those using Google’s Cr-48 notebooks, which run Chrome OS and present absolutely everything in a browser tab.
Settings are also searchable, which many users will likely find extremely helpful.
Here’s a brief demo video showing Chrome’s new Settings pages in action:
Google has also extended its sandboxing features to Chrome’s Flash player.
Interested parties can download the latest version of Chrome now; be sure to check back with us in the comments section to let us know what you think of the new browser.
Cartridge World Printer Ink: A Good Bargain? - PCWorld
Some people call me cheap, even stingy. I'd rather be known as thrifty. That's why I won't buy the original (OEM) printer cartridges for my HP Photosmart e-All-In-One inkjet MFP. As a serial refiller, my quest is to find good third-party options--including remanufacturers, refill services, and do-it-yourself refill kits--and tell you whether the savings are worth the trouble.
I've tried a variety of alternatives. A do-it-yourself refill kit from InkTec offered the best cost per page and print quality, but it also caused the most mess. Office Depot's remanufactured cartridges provided meager savings and middling output quality. The best option I've found so far is Costco's onsite refilling service, which saved me more than half the cost over the OEM ink, with little effort and acceptable print results.
Can Cartridge World Beat HP's Own Ink?
This time I tried remanufactured cartridges from Cartridge World. The company sells toner and ink cartridges for assorted printers, including numerous HP, Canon, Dell, and Lexmark models. You've probably seen one of Cartridge World's 1700 retail stores, 650 of which are in the United States and Canada. You can also buy direct from the company's Website.
Because I used just one set of Cartridge World cartridges, and with only one printer, my experience is anecdotal and does not test the durability or archivability of third-party inks, nor how the printer will fare after repeated use with them. Nevertheless, my hands-on trials will give you a taste of what to expect if you try a third-party alternative with your own printer.
With both the HP and Cartridge World inks, I printed out a set of pages--ranging in content from plain text to a full-size color photo--over and over again until the ink started to run out (blank streaks appeared on the page). I counted the number of pages that printed before streaks appeared, to get a sample page yield. (In all my tests, such page yields will likely differ from those that HP or the third-party company quotes, just as your own mileage will vary depending on what you print.) I also compared the print quality of the pages using Cartridge World ink versus those printed with the HP cartridges.
Cartridge World Pricing Varies From Store to Web
Products:
* Cartridge World remanufactured HP 60 black cartridge: $12.99 at a store, $15.32 online
* Cartridge World remanufactured HP 60 tricolor cartridge: $15.99 at a store, $18.55 online
Vendor URL: CartridgeWorld.com
Worth trying? Yes
Hassle factor: Low
Print quality compared with OEM ink: Satisfactory, but not as good as OEM
Yield (mixed set of samples): 156 pages
Cost per page: 19 cents (OEM: 27 cents)I drove to my nearest Cartridge World store to buy two remanufactured HP 60 ink cartridges for my Photosmart e-All-in-One printer. I paid $12.99 for the black ink cartridge (model number CWH-60K) and $15.99 for the tricolor unit (CWH-60Tri). The sales clerk tried to upsell me to the high-capacity cartridges, which, she said, "cost twice as much but print three times as many pages" as the standard tanks. I declined. Total cost excluding sales tax: $28.98.
When I got home, I compared Cartridge World's brick-and-mortar prices with those on its Website. Weird: The online prices were significantly higher than what I paid. The black cartridge was $15.32, and the tricolor was $18.55. Add $1.99 for shipping, and that comes to $35.86. Why the discrepancy? According to Sharon Kinkade, director of marketing for Cartridge World North America, store franchisees can set their own pricing. So you may pay more or less at a Cartridge World in your area than I did at mine in Los Angeles, and your store's price may be lower--or higher--than the price you'll find on the Web. If you ever needed a compelling reason to shop around, here it is.As with remanufactured cartridges from other vendors, the Cartridge World tanks are visually indistinguishable from the OEM ones, aside from the company's stickers on the top and side.
Installation was simple: I popped out the empty HP cartridge and inserted the Cartridge World tank. Printing was uneventful, save for HP's error messages, which appeared soon after I started printing. Alarmist Exhibit A: 'Counterfeit or Used Cartridge Detected'.
Cartridge World Output Quality Falls Short
As with most third-party inks I've tested, Cartridge World's output quality was good enough for everyday printing, but not on a par with the quality I saw from OEM ink. HP's ink, for instance, produced grayscale photos with crisper and more realistic textures. And although Cartridge World's color images were attractive, HP's were noticeably sharper and more vibrant. In my water-drop tests, Cartridge World's inks smeared no more or less than HP's.
Overall, I'd rate Cartridge World's inks, along with Office Depot's, in the middle of the pack: a little better than Costco's, but not as good as HP's or InkTec's. My analysis is subjective, of course, and Cartridge World's inks may suit your printing needs just fine.
Cartridge World Cost Savings Are Minimal
I printed 156 pages with Cartridge World's remanufactured black and tricolor cartridges before streaks appeared in images and text. That comes out to 19 cents per page, assuming you get the price I paid at my local store. If you purchase at the higher online prices, the cost estimate rises to 23 cents per page. By comparison, you'll pay 27 cents per page if you buy the HP 60 black and tricolor cartridges separately.
Cartridge World ink saved me a few bucks over HP's own inks. InkTec's do-it-yourself refill remains the cheapest I've tried by far. For less-adventurous penny pinchers, Costco's refill service is a great deal at 11 cents per page--assuming that you find its mediocre output quality acceptable for your needs.
California Hispanics Moving Inland Means Safe Seats in Jeopardy - Bloomberg
For Douglas Johnson, the number six says it all. That was how many California Hispanics were in Congress in 2000, accounting for 11 percent of 53 U.S. House seats, and that’s how many are there today.
“There was a bipartisan effort to keep all the incumbents safe and the emerging populations quiet,” said Johnson, a Rose Institute of State and Local Government fellow at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. “And it worked.”
Magnitude 7.3 earthquake rocks northern Japan | kvue.com | KVUE News | Austin, TX | Breaking News
TOKYO (AP) — A magnitude 7.3 earthquake hit off Japan's northeastern coast Wednesday, shaking buildings hundreds of miles away in Tokyo and triggering a small tsunami. There were no immediate reports of significant damage or injuries.
The quake struck at 11:45 a.m. local time and was centered about 90 miles (150 kilometers) off the northeastern coast — about 270 miles (440 kilometers) northeast of Tokyo — at a depth of about 5 miles (8 kilometers), Japan's meteorological agency said.
Qaddafi Threatens Ne
Qaddafi Threatens New Fight Against No-Fly Zone
There were reports on Wednesday that Colonel Qaddafi had sent a message to Cairo, although the identity of the recipient was unclear. The Associated Press said an executive jet landed in the Egyptian capital on Wednesday carrying a senior military official from Tripoli — Maj. Gen. Abdul-Rahman bin Ali al-Saiid al-Zawi, identified as the head of Libya’s logistics and supply authority.
The plane, a private Falcon jet, had taken off from a small Libyan airfield and flown through Maltese and Greek airspace, The A.P. said. Since Libya’s uprising began last month, Colonel Qaddafi has seemed isolated with few outside leaders.
In his latest utterance, Colonel Qaddafi was speaking in an interview on Wednesday with Turkish public television in Tripoli as his forces deployed airstrikes, armor and artillery against rebels seeking his ouster in battles along the eastern Mediterranean coast and in the besieged western city of Zawiyah, which the government claimed to have mostly re-captured on Wednesday.
The debate on a no-fly zone has become louder in world capitals. European countries such as Britain and France seem to favor the idea while the United State Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has underscored the difficulties of imposing a ban comparable to the prohibition on flights over the north and south of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Britain and France are working on a United Nations resolution to authorize a no-flight zone, though it is unclear whether such a measure could gain needed support from Russia and China, which are traditionally leery of military intervention.
As the fighting continued on Tuesday, President Obama and the British prime minister, David Cameron, agreed in a phone call on the shared objective of “the departure of Qaddafi from power as quickly as possible,” the White House said in a statement, adding that they would “press forward with planning, including at NATO, on the full spectrum of possible responses, including surveillance, humanitarian assistance, enforcement of the arms embargo and a no-fly zone.”
In his interview with Turkish journalists, broadcast in Turkey on Wednesday, Colonel Qaddafi seemed almost to welcome the idea himself, arguing that it would expose Western motives.
“Such a move would be very useful in a way that all Libyan people would then realize that their real intention is to take Libya under control, take people’s freedoms away and seize their oil,” he said. “Therefore, all Libyan people would take up arms and fight.”
As on several occasions in the past, he argued that Libya has provided a guarantee of security in the Mediterranean stretching to southern Europe, standing as a bulwark against Al Qaeda.
“The stability of Libya means the security of the Mediterranean and therefore the security of the world,” Colonel Qaddafi said. “If Al Qaeda takes over in Libya, it would be a major disaster and Europe would soon be filled with refugees that Al Qaeda would transfer from Africa.”
“If they seize control here, the whole region including Israel would be dragged into chaos,” he said. “No one can prevent them as efficiently as we did.”
Col. Qaddafi gave his interview at a hotel in Tripoli where foreign reporters are staying, arriving there after loyalist forces battered the rebel-held city of Zawiyah for a fifth day. With land lines, cellphones and the Internet down, and journalists barred from the area, it was impossible to tell whose flag flew over Zawiyah’s central square as darkness fell.
But there were mounting reports on Wednesday that loyalist forces had used overwhelming force in the city to encircle its main square. “They have surrounded the square with snipers and tanks. The situation is not so good. It’s very scary. There are a lot of snipers,” a resident, who was not identified by name, told Reuters.
Fighting was also reported on Tuesday in the rebel-held city of Misratah, Libya’s third largest, about 100 miles east of Tripoli.
Far from Libya’s shores, global powers seem frustrated by their apparent inability to influence events, with Colonel Qaddafi seeming impervious to criticism and rebels in eastern Libya cautious about accepting western help beyond the imposition of a no-fly zone. In a major embarrassment, a team of British diplomats guarded by special forces made an ignominious retreat from Benghazi, the rebel capital, aboard a British warship on Monday after being arrested and held at the weekend.
The diplomatic and political effort to hasten Colonel Qaddafi’s departures is focused on NATO meetings in Brussels on Thursday and Friday
The Pentagon press secretary, Geoffrey Morrell, told reporters traveling with Mr. Gates from Afghanistan to Brussels on Wednesday that the defense secretary’s position on a possible no-fly zone had not changed — in short, that it remains one of a number of potential military courses of action that Mr. Gates is providing to Mr. Obama.
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David D. Kirkpatrick reported from Tripoli, Libya, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Reporting was contributed by Sebnem Arsu in Istanbul, Turkey, Kareem Fahim from Ras Lanuf, Libya, Anthony Shadid from Benghazi and Elisabeth Bumiller from Stuttgart, Germany.