Generous Donation
John Peters has donated room and board for one of our volunteers. This donation has no time limit and includes a swimming pool. Thanks John!
Using the Internet to Fight Bioterrorism
Our FightAIDS@Home team has moved up in ranking from 209 to 136 since
our last newsletter! Join FightAIDS@Home at
http://fightaidsathome.scripps.edu/ to use spare clock cycles on your
computer to help discover new drugs that fight AIDS. Join our team at
http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/team/...G4T4VRP1
Considering the poor preparation by world governments for a lethal
bioweapon attack, nongovernmental approaches like this may save millions
of lives! As Ray Kurzweil says, "There are tens of thousands who have
the knowledge and tools today to create and release a destructive
biological virus."
Bill Frist
Bill Frist, U.S. Senate Majority Leader, joins forces with Ray Kurzweil
to support a "Manhattan Project for the 21st Century" whose goal would
be to protect us against biological weapons and natural pandemics.
He says:
"Like everyone else, politicians tend to look away from danger, to hope
for the best, and pray that disaster will not arrive on their watch even
as they sleep through it. This is so much a part of human nature that it
often goes unchallenged.
But we will not be able to sleep through what is likely coming soon — a
front of unchecked and virulent epidemics, the potential of which should
rise above your every other concern. For what the world now faces, it
has not seen even in the most harrowing episodes of the Middle Ages or
the great wars of the last century...
No intelligence agency, no matter how astute, and no military, no matter
how powerful and dedicated, can assure that a few technicians of
middling skill using a few thousand dollars worth of readily available
equipment in a small and apparently innocuous setting cannot mount a
first-order biological attack.
It's possible today to synthesize virulent pathogens from scratch, or to
engineer and manufacture prions that, introduced undetectably over time
into a nation's food supply, would after a long delay afflict millions
with a terrible and often fatal disease. It's a new world...
So what must we do?
I propose an unprecedented effort — a "Manhattan Project for the 21st
Century" — not with the goal of creating a destructive new weapon, but
to defend against destruction wreaked by infectious disease and
biological weapons...
This is a bold vision. But it is the kind of thing that, once
accomplished, is done. And it is the kind of thing that calls out to be
done — and that, if not done, will indict us forever in the eyes of
history.
In diverting a portion of our vast resources to protect nothing less
than our lives, the lives of our children, and the life of our
civilization, many benefits other than survival would follow in train — not least the satisfaction of having done right."
Listen to Bill Frist at http://instapundit.com/archives/028623.php
Scientific Advisory Board News
Sir Clive W.J. Granger has joined our Scientific Advisory Board. He is the second Nobel Laureate to join our Board!
Professor Sir Clive W.J. Granger, Nobel Laureate
Professor Sir Clive W.J. Granger is a Welsh-born economist, and
Professor Emeritus at the University of California at San Diego, USA. Along with Robert Engle of New York University he shared the 2003 Nobel
Prize in Economics for methods of analyzing economic time series with
common trends ("Cointegration"). Watch the 3 minute introduction to his
Nobel Prize Lecture. Watch the 33 minute Nobel Prize Lecture at
http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureat...ntro.ram Read
his Nobel Prize Lecture at
http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureat...ture.pdf Watch
the 22 minute interview with the 2003 Prize Winners in Economics at
http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureat...view.ram Read his
speech at the Nobel Banquet at
http://nobelprize.org/economics/laureat...ech.html
Clive's great breakthroughs concerned the relationships between
different financial or economic variables over time. He showed that
traditional statistical methods could be misleading if applied to
variables that tend to wander over time without returning to some
long-run resting point. He also demonstrated that many variables display
similar long-run patterns that can be exploited in statistical analysis. Combining several of these variables can create a joint variable that
returns to a resting point, allowing traditional methods to be used. For
example, economic forces such as uneven technological progress cause
consumption and income to grow over time, but other economic forces,
such as constraints on budgets, make them follow similar paths.
This discovery not only led to significant breakthroughs in statistics
and macroeconomic forecasting, but also to an important reconciliation
between macroeconomic theory and data. He also developed a formal
statistical notion of causality based on which variables help to predict
other variables. His discovery is widely used and is commonly known as
Granger causality. While at UCSD he was famously photographed astride a
powerful motorbike with the photo eventually captioned "Rebel without a
causal model".
Clive earned a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of Nottingham in
1955 and a Ph.D. in Statistics from the University of Nottingham in
1959. He was awarded a Honorary D.Sc. Degree from the University of
Nottingham in 1992, a Doctor Honoris Causa from Universidad Carlos III
de Madrid in 1996, a Doctor Honoris Causa from the Stockholm School of
Economics in 1998, a Honorary D.Sc. Degree from the University of
Loughborough in 2002, and a Doctor Honoris Causa from Aarhus University
in 2003.
He authored "Essays in Econometrics: Collected Papers of Clive W. J.
Granger", "Empirical Modelling in Economics: Specification and
Evaluation" which is also available as a digital download, "Modelling
Nonlinear Economic Relationships (Advanced Texts in Econometrics)",
coauthored "Spectral Analysis of Economic Time Series (Princeton Studies
in Mathematical Economics)", and he inspired "Cointegration, Causality,
and Forecasting : A Festschrift in Honour of Clive W.J. Granger". Read
his full list of publications at http://ideas.repec.org/e/pgr55.html
Some of the free publications that Clive has authored or coauthored are
"Time Series Analysis, Cointegration, and Applications",
"Non-stationarities in stock returns", "Extracting Information from
Mega-Panels and High-Frequency Data", "Hidden Cointegration", "A
Dependence Metric for Nonlinear Time Series", and "Is Seasonal
Adjustment a Linear or Nonlinear Data Filtering Process?". Read a list
of his free publications at http://econ.ucsd.edu/~cgranger/pubs.html
His paper "Forecasting Stock Market Prices: Lessons for Forecasters" was
chosen by the editors of International Journal of Forecasting as best
paper in years 1992/1993. He received the Biennial Medal from the
Modeling and Simulation Society of Australia and New Zealand in 2001 and
was inducted into the "Order of Knight Bachelor" by Her Majesty Queen
Elizabeth II of England in 2004.
Clive became a Fellow of the Econometric Society in 1972, a Fellow of
the American Academy of Arts and Science in 1994, a Fellow of
International Institute of Forecasters (Inaugural Group of Four) in
1996, a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in
2002, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2002.
He was born in Swansea, Wales, and educated at the University of
Nottingham, England where he was an undergraduate and postgraduate
student, and subsequently became a full professor. In all, he spent 22
years at the University before leaving for UCSD in 1974. In 2005, the
building that houses the Economics and Geography Departments at the
University of Nottingham was renamed the Sir Clive Granger Building in
honor of his Nobel achievement.
Clive is married to Lady Patricia, and has two children, Mark and
Claire. He teaches at the University of Melbourne, Australia for a month
or more each year and visits the University of Canterbury, New Zealand
for two months each year.
