Self-Development Blog

An ambitious $1.6 billion spacecraft that would investigate the mysterious force that is apparently accelerating the expansion of the universe — and search out planets around other stars, to boot — might have to be postponed for a decade, NASA says, because of cost overruns and mismanagement on a separate project, the James Webb Space Telescope. The news has dismayed many American astronomers, who worry they will wind up playing second fiddle to their European counterparts in what they say is the deepest mystery in the universe.

“How many things can we do in our lifetime that will excite a generation of scientists?” asked Saul Perlmutter, an astronomer at the University of California, Berkeley, who is one of dark energy’s discoverers. There is a sense, he said, “that we’re starting to give up leadership in these important areas in fundamental physics.”

Last summer, after 10 years of debate and interagency wrangling, a prestigious committee from the National Academy of Sciences gave highest priority among big space projects in the coming decade to a satellite telescope that would take precise measure of dark energy, as it is known, and also look for planets beyond our solar system. The proposed project goes by the slightly unwieldy acronym Wfirst, for Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope.

The Academy’s report was ambushed by NASA’s announcement in November that the successor to the Hubble, the James Webb Space Telescope, which had been scheduled for a 2014 launching, would require at least another $1.6 billion and several more years to finish, pushing the next big mission to 2022 at the very earliest. The Webb will search out the first stars and galaxies to have formed in the universe, but is not designed for dark energy.

To take up the slack until 2025 — or whenever the American mission can finally fly — the space agency has proposed buying a 20 percent share in a European dark-energy mission known as Euclid that could fly as soon as 2018. In return, NASA would ask for a similar investment by Europe in Wfirst.

But, said Dr. Perlmutter, “most of us think it is hard to imagine if we do Euclid now that we will do a dark-energy mission then.”

Alan P. Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science, who heads a committee that advises NASA on astrophysics, said: “If Euclid goes ahead, they’re going to own the field. There’s no way the U.S. can stop them.”

Last month, the American astronomers’ worries about falling behind seemed to be validated by a second Academy panel convened to consider the Euclid option. The panelists pointed out that part of the reason that Wfirst had been given such high priority was that it could be launched sooner rather than later. The panel urged NASA to stay the course or to explore merging Wfirst and Euclid in a joint operation.

Everybody agrees that nothing is cast in stone yet. Euclid must survive a bake-off with two other projects before it is approved by the European Space Agency, or E.S.A. Not until then, European astronomers say, will they be able to talk about changes to the project.

NASA has not said how it plans to get the $1.6 billion it needs to finish the Webb telescope, and thus how much will be left for other projects this decade. Some of the answers will be in the 2012 NASA budget due next month. “Fitting the E.S.A. and NASA processes together at this stage would be a challenge, but the scientific benefits are clear,” according to the new report by the Academy, which was delivered in December.

Jon Morse, director of astrophysics at NASA headquarters, said in an interview that NASA was committed to carrying out the recommendations of the original Academy survey that endorsed Wfirst. It is the “sense of Congress,” he said, that the Academy “should guide NASA science programs.”

Asked about worries that Euclid could give the Europeans a big leg up in dark-energy work, Dr. Morse said, “The Europeans have developed a significant capability for doing their own missions.” “The scientific return for their investment has been outstanding,” Dr. Morse said, adding that European astronomers are looking for “frontier scientific discoveries” to make.

Dark energy certainly counts as frontier science. The discovery a decade ago that the universe is speeding up, in defiance of common sense or cosmic gravity, has thrown into doubt notions about the fate of the universe and of life within it, not to mention gravity and even the nature of the laws of physics. It is as if, when you dropped your car keys, they shot up to the ceiling.

Physicists have one ready-made explanation for this behavior, but it is a cure that many of them think is worse than the disease: a fudge factor invented by Einstein in 1917 called the cosmological constant. He suggested, and quantum theory has subsequently confirmed, that empty space could exert a repulsive force, blowing things apart. But the best calculations predict an effect 10 to the exponent of 120 times greater than what astronomers have measured, causing physicists to metaphorically tear their hair out and mutter about multiple universes.

The astronomers who made this discovery were using the exploding stars known as Type 1a supernovae as cosmic distance markers to track the expansion rate of the universe.

Since then, other tools have emerged by which astronomers can also gauge dark energy by how it retards the growth of galaxies and other structures in the universe. So far the observations are consistent with it being Einstein’s constant, but not definitive; more precise measurements, many of which can only be done from space, are needed.

Dr. Perlmutter, who works in the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, proposed a dark energy mission known as SNAP (Supernova Acceleration Probe) in 1999. In 2003, the White House asked the Energy Department to partner with NASA on the project, which became known as JDEM, for Joint Dark Energy Mission, and a call went out for competing proposals.

But NASA and the Energy Department found it hard to collaborate, and several rounds of meetings and committees went nowhere. “Maybe we shouldn’t have tried to ride two horses,” Dr. Perlmutter said.

In 2008, NASA and the Energy Department budgeted $600 million, not including launching costs, for a mission, but a working group of dark-energy scientists could not come up with a design that would fit in the budget.

Feeling that the blessing of the National Academy of Sciences was needed to proceed with a more expensive project, Dr. Morse submitted a couple of versions of the dark energy mission to the Academy panel — also known as Astro2010 — that was charged with setting priorities for the astronomical community for the next decade.

Alan Dressler of the Carnegie Observatories, who led one of the panel’s subcommittees, noticed that three of the submitted projects — including dark energy, a search for planets around other stars, dubbed exoplanets, and a survey of infrared radiation from the heavens — all required the same hardware. He proposed combining them into a larger mission (“putting more eggs into the basket,” in Dr. Perlmutter’s words), in a project that could launch around 2020. That larger mission they dubbed Wfirst.

“It looked then and it still looks to me like a good deal,” said Roger Blandford of Stanford, an astrophysicist and the chairman of the Astro2010 panel.

Meanwhile, the European Space Agency had also made dark energy a priority. Last February, the Europeans sent NASA a letter offering the Americans a 20 percent piece of Euclid and two slots on the mission’s science team. American astronomers were ambivalent. Joining Euclid would divert resources from their own mission, thus delaying it.

In September NASA’s advisory committee on astrophysics, which is led by Dr. Boss of the Carnegie Institution, concluded that Euclid could spend three or four years “skimming the cream off the dark energy pail” before Wfirst got into the sky.

Both Dr. Boss’s council and yet another committee, the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee, which counsels the National Science Foundation and Energy Department as well as NASA, concluded that joining Euclid was not in keeping with the original Academy recommendations.

By the time the second Academy panel reported in December, the news about the Webb telescope’s problems had made everything worse. The Webb, which was the highest Academy priority 10 years ago and has already cost $5 billion, could not be launched any earlier than 2015 and would probably be even later, because of NASA’s inability to correctly estimate how long it would take to do things like test the telescope. How much of the $2.2 billion that NASA was to have available for new astrophysics missions this decade will be left once Webb is taken care of is anybody’s guess.

On top of that, NASA faces what Dr. Morse calls “an evolved difficult fiscal environment,” with Republicans bent on reducing the federal budget taking over the House of Representatives.

Some astronomers said they felt ambushed by NASA and Dr. Morse, who briefed the Astro2010 panel during its two years of deliberations. “He didn’t know? He should be fired,” said Dr. Dressler of the Carnegie Observatories.

Dr. Morse said he understood and shared his colleagues’ frustration. But said he had warned the panel all along that its plans could be upset by the Webb, which has always been known to have problems. “The community,” he said, referring to the Astro2010 panel, “did the best job they could with what they were given. The fiscal constraints are far worse now than we could imagine a year ago.”

Or, as Michael Turner, a cosmologist at the University of Chicago and a member of Astro2010, put it, “We’re in a terrible mess.”

In December, NASA solicited proposals from astronomers who want to join Euclid and named a team that will begin meeting in February to begin planning Wfirst.

One problem with Euclid from the Academy point of view is that it does not include observations of supernovae, the technique by which dark energy was discovered. Nor does the United States play a leadership role.

Dr. Boss, however, speaking personally, said he worried that those recommendations were out of date with new realities — budget and otherwise — and that following them could keep the United States out of what might be the only dark-energy mission for some time. “It’s time for some creative thought,” he said.

“The European Union is producing more papers per year than the U.S.,” Dr. Boss went on. “They passed us a year ago and are doing quite well.”

Dr. Blandford, the chairman of the original Academy panel, agreed. “Dark energy and exoplanets are both fields of tremendous scientific importance and have caught the public’s attention,” he said. “In both cases, the U.S. is currently the leading contributor. To abdicate that investment and opportunity would seem a terrible shame, but it doesn’t mean we have to see Europeans as enemies we have to vanquish.”

Dr. Perlmutter, one of the discoverers of dark energy, sounded a similar note. “What’s sad here is that everybody’s been trying hard, there are no villains,” he said. “We all feel it is important to be at the table. At the end of the day we’re scientists, you want to see science done.”

NY Times

Many thought this race would be determined by the end of 2010, but as we roll into 2011 the mobile phone race is still too close to call.

According to a report released Monday by Nielsen, the market research company, Apple’s iPhone operating system is still the top mobile OS in the United States, controlling 28.6 percent of the smartphone market. Google’s Android platform is close by at 25.8 percent of the market, rising steadily as it nips at Apple’s heels.

The BlackBerry from Research In Motion, once the leader in the smartphone space, continues on its steady decline and now controls 26.1 percent of the market. In June 2010, Research In Motion was far ahead of Apple and Google with a 33 precent share.

Nielsen noted in the report that the race to own the “consumer market share is tighter than it has ever been” since the smartphone emerged as a multibillion-dollar market several years ago.

Earlier mobile reports by Nielsen noted that the smartphone market would not stabilize in the near future, as Apple, Google and RIM continued to add customers to the smartphone ranks. The latest numbers from Nielsen show that during November, 45 percent of mobile phone customers decided to buy a smartphone over a feature phone.

As Egypt’s Coptic Christians protest for greater protection after a deadly church bombing, their brethren in Europe could now be under threat.

It has emerged that even before the New Year’s blast, Germany’s Coptic bishop had warned Berlin about possible dangers to his community. And police in France are checking reports of threats there.

It is feared Coptic Christians in Egypt and abroad could be targeted around Christmas, which for them falls on January 7.

Some 21 people died and dozens more were injured in this weekends’ attack by a presumed suicide bomber in Alexandria. It has stirred deep sectarian tension in Egypt where security has been stepped up.

euronews

Iran has invited foreign diplomats to tour its nuclear facilities, ahead of fresh talks with key world powers over its controversial nuclear programme.

The offer was reportedly extended to Russia, China and several EU countries, but not the US.

US State Department spokesman, Philip J Crowley, has dismissed the offer as a "clever ploy".

Many Western countries suspect Iran is developing nuclear weapons, but Tehran says its programme is peaceful.

US 'snub'

"The representatives of some European Union countries, NAM [Non-Aligned Movement], and some representatives of the five-plus-one [world powers] have been invited to visit our nuclear sites," foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told reporters.

He said the invitation was part of the Islamic republic's attempt to demonstrate "co-operation with the IAEA", referring to the UN nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

China, a close economic ally of Iran, has confirmed it was among the invitees, but foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei did not say whether any of its diplomats would go.

Asked specifically whether a US representative would be invited, Mr Mehmanparast said in Tehran: "The list of the countries invited for the visit will be unveiled when it is finalised."

But the New York Times reports that the invitation has "pointedly snubbed" the United States, citing European diplomats close to the negotiations.

Washington, which has been spearheading the campaign for sanctions against Iran, swiftly dismissed the offer.

"It's a clever ploy, but it's not a substitute for Iran's responsibilities to the [International Atomic Energy Agency] IAEA," Mr Crowley told the New York Times.

Rare visit

Tehran is already subject to inspections by the IAEA, but it would appear that this tour may be aimed at diplomats, not inspectors, says the BBC's Iran correspondent James Reynolds.

The last such trip which Tehran arranged was in February 2007.

Mr Mehmanparast said the visit would take place ahead of a second round of talks on Tehran's nuclear programme, scheduled for late January in Istanbul, Turkey, although no date has been confirmed.

Iran is set to hold talks with the five permanent UN Security Council members - the US, Russia, China, the UK and France - plus Germany.

The talks will follow a two-day meeting in Geneva early last month which EU foreign affairs chief Baroness Ashton described as "substantive", though little was agreed beyond a commitment to meet again. Those were the first talks in over 14 months.

Nuclear sites

Mr Mehmanparast did not say which nuclear facilities the envoys would travel to, but the AP news agency said Bushehr and Natanz were on the list, citing a diplomat accredited to the IAEA.

While Bushehr has been built under IAEA supervision, the uranium enrichment plant at Natanz is at the heart of Iran's dispute with the UN Security Council.

Last year, Iran told the IAEA that Natanz would be the venue for new enrichment facilities - construction of which would start around March 2011.

The UN is concerned because the technology used for producing fuel for nuclear power can be used to enrich the uranium to a much higher level to produce a nuclear explosion.

The IAEA has voiced growing frustration at what it sees as lack of Iranian co-operation with its inspectors.

The UN Security Council has imposed four rounds of sanctions on Iran and demanded that it stops its uranium enrichment programme.

Iranian negotiators have flatly ruled out discussing such demands at the Istanbul meeting.

BBC

Welcome to 2011. The year begins with a question. Is Hungary fit to assume the rotating presidency of the European Union?

It may appear an arcane concern. The presidency is a less influential role than it used to be. Few voters understand its purpose beyond giving every country a six-month turn to be the face of the EU.

And then there is the muddle over Europe's string of presidents. (There is a President of the European Parliament, a President of the Council, a President of the Commission.)

Perhaps because of their number these presidents compete for attention. It is one of the certainties of covering Europe that when there is a significant international event my e-mail will ping into life as the various presidents vie with each other for attention.

Now for these officials Hungary poses a dilemma. Its leader is Viktor Orban, a populist politician who was once a fierce anti-communist. Last year he surfed to power on a wave of distaste for the self-confessed lies of the Socialist government and their mismanagement of the economy.

Mr Orban's party Fidesz controls a two-thirds majority in parliament. What this prime minister wants he gets.

His government has just passed a new media law which empowers a watchdog council to impose fines on coverage it considers "unbalanced" or offensive to "human dignity". This council has five members and is dominated by government supporters.

Journalists can be forced to identify their sources when they write stories about national security or public safety. The right to secrecy will only be upheld if it is in the public interest. There will be limits on "crime-related news". The fines can be close to a million dollars and have to be paid up-front before an appeal process can begin.

There is much that is vague and undefined about this legislation, but some of Hungary's papers have responded by publishing blank pages. One left-leaning paper this week declared on its front page that "freedom of the press in Hungary comes to an end".

Others, like the International Press Institute, warned that the new law is an attempt to "exert control over public broadcasters".

A prominent liberal MEP, Guy Verhofstadt, says "the time of Pravda is over - this new law is unacceptable. Hungary must explain and the [EU] Commission must act."

The Foreign Minister of Luxembourg, Jean Asselborn, questioned whether Hungary was fit to take on the EU presidency.

And most importantly, Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman said that "as a country that is about to take over the EU presidency, Hungary will have a special responsibility for the whole union's image in the world".

In the face of such criticism Mr Orban says he doesn't have wobbly knees. The law, his government insists, is to ensure balanced reporting. Budapest has hit back at the criticism. It says it "remains committed to freedom of the press and in no way wishes to stifle the opposition's views".

The EU - in a letter - has asked for clarification. But it has all come rather late. This week the EU caravan heads for Budapest to celebrate the start of the Hungarian EU presidency.

So here is the rub. What will the EU's various presidents, commissioners and High Representative say? How will they respond to the Luxembourg question - is Hungary fit to lead the EU? Or the implied German question - are these the values that the EU wants to present to the world?

There is another sore point. Hungary is targeting new taxes at foreign companies. Some are threatening to pull out. Others say that it is illegal to go after foreign investors in a single market.

In the end the tax issue is about rules and markets. Media freedom is more difficult to judge. But Hungary is in the spotlight and the awkward questions won't go away.

Graves containing the remains of 220 people and dating back to the Nazi era have been found at a psychiatric hospital in western Austria.

The remains were discovered when a yard belonging to the hospital in Hall in Tyrol province was dug up as part of a construction project.

Building work has now stopped until a investigation is carried out.

It is feared those buried may have been disabled people murdered under the Nazis' euthanasia programme.

Tens of thousands of people with physical or mental disabilities were killed by the Nazis, who regarded them as unfit to live.

Some 30,000 were killed at one psychiatric hospital alone - Schloss Hartheim, near Linz in upper Austria.

Tilak, the company responsible for the Hall hospital, said the graves contained the remains of people buried between 1942 and 1945.

There were, it added, "suspicions that the dead [were] at least partially victims" of the Nazis' euthanasia programme.

A spokesman, Johannes Schwamberger, said work on the construction project had been stopped to allow an investigation and to identify the dead.

Hall Hospital remains a functioning psychiatric hospital, with beds for 500 patients.

BBC

The automakers are trying mightily to persuade us.

In marketing campaigns featuring heavy-metal theme songs, rapping parents, secret agents in cat masks, pyrotechnics and even Godzilla, minivan makers are trying to recast the much-ridiculed mom-mobile as something that parents can be proud — or at least unashamed — of driving.

Toyota led the effort early last spring with a campaign for its Sienna model that features a self-indulgent couple rapping about rolling through the cul-de-sacs with their posse of kids in their “Swagger Wagon.”

“The stories we heard were, ‘I just don’t want to be seen in a minivan. I don’t like being the soccer-mom joke or feeling like I’ve given up all trace of my identity to be a parent,’ ” said Richard Bame, Toyota’s national marketing manager for trucks and minivans.

Other automakers have jumped on the theme, too. For example, in a series of ads that began this fall, Honda claims its 2011 Odyssey “beckons like no van before.” One spot deploys a song by the metal rockers Judas Priest to awe a grocery-toting father with the van’s capabilities. In another, a couple seeking a romantic night out finds an Odyssey with rose petals spilling out of the sliding doors, chocolate-covered strawberries in a cooler compartment and a fire crackling on the rear-seat video screen.

Chrysler, which invented minivans in 1983, plans to offer a high-powered version of its 2011 Dodge Grand Caravan, aimed at fathers, which it has nicknamed the “man van.”

And Ford Motor, which stopped making minivans in 2006, is jumping back into the game with the diminutive C-Max. The seven-passenger vehicle is about two feet shorter than the Odyssey and Sienna and offers high-tech features like sensors that allow drivers to open the rear liftgate simply by waving a leg under the bumper.

Ford calls the C-Max a compact “people mover” and hopes its European design will make the vehicle practical for families without the unflattering “minivan” label. “Many are hard pressed to notice it has sliding doors. That wasn’t by accident,” said a Ford spokesman, Said Deep.

Having spent recent years making minivans more child-friendly through amenities like dual-screen entertainment systems and reconfigurable seating, the automakers are now focused on making them more appealing to adults, especially men, who have shied away from the vehicles and their connotations. Nearly every minivan sold in the United States has been redesigned in 2010 to offer flashier looks, more advanced technology and a sportier ride.

Making a minivan seem hip might be a stretch, but the new marketing efforts seem to be paying dividends, although the vehicles remain a small niche of the auto market.

The Toyota Sienna spots have become a Web sensation. The original ad drew more than 7.8 million views on YouTube, and the term “swagger wagon” — coined by the actor playing the father, Brian Huskey — has been adopted by some parents as a generic term for minivans.

Analysts credit the Toyota campaign with helping to increase sales of the Sienna by 18.5 percent through November — double the industry average for minivans and a rare bright spot for Toyota, whose overall sales have been flat since bad publicity over product recalls.

Sales of the Honda Odyssey are up 42 percent since October, when the 2011 model and new ad campaigns were introduced.

Colin McGraw, who has three young daughters and is expecting a fourth child in March, bought a 2011 Odyssey after discovering that most crossovers, which provide the capacity of a sport utility vehicle or minivan but are generally smaller and have four hinged doors, offered less cargo space and lower fuel economy.

“Minivans just make more sense for families,” said Mr. McGraw, a software consultant in Castle Rock, Colo. “They’re easier to get kids in and out of.”

At the Weymouth Honda dealership near Boston, the general manager, Jason Tobias, said the new Odyssey, with a bold new exterior that has been described as ugly in some reviews, has been gaining fans rapidly. Each one arrives on the lot already sold, and there is a waiting list for the top-end Touring Elite trim level, which sells for more than $40,000.

“With the new design, I think that it’s changed a lot of people’s opinions,” Mr. Tobias said. “So many people used to say, ‘I’ll never drive a minivan,’ and then, guess what? It’s called children.”

Chrysler just started shipping the updated versions of the Town & Country and Dodge Grand Caravan to dealers last month, but their sales rose even before that as Chrysler ramped up its advertising. One of the seemingly nonsensical — and certainly nontraditional — commercials showed suit-clad adults donning cat and mouse masks to prepare for a gang-style fight.

Minivans have a long way to go before coming even close to regaining the popularity they enjoyed a decade ago. They account for just 4 percent of all new-vehicle sales in the United States, compared with 20 percent for crossovers, according to Autodata, which tracks industry sales.

Automakers were on pace to sell about 450,000 minivans last year, a 9.3 percent increase from 2009 but far below the peak of 1.37 million in 2000. And the growth in minivan sales trails the overall domestic auto industry, which grew 11.1 percent through November.

Jack Nerad, editorial director at the Kelley Blue Book, which provides information about vehicles to consumers, said he thought the minivan segment was no longer shrinking. But whether it can grow again depends on how much the automakers can shed the stigma of vans.

“I don’t think anybody can dispute the functionality of a minivan for a family,” he said. “They’re not going to blow you away the way a coupe would, but in terms of what they do, they’re pretty amazing.”

But Chris Cedergren, a partner with Iceology, an automotive marketing consultancy in Los Angeles, said the vehicle would remain a tough sell to shoppers, no matter how well it might suit their needs, because of the image problem.

“Minivans quickly became appliances, and no one wants a white washing machine or a white refrigerator,” he said. “They want something they feel proud of driving, and they don’t want to be embarrassed.”

That’s why Kristen Howerton, a marriage and family therapist in Costa Mesa, Calif., never wanted to own a minivan. She disliked them so much that she titled her popular parenting blog “Rage Against the Minivan.”

“It’s just a symbol of women becoming the invisible, exchangeable mom — the soccer mom — where we all look the same and no longer have a sense of what’s cool,” Mrs. Howerton said.

But last year, she and her husband found that going anywhere with four young children had become impossible. Many of her readers suggested the unthinkable.

After searching desperately for an alternative, Mrs. Howerton gave in and bought a Toyota Sienna. “As much as I was opposed to it initially, it really has made life easier,” she said. “Mobility is more important than any standards I’m trying to uphold in my mind.”

ny times

A SUBSTANTIAL part of all stock trading in the United States takes place in a warehouse in a nondescript business park just off the New Jersey Turnpike.

Few humans are present in this vast technological sanctum, known as New York Four. Instead, the building, nearly the size of three football fields, is filled with long avenues of computer servers illuminated by energy-efficient blue phosphorescent light.

Countless metal cages contain racks of computers that perform all kinds of trades for Wall Street banks, hedge funds, brokerage firms and other institutions. And within just one of these cages — a tight space measuring 40 feet by 45 feet and festooned with blue and white wires — is an array of servers that together form the mechanized heart of one of the top four stock exchanges in the United States.

The exchange is called Direct Edge, hardly a household name. But as the lights pulse on its servers, you can almost see the holdings in your 401(k) zip by.

“This,” says Steven Bonanno, the chief technology officer of the exchange, looking on proudly, “is where everyone does their magic.”

In many of the world’s markets, nearly all stock trading is now conducted by computers talking to other computers at high speeds. As the machines have taken over, trading has been migrating from raucous, populated trading floors like those of the New York Stock Exchange to dozens of separate, rival electronic exchanges. They rely on data centers like this one, many in the suburbs of northern New Jersey.

While this “Tron” landscape is dominated by the titans of Wall Street, it affects nearly everyone who owns shares of stock or mutual funds, or who has a stake in a pension fund or works for a public company. For better or for worse, part of your wealth, your livelihood, is throbbing through these wires.

The advantages of this new technological order are clear. Trading costs have plummeted, and anyone can buy stocks from anywhere in seconds with the simple click of a mouse or a tap on a smartphone’s screen.

But some experts wonder whether the technology is getting dangerously out of control. Even apart from the huge amounts of energy the megacomputers consume, and the dangers of putting so much of the economy’s plumbing in one place, they wonder whether the new world is a fairer one — and whether traders with access to the fastest machines win at the expense of ordinary investors.

It also seems to be a much more hair-trigger market. The so-called flash crash in the market last May — when stock prices plunged hundreds of points before recovering — showed how unpredictable the new systems could be. Fear of this volatile, blindingly fast market may be why ordinary investors have been withdrawing money from domestic stock mutual funds —$90 billion worth since May, according to figures from the Investment Company Institute.

No one knows whether this is a better world, and that includes the regulators, who are struggling to keep up with the pace of innovation in the great technological arms race that the stock market has become.

WILLIAM O’BRIEN, a former lawyer for Goldman Sachs, crosses the Hudson River each day from New York to reach his Jersey City destination — a shiny blue building opposite a Courtyard by Marriott.

Mr. O’Brien, 40, works there as chief executive of Direct Edge, the young electronic stock exchange that is part of New Jersey’s burgeoning financial ecosystem. Seven miles away, in Secaucus, is the New York Four warehouse that houses Direct Edge’s servers. Another cluster of data centers, serving various companies, is five miles north, in Weehawken, at the western mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. And yet another is planted 20 miles south on the New Jersey Turnpike, at Exit 12, in Carteret, N.J.

As Mr. O’Brien says, “New Jersey is the new heart of Wall Street.”

Direct Edge’s office demonstrates that it doesn’t take many people to become a major outfit in today’s electronic market. The firm, whose motto is “Everybody needs some edge,” has only 90 employees, most of them on this building’s sixth floor. There are lines of cubicles for programmers and a small operations room where two men watch a wall of screens, checking that market-order traffic moves smoothly and, of course, quickly. Direct Edge receives up to 10,000 orders a second.

Mr. O’Brien’s personal story reflects the recent history of stock-exchange upheaval. A fit, blue-eyed Wall Street veteran, who wears the monogram “W O’B” on his purple shirt cuff, Mr. O’Brien is the son of a seat holder and trader on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in the 1970s, when the Big Board was by far the biggest game around.

But in the 1980s, Nasdaq, a new electronic competitor, challenged that dominance. And a bigger upheaval came in the late 1990s and early 2000s, after the Securities and Exchange Commission enacted a series of regulations to foster competition and drive down commission costs for ordinary investors.

These changes forced the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq to post orders electronically and execute them immediately, at the best price available in the United States — suddenly giving an advantage to start-up operations that were faster and cheaper. Mr. O’Brien went to work for one of them, called Brut. The N.Y.S.E. and Nasdaq fought back, buying up smaller rivals: Nasdaq, for example, acquired Brut. And to give itself greater firepower, the N.Y.S.E., which had been member-owned, became a public, for-profit company.

Brokerage firms and traders came to fear that a Nasdaq-N.Y.S.E. duopoly was asserting itself, one that would charge them heavily for the right to trade, so they created their own exchanges. One was Direct Edge, which formally became an exchange six months ago. Another, the BATS Exchange, is located in another unlikely capital of stock market trading: Kansas City, Mo.

Direct Edge now trails the N.Y.S.E. and Nasdaq in size; it vies with BATS for third place. Direct Edge is backed by a powerful roster of financial players: Goldman Sachs, Knight Capital, Citadel Securities and the International Securities Exchange, its largest shareholder. JPMorgan also holds a stake. Direct Edge still occupies the same building as its original founder, Knight Capital, in Jersey City.

The exchange now accounts for about 10 percent of stock market trading in the United States, according to the exchange and the TABB Group, a specialist on the markets. Of the 8.5 billion shares traded daily in the United States, about 833 million are bought and sold on Mr. O’Brien’s platforms.

As it has grown, Direct Edge and other new venues have sucked volumes away from the Big Board and Nasdaq. The N.Y.S.E. accounted for more than 70 percent of trading in N.Y.S.E.-listed stocks just five years ago. Now, the Big Board handles only 36 percent of those trades itself. The remaining market share is divided among about 12 other public exchanges, several electronic trading platforms and vast so-called unlit markets, including those known as dark pools.

THE Big Board is embracing the new warp-speed world. Although it maintains a Wall Street trading floor, even that is mostly electronic. The exchange also has its own, separate electronic arm, Arca, and opened a new data center last year for its computers in Mahwah, N.J.

From his office in New Jersey, Mr. O’Brien looks back across the water to Manhattan and his former office on the 50th floor of the Nasdaq building at One Liberty Plaza, and he reflects wistfully on the huge changes that have taken place.

“To walk out of there to go across the river to Jersey City,” he says. “That was a big leap of faith.”

His colleague, Bryan Harkins, the exchange’s chief operating officer, sounds confident about the impact of the past decade’s changes. The new world is fairer, he says, because it is more competitive. “We helped break the grip of the New York Stock Exchange,” he says.

In this high-tech stock market, Direct Edge and the other exchanges are sprinting for advantage. All the exchanges have pushed down their latencies — the fancy word for the less-than-a-blink-of-an-eye that it takes them to complete a trade. Almost each week, it seems, one exchange or another claims a new record: Nasdaq, for example, says its time for an average order “round trip” is 98 microseconds — a mind-numbing speed equal to 98 millionths of a second.

The exchanges have gone warp speed because traders have demanded it. Even mainstream banks and old-fashioned mutual funds have embraced the change.

“Broker-dealers, hedge funds, traditional asset managers have been forced to play keep-up to stay in the game,” Adam Honoré, research director of the Aite Group, wrote in a recent report.

Even the savings of many long-term mutual fund investors are swept up in this maelstrom, when fund managers make changes in their holdings. But the exchanges are catering mostly to a different market breed — to high-frequency traders who have turned speed into a new art form. They use algorithms to zip in and out of markets, often changing orders and strategies within seconds. They make a living by being the first to react to events, dashing past slower investors — a category that includes most investors — to take advantage of mispricing between stocks, for example, or differences in prices quoted across exchanges.

One new strategy is to use powerful computers to speed-read news reports — even Twitter messages — automatically, then to let their machines interpret and trade on them.

By using such techniques, traders may make only the tiniest fraction of a cent on each trade. But multiplied many times a second over an entire day, those fractions add up to real money. According to Kevin McPartland of the TABB Group, high-frequency traders now account for 56 percent of total stock market trading. A measure of their importance is that rather than charging them commissions, some exchanges now even pay high-frequency traders to bring orders to their machines.

High-frequency traders are “the reason for the massive infrastructure,” Mr. McPartland says. “Everyone realizes you have to attract the high-speed traders.”

As everyone goes warp speed, a number of high-tech construction projects are under way.

One such project is a 428,000-square-foot data center in the western suburbs of Chicago opened by the CME Group, which owns the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It houses the exchange’s Globex electronic futures and options trading platform and space for traders to install computers next to the exchange’s machines, a practice known as co-location — at a cost of about $25,000 a month per rack of computers.

The exchange is making its investment because derivatives as well as stocks are being swept up in the high-frequency revolution. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission estimates that high-frequency traders now account for about one-third of all volume on domestic futures exchanges.

In August, Spread Networks of Ridgeland, Miss., completed an 825-mile fiber optic network connecting the South Loop of Chicago to Cartaret, N.J., cutting a swath across central Pennsylvania and reducing the round-trip trading time between Chicago and New York by three milliseconds, to 13.33 milliseconds.

Then there are the international projects. Fractions of a second are regularly being shaved off of the busy Frankfurt-to-London route. And in October, a company called Hibernia Atlantic announced plans for a new fiber-optic link beneath the Atlantic from Halifax, Nova Scotia, to Somerset, England that will be able to send shares from London to New York and back in 60 milliseconds.

Bjarni Thorvardarson, chief executive of Hibernia Atlantic, says the link, due to open in 2012, is primarily intended to meet the needs of high-frequency algorithmic traders and will cost “hundreds of millions of dollars.”

“People are going over the lake and through the church, whatever it takes,” he says. “It is very important for these algorithmic traders to have the most advanced technology.”

The pace of investment, of course, reflects the billions of dollars that are at stake.

The data center in Weehawken is a modern building that looks more like a shopping mall than a center for equity trading. But one recent afternoon, the hammering and drilling of the latest phase of expansion seemed to conjure up the wealth being dug out of the stock market.

As the basement was being transformed into a fourth floor for yet more computers, one banker who was touring the complex explained the matter bluntly: “Speed,” he said, “is money. “

THE “flash crash,” the harrowing plunge in share prices that shook the stock market during the afternoon of May 6 last year, crystallized the fears of some in the industry that technology was getting ahead of the regulators. In their investigation into the plunge, the S.E.C. and Commodity Futures Trading Commission found that the drop was precipitated not by a rogue high-frequency firm, but by the sale of a single $4.1 billion block of E-Mini Standard & Poor’s 500 futures contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange by a mutual fund company.

The fund company, Waddell & Reed Financial of Overland Park, Kan., conducted its sale through a computer algorithm provided by Barclays Capital, one of the many off-the shelf programs available to investors these days. The algorithm automatically dripped the billions of dollars of sell orders into the futures market over 20 minutes, continuing even as prices started to drop when other traders jumped in.

The sale may have been a case of inept timing — the markets were already roiled by the debt crisis in Europe. But there was no purposeful attempt to disrupt the market, the regulators found.

But there was a role played by some high-frequency machines, the investigation found. As they detected the big sale and the choppy conditions, some of them shut down automatically. As the number of buyers plunged, so, too, did the Dow Jones Industrial Average, losing more than 700 points in minutes before the computers returned and prices recovered just as quickly. More than 20,000 trades were ruled invalid.

The episode seemed to demonstrate the vulnerabilities of the new market, and just what could happen when no humans are in charge to correct the machines.

Since the flash crash, the S.E.C. and the exchanges have introduced marketwide circuit breakers on individual stocks to halt trading if a price falls 10 percent within a five-minute period.

But some analysts fear that some aspects of the flash crash may portend dangers greater than mere mechanical failure. They say some wild swings in prices may suggest that a small group of high-frequency traders could manipulate the market. Since May, there have been regular mini-flash crashes in individual stocks for which, some say, there are still no satisfactory explanations. Some experts say these drops in individual stocks could herald a future cataclysm.

NY Times

By the time the conference call ended, it was nearly midnight at Bank of America’s headquarters in Charlotte, N.C., but the bank’s counterespionage work was only just beginning.

A day earlier, on Nov. 29, the director of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, said in an interview that he intended to “take down” a major American bank and reveal an “ecosystem of corruption” with a cache of data from an executive’s hard drive. With Bank of America’s share price falling on the widely held suspicion that the hard drive was theirs, the executives on the call concluded it was time to take action.

Since then, a team of 15 to 20 top Bank of America officials, led by the chief risk officer, Bruce R. Thompson, has been overseeing a broad internal investigation — scouring thousands of documents in the event that they become public, reviewing every case where a computer has gone missing and hunting for any sign that its systems might have been compromised.

In addition to the internal team drawn from departments like finance, technology, legal and communications, the bank has brought in Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting firm, to help manage the review. It has also sought advice from several top law firms about legal problems that could arise from a disclosure, including the bank’s potential liability if private information was disclosed about clients.

The company’s chief executive, Brian T. Moynihan, receives regular updates on the team’s progress, according to one Bank of America executive familiar with the team’s work, who, like other bank officials, was granted anonymity to discuss the confidential inquiry.

Whether Mr. Assange is bluffing, or indeed has Bank of America in its sights at all, the bank’s defense strategy represents the latest twist in the controversy over WikiLeaks and Mr. Assange.

The United States government has been examining whether Mr. Assange, an Australian, could be charged criminally for the release by WikiLeaks of hundreds of thousands of classified Pentagon and State Department diplomatic cables that became the subject of articles in The New York Times and other publications last month.

The Swedish government is also seeking to question Mr. Assange about rape accusations against him. As he fights extradition from Britain in that case, he remains under house arrest in an English mansion. Mr. Assange has said the timing of the rape accusations was not coincidental, and that he was the victim of a smear campaign led by the United States government.

Despite his legal troubles, Mr. Assange’s threats have grown more credible with every release of secret documents, including those concerning the dumping of toxic waste in Africa, the treatment of prisoners held by the United States at Guantánamo Bay, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and, most recently, the trove of diplomatic cables.

That Mr. Assange might shift his attention to a private company — especially one as politically unpopular as Bank of America or any of its rivals, which have been stained by taxpayer-financed bailouts and the revelation of improper foreclosure practices — raises a new kind of corporate threat, combining elements of law, technology, public policy, politics and public relations.

“This is a significant moment, and Bank of America has to get out in front of it,” said Richard S. Levick, a veteran crisis communications expert. “Corporate America needs to look at what happens here, and how Bank of America handles it.”

Last month, the bank bought up Web addresses that could prove embarrassing to the company or its top executives in the event of a large-scale public assault, but a spokesman for the bank said the move was unrelated to any possible leak.

Then, on Dec. 18, Bank of America may have antagonized Mr. Assange further when it said it would join other companies like MasterCard and PayPal in halting the processing of payments intended for WikiLeaks, citing the possibility the organization’s activities might be illegal.

Mr. Assange has never said explicitly that the data he possesses comes from Bank of America, which is the nation’s largest bank, though he did say that the disclosure would take place sometime early this year.

Eric Dash and Louise Story contributed reporting

The bank has emerged as the most likely target because a year before the latest threat, Mr. Assange said in an interview that his group had the hard drive of a Bank of America executive containing five gigabytes of data — enough to hold more than 200,000 pages of text — and was evaluating how to present it. It was this connection that set the wheels in motion on Nov. 30.

The financial markets took the threat seriously. Bank of America shares fell 3 percent in trading the day after Mr. Assange made his threat against a nameless bank, and while the stock has since recovered, the prospect of a Bank of America data dump from WikiLeaks remains a concern, said Moshe Orenbuch, an analyst with Credit Suisse.

“The fears have calmed down somewhat, but if there is something out there that is revealed, the market reaction will be negative,” he said.

Bank of America’s internal review has turned up no evidence that would substantiate Mr. Assange’s claim that he has a hard drive, according to interviews with executives there. The company declined to otherwise comment on the case. A WikiLeaks representative also declined to comment.

With the data trail cold, one working theory both inside and outside the bank is that internal documents in Mr. Assange’s possession, if any, probably came from the mountains of material turned over to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Congressional investigators and the New York attorney general’s office during separate investigations in 2009 and 2010 into the bank’s acquisition of Merrill Lynch.

As it happens, Mr. Assange’s first mention of the Bank of America hard drive, in October 2009, coincided with hearings by the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform into the Merrill merger, and with wide-ranging requests for information by the committee.

The bank’s investigative team is trying to reconstruct the handover of materials to public agencies for a variety of inquiries, in pursuit of previously undisclosed documents that could embarrass the company, bank officials said.

In addition to the Merrill documents, the team is reviewing material on Bank of America’s disastrous acquisition in 2008 of Countrywide Financial, the subprime mortgage specialist, the officials said. The criticism of Bank of America’s foreclosure procedures centers mostly on loans it acquired in the Countrywide deal, and one possibility is that the documents could show unscrupulous or fraudulent lending practices by Countrywide.

If that is the case, it would not only reignite political pressure on Bank of America and other top mortgage servicers, but it could also strengthen the case of investors pressuring the big banks to buy back tens of billions in soured mortgages.

“If something happens, we want to be ready,” one bank official said. “You want to know what your options are before it comes out, rather than have to decide on the spot.” Bank of America’s efforts are complicated by the fact that it has made several huge acquisitions in recent years, and those once-independent companies had different computer systems and security procedures.

WikiLeaks has taken on private companies in the past, including leaking documents from Barclays of Britain and Bank Julius Baer of Switzerland, but neither disclosure drew nearly as much attention.

Officials at the S.E.C., the House oversight committee and the New York attorney general’s office insist the information they received had been turned over in the form of papers and discs, never a hard drive, and deny they are the source of the WikiLeaks cache.

At the same time, Mr. Assange’s own statements would seem to undermine the government-as-source theory, hinting instead that resignations might follow as evidence emerges of corruption among top executives, something the public investigations never found.

“It will give a true and representative insight into how banks behave at the executive level in a way that will stimulate investigations and reforms, I presume,” he said in the November 2010 interview with Forbes. “For this, there’s only one similar example. It’s like the Enron e-mails.”

NY Times

Faced with growing budget deficits and restive taxpayers, elected officials from Maine to Alabama, Ohio to Arizona, are pushing new legislation to limit the power of labor unions, particularly those representing government workers, in collective bargaining and politics.

State officials from both parties are wrestling with ways to curb the salaries and pensions of government employees, which typically make up a significant percentage of state budgets. On Wednesday, for example, New York’s new Democratic governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, is expected to call for a one-year salary freeze for state workers, a move that would save $200 million to $400 million and challenge labor’s traditional clout in Albany.

But in some cases — mostly in states with Republican governors and Republican statehouse majorities — officials are seeking more far-reaching, structural changes that would weaken the bargaining power and political influence of unions, including private sector ones.

For example, Republican lawmakers in Indiana, Maine, Missouri and seven other states plan to introduce legislation that would bar private sector unions from forcing workers they represent to pay dues or fees, reducing the flow of funds into union treasuries. In Ohio, the new Republican governor, following the precedent of many other states, wants to ban strikes by public school teachers.

Some new governors, most notably Scott Walker of Wisconsin, are even threatening to take away government workers’ right to form unions and bargain contracts.

“We can no longer live in a society where the public employees are the haves and taxpayers who foot the bills are the have-nots,” Mr. Walker, a Republican, said in a speech. “The bottom line is that we are going to look at every legal means we have to try to put that balance more on the side of taxpayers.”

Many of the proposals may never become law. But those that do are likely to reduce union influence in election campaigns, with reverberations for both parties.

In the 2010 elections, Republicans emerged with seven more governor’s mansions and won control of the legislature in 26 states, up from 14. That swing has put unions more on the defensive than they have been in decades.

But it is not only Republicans who are seeking to rein in unions. In addition to Mr. Cuomo, California’s new Democratic governor, Jerry Brown, is promising to review the benefits received by government workers in his state, which faces a more than $20 billion budget shortfall over the next 18 months.

“We will also have to look at our system of pensions and how to ensure that they are transparent and actuarially sound and fair — fair to the workers and fair to the taxpayers,” Mr. Brown said in his inaugural speech on Monday.

Many of the state officials pushing for union-related changes say they want to restore some balance, arguing that unions have become too powerful, skewing political campaigns with their large war chests and throwing state budgets off kilter with their expensive pension plans.

But labor leaders view these efforts as political retaliation by Republicans upset that unions recently spent more than $200 million to defeat Republican candidates.

“I see this as payback for the role we played in the 2010 elections,” said Gerald W. McEntee, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the main union of state employees. Mr. McEntee said in October that his union was spending more than $90 million on the campaign, largely to help Democrats.

“Now there’s a bull’s-eye on our back, and they’re out to inflict pain,” he said.

In an internal memorandum, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. warned that in 16 states, Republican lawmakers would seek to starve public sector unions of money by requiring each government worker to “opt in” before that person’s dues money could be used for political activities.

“In the long run, if these measures deprive unions of resources, it will cut them off at their knees. They’ll melt away,” said Charles E. Wilson, a law professor at Ohio State University.

Of all the new governors, John Kasich, Republican of Ohio, appears to be planning the most comprehensive assault against unions. He is proposing to take away the right of 14,000 state-financed child care and home care workers to unionize. He also wants to ban strikes by teachers, much the way some states bar strikes by the police and firefighters.

“If they want to strike, they should be fired,” Mr. Kasich said in a speech. “They’ve got good jobs, they’ve got high pay, they get good benefits, a great retirement. What are they striking for?”

Mr. Kasich also wants to eliminate a requirement that the state pay union-scale wages to construction workers on public contracts, even if the contractors are nonunion. In addition, he would like to ban the use of binding arbitration to settle disputes between the state and unions representing government employees.

Labor leaders, who argue that government employees are not overpaid, worry that many of these measures have a much better chance of enactment than in previous years because of Republican electoral gains and recession-ravaged taxpayers’ reduced sympathy toward government workers.

The A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s internal memo warned labor leaders, “With the enormous losses in state legislatures around the country, we will face not only more attacks on working families and their unions — we will face more serious attacks, particularly in the formerly blue or purple states that are now controlled by a Republican trifecta.”

It pointed in particular to six states, including several former union strongholds, where Republicans control the governor’s mansion and both houses of the legislature: Indiana, Maine, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Naomi Walker, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.’s director of state government relations, said many voters would oppose the antiunion efforts. “I think folks in these states are going to ask whether this is the right time to weaken unions when corporations are amassing more power than ever,” she said. “We’ve been fighting against privatizing Social Security and sending jobs offshore and to get the best deal for the unemployed. It would be a lot easier for Republicans if unions weren’t there to throw up these roadblocks.”

Union leaders particularly dread the spread of right-to-work laws, which prevail in 22 states, almost all in the South or West. Under such laws, unions and employers cannot require workers to join a union or pay any dues or fees to unions to represent them.

Unions complain that such laws allow workers in unionized workplaces to reap the benefits of collective bargaining without paying for it. Pointing to lower wages in right-to-work states, unions say the laws lead to worse wages and benefits by weakening unions.

But lawmakers who are pushing right-to-work laws argue that they help attract investment. “The folks who work day-to-day in economic development tell us that the No. 1 thing we can do to make Indiana more attractive to business is to make Indiana a right-to-work state,” said Jerry Torr, an Indiana state representative who backs such legislation.

Some union leaders say that proposals like right-to-work laws, which have little effect on state budgets, show that Republicans are using budget woes as a pretext to undercut unions.

“They’re throwing the kitchen sink at us,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. “We’re seeing people use the budget crisis to make every attempt to roll back workers’ voices and any ability of workers to join collectively in any way whatsoever.”

A group composed of Republican state lawmakers and corporate executives, the American Legislative Exchange Council, is quietly spreading these proposals from state to state, sending e-mails about the latest efforts as well as suggested legislative language.

Michael Hough, director of the council’s commerce task force, said the aim of these measures was not political, but to reduce labor’s swollen power. “Government budgets have grown and grown because of the cost of employees’ pensions and salaries,” he said. “Now we have to deal with that.”

NY Times