Another day, another
record oil price. Here is
a Web site that puts prices in historic perspective, including adjusting for inflation. Why are prices rising so fast, and why are they so high? For one thing, U.S. production is low.
In August, the U.S. oilfields produced less than they did during any August since 1949. The production has consistently been pretty low all year. But in towns around America, well owners big and small are
enjoying profits they have not seen in years.
Alaskan oil production is also way off peaks, while demand for imports is high. In recent weeks, however, imports have fluctuated some. Generally the U.S. depends on about 10-million barrels of imported crude a day. Recently, imports have fluctuated to 9.1 million barrels. That is enough to make traders very jumpy. The
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries said this week that it will not add production, so the trends you see now will be around for a while.
Heating oil prices are rising with the price of crude.
Newsday says:
With the approach of the holiday season, demand will rise again and so
will prices, says Stephen Schork, publisher of the industry newsletter
The Schork Report in Villanova, Pa. "Higher gasoline prices in the near
term are unavoidable," he said. "I think we would see at least another
20 or 25 cents higher by Thanksgiving."
Diesel Prices Hammer Truckers
You may be worried about gasoline prices, but truckers and train companies are getting hammered by record diesel prices.
The Department of Energy says:
Retail diesel prices climbed 6.3 cents last week to reach 315.7 cents
per gallon, an amount equal to the all-time record high price of
October 24, 2005. Regional prices were all higher with the East Coast
rising 7.0 cents to hit 314.8 cents per gallon. The Midwest price
pushed higher to 312.2 cents per gallon, increasing by 5.5 cents. The
Gulf Coast gained 6.8 cents per gallon to move to 306.2 cents per
gallon. The Rocky Mountain price increased to 328.1 cents per gallon, a
gain of 5.2 cents. Setting a second consecutive record for the West
Coast region, prices rose 7.1 cents to hit 339.4 cents per gallon.
California prices were up 6.8 cents to 340.6 cents per gallon,
establishing another record price for the State.
Parents Not Ruining Kids After All
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, parents are more involved in their children's lives, are restricting how much TV their children watch and are reading to them quite a bit. There is even an up tick in the percentage of families eating dinner together.
Click here for the detailed release [PDF]. Here is the quick summary:
Parents are taking a more active role in the lives of their
children than they did 10 years ago, according to data released today
by the U.S. Census Bureau. For example, in 2004, 47 percent of
teenagers had restrictions on what they watched on television, when
they watched, and for how long, up from 40 percent in 1994.
A Child’s Day: 2004
examines the well-being of children younger than 18 and provides an
updated look into how they spend their days. This series of 30 tables
published by the U.S. Census Bureau is based on the Survey of Income
and Program Participation (SIPP) and addresses children’s living
arrangements, family characteristics, time spent in child care,
academic experience, extracurricular activities and more.
According
to this latest look into the lives of children, about 68 percent of 3-
to 5-year-olds had limits on their television viewing, an increase from
54 percent in 1994. More children 6 to 11 found they, too, were living
with restrictions on television: 71 percent in 2004 compared with 60
percent 10 years earlier.
In 2004, 53 percent of
children younger than 6 ate breakfast with their parents every day. That compared with only 22 percent of teenagers who ate
breakfast with their parents each morning. Those percentages increased
at the dinner table, where 78 percent of children younger than 6 ate
dinner nightly with their parents, compared with 57 percent of
teenagers.
According to the current data, parents
continued to exert a positive influence on their children in other
ways. Seventy-four percent of kids younger than 6 were praised by their
mother or father three or more times a day. The same was true
for 54 percent of children 6 to 11 and 40 percent of 12- to
17-year-olds.
Children 1 to 2 were read to an average
of 7.8 times in the previous week of the survey, while
children 3 to 5 were read to an average of 6.8 times in the previous
week.
Other highlights:
About
half of all children 1 to 5 are read to seven or more times a week; 53
percent for 1- to 2-year-olds, and 51 percent for 3- to 5-year olds.
The
percentage of children participating in lessons, such as music, dance,
language, computers, or religion, went up for 6- to 11-year olds, from
24 percent in 1994 to 33 percent in 2004 .
From
1994 to 2004, the percentage of children who changed schools went down
for 6- to 11-year-olds, from 30 percent to 26 percent. For 12- to
17-year-olds, the percentage of children who changed schools dropped
from 52 percent to 42 percent.
From
1994 to 2004, the number of children 12 to 17 who repeated a grade
declined from 16 percent to 11 percent. For children 6 to 11, the rate
remained the same at 7 percent.
Dia de los Muertos
Today is a significant day in the Mexican holiday calendar. It is the final day of
Dia de los Muertos, day of the dead.
Click here to see a deep and substantial site from AZ Central.
Could Avatars Replace News Anchors?
The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University is turning out journalists, but the IT school is working on technology that could replace the news anchor with talking avatars.
Click here to see what it looks like. Users can completely customize what they want in their show. The delivery is stiff and fairly unwatchable, but the idea is interesting.
Called
"News at Seven," the computer-generated show works like this:
News At Seven is a system that automatically generates a virtual
news show. Totally autonomous, it collects, parses, edits and organizes
news stories and then passes the formatted content to an artificial
anchor for presentation. Using the resources present on the web, the
system goes beyond the straight text of the news stories to also
retrieve relevant images and blogs with commentary on the topics to be
presented.
Once it has assembled and edited its material, News At Seven
presents it to the audience using a graphical game engine and
text-to-speech (TTS) technology in a manner similar to the nightly news
watched regularly by millions of Americans. The result is a cohesive,
compelling performance that successfully combines techniques of modern
news programming with features made by possible only by the fact that
the system is, at its core, completely virtual.
In this, our first deployment of the system, the show produced is a
three-minute daily news update, featuring national, international, and
human-interest stories, with commentary from blogs on the national
story. After the material has been assembled, the system is ready to
present the news using preset scripts. The engine, and our extensions
to it, allows us to present believable human-like newscasters as well
as more imaginative scenes and sets that are only possible because the
show is virtual. We also use techniques to make the generated vocal
audio more interesting and believable.
My favorite talking avatar is
Polly Glotto a robotic translation service.
My friend Bob Papper found that people are not as thrilled with news anchors as you might think.
He writes:
In the
Future of News study
that I did for RTNDF and the Ford Foundation (which is still up on this
site), just under 60% of people 18+ said news is better with anchors.
Just under 30% said news would be better without anchors, and just
under 10% said it doesn’t matter. Not nearly the ringing endorsement of
anchors that most of us might have expected. But the bigger surprise
was who came down on which side of the issue, because the answer
really split based on age. Overall, more than two-thirds of those 18-34
said the news is better with anchors versus just under half of those
35+ saying so.
Astronomers Find Huge Black Hole
The black hole is
1.8 million light-years from Earth and is about 24 to 33 times the size of our sun.
Will Green Hotels Pay Off?
Do you care if your hotel uses biodegradable soap or energy-saving lights? Do you care if your hotel composts waste, donates food leftovers to food pantries and buys local produce? While I have my doubts,
somebody apparently thinks this will matter.
We are always looking for your great ideas. Send Al a few sentences and hot links.
Editor's Note: Al's Morning
Meeting is a compendium of ideas, edited story excerpts and other
materials from a variety of Web sites, as well as original concepts and
analysis. When the information comes directly from another source, it
will be attributed and a link will be provided whenever possible. The
column is fact-checked, but depends on the accuracy and integrity of
the original sources cited. Errors and inaccuracies found will be
corrected.
Why is the link between oil prices and the current...
