"Big Bang" machine set to yield surprises

Scientists could begin garnering information on the origins of the universe in the coming months as the world's biggest particle collider starts moving to full power next year, a project leader said Monday.

But it may not be until 2011 that what is dubbed the "Big Bang Machine" -- the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) -- straddling the Swiss-French border at the CERN research center will hit its top velocity, physicist Steve Myers added.

The LHC -- a nearly $10 billion experiment involving scientists worldwide -- was relaunched at the weekend after a technical accident 14 months ago brought it to a halt just nine days after its start-up.

Myers, CERN's Director for Accelerators, told Reuters Television that particle beams had been piped round the 27-km (17-mile tunnel) Friday, and all had gone smoothly.

"Everyone is very confident because this has been a tremendous start-up. We're making measurements on this machine now that you normally only make a year or two into an accelerator's operations," he said.

ORIGINS OF LIFE

The key aim of the project is to discover how the universe took shape after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago that spilled out matter at vast speeds and energies that eventually became suns, stars, planets and then life itself.

But what Myers called "new surprises in physics that we can really measure" will probably have to wait until the particle beams can be collided at the LHC's maximum force.

"We will be contemplating reaching that ultimate energy in 2011," he said.

Experiments in a previous collider at CERN -- the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva at the foot of France's Jura mountains -- staged particle collisions producing energy close to that of the Big Bang.

But the LHC at its full might should recreate conditions just one billionth of a second after the primeval explosion to be captured by an array of super-computers, which will transmit the data to scientists in 33 countries.

Among enduring mysteries that researchers hope to unravel are the black holes in the universe, what anti-matter is and whether there is a Higgs Boson

The Boson is a theoretical particle thought to give matter its mass, enabling it to come together. It was first advanced by Edinburgh University scientist Peter Higgs in 1964 as an explanation of how the universe was formed.

Earlier efforts to capture it at CERN and at a similar laboratory in the United States have failed.

The LHC relaunch was lower key than the first attempt on September 10, 2008, where small technical faults culminated in a massive explosion.

The blast damaged the vast magnets that pull the particles around the tunnel and smash them together. But Myers said every precaution had been taken to ensure that could not happen again.

He said the first collisions would be staged at low energy within two weeks. After a two-week break over Christmas, energy would be increased, and then perhaps again in the spring.

THIRD IPHONE WORM

Another week, another worm hitting jailbroken iPhones. As with the previous exploits, which Rickrolled your phone's wallpaper and stole your data, this nasty piece of work burrows its way into your jailbroken device if you haven't changed the password for the iPhone's root account--you have changed your root password, right? Right?.

A source who's seen the worm in the wild tells Macworld that, after compromising the phone, the worm goes on to replace the phone's copy of the SSH remote login software, changes the root password (so you can't stop the worm without wiping the phone), skims your SMS database, checks in with its Lithuania-based overlords via the network, and then starts running a piece of software that searches for other vulnerable phones on both the local network and known IP address ranges of specific Internet Service Providers (mostly European). Somebody should have told the worm that nobody likes overachievers.

Our source also told us that though the worm seems to include code for uploading the SMS database to the worm's creators, it wasn't active in the version he saw. However, the worm can also download further files over the network, meaning it could potentially add other attack capabilities.

For users, the main visible symptom seems to be intense battery drain as a result of the constantly-running ssh-attacking process that the worm starts. Apparently, the reduction in battery life has been so severe that it's even caused some infected users to wipe and restore their handsets without even realizing that the worm was installed.

Security firm Intego is reporting that the worm also changes routing information on the phone so that customers of a particular Dutch bank trying to access their accounts will be redirected to a fake site, where they will be prompted to enter their login credentials--which will then be transmitted to the worm's creators. Intego also suggests that the aforementioned SMS upload capability is active in some versions of the worm.

This is probably the nastiest iPhone threat we've seen so far. If you have jailbroken your phone or are even thinking about jailbreaking your phone, it is imperative that you change your root password--we've even got a tutorial to show you just how to do that. And, as before, those who haven't jailbroken their phone are immune from this new exploit.

Israel Has History of Uneven Prisoner Swap Deals

Palestinians said Monday that negotiators were close to exchanging an Israeli soldier held by Gaza militants for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners. Israel has carried out such swaps in the past:

--June 2008: In exchange for the bodies of two Israeli soldiers, Israel frees a Lebanese convicted in a fatal 1979 apartment house attack, four other Lebanese prisoners, an undisclosed number of Palestinian prisoners and dozens of bodies of Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas.

--January 2004: In a deal with Hezbollah, Israel trades 436 Arab prisoners and the bodies of 59 Lebanese fighters for an Israeli civilian and the bodies of three Israeli soldiers.

--July 1996: Israel frees 65 prisoners for the return of the bodies of two soldiers from Lebanon.

--September 1991: Israel frees 51 prisoners for proof that one of its soldiers held in Lebanon is dead.

--May 1985: Israel swaps 1,150 Lebanese and Palestinian prisoners for three Israeli soldiers captured in Lebanon after Israel invaded in 1982. Criticism over the lopsided deal intensified after many of the freed prisoners played leading roles in a Palestinian uprising that began in 1987.

--November 1983: Israel swaps 4,600 Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners for six Israeli soldiers captured in Lebanon in September 1982.

Will JPMorgan chief Jamie Dimon be our next Treasury Secretary?

A report in The New York Post suggests that Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase (JPM), could be the logical replacement for current U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. The paper's sources indicate that "a number of policy makers have begun mentioning Dimon as a successor to Geithner, whose standing in Washington has suffered because of the country's high unemployment rate, the weakness of the dollar, the slow pace of the recovery and the government's mounting deficit."

Meanwhile, reports the Post, Dimon has emerged as one of the heroes of the financial crisis, "having navigated JPMorgan through the recession and being a go-to guy when Uncle Sam last year needed Wall Street's help during the collapses of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual."

As evidence that such a move could be imminent, the newspaper reports that Dimon recently put a succession plan into place at JPMorgan Chase. However, the CEO has apparently told his associates that he plans to stay on at the bank for "six or seven years" longer. A spokesman for the Dow component declined to comment on the Post's speculation.

In morning trading, JPM is following the broader equities market higher. The stock was up more than 2% at last check, adding to its year-to-date advance of roughly 34.7%. Since late March, the shares have cruised higher along support from their 20-week moving average.

In response to the equity's uptrend, option traders have slowly started to gravitate toward bullish bets on the stock. During the past 10 days, speculators on the International Securities Exchange (ISE) have bought to open 1.43 calls for every put on JPM. This ratio ranks higher than 70.7% of other such readings taken during the past year, revealing that calls are being snapped up over puts at a faster pace than usual.

Three Mile Island radiation caused by pipe cutting

HARRISBURG, Pa. -- Officials are trying to determine how workers cutting a pipe stirred up radioactive dust at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant.

Plant spokesman Ralph DeSantis said Monday that the public was not endangered Saturday, when a dozen workers were exposed to radiation.

The central Pennsylvania plant has two reactors. One suffered a partial meltdown in 1979 and is mothballed. The other is still in use, but has been shut down since last month so steam generators could be replaced.

DeSantis says the radioactive dust emanated from reactor cooling system pipes the workers were cutting. He says a radiation monitor "temporarily went up" slightly, but a later survey detected no contamination outside.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission says the radiation isn't significant.

Scott Rothstein's properties

Attorney Scott Rothstein tapped into millions of dollars from his massive investment scam to cover payroll costs at his expanding Fort Lauderdale law firm, federal authorities said in a court record released Monday.

Rothstein's law firm generated revenue of $8 million in one recent year, yet his 70-lawyer firm had a payroll of $18 million, prosecutors said. Rothstein, who owned half of Rothstein Rosenfeldt Adler, used investors' money from his Ponzi scheme to make up the shortfall, they said.

The allegations were revealed in an amended forfeiture complaint against dozens of Rothstein's real estate properties, foreign cars, restaurants and other assets -- including $12 million in the lawyer's bank account in Morocco, along with millions more donated to political campaign and charitable funds.

``Funds used to acquire the [Rothstein] assets came from the `Ponzi' scheme and not from legitimate RRA funds,'' Assistant U.S. Attorney Alison W. Lehr wrote in the amended forfeiture action.

Rothstein, 47, who had fled to Morocco in late October as his investment fund of legal settlements sold to wealthy investors collapsed, has not been charged with a crime. After his return in early November, FBI and IRS agents began seizing his assets and raiding his law firm.

The civil forfeiture is based on money laundering allegations that Rothstein amassed his fortune by defrauding investors, prosecutors said. Investors bought shares in his fabricated confidential settlements from employment-discrimination and other civil cases during the past four years -- investments that promised returns up 40 percent.

According to the forfeiture action, the U.S. government is now seeking to seize 15 parcels of South Florida real estate -- adding seven more to the original list. Also seized were 20 cars -- including three Ferraris, three Corvettes, two Rolls Royces, a limousine and a $1.5 million Bugatti sports car, plus an 87-foot yacht, four personal watercrafts, 304 pieces of jewelry, a guitar collection, $80,000 in American Express gift cards and $272,000 in cash.

The government is also seeking the equity Rothstein has in some 21 different companies in which he invested, including restaurants, a mortgage company, a sports agency, two banks and a biofuel company.

Rothstein also had an overseas account with Bank Populaire in Morocco, where he had $12 million. Federal authorities are seeking to seize another $2 million held in the same bank under the name Ahnick Khalid and a $1 million account held by Steve Caputi, owner of the Cafe Iguana nightclub in Pembroke Pines.

Another $1.3 million is held in four accounts at Gibraltar Bank. And Rothstein had a separate investment account holding $1.2 million.

Finally, the government is seeking more than $160,000 in political contributions and charitable donations of $800,000 to the Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital in Hollywood and $1 million to Holy Cross Hospital in Fort Lauderdale.

Holy Cross officials announced last week that the hospital was going to return the $1 million gift, which was to be used for a new women's center with Rothstein's charitable foundation engraved over the entrance to the lobby.

MURDOCH & GOOGLE

Bless you, Rupert Murdoch, you really do keep things interesting. The News Corp media maven is threatening to take all of his newspapers' content off Google and give Microsoft Bing exclusive rights to index his news. This is the second Big Murdoch Threat recently, the first being his brazen announcement to put all of his news behind a pay wall. What is Murdoch thinking? I think I know.

The central struggle of monetizing online news is that ad rates for web pages are significantly worse than the print ad rates that once buttressed newspapers. So for a newspaper publisher like Murdoch, big online traffic helps, but it doesn't pay for a sprawling roster of reporters and editors. Somebody's gotta break the tyranny of revenue-light banner ads, eventually. You can go the Daily Beast model and try to infuse online ads with a dash of glamour to drive up premiums and juice click-through rates. You can go the Financial Times/WSJ model of combining limited free content with paid registration for full access. Or you can think outside the box, turn off Google and get another search engine to pay you for exclusive rights to your content.

Would Murdoch loose traffic with this gambit? Oh you bet. By "turning off" Google, WSJ could, by one estimate, lose 25% of its page views -- although that number doesn't take into account any increase in traffic from the Bing deal. But remember, big traffic numbers are a fig leaf. Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review found that this 25% Google crowd accounted for less than $12m a year in advertising. If Murdoch can get a better deal with Bing -- at a time when Bing might be desperate to increase its news integrity -- then we should take this threat seriously.

As a coda, Jeff Jarvis thinks this idea is suicide, and I think Jeff Jarvis is wrong. His critique of Google-blocking is all about traffic, and that's crazy, because nobody in his right mind thinks that online traffic is going to save the New York Times, or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal. Just ask them! (The NYT is actually making more money from readers than advertisers now even though their online traffic is killer.) Jarvis doesn't mention ads or ad rates in this article, and he uses the word revenue once in reference to About.com. He's not engaging with the central problem, which is that today's online ad rates can't save journalism. So why blame Murdoch for looking for something that can?.

Caterpillar Beating Komatsu as Dow Soars on Dollar

For the first time since the equity rally began in March, the biggest U.S. stocks are beating the smallest as the dollar’s descent sends investors to companies with the most business in international markets.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average of companies with $116.6 billion in median market value rose 7.9 percent this quarter, compared with the 0.2 percent loss by the Standard & Poor’s SmallCap 600 Index, whose members are worth $591.8 million on average. The Dow had trailed by 26 percentage points following the stock market’s low on March 9.
The largest corporations are winning now because they get more sales abroad, where growth in nations from Brazil to China exceeds the pace in the world’s biggest economy. The dollar’s drop helps Peoria, Illinois-based Caterpillar Inc., Ford Motor Co. and McDonald’s Corp. by boosting the value of revenue when foreign earnings are brought back to the U.S.
“The large-cap multinational exposure to a weak dollar and non-dollar revenues has been causing them to outperform,” said Chris Hyzy, New York-based chief investment officer at U.S. Trust, a Bank of America Corp. unit overseeing about $188 billion. “That’s going to be stickier than many people believe. It’s not going to go away in the new year.”
Large Stock Shift
While the dollar has fallen since March, the 30-company Dow average didn’t start beating the rest of the stock market until this quarter. Now, investors are buying bigger stocks on concern the rally in equities will slow, said Henry Herrmann, the chief executive officer of Waddell & Reed Financial Inc., which manages $70 billion from Overland Park, Kansas. The S&P 500 posted its first monthly drop since February in October after a 56 percent jump and declined 0.2 percent last week to close at 1,091.38 on Nov. 20.
The Dow added 162.86 points, or 1.6 percent, to 10,481.02 at 10:51 a.m. in New York today. The S&P SmallCap 600 climbed 2.5 percent to 316.68.
The largest companies generate about 33 percent of their sales abroad, compared with 20 percent for the smallest, according to data compiled by Charlotte, North Carolina-based Bank of America.
Smaller companies are at a disadvantage because the dollar has declined against all 16 of the most-active currencies this year as the government sold record levels of new debt to support the $11.6 trillion that it spent, lent or guaranteed to end the worst recession since the 1930s. The Dollar Index has lost 16 percent from its three-year high on March 5, the steepest retreat since 1986.
‘Quietly Very Pleased’
President Barack Obama “has to be quietly very pleased about it,” said Kenneth Rogoff, a professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund. “The dollar’s decline benefits big multinationals that happen to be getting a lot of their profits from abroad. That’s clear.”
Caterpillar, the biggest maker of bulldozers and excavators that got 66 percent of sales outside the U.S. in 2008, has added 16 percent this quarter on the New York Stock Exchange. Tokyo- based Komatsu Ltd., its top competitor, added 2.4 percent since Sept. 30.
Ford, the only major U.S. automaker to avoid bankruptcy, has risen 22 percent in the fourth quarter, compared with a 10 percent decline for Seoul-based Hyundai Motor Co., South Korea’s largest car manufacturer. Dearborn, Michigan-based Ford does 51 percent of its business abroad. South Korea’s won is the second- best performer among Asia’s 10 most-active currencies this year.
66% of Sales
McDonald’s has gained 12 percent since Sept. 30, while Darden Restaurants Inc., the owner of Olive Garden and Red Lobster, declined 6.4 percent.
Converting currencies into dollars will add 10 cents to 13 cents a share to 2010 profit at McDonald’s, the world’s largest restaurant chain said on Nov. 12. The Oak Brook, Illinois-based company, whose market value is more than 15 times bigger than Darden’s, gets 66 percent of sales from overseas, versus 3.6 percent at its Orlando, Florida-based rival.
“People are trying to determine who has pricing power, where can we see revenue growth, where is there potential for market expansion, where is the emerging market international exposure,” Waddell & Reed’s Herrmann said. “Most of those questions lead to the conclusion of bigger cap and higher quality.”
Better Returns
The dollar’s drop is also helping broader measures for the biggest U.S. companies outperform indexes for the smallest. The S&P 100 has risen 5.8 percent this quarter, compared with a 4.9 percent gain for the S&P 500 and 1.1 percent rise with the S&P MidCap 400. The Russell 2000 Index has lost 1 percent. Their median market capitalizations are $40 billion, $8.55 billion, $2.17 billion and $375 million, respectively.
Among companies in the S&P 500, those generating more than half their revenue abroad beat those doing business solely in the U.S. by 30 percentage points in 2009 through Nov. 17, according to data compiled by Bespoke Investment Group LLC, a Harrison, New York-based research firm. The stock measure has risen 61 percent since March 9.
Weakness in the U.S. currency will continue next year even after the Federal Reserve boosts interest rates, a move Chairman Ben S. Bernanke says is an “extended period” of time away, according to the top forecasters in Bloomberg’s ranking of 46 firms last month. Standard Chartered Plc, Aletti Gestielle SGR, HSBC Holdings Plc and Scotia Capital Inc. say the dollar will depreciate as much as 7.1 percent versus the euro.
Central Banks
Odds of a Fed increase don’t exceed 50 percent until September, according to trading in Fed funds futures contracts. The central bank cut its target rate for overnight loans between banks to as low as zero, a record, in December.
“Over the next 12 months, and more likely over the next few years, the dollar should fall,” said David Kelly, who helps oversee $480 billion as chief market strategist for JPMorgan Funds in New York. “Large-cap companies do have more exposure to the rest of the world, so they should benefit.”
Record foreclosures, frozen credit markets and $1.72 billion in bank losses and writedowns from the collapse of the subprime-mortgage market prompted government rescue plans that have accelerated the dollar’s retreat.
Policy makers say they want to end the dollar’s plunge. European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet has argued for a strong dollar, calling it “extremely important” last month. Bernanke said during a Nov. 16 speech in New York that the Fed is “attentive” to changes in the currency’s value and “will help ensure that the dollar is strong.”
Amassing Reserves
To keep their currencies from appreciating too fast, governments in developing nations have amassed record foreign- exchange reserves as their central banks bought dollars. Brazil imposed a tax on foreign investments in October to end a rally that’s driven the real up 34 percent against the dollar in 2009.
International sales haven’t guaranteed stock gains. Chicago-based Boeing Co., which gets 39 percent of revenue abroad, cut its full-year profit forecast on Oct. 21 following $3.5 billion in charges for the delayed 787 Dreamliner and 747-8 jumbo jet programs. Its shares lost 2.6 percent since Sept. 30.
Emerging markets remain a draw for corporations. The U.S. unemployment rate is 10.2 percent, the highest level since 1983, and Americans cut spending for the first time in five months in September, according to the Commerce Department.
U.S. GDP
The median of 63 economist estimates compiled by Bloomberg show that the U.S. may expand 2.6 percent in 2010, after increasing at a 3.5 percent rate in the third quarter of 2009 following a year of contraction. Brazil, Latin America’s biggest economy, will grow 3.8 percent in 2010 and China, the most- populous nation, will gain 9.5 percent, according to the median forecasts.
“Large companies are in the sweet spot,” said Michael Obuchowski, chief investment officer of First Empire Asset Management Inc. in Hauppauge, New York, which oversees about $3.3 billion. “When the consumer is still slowly recovering, being able to boost the exports really helps the manufacturing part of the economy, the exporting part of the economy.”