That's a grizzly bear about to try to swallow a camera. (Brad Josephs)

VIDEO: Look Inside A Grizzly Bear's Mouth

May 20, 2013 — A 3-year-old grizzly in Alaska found a GoPro camera that had been set up to capture nature scenes. The result: Very upclose video. Warning: If slobber and big teeth aren't your thing, this video may not be for you.

When a 3-year-old grizzly in Alaska came upon a GoPro camera that adventure guide Brad Josephs had set up in the wild, the encounter produced footage that takes you right inside the bear's mouth.

We saw Josephs on CNN, talking about the amazingly close up view the camera got. Fair warning: If you don't like slobber, teeth and tongues, the video may be more than you can bear.

According to Josephs' YouTube posts, the camera survived. He adds here that it had been "strapped to a rock with a rubber band! ... The bear only gently mouthed the camera, and didn't even put a dent in it!"

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Deborah Turness. (NBCUniversal)

Deborah Turness, Of British ITV, Will Be President Of NBC News

May 20, 2013 — Turness becomes the first female president of one of the big three television networks in the U.S. She is scheduled to take the helm in August.

NBC announced Monday that Deborah Turness, the former editor of the British ITV News, will become president of NBC News beginning in August.

Turness, the network said, becomes the first woman to head the news division of one of the Big Three television networks in the United States.

"Deborah has built an outstanding reputation as both a journalist and business executive with a proven track record for innovation and collaboration," Pat Fili-Krushel, NBCUniversal's Chairman, said in a statement. "She is a leader with a global perspective, who is also very familiar with NBC News, having worked closely with us through our partnership with ITN. Her passion for the news business, combined with her creativity and vision, will be a tremendous asset to NBC News, and I'm very pleased to welcome her to the team."

ITN, by the way, produces ITV News in London.

The Guardian reports that when Turness took the helm at ITV in 2004, she was also the first female president of a network news organization in the U.K.

The paper adds:

"Some ITV News staff were moved to tears during the newsroom announcement at 3pm UK time, led by ITN chief executive John Hardie.

"In a memo to staff, [ITN chief executive John Hardie] said Turness's replacement has 'huge shoes to fill' and described her as one of his 'most trusted and valued advisers.'"

The Wall Street Journal reports:

"NBC News has been without a president since February, when former president Steve Capus stepped down. His departure came six months after NBC's immediate parent, NBCUniversal, had reorganized its news properties including CNBC and MSNBC into a newly created NBCUniversal News Group."

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Big fat A+ written in chalk on a blackboard. (iStockphoto.com)

'Cheating' Can Be An Effective Learning Strategy

May 20, 2013 — It's the end of the academic year and students everywhere are taking tests. What for? Commentator Tania Lombrozo suggests we should shift our focus from testing for assessment to testing for learning.

It's the end of the semester here at UC Berkeley, and I've got testing on my mind. I'm not the only one; across campus, instructors are engaged in the arduous task of grading quickly and fairly while students sigh with relief as they exit their final, final exams.

We most often think of tests as being about assessment. They tell us something about how successfully an individual has mastered the material being tested, and this assessment can in turn help us to assign grades, make determinations about placement or identify areas that would benefit from further study.

There's no doubt that these uses for tests have some value. But thinking of tests as mere instruments for assessment misses an opportunity for learning.

The very process of preparing for and taking tests can foster learning, and that, after all, is the fundamental goal of education, isn't it? I'd certainly like to think so, though there are more cynical takes on the role of higher education.

Let's consider a thought-provoking article published last month in which UCLA ecologist Peter Nonacs describes how he boosted learning in his behavioral ecology class by letting students cheat on a test. (Okay, so it wasn't really cheating, since he sanctioned the use of peers, books, the Internet and other sources in crafting the best answers to the exam questions.) As he'd hoped, the lead-up to the exam and the test-taking itself got students thinking like behavioral ecologists, including the very principles of game theory Nonacs hoped to instill:

In discussion section, they speculated, organized, and plotted. What would be the test's payoff matrix? Would cooperation be rewarded or counter-productive? Would a large group work better, or smaller subgroups with specified tasks? What about "scroungers" who didn't study but were planning to parasitize everyone else's hard work? How much reciprocity would be demanded in order to share benefits?

His approach was especially clever and appropriate for a class on ecology, where cooperation and competition in real-world "tests" are integral to the subject matter, but the strategy of rethinking tests as opportunities for learning is more general. Nonacs writes:

Is the take-home message, then, that cheating is good? Well ... no. Although by conventional test-taking rules, the students were cheating, they actually weren't in this case. Instead, they were changing their goal in the Education Game from "Get a higher grade than my classmates" to "Get to the best answer."

A shift to thinking about tests for mastery rather than measurement isn't just refreshing, it's also supported by psychological research.

Dozens (if not hundreds) of studies have investigated students' goals in learning and how they influence achievement. Most prominently, researchers have differentiated mastery goals, which focus on improving one's own competence, from performance goals, which focus on doing well to outperform others, obtain positive feedback (in the form of grades or praise), or avoid looking bad.

Adopting mastery goals pretty reliably leads to greater learning, increases willingness to tackle hard problems and can even improve social relationships. So conceptualizing tests as opportunities for learning - consistent with a mastery goal - can itself improve learning, even if the tests take more traditional forms than that of Nonacs's collaborative experiment.

And that's not all: there's also evidence that test-taking itself can improve retention for the material being tested. In a 2006 demonstration of a phenomenon known as the "testing effect," for example, Roedieger and Karpicke had students read passages of text and then either repeatedly study them or repeatedly test their ability to recall them, without any feedback on how well they did on the tests. The students who repeatedly studied the passage were more confident about their ability to remember the content than those who were repeatedly tested. But the latter group considerably outperformed the former when it came to actual memory for the passage one week later.

So testing can be an excellent tool in an educator's toolbox, but it's one that needs to be used wisely. The American Psychological Association warns of the dangers of "high-stakes" testing in our nation's schools, and a report from the National Academies of Science suggests few benefits to our current test-based accountability system.

Part of the problem, I contend, is a narrow focus on testing for assessment. Let's start thinking about testing for learning.

You can keep up with more of what Tania Lombrozo is thinking on Twitter: @TaniaLombrozo

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Carbon isotope analysis: a scientific way to know just how much soda kids are drinking behind parents' back? (iStockphoto)

Can A Piece Of Hair Reveal How Much Coke Or Pepsi You Drink?

May 20, 2013 — People are notorious for under-reporting what they consume -- they lie, forget or just guess wrong. For researchers who want to know how much soda we're drinking, a high-tech analysis technique could help.

One way to know how much soda people drink is to ask them.

The problem? We tend to underestimate, lie or forget what we've consumed.

And this is a challenge for researchers who study the links between sugar-sweetened beverages and obesity.

A new study published in the Journal of Nutrition explains a technique that could help researchers get a good measurement of sugary beverage consumption — by analyzing a piece of hair or a blood sample.

Researcher Diane O'Brien of the University of Alaska and her colleagues have used carbon isotope analysis to develop their measuring tool. "We're isolating the (carbon) isotope ratio in a specific molecule," explains O'Brien. The molecule is an amino acid called alanine, which captures carbon from sugars.

It turns out that when you consume sweetened soda, slightly more of a particular kind of carbon called C-13 gets trapped in alanine and incorporated into proteins. And proteins hang around in the body much longer than sugar does. So the scientists say they can sample proteins to look for extra amounts of C-13 in alanine. People with a lot of C-13 are likely to be people who have consumed a lot of corn syrup and cane sugar.

Using this technique, O'Brien says you can capture a longer-term picture of sugar consumption compared to urine samples — which only reveal how much sugar a person has consumed in the last day or so.

Carbon isotope analysis has helped scientists piece together ancient dietary patterns, explains Dale Schoeller of the University of Wisconsin, Madison in a commentary about the study.

"The use of stable isotope signatures has even provided information about the diet of Otzi (aka The Iceman),the 5000-year-old natural mummy found in the Alps in 1991."

And he writes that he thinks the technique will be helpful for researchers studying the obesity epidemic.

"This should be a major step toward resolving the controversy over the role of
caloric sweetener intake in the development of obesity," writes Schoeller.

Not everyone is convinced.

"This is an interesting, but preliminary, finding," says Dr. David Ludwig of Boston Children's Hospital and director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center, in an email to us.

And Barry Popkin of UNC-Chapel Hill, another obesity researcher, sounds the same note: "This might be useful," Popkin writes in an email to us. But the big drawback, he says, is such testing is expensive to carry out.

Still, as the mom of a teenage son who's been spotted more than once sneaking off on his bike to the corner store for a a big-old soft drink in the afternoon, it would be nifty to perform the r-u-drinking-soda? test.

So can O'Brien help?

"Sure, in theory we could run your son's hair and find out if he's quaffing on the sly," O'Brien says.

Or maybe I should just check the bottles in the recycle bin. ('fess up, Luke, I'm onto you!)

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Not just an empty suit. (Flickr)

Ask A Banker: Capital, Capital!

May 20, 2013 — Should banks be required to hold much more capital as a safety net? Just kidding, banks don't hold capital!

Hi, it's Ask a Banker! You should send us questions on email or Twitter, but this particular question, though timely, was made up by me, sorry:

Q. Should banks be required to hold much more capital as a safety net? Or should they be putting that money to productive use by lending it out instead?

Naaaaah, just messing with you. The recent debate over bank capital, sparked by Anat Admati and Martin Hellwig's book The Bankers' New Clothes and the Brown-Vitter bill in the Senate, has had at least one unambiguous effect, which is that it is now fashionable in certain circles to say "banks don't hold capital" in the tone of voice formerly reserved for correcting split infinitives or declining ketchup on your hot dog.

Banks don't hold capital! And bank capital isn't money kept in a vault - it can be put to productive use, too.

Okay, that's out of the way. Now, let's talk about what capital is and whether there should be more of it. I feel a little silly doing so because, while The Bankers' New Clothes is sort of the Eats, Shoots and Leaves of financial regulation, it's also a pretty good book about bank capital that is designed to be super easy for the non-expert reader, so you could just read it and I could go do something else.

Nonetheless! The book seems to have sparked the Brown-Vitter bill in the Senate, which would require big (over $500 billion in assets) banks to have capital equal to at least 15% of their assets. This in turn would require those big banks to raise something over $1 trillion in capital or, alternatively, to become much smaller banks.* The banks don't want to get smaller, for reasons you can probably figure out on your own; they also don't seem all that enamored of raising more capital, for reasons that might require more explaining.

So: What is capital? We might as well start with "banks don't hold capital": capital isn't a thing a bank has or holds or keeps in a vault somewhere collecting dust; it's more of a description of where the money comes from. Or, doesn't come from: capital is money that isn't borrowed. Banks, like all companies, own stuff, and like many companies, they borrow money. Here's a roughly accurate diagram of what that looks like at one particular bank (J.P. Morgan):**

Notice that the left side (JPMorgan's "assets") is bigger than the right side (its "liabilities"), which is generally the case - companies that owe more than they own tend to be in trouble. JPMorgan has about $2.4 trillion worth of stuff, some of which represents money put to productive use in the economy (loans to people to buy houses, or loans to companies to build factories), some of which is just money kept in vaults and emergency funds, and some of which is ... derivatives, where, you make the call.

JPMorgan also owes around $2.2 trillion to various people. Some of those people can take their money out any time - like people with Chase checking accounts (under "Deposits"), or people who lend to JPMorgan in the repo markets (under "Other short-term debt"). Others have their money locked in for a while - like people with 6-month certificates of deposit (also under "Deposits"), or people who own JPMorgan ten-year bonds ("Long-term debt").***

If you subtract what JPMorgan owes other people from what it has, you get its capital, which as it happens is about $207 billion:

So, on some simplistic assumptions, capital is just the result of some arithmetic:

Capital is how much money would be left in the bank if you sold all the bank's stuff and paid off all its debts.

If you actually did that - and you wouldn't, it wouldn't really work out this way, but pretend - if you actually did that then that leftover money would go to JPMorgan's shareholders. They're what's called the "residual claimants," which just means that they get what's left after everyone else has been paid off.**** So the capital is sometimes called "shareholders' capital," because it belongs to them.

Where does capital come from? Well, it comes from arithmetic doesn't it? At the birth of a bank, some people get together and decide to start a bank and they each contribute $100 for one share, or whatever, and that's the initial capital that gets the bank started. But over time, the bank's capital mostly grows from arithmetic: if the bank is making profits, then the value of what it owns will grow faster than the value of what it owes. In other words, if a bank is making a profit, its capital will increase.

For reasons we'll get to in a bit, banks sometimes have too much or too little capital - too much if they've been really profitable, too little if they've lost a lot of money. If they have too much capital they tend to return money to shareholders, by buying back stock or paying dividends. If they have too little they tend to raise more capital, by selling more shares. Another arithmetic definition of capital is that it's:

• the total amount of profit the bank has made in its history (minus, of course, all the losses it's made in its history), plus
• the amount of money it's raised by selling stock, minus
• the amount it's spent buying back stock and paying dividends.

The fact that "profit plus cash that comes in from selling stock minus cash returned to shareholders" comes out to the same number as "the value of your assets minus your liabilities" is the sort of mild arithmetico-definitional magic that really ought to have a name, like "fundamental theorem of accounting" or something, but as far as I can tell it doesn't.*****

Those arithmetic definitions of capital should make clear an important fact: if a bank loses money, its capital is reduced before any of its debts are. The capital is the "first-loss position"; sometimes people say it "absorbs" losses. If JPMorgan just misplaces $100 billion of cash, then its assets will go from $2.4 billion to $2.3 billion, but its debts won't change by a penny: it'll still owe various bondholders, depositors, etc. a total of about $2.3 billion. This means that its capital will now be $107 billion, say, instead of $207 billion: the entire $100 billion loss will go directly to the people who own stock in JPMorgan — the people with a claim on JPMorgan's capital. If JPMorgan misplaces $300 billion of cash, then its capital will be zero, and the stock in JPMorgan will be worth zero. On top of that, some of the people who loaned money to JPMorgan won't be paid back.

Those arithmetic definitions might raise another question: if capital is, at the end of the day, the value of what you have minus what you owe to other people, or equivalently the value of all your profits added up, then why wouldn't you want more of it? The big banks are subject to capital requirements by regulation, and tend in practice not to have too much more capital than they're required to have. And they are very unhappy with Brown-Vitter, which would raise those requirements dramatically.

But, why? In your personal life having more money and less debt seems like a good thing, no? Most people celebrate paying off the mortgage, rather than running out and getting another one. Why do bank executives disagree?

The answer starts with the fact that bank executives, in theory, work for (and generally are) shareholders - the people with the claim on capital. Those shareholders obviously want the bank to increase its capital by making money. But then they want the bank to give them the money: to "return capital" via share repurchases (which drive up the stock price) and dividends(cash payments to shareholders). For the bank to make money and keep it is relatively less appealing, and what they particularly don't want is for the bank to increase its capital by asking them for money.******

I'm tempted to stop there and say it's as simple as that: people invest in banks because they'd like to make money; having money come out of the bank and into their pockets is good; having money stay in the bank is so-so; having the bank sell more shares is bad.

But there's another issue, which is that banks - and their shareholders - tend to like leverage, which is the superpower that borrowed money creates. Borrowing money - especially when you can borrow it really cheaply, like you can today - allows you to magnify your profits and losses. Magnifying your profits is good for shareholders (they get the profits!). Magnifying your losses isn't great, but since the shareholders don't necessarily suffer all of the losses (their shares can't go below zero), they might still prefer to take the risk. "Capital," remember, just refers to money that the bank hasn't borrowed: the more capital a bank has, by definition, the less leverage it has.

On the other hand, people who think that banks need to be safer like capital and tend to think that there should be more of it. Capital has two features that make it attractive to these people. Or, one feature, which is that you don't have to pay it back. But this means two things: first, you don't have to pay it back at any particular time. Second, there's no particular amount that you have to pay back.

First, time: much bank financing (tri-party repo, for instance) is what is called "overnight" financing because it is literally that: someone is lending you money for less than 24 hours. This is pretty annoying for all concerned, but it has the key advantage for the lender that they can get out at the first sign of trouble. If you've been lending money overnight to a bank for a while and find out on Wednesday morning that they've lost a lot of money to rogue traders, you can just decide not to "roll" your loan, that is, lend the money again Wednesday night. And, there, you're done, you've got your money back.

That's bad for the bank: when they've lost a lot of money to rogue traders is when they particularly need money, and might have a tough time raising it (because who wants to lend to a bank that might be going under?). Look back at that chart: JPMorgan has something like $650 billion of short-term debt - some overnight, but all of it coming due within one year. If they couldn't "roll" that debt then they'd need to pay it all back in fairly short order. They have about $300 billion in cash, which would help, but if they really needed to pay back the full $650 billion they'd need to sell $350 billion of other stuff to raise more cash. Selling $350 billion worth of stuff all at once has a tendency to make it worth less than $350 billion.

This problem - which is often referred to under the name "liquidity" - can be addressed by having lots of capital. Capital never needs to be paid back. Shareholders can never demand that JPMorgan pay them back their $207 billion, so that funding can never cause a crisis.

But the liquidity problem can also be addressed in other ways. For instance: banks could just use less short-term debt, which can cause a liquidity crisis any given day, and more long-term debt, which makes these crises less likely. And in fact there are a lot of proposals to require banks to use more long-term debt and rely less on short-term funding markets. Or: banks could have more liquid assets - more stuff that they could sell quickly, without it losing value, if they did need to pay off their debts suddenly - and, again, that's a popular topic of regulation.

The second advantage of capital is unique to capital:******* you don't have to pay back any particular amount. A bank share, unlike a bank bond or deposit, doesn't have a fixed dollar amount; it's just worth whatever it's worth. This sounds like a meaningless advantage because, as we just said, you never need to pay it back at all, but there's nonetheless some psychologico-regulatory meaning that's worth discussing. It goes like this:

• If you lend money to a bank, for example by putting your life savings in a checking account at the bank, and the bank loses all of it, you will freak out, and so will your congressperson; whereas
• If you invest money in bank stock, and the value of that stock goes to zero, it's really your fault, man. You can freak out if you want, and the world being what it is you can probably find someone to get angry along with you, but it ain't me. You bought bank stocks, you got what you deserve.

Is that ... unsatisfying? Because it's kind of important. The thing about "more capital makes banks safer" is that in a certain light it's nonsensical: a bank's risk of losing money depends on its actions and its assets. If it buys terrible mortgage-backed securities or gets sued for fraud all the time, then it will lose money, no matter how much money it owes or doesn't owe to other people. The question is just who will bear those losses.********

But that's an important question. If JPMorgan, with its $207 billion in capital, loses $50 billion, then to some approximation its shareholders will suffer $50 billion in losses. Tough luck to them! But if it loses $500 billion, then the shareholders' $207 billion of losses are the least of our problems. The big problem is where the other $300 billion in losses go: which of the people holding the $2.2 trillion in JPMorgan debt don't get paid back (or don't get fully paid back).

There are not a lot of great answers. The depositors? Like, JPMorgan's failure should cause you to lose what's in your checking account? Nah, we have deposit insurance because that seems like such a bad idea. The creditors and trading counterparties? Maybe, but remember that those tend to be financial institutions too; if they take unexpected losses on JPMorgan debts that they thought were totally safe, then they might run into trouble too, causing a domino effect of financial panic.

The answer is probably: there'll be a taxpayer bailout. Hahaha, no, the whole post-financial-crisis regulatory world is oriented around finding ways to avoid a bailout. There'll be an "orderly liquidation" where a carefully managed process causes some of a failed bank's creditors to take losses without sparking a panic or touching the creditors (depositors, etc.) whom we don't want touched. I mean, sure, whatever, maybe. But there's no doubt that the simplest way to reduce the risk of panic on the one side, and bailouts on the other, is to raise capital requirements in advance: to force banks to get relatively more of their money from people who expect to bear losses, and relatively less from people who don't.

The advantage of making banks have much more capital is that it makes the risks clearer: it forces banks to be funded more by shareholders who knowingly accept the risk that they might lose money, and less by depositors and repo markets who pretend that their financing of bank activities is risk-free.

The disadvantage of making banks have much more capital is, also, that it makes the risks clearer. Banks exist to hide risks: to take money entrusted to them for safekeeping and lend it out to fund the risky activities that help our economy grow, without scaring people about the risk. Banks "exist to hide such information; they are created and structured to keep secrets." The secret being: someone might lose money!

But sometimes that's a good secret to keep. Ultimately banks get their money from people. People seem to have some preference for putting money into banks in "safe" forms (deposits, etc.), rather than "risky" forms (shares of stock). If regulation shifts the mix into more "risky" forms of bank financing - if it makes people face up to the risks of their banks - then they will have a harder time satisfying that preference for safe assets. Then what happens?

Maybe we all just get wiser and more mature about our risks, and fund our risky economy with a clear-eyed, world-weary stoicism. But: when has that happened? Maybe we shadow-bank: we shift our money into other, non-bank, areas that promise us safety but carry their own risks of financial disaster. (And that are less blessed with enlightened regulation than the banking sector is.) Or maybe we just reduce the size of our banking sector, which a lot of people might like, but which might also mean less lending, less financing for new businesses, and less economic activity.

Which, when our economy is shaky to begin with, might turn out to be a high price to pay for facing the demons of our banking system. Increasing bank capital may force everyone to be more realistic about the risks of banking, but realistic isn't always what we want.

* Though, amusingly, the bill seems to prohibit that approach. The legislative process is not always pretty.

** This is not meant particularly seriously; you could carve up the categories differently, and probably a lot of what I'm calling "monstrosities" could be more accurately lumped with cash, or stocks and bonds, than with the core monstrosities of opaque derivatives.

*** There's also a tiny sliver of preferred stock. People who own JPMorgan preferred stock can never demand their money back - they just put up, say, $10,000, and get back, say, $550 a year in interest for the rest of eternity. Under certain definitions preferred stock is capital; under others it isn't. That's kind of a boring debate? Under U.S. accounting rules it's normally "equity" rather than "liabilities," so my presentation here is somewhat nonstandard, but I'm conforming to the Brown-Vitter approach, which believes that the only real capital is common equity capital.

**** There is some interesting controversy over whether the shareholders are really the "residual claimants," or at least, over whether they're the only ones. You might argue that if there's any money left over after JPMorgan's creditors have been paid back, JPMorgan's bankers and traders will take it, and you wouldn't necessarily be wrong.

***** Loosely speaking it's called "the accounting equation," but only very loosely speaking.

****** This is especially true because, these days, giving a bank a dollar makes it worth a bit less than a dollar. If you go to Google Finance you'll see that JPMorgan's stock - all of it combined, its "market capitalization" - is worth about $193 billion, not $207 billion. So the market places a lower value on JPMorgan's stuff than JPMorgan's accountants do. The market thinks JPMorgan is worth less than its accounting value ("book value") because the market thinks its future is somewhat alarming, or because the market distrusts the value that its accountants assign to its assets, or some combination of the two. What this means is that if JPMorgan raises $1 from shareholders, it will only be worth about 93 cents, and if JPMorgan gives $1 back to shareholders, it'll only cost them about 93 cents. I don't mean to pick on JPMorgan; most big banks these days trade at a discount to their book value due to mistrust and fears about the future. Bank of America's dollars are worth 67 cents.

******* Though not unique to common equity capital. Some other things, like preferred stock or "bail-in debt," is also loss absorbing. The Brown-Vitter and Admati-Hellwig approach stresses simplicity so is deeply distrustful of those sorts of things.

******** I'm lying. The question isn't just that. There are real costs of debt, which are lumped under the heading "costs of insolvency"; roughly speaking, if you lose enough money, then the holders of your debt can put you into bankruptcy and force you to sell all your stuff at a loss and so destroy value. Whereas capital can't do that: if a well capitalized bank loses a lot of money (but less than its capital cushion), it can live to fight another day. There is a lot to say about these issues, and Admati and Hellwig talk more about them in chapter 3 of their book.

Copyright 2013 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.