Jeffrey Zients was tapped to help fix problems with the Obama administration's heath care website.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Jeffrey Zients isn't exactly a household name. But if he can cure what ails the Affordable Care Act website, he'll be one of the best-known figures in the Obama administration.
Zients (rhymes with Heinz) is the professional manager President Obama turned to in order to solve the by-now-infamous problems with the federal government's health care exchange website.
Zients was settling into his job as the head of Obama's National Economic Council when the president tapped him to help rescue the site. The 46-year old is known as a brainy problem-solver with a knack for cutting through bureaucratic knots.
It was Zients, for instance, whom Obama turned to at an earlier point to unstick the "Cash for Clunkers" initiative. That 2009-2010 federal effort to lift auto sales out of the doldrums by underwriting dealer rebates to car buyers had stalled when the computer systems were overwhelmed with requests. Zients is credited with overseeing that fix.
Zients performed a similar managerial feat to break a bottleneck on GI Bill benefits for post-9/11 vets.
"Jeff Zients is a rock star," said Vivek Kundra, who served as the Obama administration's chief information officer from 2009 to 2011. "He has an amazing ability to convene the right people, to be pragmatic about problem-solving and to focus the energy of the administration on execution. He can close the gap between the theoretical and the ability to actually deliver something meaningful."
Besides being the administration's chief performance officer during Obama's first term, Zients served two stints as acting director of the Office of Management and Budget.
His OMB experience gave him plenty of experience testifying before Congress. That should come in handy since he's likely to find himself planted for hours on end at the many hearings Congress promises to have on problems with the Obamacare website.
Fred Malek, a long-time Republican fundraiser, adviser to presidents, corporate chieftain and Zients fan, said: "I think he's very well suited for the job. Look, he's not a technology expert but that's not what you need. You have a lot of technology experts being imported to help with this fix.
"What you need is somebody who can manage a team, lead a team, figure out what the most important aspects of things are and drive them toward a positive result," Malek said.
"Jeff is a very good CEO. He works very well with people. He's highly analytical but at the same time has a very nice personal touch which enables him to get buy-in to what he wants to do, to get followership and to get people moving in the right direction," he said. "He understands the world of business. He understands the world of government. He knows enough about technology. But above and beyond everything else, he's just a damn good manager."
That said, here are few more things to know about Zients:
He and Malek led an investor group (that included Colin Powell) that got Major League Baseball to agree to return a team to Washington. But in one of Zients' few high-profile failures, the MLB awarded the franchise to another group. Still, Malek credits Zients with getting city officials in Washington, D.C., on board with the effort, something Malek hadn't been able to achieve before Zients joined.
He honed his management chops early and hasn't let them dull. Shortly after graduating from Duke University (summa cum laude, of course, in political science), he became a management consultant, eventually holding the chief executive officer's job and other top posts at two firms that provided corporate clients with research and management advice.
He had a supersized payday when the two companies went public. In 2002, Fortune estimated his wealth at $149 million, which placed him 25th on its list of the richest Americans then under 40.
His mother, Debbie Zients, thinks the world of him, telling USA Today that he "has a lot of brains up there but he's very caring and very compassionate."
Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany, spoke to Barack Obama on Wednesday evening to demand explanations over reports suggesting that the NSA has been monitoring her mobile phone.
Contact: Kevin Stacey kevin_stacey@brown.edu 401-863-3766 Brown University
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] By tuning gold nanoparticles to just the right size, researchers from Brown University have developed a catalyst that selectively converts carbon dioxide (CO2) to carbon monoxide (CO), an active carbon molecule that can be used to make alternative fuels and commodity chemicals.
"Our study shows potential of carefully designed gold nanoparticles to recycle CO2 into useful forms of carbon," said Shouheng Sun, professor of chemistry and one of the study's senior authors. "The work we've done here is preliminary, but we think there's great potential for this technology to be scaled up for commercial applications."
The findings are published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The idea of recycling CO2 a greenhouse gas the planet current has in excess is enticing, but there are obstacles. CO2 is an extremely stable molecule that must be reduced to an active form like CO to make it useful. CO is used to make synthetic natural gas, methanol, and other alternative fuels.
Converting CO2 to CO isn't easy. Prior research has shown that catalysts made of gold foil are active for this conversion, but they don't do the job efficiently. The gold tends to react both with the CO2 and with the water in which the CO2 is dissolved, creating hydrogen byproduct rather than the desired CO.
The Brown experimental group, led by Sun and Wenlei Zhu, a graduate student in Sun's group, wanted to see if shrinking the gold down to nanoparticles might make it more selective for CO2. They found that the nanoparticles were indeed more selective, but that the exact size of those particles was important. Eight nanometer particles had the best selectivity, achieving a 90-percent rate of conversion from CO2 to CO. Other sizes the team tested four, six, and 10 nanometers didn't perform nearly as well.
"At first, that result was confusing," said Andrew Peterson, professor of engineering and also a senior author on the paper. "As we made the particles smaller we got more activity, but when we went smaller than eight nanometers, we got less activity."
To understand what was happening, Peterson and postdoctoral researcher Ronald Michalsky used a modeling method called density functional theory. They were able to show that the shapes of the particles at different sizes influenced their catalytic properties.
"When you take a sphere and you reduce it to smaller and smaller sizes, you tend to get many more irregular features flat surfaces, edges and corners," Peterson said. "What we were able to figure out is that the most active sites for converting CO2 to CO are the edge sites, while the corner sites predominantly give the by-product, which is hydrogen. So as you shrink these particles down, you'll hit a point where you start to optimize the activity because you have a high number of these edge sites but still a low number of these corner sites. But if you go too small, the edges start to shrink and you're left with just corners."
Now that they understand exactly what part of the catalyst is active, the researchers are working to further optimize the particles. "There's still a lot of room for improvement," Peterson said. "We're working on new particles that maximize these active sites."
The researchers believe these findings could be an important new avenue for recycling CO2 on a commercial scale.
"Because we're using nanoparticles, we're using a lot less gold than in a bulk metal catalyst," Sun said. "That lowers the cost for making such a catalyst and gives the potential to scale up."
###
The work was funded by a National Science Foundation grant to the Brown-Yale Center for Chemical Innovation (CCI), which looks for ways to use CO2 as a sustainable feedstock for large-scale commodity chemicals. Other authors on the paper were nder Metin, Haifeng Lv, Shaojun Guo, Christopher Wright, and Xiaolian Sun.
Editors: Brown University has a fiber link television studio available for domestic and international live and taped interviews, and maintains an ISDN line for radio interviews. For more information, call (401) 863-2476.
[
| E-mail
Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Gold nanoparticles give an edge in recycling CO2
PUBLIC RELEASE DATE:
24-Oct-2013
[
| E-mail
]
Share
Contact: Kevin Stacey kevin_stacey@brown.edu 401-863-3766 Brown University
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] By tuning gold nanoparticles to just the right size, researchers from Brown University have developed a catalyst that selectively converts carbon dioxide (CO2) to carbon monoxide (CO), an active carbon molecule that can be used to make alternative fuels and commodity chemicals.
"Our study shows potential of carefully designed gold nanoparticles to recycle CO2 into useful forms of carbon," said Shouheng Sun, professor of chemistry and one of the study's senior authors. "The work we've done here is preliminary, but we think there's great potential for this technology to be scaled up for commercial applications."
The findings are published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.
The idea of recycling CO2 a greenhouse gas the planet current has in excess is enticing, but there are obstacles. CO2 is an extremely stable molecule that must be reduced to an active form like CO to make it useful. CO is used to make synthetic natural gas, methanol, and other alternative fuels.
Converting CO2 to CO isn't easy. Prior research has shown that catalysts made of gold foil are active for this conversion, but they don't do the job efficiently. The gold tends to react both with the CO2 and with the water in which the CO2 is dissolved, creating hydrogen byproduct rather than the desired CO.
The Brown experimental group, led by Sun and Wenlei Zhu, a graduate student in Sun's group, wanted to see if shrinking the gold down to nanoparticles might make it more selective for CO2. They found that the nanoparticles were indeed more selective, but that the exact size of those particles was important. Eight nanometer particles had the best selectivity, achieving a 90-percent rate of conversion from CO2 to CO. Other sizes the team tested four, six, and 10 nanometers didn't perform nearly as well.
"At first, that result was confusing," said Andrew Peterson, professor of engineering and also a senior author on the paper. "As we made the particles smaller we got more activity, but when we went smaller than eight nanometers, we got less activity."
To understand what was happening, Peterson and postdoctoral researcher Ronald Michalsky used a modeling method called density functional theory. They were able to show that the shapes of the particles at different sizes influenced their catalytic properties.
"When you take a sphere and you reduce it to smaller and smaller sizes, you tend to get many more irregular features flat surfaces, edges and corners," Peterson said. "What we were able to figure out is that the most active sites for converting CO2 to CO are the edge sites, while the corner sites predominantly give the by-product, which is hydrogen. So as you shrink these particles down, you'll hit a point where you start to optimize the activity because you have a high number of these edge sites but still a low number of these corner sites. But if you go too small, the edges start to shrink and you're left with just corners."
Now that they understand exactly what part of the catalyst is active, the researchers are working to further optimize the particles. "There's still a lot of room for improvement," Peterson said. "We're working on new particles that maximize these active sites."
The researchers believe these findings could be an important new avenue for recycling CO2 on a commercial scale.
"Because we're using nanoparticles, we're using a lot less gold than in a bulk metal catalyst," Sun said. "That lowers the cost for making such a catalyst and gives the potential to scale up."
###
The work was funded by a National Science Foundation grant to the Brown-Yale Center for Chemical Innovation (CCI), which looks for ways to use CO2 as a sustainable feedstock for large-scale commodity chemicals. Other authors on the paper were nder Metin, Haifeng Lv, Shaojun Guo, Christopher Wright, and Xiaolian Sun.
Editors: Brown University has a fiber link television studio available for domestic and international live and taped interviews, and maintains an ISDN line for radio interviews. For more information, call (401) 863-2476.
[
| E-mail
Share
]
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Citizens inspect the site of a car bomb attack in the capital's eastern Mashtal neighborhood, Iraq, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013. Insurgents on Sunday unleashed a new wave of car bombs in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, killing and wounding dozens of people, officials said. (AP Photo/ Khalid Mohammed)
Citizens inspect the site of a car bomb attack in the capital's eastern Mashtal neighborhood, Iraq, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013. Insurgents on Sunday unleashed a new wave of car bombs in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, killing and wounding dozens of people, officials said. (AP Photo/ Khalid Mohammed)
Citizens are seen through a broken window of a bus destroyed in a blast at a bus station in the capital's eastern Mashtal neighborhood, Iraq, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013. Insurgents on Sunday unleashed a new wave of car bombs in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, killing and wounding dozens of people, officials said. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)
Citizens inspect the site of a car bomb attack at a bus station in the Baghdad's eastern Mashtal neighborhood, Iraq, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013. Insurgents on Sunday unleashed a new wave of car bombs in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, killing and wounding dozens of people, officials said. (AP Photo/ Khalid Mohammed)
Citizens and security forces inspect the site of a car bomb attack at a bus station in the Baghdad's eastern Mashtal neighborhood, Iraq, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013. Insurgents on Sunday unleashed a new wave of car bombs in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, killing and wounding dozens of people, officials said. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)
Citizens gather at the site of a car bomb attack at a bus station in the Baghdad's eastern Mashtal neighborhood, Iraq, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2013. Insurgents on Sunday unleashed a new wave of car bombs in Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad, killing and wounding dozens of people, officials said. (AP Photo/Khalid Mohammed)
BAGHDAD (AP) — A new wave of car bombs hit Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad on Sunday, killing at least 42 people and wounding dozens, officials said. It was the latest in a series of coordinated attacks targeting civilian areas that has killed hundreds in recent months.
Four police officers said the bombs, placed in parked cars and detonated over a half-hour, targeted commercial areas and parking lots. The deadliest blast was in the southeastern Nahrwan district where two car bombs exploded simultaneously, killing seven and wounding 15 others.
Two other explosions hit the northern Shaab and southern Abu Dshir neighborhoods, each of which killed six people. Other blasts hit the neighborhoods of Mashtal, Baladiyat and Ur in eastern Baghdad, the southwestern Bayaa and the northern Sab al-Bor and Hurriyah districts.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but such systematic attacks are a favorite tactic of al-Qaida's local branch. It frequently targets civilians in markets, cafes and commercial streets in Shiite areas in an attempt to undermine confidence in the government, as well as members of the security forces.
Six medical officials confirmed the casualty figures. All officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to release information.
In Mashtal, police and army forces sealed off the scene as ambulances rushed to pick up the wounded where pools of blood covered the pavement. The force of the explosion damaged number of cars and shops. At one restaurant, wooden benches were overturned and broken eggs were scattered on the ground.
Violence has spiked in Iraq since April, when the pace of killing reached levels unseen since 2008. Today's attacks bring the death toll across the country this month to 531, according to an Associated Press count.
Over the last few days there has been a lot of talk about Apple’s new direction for iWork, especially when it comes to the OS X versions of its productivity suite. At an event on Tuesday, the company announced that they would be making iWork free with purchase of a new device — but it also announced a redesign that many are seeing as a regression of the product.
Specifically, many who use Pages, Numbers and Keynote heavily are remarking on the loss of what they characterize as ‘pro’ features. These power users are lamenting the changes, many of which mimic the look and feel of the suite on Apple’s iOS platform.
The thing is: they’re right. Apple did ‘walk back’ the features and feel of iWork slightly across the board, and significantly in some niche cases. But it’s far too early in this new era of a free iWork to begin panicking about its future.
From what I understand, the fact that this new version of OS X iWork looks and feels a lot like the iOS version is no coincidence. It’s actually a re-write that’s founded on the code base of the (now 64-bit) iOS apps. And a decision was made to unify the visual look and interactive feel of the apps across all platforms — with the far more prolific iOS used as inspiration.
iWork is handled under the supervision of Apple’s Eddy Cue, not the OS X chief Craig Federighi, but it’s boggling to think that this kind of decision wouldn’t have been very carefully considered by the senior staff at Apple. There are easy parallels to draw here to Apple’s ‘back to the Mac’ initiative, which brought features and feel from its enormously popular iPhone and iPad to the Mac — largely in order to make them more familiar to ‘halo’ adopters who may have started their Apple experience with a portable device, not a traditional desktop or laptop.
Lots of folks are getting all worked up about iWork being ‘dumbed down’ but it feels like a reset to me. I can see this playing out pretty much like Apple’s recent Final Cut Pro X re-thinking. That app was introduced in a radically simplified and streamlined form that caused immediate outcry. Over time, Apple has steadily added back features that were missing from the early dramatic redesign of the pro video editing suite. A handful of mis-handled decisions like pulling the old version of FCP too soon caused unnecessary friction there, but recent updates to FCPX have made it a very viable choice for professionals again.
If we can ascribe anything to Apple’s recent efforts to bring iOS sensibilities to its Mac software it’s that it likes to start extremely tight and zoom out as it adds features back into the mix.
Now, you can (rightly) argue that this is incredibly inconvenient to people who use iWork all day to do stuff that has been hampered or made impossible by the changes. And you could argue that Apple could have worked in all of the features that iWork had before, and maybe even more. These are not strange and unusual viewpoints. But that’s simply not the way Apple works, and it’s definitely not in its playbook lately as it goes through a big re-vamp in product direction and design.
There are some serious bugs and upsetting omissions in the latest iWork, but that’s the price of a dramatic break with the past. And Apple has shown a willingness to take the heat on this stuff before. It’s unfortunate that users must share in the growing pains, but there it is.
Note, though, that this isn’t about free software getting fewer features, it’s specifically about re-focusing the product. Making iWork free has nothing to do with the latest versions (or future versions) having less functionality. These don’t feel like ‘lite’ editions of the apps, and Apple would not have put as much effort as it did into improving the quality and feature-set of iWork for iCloud if it planned on making the native apps just so much ‘freeware’.
As with many of Apple’s product decisions lately, this is about serving the majority of users as well as possible. And if that means short-term pain and perhaps even something we could call ‘regression’, then so be it. In the end, I expect iWork to move forward to the point at which it was and beyond in the coming months.
With the drama of the 17-day government shutdown over, the spotlight this week turned to the troubled rollout of the federal health insurance exchanges. Host Scott Simon talks to NPR's Ron Elving about the frustrations from both parties over the crippled HealthCare.gov website.
This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. With the drama of the 17-day government shutdown over, the spotlight returned this week to the troubled rollout of the Obamacare insurance exchanges. Both Republicans and Democrats expressed anger over the crippled HealthCare.gov website during hearings that were conducted this week, but of course there are competing agendas, as there always are.
To help us sort through these political implications is our own Ron Elving, senior Washington editor. Ron, thanks very much for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: How big a deal might these problems be?
ELVING: It's a big deal because, you know, it casts doubt on the basic practical viability of what has been the President's signature legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act. And just at the moment when it had survived all of these other big political tests, you know, passage and enactment and the Supreme Court test, and then the big shutdown showdown, just when we get through all of those traps, well, how ironic that a faulty website could seemingly be the undoing of Obamacare at this point.
SIMON: Politically speaking, is this the kind of thing that can be fixed and move on, or could there be something more permanent here?
ELVING: Well, we just had a briefing from the former director of the Office of Management and Budget who is a very well-respected crisis manager, Jeff Zients, and the President has brought him in and put him in charge of trying to straighten all of this out. And he says, look, we've had 700,000 people create accounts on these websites in the first couple, three weeks, troubled as they have been. Problem is, of course, only a minor fraction of those people have actually managed to get through to enrolling for health insurance, private health insurance.
About half the people who've gotten through got through on state exchanges, as opposed to the federal ones that most of the states essentially defaulted to. So the program is unquestionably troubled. But if it is possible to bring it around, and Jeff Zients says by the end of November - give us four or five weeks - the vast majority of people, he says, will have a smooth experience when they go to HealthCare.gov.
If that's true then the Obama Administration will have a reason for thanksgiving.
SIMON: With the advantage of a few days hindsight, did Republican critics of the program miss an opportunity during the shutdown to be able to talk about this?
ELVING: Surely if there had been no shutdown crisis, the first days in October when this site was struggling would have been the biggest story, the only story in Washington. Instead, they were overshadowed by this other crisis. So now that we're through the woods on the one hand, we suddenly have this focus on the health care site, then that's an opportunity for the Republicans really to make a comeback, although they have to be kicking themselves that they weren't able to do this right from the beginning.
And right now they're trying to make up lost ground on that and we'll have to see in the weeks ahead which way this goes. Is there more resentment over the shutdown crisis? Is there more of a lingering bruise on their brand from that? Or are people still focused week after week on the inadequacies of this particular website?
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by a contractor for NPR, and accuracy and availability may vary. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Please be aware that the authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio.
![[ Back to EurekAlert! ]](http://www.eurekalert.org/images/back2e.gif){kind=small}
Share
