Bill Owens

Bill Owens was named executive editor of "60 Minutes" in June 2008. In this role, he oversees the production of all "60 Minutes" segments from conception through screening. In the fall of 2010, he launched the first Web site programmed entirely with originally produced "60 Minutes" content, 60MinutesOvertime.com, and supervises its staff and weekly production.

He had been the broadcast's senior broadcast producer, joining the senior staff in 2007 from "The CBS Evening News." There he was senior broadcast producer since Jan. 2006, a position Owens took after producing "60 Minutes" stories for correspondent Scott Pelley since 2003.

Before that, the Pelley-Owens team produced segments for "60 Minutes II" (2000-03), including an hour-long interview with President George W. Bush on the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the genocide in Sudan. The team also covered the American invasion of Iraq as a unilateral correspondent-producer team on the ground, contributing news-making reports to all CBS News programs.

Owens was CBS News' White House producer (1996-2000), working with Pelley, Bill Plante and Rita Braver, and covering, among many other stories, the impeachment of President Bill Clinton. Prior to that, he was a producer for the CBS Evening News in Washington, D.C. (1994-96).

Owens was the anchor producer for Paula Zahn and Harry Smith (1993-94) and the coordinating producer for "CBS This Morning" (1991-93) in New York. He also served as a national desk assignment editor and field producer (1990-91), as well as a desk assistant for CBS News and for WCBS-TV, the CBS Owned station in New York (1988-90).

Owens began his journalism career in 1988 as a summer intern for CBS News working at the national political conventions in Atlanta and New Orleans.

He has received an Emmy Award and an IRE Award and has contributed to a RTNDA Edward R. Murrow Overall Excellence Award.

Owens was born in Oyster Bay, N.Y. He was graduated from Towson in 1988 with a bachelor of science degree in mass communications. Owens is married and has two children.

[dicktinsley]

I am not certain if this is the most appropriate place to make this comment but I really could not find any other.

Would 60 minutes be interested in some investigative reporting on the overall effectiveness of the agriculture development, rural poverty alleviation program aimed at smallholder producers in developing countries? A program that consumes several billion dollars each year with very little, if any, impact on the smallholder beneficiaries it claims to be assisting. This is true for virtually all donors and all recipient countries, USAID, World Bank, FAO, EU etc.

The concern is the effort to assist smallholder by organizing them into what might be socially desirable cooperative organizations, but are too administratively cumbersome to compete with the vilified private traders, so the famers wisely take the bulk of their business elsewhere. The result is programs attract the active participation of only a small percent of the potential beneficiaries, and they "side sell" most of their crop to private traders so the overall impact on the community economics is negligible. This is then covered up with some highly deceptive (spin) reporting that overlooks the basic business parameters that might separate an appreciated innovation that will be sustainable beyond donor assistance, from what is basically a publicity stunt of the donor's good intentions. Also, the reporting concentrates on aggregate reporting so the numbers sound great but when prorated to individuals are next to nothing. An example is an article prepared by a VP of ACDI/VOCA, one of the leading non-profit NGO implementing organizations, on Fair Trade Coffee in Ethiopia. It contains the following passage:

"The Oromia Coffee Farmers' Cooperative Union, launched in June
1999, requested and received permission from the government to
become a direct exporter of its members coffee bypassing the central
auction and giving more control and market share to the producer.
With ACDI/VOCA assistance, the union - representing 21,891 coffee
growers - last year exported 181 tons of coffee directly to specialty
buyers in Europe and the US."

Sound impressive! Now some simple arithmetic would revile:
181,000/21,891 = 8.26 kg/member (18.2 lbs)

I don't care how poor you are I don't see how the price difference between fair trade and normal trade will have any impact if you are only dealing with 8.3 kg/member. What would that amount to $1-2 per member, and even at poverty income of $1/day it would be less than 1% of your income. Now what are the continuous facilitation costs to provide that benefit? Probably the facilitation costs would exceed a million dollars a year. Unfortunately this appears to be the common practice in reporting development projects.

If you are interested in following up on this I have a list of 6 questions that I think represent the basic business parameters for which you cannot find answers to, and which I would happy to provide or can easily be found on my website;

www.smallholderagriculture.com

While I can appreciate that foreign assistance is not really a very popular subject, however, Fair Trade is getting substantial public following among people hoping to assist with poverty alleviation. Thus it might be good to consider a title similar to "Fair Trade: Are the Farmers Interested?" Or is the mandated accompanying business model just too administrative cumbersome, too inconvenient and too out of sync with the farmers reasonable thought out financial management Strategy, emphasizing holding assets in-kind as long as possible, that the farmers wisely take their business elsewhere, mostly to the private traders development projects tend to vilify.

If you are interested in following up on this I would be happy to provide more details and assist you in developing the necessary additional information to make a good 20 minute segment that could push the development effort into a far more effective effort. We, as tax payers funding the effort, deserve a better return on our investment, and the smallholder producers deserve more effective programs for their benefits. I think CBS and 60-minutes has the political clout and reputation to make some major impact here for the good of all.

Thank you for your consideration.

Dick Tinsley
Professor Emeritus, Depart. Of Soils and Crops Sciences
Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO

[Fr-Marty]

Bill,
Interesting Story, if true, it could make a big difference:play both URLs
ENERGY
This is the Biggest Battery Breakthrough ever
BY CHRISTOPHER MIMS
8 JUN 2011
http://www.grist.org/list/2011-06-08-no-joke-this-is-the-biggest-battery-breakthrough-ever


A pioneer in battery research who already successfully launched a $350 million company to supply batteries to the likes of GE and Chrysler has done it again -- only this time, "it" represents the complete reinvention of battery technology as we know it.

This technology is in the research phase, but if it can be cost-effectively brought to market -- and there's every reason to believe that it could be -- it could revolutionize the way we store and transport energy, in the process fully replacing fossil fuels and especially oil.

The key to this new technology is that the metals that would normally be solids in a conventional battery have been broken into nano-size particles that are suspended in a liquid. The batteries, known as "semi-solid flow cells," store their power in a black gunk that looks like motor oil, which has earned it the nickname "Cambridge Crude." Because charge is stored in this liquid, it would be possible to "fuel up" an electric car with charged liquid electrolyte, just like fueling up at a conventional gas pump.

This could eliminate one of the primary issues with turning electric cars into true analogues for the modern automobile -- namely, that transferring energy into them takes significantly more time than the comparable process of filling a car up with gasoline.

A second knock against electric vehicles is that their batteries are less energy-dense, and therefore heavier, than an equivalent amount of gasoline. But the new semi-solid batteries could be up to twice as energy-dense as conventional lithium-ion batteries, which means that car manufacturers could get twice the range out of the same battery mass, or go for a lighter vehicle overall.

The batteries could also be constructed at lower cost than conventional ones, which makes them suitable for giant, grid-scale applications like storing power from intermittent renewables.

So, just to sum up: This discovery represents cheap, energy-dense liquid batteries that could make renewable power cheaper and electric cars truly competitive. And did we mention they can also be charged like conventional batteries? If they fail to name their first viable prototype Magic Unicorn, they're missing out.

Straight to the source

New battery design could give electric vehicles a jolt, MIT News
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/flow-batteries-0606.html

Fr Marty Patton
Fairfield, OH 45014-3702