October 31, 2003
Installment of first gay bishop to draw supporters, foes
The warring camps of the Episcopal Church USA face off in Durham, N.H., on Sunday, over the installation of the church's first openly gay bishop — a move some say will fracture the church in America and jeopardize the worldwide Anglican Communion.The Rev. V. Gene Robinson, 56, a divorced dad who has lived with his male partner for 14 years, will be consecrated bishop in this diocese at services in the University of New Hampshire's ice hockey arena. It's the only place large enough for 4,000 clergy, local supporters, gay Episcopal leaders, international media and protesters. Consecrating a bishop is like a wedding ceremony with a built-in moment when anyone who objects is invited to speak.
Three miles away, conservative Episcopalians from across the nation will hold an alternative prayer service at the 500-seat Durham Evangelical Church, the nearest, biggest sanctuary they could borrow.
They'll hear preachers and leaders of the American Anglican Council, who say Robinson's consecration breaks with Anglican doctrine. The Episcopal Church is the U.S. branch of Anglicanism.
Brazil launches free nation-wide HIV testing
Brazil has launched a free HIV testing campaign in a nation-wide effort to save the hundreds of thousands of people who are not aware that they have been infected.Free tests will be done in public hospitals and the programme aims to conduct 3.6 million tests by the end of 2004.
The country's Health Minister says he hopes this will better inform people who are unaware that they have the the AIDS-causing virus, who may be unwittingly spreading the disease.
He believes that out of an estimated 600,000 Brazilians with AIDS, 400,000 are ignorant of their condition.
Brazil will also launch a massive advertising campaign for the tests this weekend.
Posters, stickers and media ads will be targeted towards high-risk groups like prostitutes, pregnant women and married women, and to parents worried about their children.
Now the worrying trend in the South American nation is that there is an obvious shift in the demographic of the AIDS patients.
While men constituted the majority of the patients in the past, poor women between the ages of 13 and 29 are most at risk.
According to the World Health Organization, Brazil has a model anti-AIDS programme
Decline of Christianity in Australia
Just 68 per cent of Australians classed themselves as Christians in 2001, down from 96 per cent at Federation, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).In the 100 intervening years, the biggest change in people's religious affiliation was the emergence of those who class themselves as having no religion at all – 25.3 per cent of the population.
The ABS said that in 2001, the two main Christian denominations, Catholicism and Anglicism, accounted for 46.5 per cent of the population.
Buddhism accounted for 1.9 per cent (357,813) of the population and Islam for 1.5 per cent (281,578).
In 2001, there were also 95,473 Hindus and 83,993 Jews in Australia.
Tax on Junk Food to Counter Youth Obesity?
... But as Brownell travels the country he's beginning to sense a shift in attitudes: "When I first started talking about this stuff, people went crazy," he says. "The biggest change is the issue of taxing food -- not that people are crazy about it, but they've gone from antagonistic to debating about it."People are more open to his ideas, Brownell believes, because of the overwhelming evidence about the consequences of obesity, especially on children: "People have begun to see how children have been victimized. We've created this environment that is destined to make our children sick." A 2000 federal survey concluded that 15 percent of children ages 6 to 11 are overweight, more than double the rate in 1980.
The book chronicles the relentless pursuit of kids by food companies, starting at birth (baby bottles emblazoned with soft-drink logos) and continuing through early years (television commercials), and the school years (fast-food school lunches). It also details efforts by food companies to have products shown in films and TV shows, and to place soft-drink vending machines in schools in exchange for payments to the schools.
Parents are becoming savvier about the influence of marketing on children's attitudes.
"They're becoming more aware of the process these companies use to sell food," Brownell said.
He outlines a typical scenario in which a McDonald's Happy Meal contains a toy version of a movie character, the movie has product placements, and the character eventually becomes a sugary breakfast cereal. "Once they see the sequence, parents are saying, 'This is not what I want from that company.' "
Brownell advocates a ban on advertisements of "unhealthy" products in ads targeting children. And his proposal for a junk-food tax would provide revenue for schools to offset payments from soft drink companies.
Some of Brownell's biggest skeptics are now standing with him on the front lines.
"When Kelly came out with the whole idea of food taxes I was absolutely against it," says Judith S. Stern, vice president of the American Obesity Association. "I felt he was singling out one part of the economy that was contributing to obesity. But as I see the epidemic getting worse and worse, and I see the irresponsibility of food companies, I'm thinking, 'Gee, Kelly, we need more of you.' "
Author Details Drug/Terrorism Link in Post-9/11 World
Narcotics trafficking, organized crime, money laundering and terrorism are inextricably linked and coordinated on American soil and in many countries allied with the U.S., according to the author of a new book on the financing of terrorism.Rachel Ehrenfeld, who wrote Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It, also asserts that this nexus of wrongdoing continues to take place in the midst of the U.S. public, its institutions and elected officials, even in the post-9/11 world.
Ehrenfeld's book underscores the reality in the aftermath of the worst attack on the United States in its history, what allowed it to happen, what must be done to prevent it from happening again and how the window of opportunity to prevent another 9/11 attack is shrinking.
As director of the American Center for Democracy (ACD), Ehrenfeld is an acknowledged expert on corruption, money laundering, transnational organized crime, international terrorism, drug trafficking and substance abuse. She is also credited with coining the term "narcoterrorism" in her 1990 book, Terrorism.
In Funding Evil, Ehrenfeld alleges that illegal narcotics, principally heroin and cocaine, flow from the Middle East and South America to U.S. and Western European streets before the drug profits are then allegedly funneled through charitable organizations, front businesses, banks (many based in America) and ultimately back to Islamo-fascist terrorist organizations like Islamic Jihad, al Qaeda, Hizballah and Hamas.
According to Ehrenfeld, information culled for the book did not come from classified documents or undercover sources, but rather from government documents, congressional committee testimony and executive agency reports, all of it available to the public.
The clandestine operations were conducted in places like Herndon, Va., Charlotte, N.C., and Quincy, Mass., as detailed in the book.
"Since I have been following this - I started with drugs, money laundering and criminal organizations and terrorist organizations - I've been doing it for 18 years," Ehrenfeld told CNSNews.com. "When I see a name, I immediately make a contact. Thank God I have a good memory. It is interesting that many of the same people are still operating, and this is why it is easy for me to identify many of the suspects."
October 30, 2003
Financial executives become a hot commodity in the age of Enron
... Under recent rules mandated by Congress following the 2001 collapse of Enron Corp. and similar corporate accounting fiascos, publicly traded companies are now required to have at least one financial expert on their board audit committees. In addition to the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations, Nasdaq and the New York Stock Exchange also sought to improve corporate governance by insisting that a majority of board directors be independent of the firm.The net effect of the new regulations is that chief financial officers — along with other executives like Jeffries with extensive financial experience — are hot properties for companies looking to select new board members.
“All of a sudden, CFOs are sexy,” said Bob Rollo, leader of the global board practice for Highland Partners, a national executive-search firm with offices in Minneapolis.
But actually landing that financial expertise isn’t always easy. Many public companies keep a tight rein on board participation by their executives, usually limiting them to one outside board. That’s particularly true for CFOs, who often have to tend to the finances at their own firms at exactly the same time other companies and their boards are reviewing their quarterly and annual reports.
With demand for specific skills on the rise, coupled with the added responsibilities and commitment that new and sitting directors are facing, many firms are turning to executive recruiters to help them fill board vacancies.
“There’s no question that Sarbanes-Oxley is changing how boards are structured and the way companies select directors,” said Susan Boren, head of the Minneapolis office of SpencerStuart, another national search firm with a significant board practice. “Maybe the biggest change is that there’s a lot more interest in retaining someone who can do an independent search rather than trying to do it themselves.”
Working the night shift leaves time for living
... An increasing proportion of the American labor force is working an alternate shift instead of the traditional 9-to-5 workday. The biggest change is that half of the 24 million shift workers now are in white collar occupations, says David Mitchell of Circadian Technologies, a shift work consulting and research firm. On average the night shift pays more: an additional 84 cents per hour.Here's another interesting fact: 40 percent of single moms work the night shift, according to Mitchell.
Michelle Lashley, a single mom, says she has reasons other than just family needs for preferring the night shift. She says working 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. at American Express' center in Weston allows her to take classes for her master's in business administration.
At night, Lashley, 38, supervises associates who are processing credit-card payments. When the sun rises, she heads home to eat breakfast with her son, get sleep, pick her son up from school, and tackle her homework and his. Her Sunday through Thursday work schedule gives her time for school on Friday nights and Saturdays. Her parents spend the night while she's at work.
''It wasn't a hard adjustment because I'm a night person,'' Lashley says. ``It's worked out better for my life and my professional goals.''
Japanese Workers Get Word From on High: Drop Formality
... The 1,366 workers at Elpida's factory here were told to stop addressing each other by their titles and simply to add the suffix -san to their names.Yukio Sakamoto, the president and chief executive in Tokyo, believes that using titles like "department chief" impedes decision-making and innovation.
"To call someone `president' is to deify him," said Mr. Sakamoto, who was influenced by the 28 years he worked at Texas Instruments. "It's part of Japan's hierarchical society. Now that has no meaning. If you have ability, you can rise to the top and show your ability."
Many Japanese companies, traditionally divided rigidly by age and seniority, have dropped the use of titles to create a more open — and, they hope, competitive — culture.
The long economic slump has forced companies to abandon seniority in favor of performance, upsetting the traditional order. This has led to confusion in the use of titles as well as honorific language, experts say.
The shift also mirrors profound changes in Japanese society, experts say. Equality-minded parents no longer emphasize honorific language to their children, and most schools no longer expect children to use honorific language to their teachers. As a result, young Japanese have a poor command of honorific language and do not feel compelled to use it.
"There's confusion and embarrassment," said Rika Oshima, the 43-year-old president of Speaking Essay, a school that instructs new employees on the use of honorific language. "Junior staffers aren't strict about using respectful forms to their bosses, whereas bosses want their staffers to use respectful forms to them, but bosses cannot say that."
What is clear is that the use of honorific language, called keigo, to elevate a person or humble oneself, has especially fallen out of use among young Japanese.
Japanese, perhaps more than any other language, has long taken account of social standing. While French speakers must decide between the familiar "tu" and the formal "vous" in addressing someone in the second person, in Japanese, there are many ways to say I or you, calibrated by age, circumstance, gender, social position and other factors. Verb endings, adjectives and entire words also shift according to the situation.
US Religious Battles and Politics
... Many conservatives, however, strongly object to the president's position on Boykin. In an article entitled, "Conservative leaders defend Gen. Boykin for speaking truth," crosswalk.com quotes former Reagan aide and prominent neoconservative Frank Gaffney, who says Boykin clearly put his finger on the truth when he said "his God is bigger than the god of Islam." The Bush administration, Mr. Gaffney says, should not reprimand Boykin for "telling the truth."Liberal columnist Michael Kinsley writes in Time magazine that it's OK to think your God is the biggest (afterall, he says, isn't that what religion is all about), and that Boykin was just saying what he believes in. But the biggest problem for President Bush, says Mr. Kinsley, is that Boykin's comments undermine one of the greatest accomplishments of the Bush administration: "... a greater appreciation that Muslims and their religion add to the richness of our great ethnic stew. And without Bush's special emphasis, the opposite might easily have happened."
In the conservative Weekly Standard, David Gelernter writes that, "of course" America is a Christian nation.
But, some people argue, that was long ago. Demographics and beliefs have changed. We have changed our minds about religion. Says who? Since when? Of course this is no longer the almost exclusively Christian nation it was in 1776. But does anyone doubt that it remains an overwhelmingly Christian nation nonetheless? We are solemnly warned that, nowadays, public expressions of Christianity are "controversial." Among whom? Look up "controversial" and you will find that "upsetting to the Los Angeles Times" is not the definition.
Overlooked in the controversy about the religious remarks made by Boykin, writes E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post, is that fact that "the general was no doubt expressing the views of tens of millions of Americans."
For the administration, it's not just that Boykin presents a political problem, because the most loyal part of Bush's base is made up of evangelical Christians, many of whom share Boykin's views. Even more important, it is highly likely that Bush himself, a genuinely devout Christian by all accounts, agrees with at least some, perhaps much, of what Boykin said. In particular, it's pretty certain that Bush believes that Satan is in some way implicated in the troubles the United States now faces. That is not an eccentric view among Christians. It is rather orthodox.
For atheists, agnostics, and liberal Christians, Jews and Muslims, Dionne continues, toleration is "an easy reach." Yet as Boykin's statements show, the very idea of religious liberty is theologically difficult for many people, regardless of the faith they follow.
A new idea in prairie conservation
... Like their neighbors, Carl Kurtz and his wife, Linda, have been spending long hours on the combine. Rather than corn or beans, however, the fruits of their labors - spread out in billowy piles on their barn floor - bear a striking resemblance to fluffy gray dust."Here's a tick trefoil. And a little bluestem. And Indian grass," says Mr. Kurtz, sifting through a handful of the gray fluff to easily identify nearly microscopic seeds: coneflower, rigid goldenrod, Canada wild rye.
Kurtz still farms the 255 acres his father bought in 1930, where the family raised pigs, chickens, cattle, and corn when he was a boy. Today, aside from 90 acres he rents out for the traditional corn-and-bean rotation, nearly all of the land is used to grow prairie. He sells the seed to homeowners, businesses, and towns that, more and more, want to plant their land so it looks the way it did 150 years ago.
While his stands of prairie are a rarity among the huge tracts of commodities that surround them, Kurtz is far from the only person growing grass seed. What is unusual is the way he grows it. Unlike nearly every other seed farmer in Iowa, he's not interested in monocultures. Instead, he sells seed in a bulk mix that includes at least 40 or 50 different species.
Kurtz, a former freelance photographer who was trained as a biologist, originally started growing prairie this way for economic reasons. Far cheaper to grow than monocultures, it meant he could offer it at much lower prices to customers. What he hadn't guessed was how many ecological benefits he'd see.
"With a monoculture it never really stabilizes," he explains. "I had a friend who had butterfly milkweed, which he planted on his hands and knees, and he only got seed out of it one year."
Kurtz's current philosophy: Nature knows what's best. The less he tries to control what he grows, the less weeding he needs to do, the more interesting the prairie looks, and the
October 29, 2003
Flat-Panel Display Demand Surges
Looking to the fastest-growing segment of the world television market, Sony announced Tuesday a $2 billion joint venture with Samsung, to produce liquid crystal displays, commonly known as flat-panel screens. With production to start in South Korea in 2005, the 50-50 joint venture would wed Sony, the world's largest producer of televisions, with Samsung, the world's second-largest producer of flat screens.Demand for flat-panel screens is expected to leap in coming years, from 4 million this year to 14 million in 2005 and to 30 million in 2007, the two companies estimated. The alliance of the two electronics giants to produce seventh-generation flat-panel screens should lead the way toward standardizing the global TV monitor format, the companies said.
October 28, 2003
Hamburg's respite for shop-weary men: hubby day care
The drop-off, unlike in most kindergartens, is quick and sob-free.
Soon after Karin von Huson kisses him goodbye, Jonny, his name written on a sticker stuck on his chest, settles into a plush couch with his friend Günter. The two nip at the drinks on the table in front of them and leaf through a pile of magazines - their wives happily off to shop in downtown Hamburg.Welcome to Männergarten, Germany's first day care for men wanting to avoid hours in department-store dressing rooms and checkout lines. The brainchild of the Nox Bar in the heart of Hamburg's shopping district, the Saturday event provides two drinks, lunch, TV sports, and male bonding, all for just 10 euros ($11.81).
"It's a great idea," says Ms. von Huson, before rushing off with her friend. "It gives us time to ourselves, where we can talk and think in quiet."
Since its debut last month, Männergarten has welcomed as many as 30 men into the back section of the bar, says manager Alexander Stein.
Behind a velvet rope, Mr. Stein has set up a sort of big-boy's playroom. Board games are stacked on ottomans in front of large couches, men's magazines cover the coffee tables, and two fish tanks built into the wall of the upscale bar emit a soothing glow.
On a recent Saturday, a playpen set up by a toy company as a promotion was put to use by a camera team that wasted no time coaxing men into the pen for the perfect shot.
Not a Saturday has gone by, in fact, in which reporters - whether from the local rag or from French television - crowd into the back room, hovering boom mikes over a card game in progress, or asking participants to play with a remote-controlled car while the photographers shoot away.
California fires show limits of firefighting
... Still, models based on decades of research are often unable to predict a fire's path when weather conditions get in the way. Fire strategy and high-tech devices haven't been able to stop blazes from wreaking havoc in southern California, pointing to the limits of fighting and forecasting wildfires, especially in a region where gusts of dry winds change direction and speed up with no warning.Case in point: San Diego's mammoth Cedar Fire grew at amazing speeds, allegedly caused by hunter shooting a signal flare into the air east of the city. Whipped by the region's perennial Santa Ana winds, the fire moved too fast to allow firefighters to forecast its path and surround it.
"You've got a fire that went from 1,000 acres to 115,000 in 12 hours," says Bob Wolf, president of the California Department of Forestry firefighters' union. "I've been a firefighter for 22 years and I've never seen anything like it."
Indeed, for the crews throughout southern California, this week's blazes represent what many call a "career fire" - an epic battle that will stay with them through their lives
China gains on Japan in age-old rivalry for Asia influence
the ebb and flow of a very old struggle for strategic influence and clout in Asia, China for now is gaining an upper hand over longtime rival Japan, whose dynamism in the 1980s and early 1990s made it the undisputed regional power broker - from Korea to Singapore and Thailand.
A host of economic and diplomatic moves by Beijing in and around Asia has begun to deepen China's strategic position in this region, say well-placed US officials, including former Bush administration specialists.Wednesday, for example, a powerhouse team of Chinese leaders - headed by Standing Committee member Wu Bangguo and rising foreign ministry star Wang Yi - begins a visit to Pyongyang to arrange the timing and agenda of the next round of six-party talks over North Korea's nuclear ambition. Mostly through the urging of the Bush administration, Beijing has seized leadership on what is often called North Asia's most dangerous security problem.
Moreover, China has a host of Asian initiatives and economic deals on the table, from an offer to begin free-trade agreements with ASEAN nations, to reenergizing its influence in central Asia through the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, to its splashy profile at the APEC summit in Bangkok, where President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao both received state-visit honors.
By contrast, Tokyo, which still arguably has the greatest investment and clout in Asia, at times seems on the wane, caught flat-footed and preoccupied with internal business.
"China is trying to take what it feels is its rightful place as the main power of Asia," says a former Bush administration official specializing in Asia. "But Japan will fight back; it is not in the US or Japan's interest to concede Asia to China, at least not yet."
TVs to Be Able to Receive Digital Signals
All but the smallest new televisions will have to be able to receive digital TV signals by July 2007 under a government rule upheld by a federal appeals court on Tuesday.The makers of TVs, VCRs and DVD players tried to block the Federal Communications Commission rule, saying it would make sets more expensive and was unnecessary because cable and satellite viewers don't need the tuners.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit sided with the FCC, which said the requirement was needed because the industry was not moving quickly enough to make tuners available.
The tuners will be needed to receive over-the-air broadcasts after the nation switches from analog to digital signals. Congress has set a goal of December 2006 for the change.
Circuit Judge John G. Roberts wrote that despite the timeline, the FCC had found that ``a logjam was blocking the development of digital TV.''
``Broadcasters are unwilling to provide more DTV programming because most viewers do not own DTV equipment, and the lack of attractive DTV programming makes consumers reluctant to invest in more DTV equipment,'' he wrote.
EU cracks down on household chemicals
The European Union announced a program Tuesday to increase its regulation of chemicals found in many household items.The BBC said the new regulations would require companies to disclose basic data on all the chemicals they produce. Around 30,000 chemicals will undergo tests to prove their safety if the proposals become law in 2005.
The new legislation, known as REACH -- Registration, Evaluation and Authorization of Chemicals -- has been hailed by supporters as the most important new regulation in 20 years, totally altering the way chemicals are controlled in Europe.
The BBC said REACH plan is designed to identify potentially harmful chemicals and classify them as "substances of very high concern." Such chemicals then would be phased out and replaced with safer alternatives.
Print yourself a roll of semiconductors?
Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center has developed a way to use inkjet printing techniques to create cheap, flexible sheets of transistors--a process that could radically change the way flat-panel screens are created.
The fabled technology lab is one of several facilities around the world that have been working to recreate the functions of traditional silicon semiconductor chips with tiny transistors printed on plastic sheets. Using electricity-conducting ink that bonds to a flexible plastic sheet, PARC researchers said Tuesday that they have been able to create arrays of bendable semiconductors that work much like their rigid counterparts.The new printable chips aren't nearly as efficient as their silicon counterparts, but they work well enough to serve as the core of liquid crystal display (LCD) screens and futuristic displays such as electronic paper, the researchers said.
Instead of hugely expensive "clean room" manufacturing facilities, the products could be created in printing facilities that might more resemble a newspaper's printing press, with sheets of transistors scrolling off the high-tech printers, the scientists speculated.
"Instead of smocked people carrying individual (silicon) wafers around a clean room or robot arms carrying stacks of wafers, imagine a person carrying a roll that looks like a 35-millimeter camera cassette, with a roll of film a meter wide and a hundred feet long," said Raj Apte, a PARC research scientist working on the project. "The clean room might even be a dirty room, since the film is going to be on cassettes."
The drive for plastics that conduct electricity has gone on for years, as scientists look for ways to replace the capital-intensive process of traditional chip and display manufacturing. Several other companies' labs, including those of Lucent Technologies' Bell Labs and Philips Semiconductors, are also pursuing the concept.
Minister faces trial, ouster for being lesbian
As the Anglican world waits and watches for the consecration of openly gay Episcopalian Bishop Gene Robinson on Sunday, the Methodist Church has all but ordered a church trial for an openly lesbian minister.According to the Washington Post, the Methodists' highest court has ruled that Karen Dammann should undergo a new investigation, and that church officials may not simply ignore church law in determining her fate. The decision by the eight-member Judicial Council, which met Oct. 22-24, means that Dammann will almost certainly face a church trial, and will likely lose her credentials as a Methodist minister. Two lower church investigative committees had declined to press charges against Dammann, who is presently serving the congregation of the First United Methodist Church in Ellensburg, Wash.
Dammann's brush with Methodist law began in February of 2001, when she came out of the closet in a letter to Seattle Bishop Elias Galvan. Dammann, 46, who was on leave from the pulpit of a Seattle church at the time, determined that she could no longer disavow her life partner and their three-year-old son, asking Galvan to reinstate her with full knowledge of her family and her life.
Instead, Galvan filed an official complaint, noting that Dammann's confession was a violation of the Methodist Book of Discipline, which bans "practicing" gay and lesbian clergy. But after surviving hearings last year before the Pacific Northwest Committee on Investigation and the Western Jurisdiction Committee on Appeals, Dammann ran out of luck before the top court last week.
Unintended Consequences of State Adoption Cash Incentives
... States across the country, often in response to cash incentives offered by the federal government, have been under intense pressure in recent years to move children through their foster care systems and into permanent homes. Indeed, the number of annual adoptions nationally almost doubled from 1995 to 2001, and New Jersey adoptions more than doubled in an even shorter time, to 1,364 in 2002 from 621 in 1998.But the effort to increase adoptions of the largely poor and minority children in the states' care has not been met with any surge of ideal families waiting to take them in. Instead, the already thin ranks of foster parents are being pushed to take up the slack, with states using federal money to subsidize the costs of formally adopting the children. The payments to parents willing to adopt can amount to hundreds of dollars a month per child. The Jacksons, with six adopted children and one foster child, received more than $30,000 in government payments last year.
The adoption of needy children is in many cases a good thing, and often the foster families they wind up with as adopted children are those they have lived with for years. But some state officials and child welfare experts say they worry that the current push is, in essence, transforming adoption into an extended form of foster care and a possible peril to children.
Once children are formally adopted, for instance, the state is no longer entitled to closely monitor their well-being. And having extended money to the foster parents willing to formally adopt — a greater amount is paid to the families who adopt medically fragile or psychologically troubled children — the risk exists that families take on more than they can handle, sometimes just for the additional money.
"Have we gone too far too fast?" asks Gary Stangler, executive director of Jim Casey Youth Opportunities Initiative, a private foundation in St. Louis focusing on getting children out of foster care. "I worry that with all the applause going to the increasing numbers of adoptions, that we are possibly putting these young people into families not equipped or prepared to handle them."
Experts are quick to caution that the case of the Jacksons of New Jersey may prove to be distinctly aberrant, and data concerning abuse or other problems experienced by children who have been adopted in recent years is still developing.
October 27, 2003
IBM vs. Microsoft: The Future of the Internet
One year ago, almost to the day, Samuel J. Palmisano, the chief executive of I.B.M., delivered a speech in New York that sketched his company's vision of the future of computing, which he called "on-demand computing."Today in Los Angeles, Bill Gates, the chairman of the Microsoft Corporation, will present his company's notion of where things are headed, which the software maker calls "seamless computing."
Behind the marketing shorthand is a kind of war of ideas over what can be thought of as "the Internet, Act II," a technological evolution that has been gathering speed. The next-generation development of the Internet has been helped by the continuing and remarkable progress in hardware. But probably more important has been the embrace of a set of software standards - rendered in a nerdy alphabet soup of acronyms, like XML, SOAP, WSDL, UDDI and so on - that open the door to widespread machine-to-machine communication across the Internet.
Over the last couple of years, I.B.M. and Microsoft have cooperated closely to reach agreement on the software standards, known as Web services, necessary for this next step. The two companies, however, agree on little else.
The Internet Act I was mainly about e-mail programs and downloading digital information to look at or listen to - Web pages, animations, video and music. Act II should bring all kinds of automated transactions among businesses and individuals. And those transactions will be able to include a hint of computer-aided intelligence.
Ruble Falls After Russian Tycoon's Arrest
Confidence in Russia's economy and leadership fell dramatically Monday after the weekend arrest of its richest man, with the ruble losing value against the dollar and shares of the biggest oil producer being pulled from trading because their worth plunged by one-fifth.President Vladimir Putin defended prosecutors' decision to arrest Russia's richest man, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whom special forces seized in a stunning operation at a Siberian airport. But fears were high that the move could stall the Russian economy, which recently has seen robust progress back from the 1998 collapse of the ruble.
Sony, DoCoMo Join on 'Smart Card' Phones
TOKYO (AP) - Sony Corp. and Japan's top mobile phone carrier, NTT DoCoMo, plan to cooperate in developing a system that will allow people to use their cell phones to pay for train tickets or buy items in stores.They plan to create a FeliCa Networks joint venture, to be set up in Tokyo in January, that will develop a new chip that integrates mobile phones with smart card technology developed by Sony, the companies said Monday.
The smart cards, which have an integrated circuit chip embedded in them, can communicate with special equipment that allows card-owners to pass through train station gates or make payments at cash registers in stores.
Sony will be a 60 percent investor in the 6 billion yen ($55 million) venture, and NTT DoCoMo will invest the other 40 percent.
With Cable TV at M.I.T., Who Needs Napster?
Two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a system for sharing music within their campus community that they say can avoid the copyright battles that have pitted the music industry against many customers.The students, Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel, drew the idea for their campus-wide network from a blend of libraries and from radio. Their effort, the Libraries Access to Music Project, which is backed by M.I.T. and financed by research money from the Microsoft Corporation, will provide music from some 3,500 CD's through a novel source: the university's cable television network.
...
While listening to music through a television might seem odd, it is crucial to the M.I.T. plan. The quirk in the law that makes the system legal, Mr. Winstein said, has much to do with the difference between digital and analog technology. The advent of the digital age, with the possibility of perfect copies spread around the world with the click of a mouse, has spurred the entertainment industry to push for stronger restrictions on the distribution of digital works, and to be reluctant to license their recording catalogues to permit the distribution of music over the Internet.
Rise of 'mutant bike' culture
... Spectators ranging from suave hipsters to modern primitives with facial tattoos and body piercings have turned out to watch a jousting match where bicycles have been converted into warhorses.A diminutive woman wearing combat boots and cut-off jeans rides a 6-foot-high monster bike made of two welded bicycle frames. With footmen steadying her bike, she climbs to the saddle, fits a 10-foot length of white PVC pipe under her arm, and lowers her head. She charges, pedaling furiously, and drops her opponent with a well-aimed lance blow; but she, too, loses her balance. The match is declared a draw.
Hip-hop product portrayals divide black community
The products have also ignited protests and boycotts nationwide, highlighting a division in the African-American community over what's an appropriate representation of the black experience.It is part of a larger cultural war among blacks, fought largely along class and generational lines.
"The traditional civil rights model included a kind of politics of respectability, putting the best face of the African-American community forward," says Imani Perry, a law professor at Rutgers University. "There is an absolute refusal in the hip-hop community to adhere to those ideals of respectability, in terms of what the public face of black people should be."
That tension may only heighten as hip-hop goes global and the appetite for edgy products grows. Nelly announced the release of Pimp Juice, named after his hit single, at the MTV music video awards late this summer. Days later, the Rev. Paul Scott, founder of the Messianic Afrikan Nation, launched a local campaign to keep it off shelves in Durham, N.C. He calls the word "pimp" derogatory and demeaning.
"We don't want our young people walking around with Pimp Juice in their lunchboxes, thinking that it's cool," says Mr. Scott, who has joined forces with black leaders nationwide to petition for Nelly to change the name. "Four hundred years ago, black women were being sold into slavery ... and now someone wants to come out with a drink selling women."
October 26, 2003
Is Wal-Mart Too Powerful?
In business, there is big, and there is Wal-Mart. With $245 billion in revenues in 2002, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is the world's largest company. It is three times the size of the No. 2 retailer, France's Carrefour. Every week, 138 million shoppers visit Wal-Mart's 4,750 stores; last year, 82% of American households made at least one purchase at Wal-Mart. "There's nothing like Wal-Mart," says Ira Kalish, global director of Deloitte Research. "They are so much bigger than any retailer has ever been that it's not possible to compare."
Free Market Recycling
... All Freecycle members have to do is join the Yahoo list serve and post a message about items wanted or items available. Within days givers are likely to hear from someone who sees their trash as treasure. The service and all items are free.More than 1,000 Portland residents have joined since the service was launched a month ago, giving away everything from cardboard boxes to crockpots to beds. And it's growing.
Explosive Growth of Hip Hop Fashion in the Burbs
... Teens living on cul-de-sacs and in small towns are increasingly taking fashion cues from rap music videos. Sales of hip-hop fashion, estimated by the NPD Group, a market information company, to be $2 billion in 2001, are considered one of the fastest growing segments of the apparel industry. That's mostly thanks to mall stores such as Sears, Nordstrom, and Target stocking more urban brands.Rap artists-turned-fashion designers are responding by expanding the scope and reach of the clothing labels they launched in the 1990s. "Having these brands is about having the bad-boy image," says Marshall Cohen, chief industry analyst at NPD. "Suburban kids are now thinking 'I don't have to live in nowhere-ville anymore,' "
This commercialization of cutting-edge fashion raises the question: Does urban fashion lose its authenticity - or street credibility - when it goes suburban?
Hip-hop culture began its journey from underground to mainstream in the mid-1970s in the Bronx section of New York City. Hip-hop pioneers were primarily young African-American men. They would express themselves by making and trading rap mix tapes, spray-painting graffiti on buildings and subway platforms, and break dancing.
As hip-hop evolved into a lifestyle, a style of dress emerged. "Hip-hop started with fashion sense," says Nelson George, author of "Hip-Hop America." "It's always been very visually orientated."
For two decades hip-hop enthusiasts appropriated items from mainstream fashion, says Mr. George. Sometimes they would wear accessories in unique ways - Adidas sneakers or Timberland boots with the laces untied. Other times they would lay claim to upmarket brands such as Tommy Hilfiger and Polo Ralph Lauren.
Walmart: Potential For Largest Employment Class Action Suit in History
More than 100 women have submitted statements to the US District Court in San Francisco, charging discrimination in the form of unequal pay and barriers to promotion. If their request to classify this as a class-action suit is granted, the class would include 1.6 million women who have worked at Wal-Mart since 1998.That would make it the largest employment class-action suit in United States history - one that would have "seismic impact," says Adam Forman, an attorney with Testa, Hurwitz, & Thibeault in Boston, which is not involved in the case.
The potential for a full battle in court ora gargantuan settlement has lawyers and employers alike watching from the edges of their seats. And the case could bring sex discrimination to the public's attention in a way not seen since Anita Hill's accusations against Clarence Thomas in 1991 forced a national conversation on sexual harassment.
However the case is resolved, it raises the specter of gender stereotypes that many assume had disappeared long ago.
"We don't hear very much anymore of people willing to say women should be home with their children, or a man should make more because he's supporting [a family] ... but the notion of women not being interested [in certain jobs] is still quite pervasive," says Joyce K. Fletcher, a professor at Boston's Simmons School of Management and its Center for Gender in Organizations.
Smoking's New Face in Europe:
Au revoir, film icon Yves Montand, with your Gauloise cigarette drooping from the corner of your mouth. Smoking in France will soon have a new image: grotesquely diseased lungs, displayed in full-color photographs plastered all over cigarette packets.
Elsewhere in Europe, where smoking has long been tolerated, the mood is also changing. Ireland, Holland, and Norway will introduce blanket bans on smoking in the workplace next year. Tobacco advertising everywhere is to be largely outlawed. The European Union is studying plans for a Continent-wide, New York-style ban on smoking in bars and restaurants.After decades of relative inaction, "things are coming to a head," because of growing awareness of the high human and economic costs of smoking, says Sophie Kazan, of the European Network for Smoking Prevention. "It's time."
France, where smoky cafes have long defined the country's image (and ruined many patrons' enjoyment of their croissants), took a bold step this week to dissuade the 32 percent of adults who still smoke: it raised tobacco taxes by 20 percent. A one-day strike by tobacconists fearful for their future did not deter the government from announcing another 20 percent tax hike next January, as part of the "war on tobacco" that President Jacques Chirac declared last March.
Mr. Chirac has made cancer reduction one of the top three goals of his mandate, which makes "the struggle against tobacco a necessity, an absolute priority," he said.
France's first Muslim school raises hopes - and concern
Spurred by a similar expulsion of 19 Muslim women from a state school in south Lille in 1994, the first Muslim high school in France opened its doors in September. And it is reenergizing a debate about the status of religion in a secular state.For the center-right government of President Jacques Chirac, the school is an experiment aimed at meeting the demands of France's second biggest religion, after Roman Catholicism, while preserving the state's secular identity and containing the threat of fundamentalism.
The goal of the Lycée Averroés, named after a 12th-century Spanish Arabian philosopher, is to offer Muslim youths an alternative to state education, something Jews, Catholics, and Protestants have enjoyed for many years.
The creation of a Muslim school financed by the state like other private religious schools, will help to integrate France's 5 million Muslims, say supporters. But there is concern, even among Muslims, that it could isolate and radicalize Muslim students.
"We [France] are a democracy and they [Muslims] have the right to open a school, like anybody else," says Jacqueline Costa- Lascoux, an expert on French secularism and a member of a state commission studying the issue. "But democracy is weak in the face of fundamentalism."
The fastest man in the world's fastest sport
Michael Schumacher, the race-car driver who won his record sixth Formula One World Championship on Sunday, may pass almost unrecognized in the United States. But elsewhere in the world, he is one of the best known faces in sport, commanding a reported $40 million annual fee from Ferrari, the team he leads.As the undisputed king of the $4 billion, 16-country F-1 circuit, dominating the world's most expensive, most dangerous, and often most dramatic sport, "Schumi," as he is popularly known, elicits strong reactions: fans either love him or hate him.
But they cannot argue with his record.
"Michael Schumacher is plainly the outstanding talent of his period," says Doug Nye, an English historian of motor racing. "He is undoubtedly the best racing driver in harness, pound for pound, and he has been for too many years."
Youth, Gangs, Guns and Violence
According to a recent report from the California Attorney General's office, "Gangs have spread from major urban areas in California to the suburbs and even to rural communities." At the same time, their access to guns seems unlimited.This mixture of youth, gangs and guns is helping to fuel a rise in violent crime and bloodshed in Oakland and other communities. Gang-related homicides are rising drastically in California, increasing nearly 61 percent between 1999 and 2001, according to state Department of Justice figures. The gang violence tracks a general increase in homicides, both in Oakland and in the state.
This year, Oakland homicides are on target to more than double the 1999 total of 68, and approximately four out of five murders are committed with a gun. Though Latino gang activity accounted for some of these homicides, the vast majority of victims and suspects continue to be African American.
The number of murder suspects in Oakland 26 years old or younger has increased from 18 in 2001 to 28 during the first nine months of this year. Six of the suspects this year are younger than 18.
New gun law adds firepower to some firms' sales
When Missouri's new law allowing licensed residents to carry concealed weapons in public goes into effect on Oct. 11, gun shops and firing ranges aren't the only ones likely to see a boost in business.
Holster makers, gun safe companies and dealers of other gun accessories could see more customers as residents react to their new freedoms."I expect more activity," said Larry Nunn, store manager of Simmons Gun Specialties in Olathe.
Gun maker moves into catalogue market
Smith & Wesson, a name synonymous with handguns and with the American West, has launched its new catalogue range, hoping its brand will help it find new customers.Crossings, as the catalogues and their accompanying online store are called, is all about clothes, furniture, accessories and ornaments, with a discreet flash of the S&W name on only a proportion of the goods on sale.
The move follows a drastic decline in recent gun sales, following the company's 2000 deal with then-US President Bill Clinton to install trigger locks and other safety features on all its weapons.
At the time, gun rights activists said the company was selling out to people who wanted to regulate firearm ownership.
The catalogues, the company says, "tap into the resurgence of American patriotism with a desire to return to a simpler, home-focused lifestyle, and love of the American West".
Brazil moves to tighten gun laws
Brazil's lower house of Congress has passed a bill to tighten gun laws in a country which saw 40,000 murders last year - one of the world's highest rates.
The legislation, which now goes to the Senate for final approval, restricts gun ownership and obliges owners to register their weapons.The bill also calls for a referendum on whether to ban gun sales outright.
But after long discussions, deputies did not set a date for the vote.
Nevertheless, it is quite an achievement for the law, known as the Statute of Disarmament, to have got so far, says the BBC's Steve Kingstone in Sao Paulo.
Athens security budget leaps 25 percent
Greek security preparations for the 2004 Games will be without precedent in Olympic history both in scale and price, organizers said Thursday, adding however that the festive atmosphere of the event will be maintained."Our strategic decision, from the first minute, was to highlight the celebratory character of the games and not have them look like a military zone," said Gianna Angelopoulos-Daskalaki, head of the Athens Organizing Committee.
Making a formal presentation of the security plan for the Aug. 13-29 Olympics, Angelopoulos-Daskalaki and the Greek police leadership said providing "absolute security" without hampering athletes, officials and spectators was not easy.
"Greece is facing one of the biggest challenges in its history," Public Order Minister Giorgos Floridis said.
The security blueprint, in its final planning stages, has increased by 25 percent to at least euro650 million ($755 million) -- a sum officials said could grow even more as the Olympics approach. The government and organizers have budgeted euro6.5 billion ($7.5 billion) overall for the Olympics.
Greece had originally planned to spend US$600 million on security, but new threats following the Sept. 11 attacks against the United States and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq complicated planning.
"In the face of these demands, our budget is the biggest ever and far surpasses previous Olympic Games," Floridis said. "It is a dynamic amount. We have budgeted euro650 million (US$755 million) at least, but you can't rule out more."
Tweaking Genes and Hormones Gives Worms Lifespan of 500 Human Years
Tweaking genes and hormones in roundworms has allowed them to live and thrive six times longer than normal, to the equivalent of 500 human years.Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco who have been working for several years to increase the lifespan of
Caenorhabditis elegans say that they have now got the worms to live three months or longer as compared to their normal lifespan of 18 to 20 days.
Medically at-risk drivers lose licenses
More than 200 Oregonians have lost their driver’s licenses under a new law aimed at getting people with potentially dangerous medical conditions out from behind the wheel.The “medically at-risk” law requires physicians and health-care providers to report to the Department of Motor Vehicles patients with a condition that could hinder their ability to drive.
Patients can get their license back by passing visual, written and driving tests, said Bill Merrill, manager of the driver control unit of the state’s DMV Services division.
Listed individuals also can appeal their case to an administrative judge.
Oregon’s law is part of a national movement to address road safety issues related to medical conditions, said Melissa Savage, a transportation analyst for the Denver-based National Conference of State Legislatures.
Several states have medical review boards that assess the abilities of specific drivers, Savage said.
Only one state, Pennsylvania, has passed a “medically-at-risk” law that holds providers liable if they fail to place someone on the list and that person is involved in a traffic accident, Savage said.
Oregon’s law, which was initially passed in 2001, made health-care providers immune from civil liability for reporting a patient to the state DMV, said Merrill.
Kids at risk of heart disease in late teens if obesity epidemic not addressed
Today's children face a future of heart disease, potentially as early as the end of their teen years, if parents and policy-makers don't urgently address the exploding problem of childhood obesity, a U.S. cardiovascular expert warned Sunday.Dr. David Katz told delegates to the Canadian Cardiovascular Congress the research advances of the past couple of decades, which have improved the prognosis for people living with heart disease, are in danger of being lost.
The threat is obesity and the fact that it triggers Type 2 diabetes. Both are risk factors for cardiovascular disease.
Women and The Opt-Out Revolution
... Despite all those women graduating from law school, they comprise only 16 percent of partners in law firms. Although men and women enter corporate training programs in equal numbers, just 16 percent of corporate officers are women, and only eight companies in the Fortune 500 have female C.E.O.'s. Of 435 members of the House of Representatives, 62 are women; there are 14 women in the 100-member Senate.Measured against the way things once were, this is certainly progress. But measured against the way things were expected to be, this is a revolution stalled. During the 90's, the talk was about the glass ceiling, about women who were turned away at the threshold of power simply because they were women. The talk of this new decade is less about the obstacles faced by women than it is about the obstacles faced by mothers. As Joan C. Williams, director of the Program on WorkLife Law at American University, wrote in the Harvard Women's Law Journal last spring, ''Many women never get near'' that glass ceiling, because ''they are stopped long before by the maternal wall.''
Look, for example, at the Stanford class of '81. Fifty-seven percent of mothers in that class spent at least a year at home caring for their infant children in the first decade after graduation. One out of four have stayed home three or more years. Look at Harvard Business School. A survey of women from the classes of 1981, 1985 and 1991 found that only 38 percent were working full time. Look at professional women in surveys across the board. Between one-quarter and one-third are out of the work force, depending on the study and the profession. Look at the United States Census, which shows that the number of children being cared for by stay-at-home moms has increased nearly 13 percent in less than a decade. At the same time, the percentage of new mothers who go back to work fell from 59 percent in 1998 to 55 percent in 2000.
Building a Dream on Aching Feet
Taryn Rose loves stylish shoes - so much so that when she was a resident in orthopedic surgery in the 1990's, she regularly walked the hard hospital floors in 2- and 3-inch heels. As she click-clacked down the halls on her rounds, she noticed that many of her patients were women "in a lot of pain, and it often came from wearing fashionable shoes that didn't fit," she said.From this insight came a life-changing idea: Dr. Rose decided to start a company to sell high-quality, handmade shoes that were both stylish and comfortable. In 1998, after completing her residency and becoming certified in her specialty, she turned her back on medicine. Brushing aside the objections of her parents and the skepticism of colleagues, Dr. Rose started Taryn Rose International out of her garage in Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif.
Her market is a niche within a niche of the $15 billion women's fashion-footwear industry - and one with little competition from luxury designers. And while companies like Easy Spirit had started selling shoes combining fashion and comfort long before Dr. Rose got her idea, those shoes were mass-produced, not handmade in Italy, and cost considerably less than the $350 to $400 for a pair of Dr. Rose's shoes. "I felt that women wearing $1,000 suits didn't want to put on $69.99 shoes," she said.
So far, her hunch has paid off handsomely. Revenue for the company, which recently doubled the size of its headquarters in Los Angeles, to 5,000 square feet, was $16.2 million for the fiscal year ended last month, up from $8 million the year before, and she said she expects that to rise to $30 million in the current fiscal year. The staff has grown to 27 from 4 in two years, and she says the company is profitable, though she would not give figures.
October 25, 2003
Study: Infants Eat Fries, Drink Soft Drinks
U.S. infants are eating fattening foods such as french fries and drinking soft drinks instead of milk, which may help explain the country's growing obesity problem, researchers said on Saturday.A survey of the eating habits of 3,000 youngsters aged four to 24 months found their diets were surprisingly similar to that of older children -- heavy on soft drinks, sweet candy, and other junk foods, and light on vegetables and fruits.
"French fries are the most popular vegetable eaten by children 19 to 24 months old," researcher Dr. Kathleen Reidy said at an American Dietetic Association conference. "Twenty to 25 percent of these kids did not eat a single healthy vegetable on the day of the survey, and 25 to 30 percent did not eat a single fruit."
Is it any wonder that 31% of Americans are obese while an additional 30% are overweight?
-Tim
The Russians Are Coming to Take Over Rouge Steel
Rouge Steel, whose sprawling works became a symbol of raw 20th-century capitalism, may soon rest in the hands of even rawer owners: Russian investors. Rouge, the nation's fifth-largest steel producer, said late Thursday that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, and had agreed to be acquired by OAO Severstal, Russia's second-largest steel producer.Financial terms were not disclosed and no timetable was set for Rouge's emergence from bankruptcy. But according to documents filed with the United States Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Del., Rouge, whose customers include the Detroit auto companies, has arranged for $120 million in debtor-in-possession financing.
It also obtained $30 million in bridge financing from Severstal, at 15 percent interest, which finance experts deemed an unusually high lending rate, even for a bankrupt company.
A spokesman for Rouge Steel, William E. Hornberger, pointed out, however, that Rouge Steel's plight was well known. The company, founded here in 1923 as an arm of the Ford Motor Company, has not made money since 1999, and had been seeking a buyer for the last year. "Send us those banks that would give us 7.5 percent money," Mr. Hornberger said.
Se Ri Park First Woman To Make Cut In Men's Event In 58 Years
Playing against men on the Korean tour, Se Ri Pak shot a 3-under 69 Saturday to tie for 10th out of 63 entrants through three rounds of the SBS Super Tournament.Pak, the first woman in 58 years to make the two-round cut in a men's golf tournament, shot a bogey-free third round and moved to 1-under 215, seven strokes behind leader Chang Ik-je.
October 24, 2003
Amazon Launches Book Search- Battle of the Search Engines
Amazon - A Letter from Jeff Bezos:
"Starting today, you can find books at Amazon.com based on every workd inside them, not just on matches to author or title keywords. Search Inside the Book -- the name of this new feature -- searches the complet inside text of more than 120,000 books -- 33 million pages of them. And since we've integrated Search Inside the Book into our standard search, using it is as easy as entering a search term in our regular search box.As just one example, by searching on the term 'Resistojet' I've been able to find books that I could not have found otherwise. I encourage you to try Search Inside the Book for yourself to see how powerful this new feature is."
Go ahead, try the Resistojet example. Or try searching for Search Engines and then for Google: "If I told you the formula that Google uses today, you could be sure that this information would be out of date before this book was even published..."
N. Wada
Open Source Everywhere
... Open source has spread to other disciplines, from the hard sciences to the liberal arts. Biologists have embraced open source methods in genomics and informatics, building massive databases to genetically sequence E. coli, yeast, and other workhorses of lab research. NASA has adopted open source principles as part of its Mars mission, calling on volunteer "clickworkers" to identify millions of craters and help draw a map of the Red Planet.There is open source publishing: With Bruce Perens, who helped define open source software in the '90s, Prentice Hall is publishing a series of computer books open to any use, modification, or redistribution, with readers' improvements considered for succeeding editions.
There are library efforts like Project Gutenberg, which has already digitized more than 6,000 books, with hundreds of volunteers typing in, page by page, classics from Shakespeare to Stendhal; at the same time, a related project, Distributed Proofreading, deploys legions of copy editors to make sure the Gutenberg texts are correct. There are open source projects in law and religion. There's even an open source cookbook.
Join the 8-Bit Music Revolution
... Chip music is made using processors from the antediluvian 8-bit past. (Pro Tools, by contrast, starts at 24 bits.) The genre's seminal moment occurred three years ago when Role Model (real name: Johan Kotlinski) created a custom Game Boy cartridge called Little Sound DJ - LSDJ for short - that takes over the palmtop's internal synthesizer and turns the device into a musical workstation capable of playing sequences and arpeggios, but not chords.Role Model, who's studying for an engineering degree at Stockholm's Royal Institute of Technology, manufactured LSDJ in Japan and offered it on the Web for about $70 until he sold all the cartridges he had made. The software is a simulacrum of DJ culture, combining the Game Boy's native bloops and bleeps with samples of old drum machines like the popular Roland TR-808. LSDJ isn't the only such cartridge: Nanoloop, made by German art student Oliver Wittchow, does similar things, but without the samples. It's easier to generate sounds right away with Nanoloop, but LSDJ is more musical and therefore more popular.
LSDJ may be technically illegal, but who cares? It's the only way Role Model and his cronies can afford to make their music. It's Le Resistance. Chip musicians plunder corporate technology and find unlikely uses for it. They make old sounds new again - without frills, a recording studio, or a major record label. It would be facile to describe the result as amateurish; it's underproduced because it feels better that way. The nature of the sound, and the equipment used to create it, is cheap. This is not music as a commodity but music as an idea. It's the Nintendo generation sampling its youth.
The essence of chip music is in reverse engineering an electronic interface - whether it's a Game Boy or a computer's sound chip - and subverting its original design. Chip music can be made using run-of-the-mill equipment, like a Casio keyboard, but first the insides must be scrambled. The lo-fi sound of the White Stripes and their ilk has a certain aesthetic kinship with chip music, but it's less tech-centric and not nearly as subversive. Kraftwerk might be the grandfathers of chip music - like today's reversible engineers, they invented many of their instruments. As for programs like Pro Tools, chip musicians don't think they're really creative. The sound isn't generated by circuitry, and you can't alter it by twisting a knob.
The Great Library of Amazonia
Jeff Bezos is building the world's biggest digital book archive. It's an info-age dream come true -- and the best way to sell books ever.... The notion of Amazon scanning all of its books but allowing users to search only those they own is a clever way around the central barrier to creating a digital archive: Copyrights are distributed among tens of thousands of publishers and authors. But when Manber told Bezos his idea, he found the Amazon founder ready to work on a grander scale. Bezos wanted his customers to be able to search everything.
In his small, ranch-style Palo Alto house, Manber and I sit side by side at a table near the kitchen as he begins typing my queries into his laptop. The computer is connected to a prototype of the archive, which at the time of my visit is scheduled to go live in a few weeks. Within seconds, I am captivated. The experience reminds me of how I felt a decade ago, when I first began browsing the Web. Back then, the Web was still small, and most of my time was spent peeking into the homepages of physicists and engineers. Even so, the power of the new network was unmistakable. The thrill didn't come from the content of the pages but from the structure of the Web itself, its obvious scalability and ease of navigation.
Amazon's new archive is more densely populated than the early Web was, but it's still far from complete. With its 120,000 titles, the archive has about as many books as a big brick-and-mortar store. Still, this is plenty to create a familiar sensation of vertigo as an expansive new territory suddenly opens up.
The more specific the search, the more rewarding the experience. For instance, I've recently become interested in Boss Tweed, New York's most famous pillager of public money. Manber types "Boss Tweed" into his search engine. Out pop a few books with Boss Tweed in the title. But the more intriguing results come from deep within books I never would have thought to check: A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole; American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis; Forever: A Novel, by Pete Hamill. I immediately recognize the power of the archive to make connections hitherto unseen. As the number of searchable books increases, it will become possible to trace the appearance of people and events in published literature and to follow the most digressive pathways of our collective intellectual life.
October 23, 2003
Junk food is fooling people into overeating
Fast food restaurants are feeding the obesity epidemic by tricking people into eating many more calories than they mean to, an important study has shown.Typical menus at McDonald’s, KFC and Burger King contain 65 per cent more calories per bite than standard British meals, making it far too easy for customers to overindulge without realising it.
The high “energy density” of junk food — the amount of calories it contains in relation to its weight — throws the brain’s appetite control system into confusion, as this is based on the size of a portion rather than its energy content.
The critical role of energy density in obesity has been revealed by Andrew Prentice, Professor of International Nutrition at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Susan Jebb, of the Medical Research Council Human Nutrition Centre in Cambridge.
In a study published in the journal Obesity Reviews, they calculated the average energy density of menus at McDonald’s, KFC and Burger King, using nutritional data from the fast food chains’ websites.
The average energy density of these restaurants’ meals was 1,100 kilojoules (263 calories) per 100 grams (4oz), 65 per cent more than the density of the average British diet and more than twice that of a recommended healthy diet. This means that a person eating a Big Mac and fries would consume almost twice as many calories as someone eating the same weight of pasta and salad.
Professor Prentice said that the human appetite encouraged people to eat a similar bulk of food, regardless of its calorific value. This left regular consumers of fast food prone to “accidental” obesity, in which they grew fat while eating portions they did not consider large.
Defense Department wants RFID tags on everything but sand
The US Department of Defense has announced a sweeping policy to slap an electronic tag on every item in its inventory - well, almost every item.By January 2005, the DoD will require all suppliers to place RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags on their goods. The feds hope this technology will help it keep track of massive inventories and improve transaction speeds. Government officials appear very bullish about the technology, but they do have limits on how far they are willing to take the RFID plan.
Wal-Mart probed over illegal staff
US officials have arrested 250 workers at retail giant Wal-Mart, as part of a clampdown on the hiring of illegal immigrants. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Bureau, part of the new Department of Homeland Security, said the immigants were hired by a contract cleaning firm, and that Wal-Mart executives had turned a blind eye to the practice.The ICE's investigation, known as "Operation Rollback", targeted workers at 61 Wal-Mart stores in 21 states.
Investigators are still pursuing at least 50 workers.
Russia opens air base to shore up Asia influence
In an attempt to shore up influence in a region it once ruled, President Vladimir Putin yesterday opened Russia's first airbase in central Asia since the break-up of the Soviet Union. Mr Putin and the Kyrgyz president, Askar Akayev, opened the Kant airbase, close to the capital, Bishkek, where 500 Russian military personnel and 10 Su-27 and Su-25 jets will be based."We intend to strengthen the security of a region whose stability is a growing factor in the international situation," Mr Putin said at the ceremony.
Car Sharing Spurring Fundamental Travel Changes
San Francisco Bay Area's City CarShare, a non-profit car sharing organization, is showing measurable impacts in reducing vehicular travel, individual transportation costs, private car ownership and environmental hazards, according to a new University of California, Berkeley, report.The findings by Robert Cervero, a professor of city and regional planning with UC Berkeley's Institute of Urban and Regional Development, represent the latest in his three-year evaluation of City CarShare's effects on travel, car ownership, the environment, parking and the quality of life in various neighborhoods.
When car sharing programs first began, positive social, economic and environmental effects were touted as potential outcomes, and Cervero's study, financed by the Federal Highway Administration's Value Pricing Program, shows that many hoped-for benefits have occurred.
City CarShare provides its service in San Francisco, Berkeley, Oakland and Palo Alto, California, and on the UC Berkeley campus. More information is available at the City CarShare website at: CityCarShare.org
Oakland Bans Wal-Mart
Oakland has become the latest Bay Area locality to ban big-box retailers that sell low-cost groceries, claiming they imperil neighborhood business districts and generate traffic headaches.Wal-Mart is not mentioned by name in the ordinance passed 7-1 Tuesday night, but the Arkansas retail giant is clearly the target of the legislation, with its plans to quickly expand the number of such stores in California and nationwide.
Shift to Online Sales Leads to Ticketmaster Job Cuts
Ticketmaster, a giant seller of sports and concert tickets, will close its customer service center, eliminating 573 jobs as increasing online sales reduce the need for telephone personnel.The West Hollywood, Calif., company said it will shut down the Virginia Beach center on Dec. 18 ...
E-commerce "is having a contracting effect on call center employment nationally" at operations that take customer orders, said John H. Boyd, president of the consulting firm The Boyd Co. Inc. of Princeton, N.J.
New Test Can Warn Of Heart Attack
Dooctors ushered in a new era of heart disease detection today with a report of a blood test that can better predict which chest-pain sufferers will have heart attacks. If the results of this and other studies hold up, the test will offer doctors a way to diagnose an imminent heart attack and act to prevent it.Doctors believe the test would be used first in emergency rooms to distinguish people who are genuinely on the brink of a cardiac emergency from millions more who have chest pain from other causes. Eventually, it may be offered in doctors' offices as part of a battery of blood tests capable of identifying those who have heart disease but don't know it.
The test could save countless lives. Each year, 1.1 million people have heart attacks, and 47% of those die, the American Heart Association says.
...
The new test measures the enzyme myeloperoxidase, or MPO, made in white blood cells. The enzyme is produced when arteries are inflamed and have rupture-prone fatty deposits.
''It's a very easy test to measure. It should be inexpensive to do this,'' Topol says.
LCD Television Sales to Boom, Affordable from 2005
Sales of LCD televisions look set to double next year, but the explosive growth expected to propel the industry in the coming decade is still more than a year off, industry executives and analysts said.The new generation of ultra-slim TVs is one of the brightest spots for electronics companies such as Korea's LG Electronics Ltd, which reported a near doubling in quarterly net profits on Thursday thanks to flat-screen sales.
The industry is expected to boom as liquid crystal display (LCD) TVs, which now cost thousands of dollars each, come down in price with the introduction of major new production capacity, mostly in Korea and Taiwan, in the next two years.
But a price drop to levels affordable to the average consumer is unlikely to occur next year, said Sheaffer Lee, president and chief operating officer of Taiwan's BenQ Corp.
October 22, 2003
An Apple Supercomputer
A home-brew supercomputer, assembled from off-the-shelf personal computers in just one month at a cost of slightly more than $5 million, is about to be ranked as one of the fastest machines in the world.Word of the low-cost supercomputer put together by faculty, technicians and students at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University is shaking up the esoteric world of high-performance computing, where the fastest machines have traditionally cost from $100 million to $250 million and taken several years to build.
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The ranking is a coup for Apple, which for several years has lagged, in terms of raw computing speed, in the PC world controlled by Intel and Advanced Micro Devices microprocessors. It is also an indication that the supercomputer industry, which has been in eclipse since the end of the cold war, is again playing a more vital role.
Study Finds Hundreds of Thousands of Inmates Mentally Ill
As many as one in five of the 2.1 million Americans in jail and prison are seriously mentally ill, far outnumbering the number of mentally ill who are in mental hospitals, according to a comprehensive study released Tuesday.
The study, by Human Rights Watch, concludes that jails and prisons have become the nation's default mental health system, as more state hospitals have closed and as the country's prison system has quadrupled over the past 30 years. There are now fewer than 80,000 people in mental hospitals, and the number is continuing to fall.
The report also found that the level of illness among the mentally ill being admitted to jail and prison has been growing more severe in the past few years. And it suggests that the percentage of female inmates who are mentally ill is considerably higher than that of male inmates.
"I think elected officials have been all too willing to let the incarcerated population grow by leaps and bounds without paying much attention to who in fact is being incarcerated," said Jamie Fellner, an author of the report and director of United States programs at Human Rights Watch.
But, Ms. Fellner said, she found "enormous, unusual agreement among police, prison officials, judges, prosecutors and human rights lawyers that something has gone painfully awry with the criminal justice system" as jails and prisons have turned into de facto mental health hospitals. "This is not something that any of them wanted."
Public College Tuition Rose 14% in '03, Survey Finds
The nation's public universities raised tuitions by 14 percent this year, the steepest increase in at least a quarter century, if not significantly longer, according to the latest annual survey by the College Board.
Tuition at community colleges across the country also rose 14 percent, the second largest increase since 1976, the earliest year for which the College Board reports data.
In both cases, the increases, which come out to 13 percent when adjusted for inflation, were largely driven by cuts in state spending on education, the College Board said.
Private universities raised tuitions by 6 percent, itself not an unusual increase in recent years. But after adjusting for inflation, 2003 was the third consecutive year that private universities raised tuitions by at least 5 percent, more than twice the rate of inflation.
The last time a series of comparable increases occurred was in the mid-1980's, when families were enjoying a much healthier economy than they are now.
As a result of the increases, tuitions reached an average of $19,710 at private colleges, $4,694 at public universities and $1,905 at community colleges, more than twice what these institutions cost 20 years ago, even after adjusting for inflation.
China's Boom Adds to Global Warming Problem
China's rapid economic growth is producing a surge in emissions of greenhouse gases that threatens international efforts to curb global warming, as Chinese power plants burn ever more coal while car sales soar.
Until the last few months, many energy experts and environmentalists said, they had hoped that China's contribution to global warming would be limited. Its state-owned enterprises have become more efficient in their energy use as they compete in an increasingly capitalist economy, and until recently official Chinese statistics had been showing a steep drop in coal production and consumption.
But new figures from Chinese government agencies confirm what energy industry executives had suspected: that coal use has actually been climbing faster in China than practically anywhere else in the world.
To the extent that global warming is caused by humanity, as many scientists believe, this is a serious problem because burning coal at a power plant releases more greenhouse gases than using oil or natural gas to generate the same amount of electricity.
China's rising energy consumption complicates diplomatic efforts to limit emissions of global warming gases. The International Energy Agency in Paris predicts that the increase in greenhouse gas emissions from 2000 to 2030 in China alone will nearly equal the increase from the entire industrialized world.
China is the world's second largest emitter of such gases, after the United States. But China's per-person energy use and greenhouse gas emissions remain far below levels found in richer countries. The emissions are, for example, roughly one-eighth of those per capita in the United States.
October 21, 2003
Arab governments adopt reforms
In the six months since Arab governments warily watched the fall of Baghdad, Arab leaders have opened the door to unprecedented political reforms.Though still a far cry from the sweeping democratic transformation activists seek, reforms in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, Qatar and other Mideast nations, taken together, mark an extraordinary change for Arab governments, observers say.
"Reform in the Arab world is taking place at a faster pace than I have ever seen since I've been observing politics,'' said Hisham Kassem, president of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights.
However, much remains to be done, and there are disagreements about how serious and long-lasting the reforms will be.
On Monday, a group of experts on the region said in the annual Arab Human Development Report, commissioned by the U.N. Development Program, that the Arab world was still falling short in three areas: freedom of expression, access to knowledge and empowerment of women.
The report was particularly critical of high illiteracy rates among women and media restrictions, saying journalists "face the illegal harassment, intimidation and even physical threats."
Nevertheless, change is in the air. Among the most significant reforms to emerge in the past six months is Saudi Arabia's announcement in May of its plan to appoint a national human rights commission. Last week, the conservative Persian Gulf monarchy said it would hold local elections for the first time. In Qatar, voters approved a new constitution in April that established the country's first elected parliament.
Egypt abolished state security courts in June, released 2,000 political prisoners on Oct. 6, and adopted a slate of reform proposals at the ruling party's conference last month. Jordan's King Abdullah II is advocating the dissolution of the Information Ministry and greater freedom of the press. Even Syria's Bashar Assad cited the need for economic and bureaucratic reforms as the impetus behind his Cabinet reshuffle last month.
Now Available: Door-to-Door Botox
Beauty is Dr. Phil Nguyen's business. Convenience is his specialty.The Denver doctor is one of the few in the nation making house calls to give Botox injections. He'll even drive to Aspen and Vail, mountain haunts of celebrity haute couture, to give local plastic surgeons a little competition with the anti-wrinkle treatments.
"We can perform it in the comfort of their own home and they don't have to wait in traffic, the doctor's office or be embarrassed by being seen in the doctor's office," said Nguyen, who uses an unmarked car.
Dr. Andrew Klapper, a plastic surgeon who began offering a similar service in New York City last summer, added: "For a busy professional getting to the doctor becomes a mission to the moon."
Yahoo Launches Anti-Spam E-Mail Decoys
Yahoo Inc., the Internet media and services company, on Tuesday launched a new set of premium e-mail features that lets users create hundreds of decoy addresses to thwart spam mail....
Yahoo said it has seen a 40 percent jump in spam from January to August and now averages 700,000 spam reports a day. Some analysts estimate that spam totals one-third of all e-mail, costing corporations billions of dollars a year.
Yahoo said its new AddressGuard feature would let users create a fictitious "base name" and then 500 variations on that name that they could give out when shopping, banking and joining communities online.
If an address started to receive spam, the user could simply shut down the address and use another one.
Sexual Identity Hard-Wired by Genetics, Study Says
Sexual identity is wired into the genes, which discounts the concept that homosexuality and transgender sexuality are a choice, California researchers reported on Monday."Our findings may help answer an important question -- why do we feel male or female?" Dr. Eric Vilain, a genetics professor at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Medicine, said in a statement. "Sexual identity is rooted in every person's biology before birth and springs from a variation in our individual genome."
His team has identified 54 genes in mice that may explain why male and female brains look and function differently.
October 20, 2003
Minister of cool in Brazil: Gilberto Gil
Gilberto Gil is rocking backwards and forwards on a mat, dreadlocks flailing in his wake, when we enter his exercise room. He stands up, revealing a pair of skimpy black briefs and the wiry body of somebody in their twenties: no fat, no sag, no wrinkles. He sits on the floor, legs outstretched into near splits, and leans forward to put his forehead on the floor: no puffing or panting, no cracking of joints, despite his 61 years. Not every government Minister - or pop superstar - would let you see him like this.Since the Sixties, Gil has been one of the most famous singers and composers in Brazil and in the middle of that decade was part of the dadaist and popular anti-establishment movement called Tropicalia. His oblique lyrics criticising the military dictatorship of the time landed him in prison, and then exile in London for two years. Since January this year, in the most exquisite case of chickens coming home to roost, he has been Brazil's Minister of Culture.
In October last year, Brazilians voted their first left-wing government in for more than four decades, led by former factory worker Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Gil was one of President Lula's appointments, and at the government's inaugural ceremony in Brasília, he led the celebrations with a headlining performance. His masterful use of image gave a message to the country of what they were promised: his white tunic and trousers symbolised the Afro-Brazilian religion of candomble, centred in his home state of Bahia, frowned upon by previous administrations; his short, dangling dreadlocks made an elegant statement about his alliance with Brazil's black communities. This government would champion the common people. Gil included a version of Marley's 'Three Little Birds' in his three-song set and then led chants of 'Viva Lula!', which the vast audience carried across the arid plains that surround the capital, a city designed solely for politics by the modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer.
Annika and the Transformation of Women's Golf
Annika Sorenstam should be golf's Player of the Year, but not for the usual reasons.It isn't so much the two major championships she won in 2003 that distinguished her. It's all the new fans she won. She isn't just the best player on the LPGA today. She's also the most popular. This ranks as one of the game's great transformations because her inability to enjoy the spotlight just a few years ago became our inability to enjoy her. She has changed her body, but the makeover went so much deeper.
Once so shy and private she would finish second to avoid giving victory speeches as a youth, Sorenstam has blossomed into a celebrity athlete comfortable with the great attention she receives.
Sorenstam, 33, will be inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame on Monday with PGA Tour veteran Nick Price, the late Leo Diegel and Japanese LPGA pioneer Chako Higuchi. Sorenstam will feel at home in the Hall of Fame as a mature player who has learned to embrace stardom rather than tolerate it.
Making Safe Sex Cool
A trendy new youth centre is aiming to grab the imagination of Angolan teenagers, and help them steer clear of HIV infection.Educating the young about the risks of unprotected sex is vital in any HIV/AIDS prevention programme, but the Jango centre in Viana, 15 km from the capital, Luanda, goes a step further by providing the children with a much-needed place to meet friends, let off steam and chill out.
Funded by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), run by a local children's organisation, Cuidados da Infancia, and supported by the NGO, Population Services International, Jango hammers home its safe-sex message, but in a fun way, designed to get teenagers back into a positive cycle of socialising and learning.
"We can talk to youth about high-risk sex, but we also need to give youth the opportunity and the tools to choose a better life for themselves," said Melanie Luick, UNICEF's HIV/AIDS Project Officer.
Asian gang violence escalates in East Bay
The gang rivalry that led to the death of 15-year-old honor student in her Richmond home last week began a decade ago when a group of Asian American students banded together to protect each other from bullies.But some of the youths, whose parents and grandparents were transplanted to the East Bay from centuries-old villages in remote highlands of Laos and Vietnam, formed street gangs and turned to drug-dealing, stealing cars and engaging in drive-by shootings -- often on each other, according to police and community leaders.
"They adopted the worst things about American culture,'' said Torm Nompraseurt, the uncle of Chan Boonkeut, the girl killed late Monday when a bullet fired through the front door of her family's home struck her in the head. "They killed my niece for no reason," said Nompraseurt, who is also an East Bay Laotian community leader. "It was just foolish and tragic.''
... The attacks are part of an increasingly violent rivalry that has gone on so long that authorities don't remember exactly how gang members began turning against each other.
"No one seems to know why these wars started,'' said Detective Manjit Sappal, an Asian gang expert with the Richmond Police Department. "I've done a lot of interviews. It goes on and on. But no one can really explain it.''
Both gangs are primarily made up of second-generation Laotian and Vietnamese immigrants whose parents came over from the least-developed mountain regions.
Divining the Wellspring of Rage That Incited Montreal Punk Riot
According to its publicist's Web site, the Exploited, a Scottish punk band, has been tear-gassed by the German police, banned from the Netherlands and "caused more carnage than a multicar pileup" during its 24-year career. But a few days ago the Exploited and another punk band, Total Chaos, were thwarted by no less a force than Canadian customs officials, who refused the bands entry to Canada from the United States on the grounds that some members had criminal records while others had lied to customs. But when that news was announced to a Tuesday night crowd waiting for the bands' show in front of the Medley, a club in downtown Montreal, fans funneled their anger at the show's cancellation into creating a multicar pileup of their own, starting the most violent riot this city has seen since the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup in 1993.According to police officials and witnesses, several dozen rioters destroyed or damaged 42 cars, smashed the windows of nearly a dozen nearby businesses and looted a record store around the corner. Police officers in riot gear tried to control the crowd, but not before images of overturned cars engulfed in flames were televised across the country. Eight people were arrested, and six people — including four police officers — were treated for minor injuries.
"Someone yelled `Riot!' and everyone just jumped in," said a 17-year-old who was there and would give only her first name, Catherine. "People were just full of rage. But there is obviously something else inside of them. It can't be just because of a show."
... But those who participated in the riot or are dealing with those involved say the seeds for the disturbance — including drugs, homelessness and tension with the police — have existed for years.
Toni Cochand, the executive director of Dans la Rue, a nonprofit organization that helps homeless youths, estimates that her group aids about 2,000 homeless minors a year, all living in squats, shelters or on the street, a number borne out by small groups of punks seen hanging out in parks and abandoned lots, or trying to hustle change by squeegeeing windshields.
Most street youths who consider themselves as punks are nonviolent, she says, but the music, fashion and attitude of punk bands like the Exploited provides a connection for those with little else to call their own.
"It's really like being a hippie in the 60's," Ms. Cochand said. "It's trying to identify with a group or a counterculture. Some subgroups in there are violent, involved in dope dealing, but most are pacifists. They are very idealistic."
One of these is Jimmy Lee, a homeless 22-year-old Montreal native in an anarchist T-shirt, who had gone to the Exploited show after seeing a flier on the wall of a squat.
"They help you explain yourself," Mr. Lee said, drawing on a stubby cigarette and waiting outside the Dans la Rue day center. "They have your ideology."
Women, Violence, Movies, Governor? - Just like Arnold
The weekend after Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor of California, the No. 1 movie in America was Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill: Vol. 1." Given the proximity of the two events, it is tempting to read them as a parable about women, violence and movies.Mr. Schwarzenegger built his popularity on larger-than-life violent screen characters, then parlayed this power in the real world to mount his campaign for governor. On the stump, he sometimes reprised poses or lines from his movies. Despite accusations from women that he groped or sexually humiliated them, he got 43 percent of the female vote.
In "Kill Bill," which opened three days after the election, women rise to a level of brutality previously reserved for men like Mr. Schwarzenegger. Where women go in this movie, limbs fly. Heads roll. Blood spurts in three shades of red.
In one scene the actress Chiaki Kuriyama, wearing a plaid skirt and schoolgirl blazer, asks a man if he wants to have sex with her. When he says yes, she stabs him.
"Do you still want to penetrate me?" she asks, pushing the knife through his torso. "Or is it I who has penetrated you?"
If political clout follows from on-screen body count, as it seemed to in California, you can only wonder what sort of political career Ms. Kuriyama has in store. Payback, as they say, is a mother.
"Kill Bill," which presents its highly stylized violence as visual repartee, is just the latest in a growing body of movies and television shows featuring wild women wielding weapons. From the animated "Powerpuff Girls" to the ABC series "Alias," in which Jennifer Garner plays a deadly secret agent in stretch fabrics, women are wreaking damage in ways previously reserved for the hairier sex.
Here Come the Glamour Gumshoes
... In the old days, private investigation firms were staffed mostly by former police officers supplementing their pensions with a little gumshoe work. But times, along with the investigation and security industry, have changed. Private investigators now devote themselves to corporate background checks, high-tech surveillance, retrieving deleted e-mail messages from company hard drives and, of course, the occasional old-style sleuthing, like trailing cheating spouses.These new snoops are more likely to have liberal arts or computer science degrees than experience walking a beat. They're much more likely to pack iPods than .38 Specials. And unlike Jake Gittes, the reluctant P.I. played by Jack Nicholson in "Chinatown," who urges the suspicious wife Mrs. Mulwray to "let sleeping dogs lie," today's young sleuths comb through databases to learn the particulars of private lives with the same sense of eagerness with which they might Google their next dates or play the latest edition of Grand Theft Auto.
"It's exciting and voyeuristic to be looking into people's lives." said Amy Gray, 28, a graduate of Brown, who wrote about her three years as a private investigator in "Spygirl" (Villard). "The work intrinsically has a satisfying quality of solving a puzzle or playing a video game. There's a `getting the bad guys' kind of feeling."
In recent years the number of college students studying forensic science has boomed, in part because media portrayals of private eyes and crime solvers in shows like "CSI" and "Cold Case" have glamorized the field, especially its computer-driven technical side. Where in the past P.I.'s were portrayed as "fumbling, bumbling people,'` said Robert J. Louden, a professor of science and protection management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan, "more and more they're showing digital video and the use of electronic devices, which portrays it as high-tech and exciting."
Another reason is simple economic opportunity. Although there are no statistics about employment in the risk management industry — as private investigation companies now call themselves — many firms say that in the wake of last year's corporate scandals and the threat of terrorism, the paranoia business is booming. Revenues at Kroll, a 2,300-employee company with offices around the globe, were up nearly 40 percent in 2002, to $289 million, compared with 2001. Robert Tucker, 33, who is the chairman and chief executive of T&M Protection Resources, one of New York City's largest security and investigations firms, said his company now has 800 employees, six times as many as it had in 1999.
"If you're good at it, there's an untold amount of work," he said.
Perhaps the biggest change has been in the industry itself, which has come to favor computer-savvy database wizards over the old-school door-knocking detective. Mike Pattishall, 26, a researcher at Corporate Risk International in Fairfax, Va., said that by searching the online services his company subscribes to, he can get the skinny — court records, motor vehicle information, property filings, even photographs — on almost anyone.
"Where in the past it required sending a field agent out to gather information," he said, "now 9 times out of 10 you can find it online."
A Consumer Class Emerges in India
After growing just 4.3 percent last year, India's economy, the second fastest growing in the world, after China, is widely expected to grow close to 7 percent this year.The growth of the past decade has put more money in the pockets of an expanding middle class, 250 million to 300 million strong, and more choices in front of them. Their appetites are helping to fuel demand-led growth for the first time in decades.
India is now the world's fastest growing telecom market, with more than one million new mobile phone subscriptions sold each month. Indians are buying about 10,000 motorcycles a day. Banks are now making $15 billion a year in home loans, with the lowest interest rates in decades helping to spur the spending, building and borrowing. Credit and debit cards are slowly gaining.
The potential for even more market growth is enormous, a fact recognized by multinationals and Indian companies alike. In 2001, according to census figures, only 31.6 percent of India's 192 million households had a television, and only 2.5 percent a car, jeep or van.
October 19, 2003
Promoting Buddhism in Hawaii
The annex chapel at Honpa Hongwanji on Pali Highway is brimming with families.Terry Labiste, left, her 9-year-old son Eric, and Doris Abe worship at the Honpa Hongwanji on the Pali Highway. The hongwanji and the Soto Zen mission are the two largest Buddhist denominations in the Islands. Buddhists here are second in numbers only to Roman Catholics.
Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser
Cori Yoshida, age 7, and other little Buddhists in training sing: "All life changes like the dew/ We have no permanent self," then listen as the animated Rev. Jan Youth, a former schoolteacher, launches into a dharma message (sermon). Cori laughs when the Transformers toy her minister is using as a visual aid refuses to transform."My wife and I grew up Buddhist," said her father, Scott Yoshida, explaining that he and Debbie want the same grounding for their daughter.
Cross the Pali and head mauka one block and the scene is much different at the main temple of the Soto Zen mission. Here, after the 45-minute service, some of the 30 or so mostly older Asian Americans gather for coffee and savory Japanese pastries and lament the loss of their youthful members to Christian churches.
Welcome to the two largest Buddhist denominations in the Islands, both taking different approaches as they face the challenges to Buddhism in Hawai'i today.
World Series on TV for Russia
When State Sports Committee head Vyacheslav Fetisov announced last month during President Vladimir Putin's visit to the United States that the World Series would be shown in Russia for the first time ever this year, the U.S. sports media immediately let loose with some potshots.ESPN columnist Jim Caple wrote a fictitious dialogue between Russian baseball commentators bashing shallow American capitalists and complaining about failed Russian wheat crops. Scott Ostler on MSNBC.com wrote that six out of every 10 televisions in Russia will be tuned into the series, meaning a total of six televisions will be tuned in.
But Russian baseball fans, an admittedly small circle, are serious about the Grand Old Game, and about 50 of them turned out at the Boar House on Sunday afternoon to watch the replay of Game 1 of the series, in which the Florida Marlins beat the New York Yankees 3-2.
"Basically everybody knows everybody else," said Yevgeny Kirushin, 40, who was a shortstop for the Soviet Union's first national team in 1986.
Muslim Nobel Prize sends a powerful message
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Iran's Shirin Ebadi on October 10 will be remembered as an important occasion for the beginning of a new era of moderation and democracy in the world of Islam. She is a noted human rights campaigner and a profound supporter of the rights women and children. Her selection is a momentous decision of the 5-member Nobel committee for a number of reasons.
NATO could change process for deploying troops
NATO officials, trying to turn their alliance into a potent machine to fight terrorism, are considering an unprecedented plan that would allow the military body to respond to specific crises without the approval of every member nation.
In addition, the defense ministers of the European member nations are considering creating a police branch of NATO modeled after the Italian Carabinieri. It would be used in peacekeeping operations, European defense ministers and other officials said.NATO defense ministers, as well as member nations' political representatives to the alliance, met here last week to determine how best to transform the military group. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization was founded to defend Europe against a Soviet invasion. Now, it must try to combat terrorism and other threats within and beyond the continent.
The two proposals, discussed on patios and in hallways during the meeting, reflected concerns about whether the newly formed NATO Response Force can get to a trouble spot quickly if approval must be granted by each member nation.
"The problem is real," said Antonio Martino, the Italian defense minister. "What if the force has to be deployed when some parliaments are not in session?"
The Italian government, backed by the French, proposed that NATO's ruling council draw up a short list of specific types of missions in which the new quick response force could be deployed after a decision made by top NATO officials. Currently, the 19 NATO members must agree to any NATO action, a cumbersome process.
Warfare at the speed of light
... Kilowatt for kilogram, this is the world's most powerful solid-state laser. Its invisible beam drilled Yamamoto's inch-thick steel plate in two seconds. Add larger crystals and it will eat steel a mile or more away."What we're building," Yamamoto explains, "is a laser weapon."
After sinking 40 years and billions of dollars into beam weapons, defense scientists are on the cusp of what could be a military revolution -- warfare at the speed of light.
"We've made a quantum leap here," said Randy Buff, solid-state laser program manager for the U.S. Army's Space and Missile Defense Command. "We're anxious to get out there and do something."
No longer are laser guns the stuff of Hollywood and Strategic Defense Initiative fantasy. Instead of laser-guiding bullets and "smart" bombs, the Pentagon inside of a decade could be armed with a beam weapon that is near-instantaneous, gravity-free and truly surgical, focusing to such hair-splitting accuracy
America’s Meal Consumption and Snacking Habits
According to findings from the newly released IRI study, What Do Americans Really Eat? ready-to-eat snack products with strong convenience benefits are fulfilling the demand for snacks and meal replacements for on-the-go consumers.According to Kim Feil, division president of worldwide innovation for Information Resources, ‘These study findings directly support the unprecedented change the snacking industry is experiencing as consumers increase their pace of life. Snack and meal solution manufacturers are faced with the opportunity to completely redefine the American diet. To a large degree, snacks and meals have become interchangeable. Manufacturers who successfully position convenient solutions across eating occasions, and even day parts, stand to reap significant rewards.’
According to the study, snacking is ubiquitous and, in fact, is replacing meals to a large extent. An estimated one-third of the study’s 1,000 Internet-based respondents regularly skip meals. When they do eat meals, nostalgia takes over: consumers typically prefer to prepare those meals fresh at home, as long as preparation is quick and convenient. Speed and preparation ease are overwhelmingly rated as the top considerations in the food selection process. Portability and ease of consumption are also important. More meals and snacks are consumed on the fly, and increasingly in the car, where handheld food products like snack bars, yogurt in a tube, and portable soups make for easy meals on the go.
Taiwan to become 'Green silicon island,' Premier Yu predicts
Premier Yu Shyi-kun (´å¿ü堃) said yesterday that the nation is expected to invest around NT$2.6 trillion (US$76.47 billion) between 2002 and 2007 to strengthen its edge in core manufacturing industries to realize the vision of turning the nation into a "green silicon island."The premier made the remarks as he welcomed nearly 2,000 prospective investors from 35 countries attending the 2003 Taiwan Business Alliance Conference, the largest-ever international investors meeting in Taiwan, which kicked off four days of meetings and forums at the Taipei International Convention Center yesterday.
The premier said that to build up momentum for Taiwan to move toward the next generation, the Executive Yuan has followed President Chen Shui-bian's (³¯¤ô«ó) strategy for economic development, which is "Invest in Taiwan, Access the World" and has mapped out the "Challenge 2008 National Development Plan, with its theme of "investing in talent, investing in R&D, investing in logistics, and investing in living environment."
Largest ever GM crop trials deliver inconclusive results
The UK's farm scale evaluations of genetically modified (GM) crops, the largest study if its kind to date, has failed to conclude whether such technology is better or worse for the environment.The results, published on 16 October, suggest that while conventional beet and oilseed rape are better for wildlife than their herbicide tolerant GM equivalents, GM maize appears less harmful to many groups of wildlife than conventional maize.
The head of the team that carried out the field scale evaluations (FSEs), Dr Les Firbank, said: 'The results are clearly important to the debate about the possible commercialisation of GM crops. But, they also give us new insights that will help us conserve biodiversity within productive farming systems.'
The seemingly contradictory results led both pro and anti GM campaigners in the UK to claim vindication for their position.
Honeywell looks to air-quality trend for healthier profits
Looking to ride what it hopes will be a movement toward designing "healthier" houses, Honeywell's homes division in Golden Valley has signed an exclusive three-year partnership with the American Lung Association to educate 2,200 home builders and heating contractors about devices that can zap mold, kill bacteria and filter pollutants from indoor air.The national initiative links Honeywell to the Lung Association's Health House program, a 10-year-old effort that promotes techniques to improve indoor air quality and benefit asthma and allergy sufferers. If it's successful, the program should boost sales for some of Honeywell's higher-margin home products.
Honeywell and the Lung Association will host air-quality workshops for home builders in 50 cities nationwide, including sessions in St. Paul set for Dec. 8-9. Lung Association officials hope to see 1,000 association-approved houses built next year in Minnesota, the equivalent of 8 percent of the new home market. Working by itself, the Lung Association has overseen the creation of 30 such houses in Minnesota so far, but Honeywell's participation means the initiative can reach a broader audience, since Honeywell is underwriting the entire cost and covering the Lung Association's expenses.
Value-Added Textile Industry
The European and North American textile industries have evolved away from mass production and into value-added technical applications. Taiwan's textile industry is on the same path but needs a sustained R&D boost to catch up.
"Taiwan is good at seizing the opportunities from new developments but is not renowned for creating new technologies in the textile industry," commented both Colin Purvis, director general of the International Rayon and Synthetic Fibers Committee, and Derek Chan, president of Nylstar Asia, during their presentations at the Textile International Forum and Exhibition 2003 in Taipei yesterday.Purvis explained the challenges facing the European man-made fiber industry, which include the flow of production to lower cost destinations, competition from subsidized cotton, the raising market share of apparel imports and trade barriers to export markets.
To meet these challenges European companies have to increase spending on R&D to produce innovation, create closer relationships with customers, become more flexible and restructure operations, Purvis said.
"What we are seeing is production moving to lower cost locations in Eastern Europe, but the high value adding specialist manufacturers staying in Western Europe. These specialist companies are focusing on technical applications rather than simple apparel applications," Purvis explained.
The technical applications include textiles for use in car interiors, airbags, active sportswear, tires, tarpaulins, inflatable boats, ropes, agri-textiles and geo-textiles
Designer steroids set sad trend
Anothermonth, another drugs shame in athletics. But the difference between this one and the others is that stars from other sports could be implicated in what may turn out to be the biggest doping scandal yet. The ramifications for sport, and athletics in particular, are enormous. It seems that a disgruntled former coach tipped off the US Anti-Doping Agency about a designer steroid, tetrahydrogestrinone (THG).
A steroid is a synthetic version of the male hormone testosterone,and when a urine sample is tested the analysing equipment is trained to search for certain remnants,or 'metabolites ', of what is left of the steroid in the athlete 's system.Once it discovers this metabolite, it registers as a spike on the read-out.A designer steroid has this tell-tale metabolite removed to avoid detection.No matter how advanced the detecting equipment, it cannot test for something that it has not been programmed to test for.
India opens largest-ever trade show in China
Launching the largest-ever Indian industrial exposition in China, India's Commerce and Industry Minister Arun Jaitely said that a dynamic India, enjoying political stability and economic growth, is ready to join hands with China to accelerate trade ties to achieve the targeted US$10 billion in bilateral trade by end of 2004.
Noting that India-China economic relations have witnessed qualitative transformation in recent years, Jaitely said that during the first eight months of this year, bilateral trade has already crossed the $4 billion mark.
"At the current rate, the bilateral trade target of $10 billion that prime ministers of the two countries have set for us is within reach," Jaitely said while inaugurating the "Made in India" show, jointly organized by the Confederation of Indian Industry and the Indian embassy in China.
Jaitely stressed that the reform process initiated by India has not been affected by change of governments in India.
US athletes test positive for designer steroid
The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) said on Thursday "several" American athletes have tested positive for a designer steroid in what it described as the largest drug bust ever in the sport.
"We have strong belief there are international athletes involved as well," USADA Chief Executive Officer Terry Madden said in a teleconference from his offices in Colorado Springs, Colorado.Madden would not name the athletes whose "A" samples had tested positive for the steroid tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) nor the number of athletes involved.
But he said: "I know of no other drug bust that is larger than this, involving the number of athletes we have involved... certainly in the anabolic steroid area."
The positive samples were found in the retesting of 350 doping tests at June's U.S. championships and 100 later out-of-competition tests, Madden said.
Cellphone Deals Sweeten in Face of New Rule on Keeping Number
Bet Sirianni is the subject of an intensifying courtship. The overtures -- like the recent offer for a free second cellular phone -- may win her over to a longer-term relationship.Her mobile phone service provider, AT&T Wireless, wants her to commit to an additional two years on her contract. "I'm thinking about it," Ms. Sirianni, a 40-year-old corporate art director in San Francisco, said of the free phone proposal. "I may give it to my son."
Ms. Sirianni is one of millions of customers whom wireless companies are trying quietly to entice into renewing their contracts in the next few weeks. New phones, additional minutes and cash credits are being handed out -- all with an eye to locking in customers who may not know that come Nov. 24 a new federal regulation will allow them, for the first time, to keep their cellphone numbers when they change mobile services.
Because mobile phones have become as important as traditional phone lines for many consumers, the desire to keep the same cellular number has prevented many from switching providers even if they are less than satisfied with the service. That is about to change.
October 18, 2003
U.S. Prescription Drug System Under Attack
For half a century Americans could boast of the world's safest, most tightly regulated system for distributing prescription drugs. But now that system is undercut by a growing illegal trade in pharmaceuticals, fed by criminal profiteers, unscrupulous wholesalers, rogue Internet sites and foreign pharmacies.In the past few years, middlemen have siphoned off growing numbers of popular and lifesaving drugs and diverted them into a multibillion-dollar shadow market. Crooks have introduced counterfeit pharmaceuticals into the mainstream drug chain. Fast-moving operators have hawked millions of doses of narcotics over the Internet.
Asian Leaders Find China a More Cordial Neighbor
More than 50 years of American dominance in Asia is subtly but unmistakably eroding as Asian countries look toward China as the increasingly vital regional power, political and business leaders in Asia say.China's churning economic engine, coupled with trade deals and friendly diplomacy, have transformed it from a country to be feared to one that beckons, these regional leaders say.
That new, more benign view of China by its neighbors has emerged in the last year as President Bush is perceived in Asia to have pressed America's campaign on terror to the exclusion of almost everything else.
October 17, 2003
Physicists Smash Internet Speed Record
Researchers have more than doubled the world speed record for internet data transfer.Scientists at the CERN particle physics laboratory in Switzerland sent the equivalent of a full-length DVD movie in about seven seconds.
Colleagues at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) received the data.
The land record was set on Oct. 1 by transferring 1.1 terabytes of data over a 7,000-kilometre link in less than 30 minutes, the team said.
The average transfer rate was 5.44 gigabits per second (Gbps), which broke the previous record of 2.38 Gbps -- more than 20,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection.
Text Mining: Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom
Of course, no one, Dr. Liebman included, is arguing that these [software] products are actually reading anything. What they are engaged in is "text mining,'' a technique that academics have been experimenting with for years but for which tools have only recently become commercially available. The prospect of rapidly scanning through reams of documents is stirring interest among researchers and analysts faced with more material than they can handle.To the uninitiated, it may seem that Google and other Web search engines do something similar, since they also pore through reams of documents in split-second intervals. But, as experts note, search engines are merely retrieving information, displaying lists of documents that contain certain keywords.
Text-mining programs go further, categorizing information, making links between otherwise unconnected documents and providing visual maps (some look like tree branches or spokes on a wheel) to lead users down new pathways that they might not have been aware of.
Seattle Losing Publicly Traded Companies
Seattle's publicly traded companies are quickly disappearing.Of the 61 Washington companies that completed initial public offerings in the past six years, 26 have either been acquired, filed for bankruptcy or relocated elsewhere. So far this year, Expedia, ImageX, Metawave Communications, N2H2, Network Commerce and Vixel have been gobbled up or closed down.
Some believe the trend will only accelerate in the next two years, with one local investment banker estimating that an additional 40 percent of Washington's publicly traded companies will be "taken out."
Disney Threatened By 3-D Animation
Meanwhile, Disney is undergoing a radical transformation of its own, experiencing wrenching internal changes in its bedrock animation business.For the first time in decades, the entertainment giant that pioneered feature-length animation with 1937's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" has no traditional animated big-budget movies in production.
The sea change comes as audiences and most Hollywood studios have largely shunned traditional 2-D hand-drawn animation in favor of cartoons that feature dazzling, lifelike images generated on a computer..
October 16, 2003
Norton Signs Historic Water Pact in West
Interior Secretary Gale Norton signed a deal Thursday meant to end years of bickering among California and six other states that rely on Colorado River water. The deal ensures more water for fast-growing cities in Southern California while limiting supplies to farms.More than 30 million acre-feet of water - enough to cover the state of Pennsylvania a foot deep - will move from farms to cities in Southern California over the 75-year life of the deal. Beyond serving burgeoning urban populations, the shift is designed to curb California's overreliance on the river.
"Today we celebrate an historic event on the Colorado River, the river that brings life to this arid region of our nation," Norton said. "With this agreement, conflict on the river is stilled."
Much of the water affected by the deal will go to San Diego. The Imperial Valley, California's biggest user of Colorado River water, will sell as much as 90 billion gallons each year to San Diego - roughly a third of the city's future water needs.
Shellfish Linked To Medicine Breakthrough
Scientists say poisonous shellfish that live on coral reefs could provide a cornucopia of new medicines.Yet just as scientists are beginning to discover the potential of cone snails, they are coming under threat.
Dr Eric Chivian, from Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, US, is appealing for action to protect the brightly coloured creatures, which are coveted by shell collectors.
He said: "Tropical cone snails may contain the largest and most clinically important pharmacopoeia of any genus in nature, but wild populations are being decimated by habitat destruction and over-exploitation.
"To lose these species would be a self-destructive act of unparalleled folly."
Super-hard Graphite Cracks Diamond
It is hard to imagine that graphite, the soft "lead" of pencils, can be transformed into a form that competes in strength with its molecular cousin diamond. Using a diamond anvil to produce extreme pressures and the ultra-brilliant X-ray beams at the Advanced Photon Source in Illinois, scientists with the High-Pressure Collaborative Access Team (HPCAT)* have surmounted experimental obstacles to probe the changes that graphite undergoes to produce this unique, super-hard substance. The study is reported in the October 17, issue of Science."Researchers have speculated for years on the extreme conditions that might change the molecular structure of graphite into a super-hard form that rivals diamond," said Wendy Mao, the study's lead author from the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and the University of Chicago.
...
The super-hard from of graphite opens the door to a myriad of applications in industry particularly as a structural component.
October 15, 2003
Bank of America to shift jobs to India
Bank of America (BoA) is to set up an Indian subsidiary in April next year, enabling it to cut costs by moving more jobs offshore, according to a report by Reuters. The move will result in job losses from BoA's global operations. Newswire reports suggest that jobs at the bank's UK operations in London are at risk, although BoA says it has not yet decided which functions will be moved to India.Reuters quotes BoA spokeswoman Elisabeth Woods who says: "India was chosen because it is a leader in information technology and processing, and has a large English speaking workforce and good infrastructure."
Oracle to Shift 6000 Jobs to India
WHILE ORACLE is to send 175 jobs to India from its Rocklin site, it appears this is the thin end of the wedge and eventually 6,000 jobs will be relocated there.That's according to a report in the Sacramento Business Journal, which said it has evidence of CEO Larry Ellison's intentions in an executive publication from July.
According to the newspaper, Oracle already has 3,000 jobs in the subcontinent, but Ellison is quoted as saying it plans to double that number in the "fairly near term".
New global treaty proposed to control climate change and improve health
A global treaty focusing on intercontinental air pollution could be a better approach to controlling climate change than the Kyoto Protocol, according to a new scientific study. By cooperating to reduce pollutants like ozone and aerosols, countries could address their own regional health concerns, keep their downwind neighbors happy and reduce the threat of global warming in the process, claim the researchers.The report appears in the Oct. 13 edition of Environmental Science & Technology, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.
The Kyoto Protocol, drafted in 1997, was designed to provide binding commitments for reducing national emissions of greenhouse gases, with a special emphasis on carbon dioxide. Some countries, however, like the United States and China, have been reluctant to fully adopt the standards because of their potential economic burden.
Pope John Paul II Controversial Figure Among U.S. Catholics
As Pope John Paul II celebrates his 25th anniversary in office, a new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll finds American Catholics approving of his performance as leader of the Catholic Church by nearly a two-to-one margin. In addition, the vast majority thinks of him as an important world leader. However, on several other matters, Catholics are divided: whether the pope should resign due to poor health or continue to serve as pope; whether he is infallible on matters of morals and faith; and whether he is out of touch with the modern world.
According to the poll, conducted Oct. 10-12, 63% of Catholics approve of the way Pope John Paul II is handling his role as leader of the Catholic Church, while just 33% disapprove.
The approval rating is down substantially from January 1999, as he made a visit to the United States and Mexico, when 85% approved of his performance. In 1993, shortly before a highly publicized visit to the United States for World Youth Day, 73% approved, still considerably above his current reading.
The most significant change from previous readings is found in the number of Catholics who disapprove of the pope's performance -- 33% in the current poll, three times the percentage found in two previous readings.
While the cause of this decline is not clear from the new poll, a strong possibility is the sexual abuse scandal involving U.S. priests that engulfed the Church in 2002. Gallup polling on that subject found most Catholics saying that the Catholic Church had done a bad job of dealing with the abuse problem, and that the policy put in place to address future sexual misconduct by priests did not go far enough.
The poorer ratings could also reflect the feeling among some Catholics that the pope's illness prevents him from adequately fulfilling his duties and thus he should resign.
For first time in humans, fertility treatment succeeds
Doctors in China have become the first in the world to make an infertile woman pregnant with an experimental technique devised in the United States for women who have healthy genes but defects in their eggs that prevent embryos from developing.The technique, called nuclear transfer, involves removing the nucleus, which contains the genetic material, from a woman's fertilized egg and transferring it to the egg of another woman that has had its nucleus removed. The resulting hybrid egg is then put back into the womb of the first woman. The idea is that the second woman's egg will provide a healthier environment for the genes.
Although researchers at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou succeeded last year in impregnating a 30-year-old woman with the technique, she gave birth prematurely and the fetuses died. Although the procedure was legal at the time in China, it was recently banned there.
AIDS: A few, scattered rays of sunshine
A litany of death and despair marks nearly three decades of AIDS history. The disease has carved the productive heart out of country after country, especially in Africa, leaving them virtually without farmers and depositing millions of orphans across the landscape.What may be the worst natural disaster ever to afflict mankind also has exposed callousness, indifference and cruelty at all levels of human interaction -- personal, national and international.
Even though the statistics remain mind-numbing, there are signs not all is lost. The epidemic yet may be controlled -- not only in the West but in those nations of Africa and Asia where AIDS proceeds like a runaway train roaring downhill.
Native Hawaiians to March on US West Coast for Hawaiian Independence
Descendants of the Hawaiian Kingdom want their independence back and will bring that message to the San Francisco Bay area Sunday, October 19th as Native Hawaiians and their supporters stage an Aloha March.
With the theme "Free Hawai'i," participants will spread the word on the Hawaiian sovereignty movement and the goal to return the islands to an independent nation status. Marchers will also express their opposition to a US backed plan to locate Hawaiians on reservations through a federal recognition program.The Aloha Marches of 1998 and 2000 in Washington, DC brought unprecedented national and international media coverage to the plight of Native Hawaiians.
A Deadly Change In Irsaeli-Palestinian Tensions
BEIT LAHIYA, GAZA STRIP - A remote-controlled bomb exploded under a U.S. diplomatic convoy Wednesday, ripping apart an armored van and killing three Americans in an unprecedented attack on an official U.S. target.The bombing, which also wounded an American, will likely intensify U.S. pressure on the Palestinian Authority to take action against militant groups. The U.S. Embassy advised U.S. citizens to leave the Gaza Strip after the attack.
There was no claim of responsibility. But if Palestinian militants were to blame, it could signal a dramatic change in strategy. While targeting Israeli soldiers and civilians for years, groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad repeatedly insist they do not target U.S. officials - apparently to avoid a harsh retribution from the Americans and the anger of Palestinian officials trying to work with Washington.
New Custom Codes: Is Russia Ready for a Change of Regimes?
Is Russia ready for a regime change?It had better be. A new Customs Code comes into force in just over two months that proponents say promises a dramatic increase in international trade volumes by improving the way Russia does business with the rest of the world.
Critics of the code, however, who have now had several months to study its final form, say it will cut budget revenues, breed chaos, squeeze out small traders, encourage intellectual property pirates and foster corruption in an agency already notorious for graft. Some even call it criminal.
Potential Seen in Hawaii-Made Chocolate
... "These are two words that the world knows: Hawaii and chocolate. You don't have to construct the definition anywhere," said Richard Oszustowicz, founder of Hawaii Gold Cacao Tree Inc., a company on the Big Island with big plans for the industry.State legislators recognized the potential of Hawaii Gold Cacao's plan by approving $10 million in special purpose revenue bonds for the company and passed a resolution that declared chocolate's potential to diversify Hawaii's farm economy.
October 14, 2003
To Whom May I Direct Your Free Call?
In the fall of 2000, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis had not yet earned any powerful enemies, at least so far as they were aware. They were just two obscure Swedish entrepreneurs who had worked with three Estonian programmers to write a file-sharing application called Kazaa. At the time, the free program was merely one of Napster's several weak stepsisters, lumped together in news reports with the likes of Snarfzilla and ToadNode.But a few months later, the record industry and its lawyers swatted down Napster. And Kazaa, with its easy-to-use interface and reliable technology, quickly began scooping up users. Kazaa does essentially everything Napster did, with one important difference.
...
Mr. Zennstrom and Mr. Friis have reunited with the same team of Estonian programmers who wrote the code for Kazaa and have created a way to allow people to make high-quality phone calls over the Internet without having to pay a penny.
On Aug. 29, their new company, called Skype, released a preliminary version of the program. Already, more than a million people have downloaded it, the company's Web site says.
Plastic surgery changes face of Japan to Western one
Women are more than ever changing the face of Japan by walking into cosmetic surgery clinics and walking out with rounder eyes, bigger noses and fewer wrinkles.''Cosmetic surgery used to have a shadowy reputation,'' said plastic surgeon Toshiya Handa. ''It was the kind of thing you only heard about celebrities and bar hostesses doing.''
By one credit agency's reckoning, spending on cosmetic surgery climbed to around $25 million last year, up 50 percent from 1994.
Ben Crenshaw: Impact of Technology on Golf
THERE ARE A LOT of people, myself included, who believe it's time to call a halt to the technological advances in the game. As a matter of fact, we may have already gone too far. Consider the modern golf ball. Today, it's not all that unusual for players to carry the ball 300 yards off the tee, an amazing distance compared with just eight years ago, when the average drive on the tour was 266 yards.This is not due to the greater strength or skill of today's players. It's simply due to advances in the technology: the improved dimple patterns on balls (which make them more aerodynamic in flight) and the trampoline effect of titanium clubs. Twenty years ago, Jack Nicklaus was warning us about the trend of increasing golf ball carry, and we thought he was crazy. But he was right, and now the distance the ball is traveling is having a profound and negative effect on course architecture and the very nature of the game.
Just wait when the new nanotechnology drivers and balls are developed. 400 yard drives and perfect trajectories.
Kraft Foods Makes Unprecedented Commitment to Taking Sustainable Coffee Mainstream
The Rainforest Alliance today announced a unique partnership with Kraft Foods to promote sustainability and equity from the coffee farm to the consumers' cup.In an unprecedented multi-year arrangement, Kraft Foods has committed to purchase over 5 million pounds of coffee in the first year from farms in Brazil, Colombia, Mexico and Central America that have been certified as sustainably managed by the Rainforest Alliance. Ongoing monitoring and verification of compliance of these farms will be provided by Rainforest Alliance and members of the Sustainable Agriculture Network.
Saudis trumpet first elections
In an unprecedented move that could lead to a form of limited democracy, Saudi Arabia's absolute rulers announced yesterday that the kingdom intends to hold its first-ever elections — a vote for municipal councils.The decision follows external pressure on the oil-rich kingdom and growing pressure for internal political reform after a series of terrorist incidents that have clearly unnerved the ruling al-Saud family.
OIC Chief: Muslims Face 'Unprecedented' Dangers Since 9/11
The head of the world's biggest Islamic organization is warning that Muslims are facing "unprecedented" dangers around the globe.Speaking at a key meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Abdelouahed Belkeziz said that since the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States two years ago, there has been a campaign against Islam and Islamic culture.
'I'll Be Back' - Arnold's Energy Deregulation Plan
Two years after energy deregulation left Californians with soaring electricity prices, rolling blackouts and a bankrupt utility, Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to give free markets another try.Some consumer advocates and Democratic lawmakers say the former actor's plan could mean a remake of the energy crisis. But Schwarzenegger says the best way to ensure low prices and encourage new power-plant construction is to "make markets work," according to his energy policy statement.
Tours to offer taste of Hawai'i
The month-old Saturday-morning Farmers' Market in the shady Kapi'olani Community College parking lot below Diamond Head is just the beginning of a number of new projects pairing the University of Hawai'i system with local farmers, the tourist industry and the state.By January, Hawai'i visitors will be able to book a unique $95 O'ahu culinary tour that will give them a peek into Chinatown markets, a walk through a Waimanalo "greens" farm, and the fun of cooking and eating a meal featuring local produce and created by a KCC chef.
It's all part of a convergence of ideas that backers hope could launch Hawai'i as a "farmers market" city on the scale of Seattle or Vancouver, and a culinary destination in competition with California's Napa Valley.
Tourism Expanding In China
China's tourism industry will see robust growth and continue to be a cornerstone of the nation's economy and a major source of job creation over the next decade, according to the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC)."China has the potential to become one of the world's great tourism economies in terms of inbound, domestic and outbound travel,'' said a WTTC report released yesterday to highlight the economic impact of travel and tourism on the Chinese mainland and the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.
Despite the outbreak of SARS earlier this year, the China's travel and tourism sectors are on track for a rapid rebound.
EU viewed by China as world power to rival US
The European Union is the world's rising superpower, poised to overtake both America and Japan as the biggest trade and investment force in China, according to a strategic policy paper published by Beijing yesterday.The Chinese government said the EU was transforming the global landscape with its successful currency launch and strides towards a joint foreign policy, defence, and judicial union.
Describing EU integration as "irreversible", Beijing marvelled at Europe's 25-35 per cent share of the global economy and its projected 450 million population after expanding into the former communist bloc next year.
New Developments In Local Search
When I need a local product or service, I get low-tech but efficient. I pull the yellow pages off my bookshelf. Within a few minutes, I've found companies that can meet my needs.
Surely web-wide search engines ought to be just as efficient at finding local commercial information! Sadly, no. I've always found that searching the web for local commerce results is often a disappointing experience.
Fortunately, there are signs that local search is about to get better. Overture is testing a local search product, while Google is beta testing its new Search By Location service. In addition, long-time local search player CitySearch is expanding its efforts. These developments and others could mean that I'll stop reaching for that printed yellow pages in the future -- and so might you.
October 13, 2003
Tiger-Proofing the Old Course
THE Old Course will be lengthened to 7,275 yards for the 2005 Open, feature seven new tees and include the longest hole on the championship rota. While the 14th at St Andrews is due to be extended to a whopping 616 yards, Peter Dawson, secretary of the Royal and Ancient, insisted yesterday the links would remain a test of brain rather than brawn.
Cell Phones Now Debit Cards in S. Korea
Kim Won-jung walked up to a vending machine and bought an orange drink. But rather than insert coins, she paid with the press of a cell phone button.Kim's Samsung handset has a debit card inside, and pushing its "hot key" beamed the information to complete the transaction.
"My brother really envies me for all the cool things I do with my phone," said Kim, 22, a math major at the Sookmyung Women's University in Seoul.
In one of South Korea's latest efforts to establish itself as a technology trendsetter, the country's three telecom giants, major credit card companies and several banks have been working for a year to enable Koreans to pay for everything from groceries to gasoline by cell phone.
Going, Going, Gone To The Concert
Imagine that concert tickets had no face value and instead were sold on the Internet to the highest bidders. You might wind up paying more for front-row seats and less for spots in the nosebleed sections. In any given row, prices could vary widely, as they do now on airplanes.That is no fantasy scenario. Ticketmaster Corp., the world's biggest ticket seller, recently held its first concert-ticket auction, putting about half of the general-admission tickets to a Sting show in New York last Saturday up for bids in a seven-day Internet sale. While it was billed as an experiment, the unusual sale fueled the idea that ticket auctions are the next frontier for event marketing.
"We will see this more and more," said Stephen Happel, an economics professor at Arizona State University who studies the ticket-sales industry. "While Ticketmaster is the most visible one, they have major competition with online ticket marketplaces," Happel said.
To see how the Internet is changing ticket sales, you need only look at eBay. About 4 million event tickets were offered for sale there last year, by professional resellers and fans. This year eBay is on track to sell even more.
While many tickets sell for more than their original value, others are bargains, as I discovered when I scooped up two seats for Shania Twain's Oct. 17 D.C. show on eBay for 20 percent below face value. EBay doesn't offer cheap tickets to every show, of course. Good seats for the Simon and Garfunkel reunion tour are selling for as much as $700.
Brain implant in monkeys called breakthrough
Washington Post via the Boston Globe:
Scientists in North Carolina have built a brain implant that lets monkeys control a robotic arm with their thoughts, marking the first time that mental intentions have been harnessed to move a mechanical object.The technology could someday allow people with paralyzing spinal cord injuries to operate machines or tools with their thoughts as naturally as others do with their hands. It might even allow some paralyzed people to move their arms or legs again, by transmitting the brain's directions not to a machine, but to the muscles in those latent limbs.
The brain implants could also allow scientists or soldiers to control, hands-free, small robots that could perform tasks in inhospitable environments or war zones.
October 12, 2003
Honda Announces Fuel Cell Breakthrough
Honda Motor Co announces the development of the Honda FC Stack - a remarkably compact, next-generation fuel cell stack that delivers high performance, yet operates at temperatures as low as -20ºC.It is the world's first fuel stack to feature a stamped metal separator structure and newly developed electrolyte membranes. The FCX equipped with the Honda FC Stack was certified 24 September by the Japanese Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport.
Honda will begin public testing of the vehicle's cold start and driving performance capabilities to advance more widespread use of fuel cell vehicles. Honda FC Stack-equipped FCX will take the role of a lead car in the 80th Tokyo-Hakone Ekiden relay race in January 2004.
Film star glamour of cigarette cases hides truth for smokers
It featured in Tolstoy's stories, was used in films by Marlene Dietrich and converted into a fatal weapon by James Bond: now the old-fashioned silver cigarette case is experiencing a surge in popularity as diehard smokers try to hide the stark health warnings on cigarette packets.Tobacconists across the country have experienced a surprising rise in demand for the cases, with some suppliers tripling their sales over the past 10 months. The demand has been prompted by the introduction in January of large black-bordered messages on cigarette packets delivering the warnings that "Smoking Kills" and "Smokers Die Younger". The warnings must cover 30 per cent of the front of the packet and 40 per cent of the back, according to a European Union directive.
The EU has further plans to introduce photographic warnings showing diseased lungs and mouths from next October, which retailers say will further fuel demand for the cases.
Low-Carb Could Spell Next Fast-Food Fight
Jeff Endervelt's interest in low-carbohydrate foods began as a personal quest when he experimented with the Atkins diet and spin-offs that helped him shed 20 pounds.As chief executive of Atlanta-based Blimpie International Inc., Endervelt saw a market worth pursuing when his customers started asking for submarine sandwiches on something other than white bread.
A sandwich shop called Blimpie's might seem an unlikely destination for dieters. It is now also the only national restaurant operator testing a separate menu targeted at the low-carb, high-protein eating craze.
The Blimpie Carb Counter Menu, launched this month in parts of New York's Long Island, offers 6-inch subs with fillings like roast beef and cheddar with wasabi dressing on seven-grain bread. The sandwiches, each with only 7 to 8.5 net carb grams and lacking the white flour eschewed by low-carb adherents, can be paired with a SoBe drink and Crunchers chips from Atkins Nutritionals Inc.
New Scientific Journal Challenges Establishment
A new scientific journal that challenges the expensive heavyweights that have dominated the world of research hits the Internet on Monday.The journal, called the Public Library of Science Biology, is backed by leading scientists such as Dr. Harold Varmus, former director of the National Institutes of Health and now chief executive officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.
They want to speed up the pace at which research is published, and also make it accessible to even the poorest of graduate students.
It will be available on the Internet at http://www.plosbiology.org. The non-profit group that backs PLoS is based in San Francisco and will launch a second journal, PLoS Medicine, next year.
Mice Allow Study Of Genetic Disorders
Genetically modified mice and rats, used in medical research, are flown from Perth to many destinations all over the world by Ozgene.The company, founded in 1999 and based in Technology Park in Bentley, performs DNA manipulation on the animals, enabling researchers to mimic human genetic disorders on a molecular level.
Chief executive and company founder Frank Koentgen said a breakthrough in the understanding of spina bifida using his company's technology was soon to be announced in a medical journal.
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October 11, 2003
CDC Study Shows Diabetes Tripling by 2050
One out of every three people who has it doesn't know it. Seventeen million Americans suffer from diabetes, a commonly known disease that shortens life and wreaks havoc on the body.Dr. K.M. Venkat Narayan of the Centers for Disease Control said, "It affects every organ of the body, because of its affects in the blood vessels. Particularly, it can cause eye disease leading to blindness, it can cause kidney disease and heart disease."
Now, a startling new study from by Dr. Narayan and the CDC says that by the year 2050, the number of Americans getting diabetes will almost triple.
Dr. Narayan said, "An average American born in the year 2000 has a one in three chance of developing diabetes during his or her lifetime."
...
So why are the numbers so high? Doctors say obesity is a major cause. But there are many other risk factors.
October 9, 2003
China Flight Plans 14 Orbits Around Earth
China's first manned space flight might be bolder than previously reported.A day after state media said the capsule would make one 90-minute loop around Earth, a major state newspaper said Thursday that 14 orbits are planned during the trip, expected sometime this month.
Astronauts are making final preparations for the flight, which is to include orbits at two different altitudes, the Liberation Daily of Shanghai said, citing "relevant channels."
The government hasn't announced a launch date or other details, but reports Wednesday by state television and other media said the rocket would blast off Oct. 15.
The Liberation Daily said the launch — from a Gobi Desert base about 900 miles west of Beijing — will happen during the day.
Success Halts Tests of Novartis Breast Cancer Drug
One of a new class of breast cancer drugs was so successful in a major international trial that scientists stopped the test half way through to allow all the patients to take advantage of the stunning success rate, the lead author of a new medical report said on Thursday.The five-year study of about 5,200 women with the most common form of breast cancer was halted midway because Femara, made by Swiss drugmaker Novartis, cut by 43 percent the risk of the disease's recurrence, compared with the risk for patients taking a placebo, scientists said.
"This is a sea change in the treatment of the disease," Dr. Paul Goss of Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, who led the research, told a news conference.
October 6, 2003
The Changing Face of Communication
For Melvin Patterson, who has been completely deaf since he was a toddler, communication is a visual experience.In the past, conducting a conversation using traditional nonvisual telecommunications tools like telephones and pagers was frustrating. Text messages or sign language conversations on jittery Web video screens were a pale substitute for a face-to-face exchange.
But that changed dramatically when Patterson tried iChat AV, new videoconferencing software, and iSight, a new Web camera, which Apple Computer Inc. introduced during the summer.
"When my girlfriend and I were able to talk to each other using iChat with iSight, I can't describe the feeling I had,'' the Chicago film school student said in an e-mail to The Chronicle. "I'm sure it is the same feeling people had long ago when the telephone was invented, being able to hear someone's voice with all their inflections from a distance."
Unlike any other technology he had seen, Patterson, 31, said the iChat AV software produced video that was clear enough to see another person's fingers and hand movements, a crucial element in communicating in American Sign Language.
My brother's son, here in front of the iChat / iSight video, is not deaf. However, he is speaking a different kind of sign language with his Uncle in Germany. This language of love is free. It's real-time. And it's leading this family to sell all their long-distance company stocks, pronto.
Since we're already Mac people, we're making the investment in the Web camera and software for us and the rest of our family. With this new technology, we have clearly entered a new era of communication.
~Jennifer
Ten Inventions That Will Change Your World
[Creative types have] continued to ply their craft in labs and basements, producing ideas that seem obscure, even loopy, until a closer look reveals their world-shifting import. Here are 10 such individual visions that may change our collective future:1) Taste Tricks: A new flavoring may turn us on to broccoli and off salt.
2) Reinventing the Mouse: Not every rodent is created equal in the weird world of drug labs.
3) Now You See It: Quantum physics may soon make things much harder for data spies.
4) Wearing Wires: A new fabric may make clothing both high tech and fashionable.
5) Space Plane: A hybrid rocket-jet engine may soon lead to ultra-high-speed travel.
6) To Build a Baby: A quick genetic test is a godsend and a moral dilemma.
7) Free for All: Open-source software transforms technology in the developing world.
8) Head Shots: Imaging technology shows what happens when liars lie and patients feel sad.
9) Waterworks: Kenyan farmers are getting a big boost from a simple piece of equipment.
10) Sky High: A British scientist may have invented a way to control the clouds.
Infrared Vision Comes to Cars
Night Vision uses an infrared technology to "light up" the road ahead. A special camera-like sensor in the grille picks up infrared energy (heat) being radiated from objects directly ahead, processes the data in real time, and translates it into a video image. The image is then projected onto your windshield, just to the left of center, through a Head-Up Display atop the instrument panel.
October 5, 2003
Heart Disease Breakthrough?
Researchers at Canterbury University may have brought scientists a step closer to finding a cure for heart disease.Led by senior lecturer in biochemistry Dr Steven Gieseg, a team has discovered a new type of free radical damage that could lead to a better understanding of the way heart disease works and possibly treatments that can halt the disease.
Until now research has concentrated on the damage to the lipids (fats and oils) in the lipoprotein particles.
But the Canterbury University team has found that the proteins on the lipoprotein particles also get damaged and form reactive peroxides that can cause further significant damage and cell death.
Growth In Personal Storage Needs
As consumers appetites grow for all things digital, so does the inevitable need for storage options to help keep their expanding stash of songs, video and snapshots secure and portable.From tiny "thumb drives" to portable hard drives and DVD burners, popular methods of copying part or all of a digital library from a home personal computer turns media stuck on a machine at home into entertainment "with legs."
"Typically the device that you use (to enjoy digital media) isn't the only device you want to use that on," said NPD Techworld analyst Steve Baker. "You want to be able to take those files with you. You want the ability to access these important digital files in a multitude of places."
Socioeconomics Plays Role in Obesity
A child's socioeconomic status plays a direct role in whether his genetic susceptibility to obesity is expressed or controlled, says a Medical College of Georgia study.Researchers studied the genotypes of almost 500 black and white American children, aged 5 to 25, and found those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds were more likely to display the negative effects of genes that are known to be involved in causing obesity.
The findings were to be presented this week at the American Physiological Society conference in Augusta, Ga.
"Some gene effects were dependent on socioeconomic status. If you are a carrier of the 'bad gene,' so to say, and you are also in a lower socioeconomic class, then you will show the effect of the gene and are obese," researcher and genetic epidemiologist Dr. Harold Snieder says in a news release.
October 2, 2003
Human Genome on Chip Offered by Rivals
The genome on a chip has arrived.Melding high technology with biology, several companies are rushing to sell slivers of glass or nylon, some as small as postage stamps, packed with pieces of all 30,000 or so known human genes.
The new products will allow scientists to scan all genes in a human tissue sample at once, to determine which genes are active, a job that previously required two or more chips. The whole-genome chips will lower the cost and increase the speed of a widely used test that has transformed biomedical research in the last few years.
"It's sort of a milestone event, very similar to generating an integrated circuit of the genome," said Stephen P. A. Fodor, the chief executive of Affymetrix Inc., the leading seller of gene chips, which are also called microarrays.
Chinese leader calls for more democracy
On the eve of the country's National Day holiday, Chinese President Hu Jintao made a vague but firm call for more democracy in China.In an address to the ruling Politburo made public by China's official news service Wednesday, Hu said the Communist Party must undertake a "sweeping systemic project" to increase public participation in government and enforce the rule of law.
Hu repeatedly emphasized the need for more democracy, raising expectations the new leader might support introducing greater pluralism in the one-party state, the New York Times reported.
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