2011 With its theme that Mind is the master weaver, creating our inner character and outer

r circumstances the book As a Man Thinketh by James Allen is an in-depth exploration of the central idea of self-help writing. 46Allens contribution was to take an assumption we all sharethat because we are not robots we therefore control our thoughtsand reveal its erroneous nature. Because most of us believe that mind is separate from matter, we think that thoughts can be hidden and made powerless; this allows us to think one way and act another. However, Allen believed that the unconscious mind generates as much action as the conscious mind, and 47 while we may be able to sustain the illusion of control through the conscious mind alone, in reality we are continually faced with a questionWhy cannot I make myself do this or achieve that? Since desire and will are damaged by the presence of thoughts that do not accord with desire, Allen concluded :We do not attract what we want, but what we are. Achievement happens because you as a person embody the external achievement you dont get success but become it. There is no gap between mind and matter. Part of the fame of Allens book is its contention that Circumstances do not make a person, they reveal him. 48This seems a justification for neglect of those in need, and a rationalization of exploitation, of the superiority of those at the top and the inferiority of those at the bottom. This, however, would be a knee-jerk reaction to a subtle argument. Each set of circumstances, however bad, offers a unique opportunity for growth. If circumstances always determined the life and prospects of people, then humanity would never have progressed. In fact, 49circumstances seem to be designed to bring out the best in us and if we feel that we have been wronged then we are unlikely to begin a conscious effort to escape from our situation. Nevertheless, as any biographer knows, a persons early life and its conditions are often the greatest gift to an individual. The sobering aspect of Allens book is that we have no one else to blame for our present condition except ourselves. 50 The upside is the possibilities contained in

knowing that everything is up to us; where before we were experts in the array of limitations, now we become authorities of what is possible.

2011 46Allens contribution was to take an assumption we all sharethat because we are not robots we therefore control our thoughtsand reveal its erroneous nature. Allens contribution was to take an assumptionwe all shareassumptionthat because we are not robots we therefore control our thoughtsassumptionbecauseand reveal its erroneous natureto take an assumption Allens contribution was to take an assumption / we all share / that because we are not robots we therefore control our thoughts / and reveal its erroneous nature. 1 assumption assume make an assumptiontake an assumption assume 1997 2004 2 3 robot 2001 erroneous error err He erred in failing to prepare the public for it. To err is human; to forgive, divine. <> All men are liable to error. He was sent by error to the wrong office. receive an erroneous impression Allen

share assumption assumption that share share the housework share sb.s troubles as well as sb.s joys share sb.s feelings share dinner with sb. share a laugh share ones conclusion with sb. Allen

47while we may be able to sustain the illusion of control through the conscious mind alone, in reality we are continually faced with a question Why cannot I make myself do this or achieve that? while we may be able to sustain the illusion of control through the conscious mind alone in reality we are continually faced with a question Why cannot I make myself do this or achieve that? while we may be able / to sustain the illusion of control / through the conscious mind alone, / in reality / we are continually faced with a question / Why cannot I make myself do this or achieve that?

1 while 1999

 1999 71 while while 2 sustain sustainable The foundations were not strong enough to sustain the weight of the house. An unshakeable faith sustained me. We should sustain the quality of our products. The villagers along the seacoast are sustained by the fishing trade. sustain a family sustain a defeat sustainable growth 3 illusion have (or cherish, entertain, hold) an illusion about sth. It is time for them to cast their illusions. The mirror gives an illusion of depth. The old mans ruddy complexion gave an illusion of good health. the conscious mind / the unconscious mind be faced with do this or achieve that do achieve /

48This seems a justification for neglect of those in need, and a rationalization of exploitation, of the superiority of those at the top and the inferiority of those at the bottom. this seems a justification and a rationalization for

neglect of those justification rationalization of exploitation, of the superiority those in needat the top at the bottom This seems a justification / for neglect of those (in need), / and a rationalization of exploitation, / of the superiority of those (at the top) / and the inferiority of those (at the bottom). 1 this contentioncontention contend 1996 72 Circumstances do not make a person, they reveal him contention this 2 justification justify The pursuit of good ends does not justify the employment of bad means. Your state of anxiety does not justify your being so rude to me. What can be said in justification of his behavior? You have no justification for criticizing him in that way. 3 neglect for neglect They neglected his warning. I neglected winding ( to wind) the clock. He has shown a persistent neglect of duty. The child was in a state of neglect. 4 in need He is in dire need. A friend in need is a friend indeed. rationalization rational

rationalize Man is a rational being. He used rational arguments to support his ideas. rationalize ones attitude to life a rationalization of customs procedures exploitation exploit exploit exploitation exploit the oil under the sea exploit the materials and the techniques of our time exploit the poor You must not exploit your authority for personal gratification. the exploitation of newly discovered oil fields There are laws against the exploitation of child labor. 4 superiority superior They counted themselves as the most superior race in the world. Quite often, his sense of superiority makes him deride her opinions. 5 inferiority inferior superiority 6 at the top / bottom / /

49 circumstances seem to be designed to bring out the best in us and if we feel that we have

been wronged then we are unlikely to begin a conscious effort to escape from our situation. circumstances seem to be designed to bring out the best in us in us the best and if we feel that we have been wronged then we are unlikely to begin a conscious effort to escape from our situation circumstances seem to be designed / to bring out the best in us / and if we feel / that we have been wronged / then we are unlikely to begin a conscious effort / to escape from our situation. 1 circumstance The weather is a circumstance to be taken into consideration. Circumstances permitting, we sail on Friday. His arrival was a happy circumstance. The circumstances suggest murder. He is now in reduced circumstances. Circumstances have it so. Circumstances alter cases. <> Under no circumstance should you see them again. Under the circumstances, there is little hope for an early settlement. 2 bring out He generally wears a pale blue tie to bring out the color of his eyes. Difficult conditions will sometimes bring out a mans best qualities. Bob was always willing to talk about his work, his latest book, etc. Chris found it easy to

bring him out. The girl is nice, but needs a lot of bringing out. bring out the best in us you know a word by the company it keeps 3 the best qualities + / the dead the unemployed the true and false The old are apt to catch cold. The duty of a doctor is to heal the wounded and rescue the dying. He has no eye for the beautiful. The unexpected always happens. 4 wrong wrong He is an innocent man wronged by being sent to prison. We will not tolerate his wronging her any more. 5 be unlikely to do sth. unlikely likely / unlikely It is (un)likely to rain. It seemed hardly likely that they would agree. He is an unlikely candidate for the election. That story of yours doesnt sound very likely. Victory is unlikely but not impossible. The new government quite likely will be more receptive to change. He may, not unlikely, join us.

be designed to 1999 73

be wronged

to begin a conscious effort

to escape from our situation

50The upside is the possibilities contained in knowing that everything is up to us; where before we were experts in the array of limitations, now we become authorities of what is possible.

The upside is the possibilities contained in knowing possibilities that everything is up to us knowing where before we were experts in the array of limitations experts, now we become authorities of what is possible authorities what is possible of The upside is the possibilities / contained in knowing / that everything is up to us; / where before we were experts / in the array of limitations, / now we become authorities / of what is possible.

upside the sobering aspect the downside /

possibilities 2000 75 problems

contained in knowing possibilities in contained knowing in doing sth. 1995 71 in attacking the tests 2002 63 in shaping and maintaining the behavior of the individual 2005 50 in dealing with a challenge 3 be up to sb. When you cut the grass is up to you. Its up to you whether you decide to take the job. Its up to us to give them all the help we can. There wasnt a real doctor there, so the doctoring was up to Billy. be up to us 4 array an array of players a complex array of political and economic questions an array of facts 5 limitation limit She reached the limits of her patience. All railroads have weight and height limitations because of tunnels, bridges and so forth. I cant shoulder such a great responsibility; I know my own limits. I can only act within my limitations. authority on of

He is an authority on preventive medicine. A good dictionary is an authority on the meaning of words. He spoke with authority on the dangers of smoking. Her expression was grave with the authority of bad news. 1 possibilities contained in knowing paraphrase The upside is the possibilities. The possibilities are contained in the knowledge. The knowledge is that everything is up to us. knowing knowledge 2 experts in the array of limitations authorities of what is possible experts authorities

2011
James Allen 46Allen Allen 47 Allen Allen 48 49 Allen 50

Comparing Recessions and Recoveries: Job Changes

By CATHERINE RAMPELL

Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics. Chart by Amanda Cox.

Horizontal axis shows months. Vertical axis shows the ratio of that months nonfarm payrolls to the nonfarm payrolls at the start of recession. Note: Because employment is a lagging indicator, the dates for these employment trends are not exactly synchronized with National Bureau of Economic Researchs official business cycle dates.

The United States added just 18,000 nonfarm payroll jobs over all in June, the Labor Department reported Friday, after having added 25,000 jobs the previous month. Neither figure is statistically significant from zero, given that the growth is compared to a base of 131 million jobs.

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

Junes employment growth numbers were only about a tenth of what economists had been forecasting. Some of the biggest (although still modest) gains were in professional and technical services, leisure and hospitality, and health care. Government at all levels federal, state and local shed workers. Most of the local jobs lost were teaching jobs. Even most of the winners, though, have a long way to go before returning to their prerecession levels.The chart above shows economywide job changes in this last recession and recovery compared with other recent ones, with the black line representing the current downturn. Since the downturn began in December 2007, the economy has shed, on net, about 5 percent of its nonfarm payroll jobs. And that does not even account for the fact that the working-age population has continued to grow, meaning that if the economy were healthy we should have more jobs today than we had before the recession. The unemployment rate measured by a different government survey, and based on how many people are without jobs but are actively looking for work ticked up to 9.2 percent in June,

compared to 9.1 percent in May (also not a statistically significant change). There are now 14.1 million workers who are looking for work and cannot find it; the figure nearly doubles if you include workers who are part-time but want to be employed full-time, and workers who want to work but have stopped looking.

20 50 2080 1999

 1000 2050 A special report on China: Urbanisation

Where do you live?

Town- and country-dwellers have radically different prospects
Jun 23rd 2011 | from the print edition

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Rus in urbe

IN DAYI COUNTY, a couple of hours drive down a motorway from the city of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, Chinese tourists stroll through the meandering courtyards of a rural mansion. In the 1950s, soon after Mao seized power, the mansion was turned into a museum, intended as a showcase of evil. It once belonged to Liu Wencai, a landowner supposedly notorious for ill-treating his tenant farmers. Liu embodied a class despised by Mao, who came to power on the back of a promise to give land back to the peasants.

In its Maoist heyday the museum was a place of pilgrimage. Red Guards swarmed there for ritual denunciations of Liu and his ilk. A high point of their visit was a trip to the water dungeon, a room with several inches of water covering the floor where Liu had allegedly kept disobedient farmers. Another was a series of life-size sculptures of peasants and their vicious oppressors. A politically disfavoured curator from Beijings Forbidden City who happened to look like Liu was forced to stand next to the sculptures as a living Liu Wencai so that visitors could shout and (though not strictly permitted) spit at him, according to Geremie Barm of Australian National University. The sculptures are still there, but in recent years a wave of revisionism has been sweeping across Dayi. Local officials were already having second thoughts by the early 1980s. But it was a book reassessing Lius life published by an outspoken journalist in 1999 that finally convinced many that the man was really not that bad. His water dungeon was a government fabrication, the museum now points out. He spent a lot of money on local schools and paid for a road to be built from Chengdu to Dayi. Last year a grandson organised a get-

together in Dayi for the extended Liu clan, whose members would once have been terrified of revealing their ties. More than 1,000 turned up. In this special report

Rising power, anxious state The princelings are coming Beware the middle-income trap Where do you live? Deng &amp; Co The long arm of the state Getting on Universalists v exceptionalists Offer to readers
Sources & acknowledgements Reprints

Related topics

Beijing China Chongqing

The slaughter of many thousands of landlords (not including Liu, who died of natural causes) by officials and vengeful peasants shortly after the communist takeover resulted in profound changes in the system of rural land ownership. Peasants got the land Mao promised them, but only briefly. In

the late 1950s the party took it back again and forced farmers into collectively owned peoples communes. The legacy of that disastrous decision, which contributed to a famine that left tens of millions dead, still weighs heavily on rural China. So too does a decision to confer hereditary status on peasants, who would be all but barred from cities to stop them rushing in to find work. The curse of the hukou The hukou system, as this one-time apartheid is commonly known, applied to urban as well as rural dwellers, but peasants got a worse deal because they received hardly any welfare benefits, and job prospects in the countryside were dismal. The system has been much eroded since the Mao era because of the need for cheap labour to fuel Chinas manufacturing boom. But its lingering impact, combined with the still collective ownership of rural land, will retard Chinas urbanisation in the years ahead just when the country is most in need of its consumption-boosting benefits. Two researchers from Chinas finance ministry, Chen Xiaoqiang and Liu Ling, wrote in March that it was time to start returning land to the peasants, both to spur consumption and to help defuse

growing rural unrest. Most officials dare not say this so bluntly, but they admit that change is needed.

In 2007 Chengdu, and Chongqing to its south-east, were given licence to experiment. The principle of collective ownership could not be changed, but farmers rights could be clarified and rural land markets of sorts could be established. In Chengdu, which is responsible for a large rural area including Dayi county, officials spoke of initiating a new land reform (hinting at similarities to the great land reform that divvied up the estate of landlord Liu). They began a drive to ensure that farmers at last got long-promised certificates showing the

exact boundaries of their fields and housing as well as confirming their rights to use them (farmland is subject to a 30-year renewable contract).

Urbanisation in China

Without such documents a market could not take off. Regulations dating back at least to 1997 have obliged officials to issue them. But Landesa, an American NGO, says a survey it conducted in mid-2010 in 17 provinces, along with Renmin University and Michigan State University, found that only 44% of respondents had a complete set of certificates. One in three had no documents at all. In April the central government

urged the whole country to finish issuing the certificates by the end of 2012. Dayi county, chosen by Chengdu as a trailblazer for land reform, says it got the job done by the middle of last year. But one peasant fumes that officials never bothered to give her any documents and seized her house and farmland a few months ago for a development project. Liu was a great landlord, she says. I wish officials today were like him. Both Chengdu and Chongqing have gone a step further. They have set up markets for rural land derivatives, allowing farmers who create new land for agricultural use (by giving up some of their housing plots, for example) to sell the right to use an equivalent amount of rural land for urban development. Thus a developer who wants to build on a greenfield site that has already been approved for urban construction bids first for a land ticket, or dipiao, which certifies that such an area of farmland has been created elsewhere. The regulations say farmers get 85% of the proceeds: good news, in theory, for those in remote, dirt-poor areas who would otherwise have no chance of cashing in on the value created by urban expansion. This is hardly revolutionary. Especially for Chongqings Maoloving party chief, Bo Xilai, doing good by the peasantry would

seem a canny move. But because the notion of the collective persists, the system is wide open to abuses. Local officials have considerable incentives to force farmers to give up housing land and move to more compact dwellings in order to create land for dipiao trading (some of the proceeds of which also go to village authorities). The dipiao markets in Chongqing and Chengdu have done little more than add a layer of complexity to a widespread trend in many parts of China that has often added to peasants grievances.

Reform might quickly be exploited by the very forces it is meant to constrain: rapacious local governments and developers
In the name of building a new socialist countryside (a slogan launched in 2005), local governments have been corralling farmers into new apartment blocks in order to free up land which they can use for profitable purposes. Officials have justified the practice as a way of reducing incentives for local governments forcibly to appropriate farmland and sell it to developers. Two million peasants a year have lost their land this way in the past five years, a senior government adviser in north-east China said in March. The new strategy often means

the farmers are crammed into apartments with no backyards to raise chickens or store tools, and they face a longer journey to their fields. Though officially sanctioned, the dipiao markets are viewed warily by the central leadership. Late last year Chengdus market was suddenly closed down. No clear explanation was given, but a Chinese scholar says higher-level officials worried that dipiao were being traded without land having first been converted to agricultural use. The risk, central officials feared, was that it would never happen at all. The market reopened in April, but the central government remains cautious. In Chongqing only 10% of the governments annual sales of undeveloped rural land are subject to the dipiao system. Thoroughgoing land reform, of the sort that would enable farmers to cash in on the value of their farmland and establish permanent and prosperous lives in cities (and at the same time encourage larger-scale farming), thus remains stuck. One obstacle is ideological: for all their economic pragmatism, many in the party still regard collectivism as a sacred principle. Privatisation remains a dirty word. A more practical worry is that reform might quickly be exploited by the very forces it is

meant to constrain: rapacious local governments and developers. These, it is feared, would take advantage of any changes to persuade farmers unaware of land values to sell their holdings at less than market rates. The numbers of poor, landless peasants would soar, creating huge instability. Reformers in Beijing argue that most farmers are far cannier than officials suspect. But the global financial crisis has strengthened the case for caution in the minds of party leaders. As many as 20m workers returned to the countryside when the crisis broke in 2008 and Chinas exports slumped. Having farmland to go back to, many officials believe, kept the unemployed migrants from taking to the streets. As officials often say in China, stability trumps everything. Prospects for reform of the hukou system are only slightly better. Both Chengdu and Chongqing have been experimenting with this. They have declared that holders of rural hukou in the countryside surrounding these cities can move into urban areas and enjoy the same welfare benefits as their urban counterparts without giving up their land entitlements. This was an important step. Though the hukou divide is widely resented, peasants have often been reluctant to give up their

rural status for fear of losing their land, as well as the added benefit in the countryside of being able to have two children rather than one. In effect, Chongqing and Chengdu have created a new class of urban residents who enjoy the best of both worlds. But grand plans for hukou reform have fallen by the wayside before as officials tot up the price. The cities of Guangzhou and Zhengzhou abandoned reform efforts several years ago because of worries about the cost. Chongqings plans are ambitious. Local officials estimate the cost of converting 3m people at around 200 billion yuan ($30 billion). But the municipality says it wants to double the number of urban hukou holders by turning 10m of its rural citizens (some of whom already live in urban areas) into cardcarrying urbanites over the next ten years. It has made a rapid start. Since it relaxed its policy in August last year it has given urban hukou to more than 1.7m people. There are conditions: they must have been working in urban areas for at least three years, or for five years if they want to transfer their hukou to the centre of Chongqing. The reform remains only partial. The benefits of being a Chongqing urbanite still cannot be transferred to any other

part of the country. And if implementing such measures nationwide means raising more taxes, urbanites will dig in their heels. Local governments dont really have the incentives and they dont have the resources to encourage greater integration of migrants into urban life, says the World Banks Mr Kuijs. Although Chinese officials define the population as being already nearly 50% urban, the number of urban hukou holders is only around 35%. Zhang Zheng of Peking University says many of those who have moved to urban areas in recent years are wrongly seen as permanent migrants. Having reached their 30s or 40s, when they can no longer do mind-numbing, fastpaced and finicky work on production lines, they will often go back to the countryside. Late last year the National Bureau of Statistics asked rural hukou holders in the north-eastern province of Jilin whether they wanted to switch to urban status. The results were surprising, one of the bureaus researchers wrote. The majority said no, and most young people who had moved to urban areas said they wanted to go back to the countryside when they got older. For the past two decades or more, urbanisation in China has

come relatively easily. As the country proudly claims, slums and shantytowns are rare compared with other developing countries. But ensuring a continuing net inflow of migrants into the cities as the youngest cohort shrinks will mean giving workers from the countryside more incentives to stay permanently (such as affordable housing and schooling). More money is being spent on these, but not yet enough. Too much responsibility is devolved to local governments that usually try hard to shirk it.

Cities say they welcome migrants, but some find roundabout

ways of keeping them from settling. Beijing recently launched a set of extraordinary measures to tame property prices and ease traffic congestion that included all but banning migrants (one-third of the citys population) from buying homes or cars. In the name of improving safety, it has started closing down basement dwellings where migrants (known as the rat tribe) often live. China says it wants urbanisation, and it certainly needs it. But even as some obstacles are removed, new ones spring up.

2007 30 1997 Landesa2010 17 44%

 2012 85% -

2005 52 3 10%

 2008 200 3 2000

1000 81700 3 5 35% 3040 20

Small Business and the Jobless Recovery(1991)

Mises Daily: Monday, July 04, 2011 by Fred Buzzeo

Article Comments More By this Author A

If we listen to most economists, we are told that the recession is over and we are in a period of recovery. In fact, the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), the official voice on this matter, tells us that the recovery began in June 2009. Fortunately, most Americans focused on making a living see right through this illusion. For example, a recent New York Times/CBS poll indicates that Americans are becoming increasingly disillusioned with the performance of the US economy. An

astonishing 70 percent of respondents said that the country is moving in the wrong direction. There is now an ongoing attack on the free-enterprise system that for over a century has made the United States the greatest economic power in history. Trillions of dollars have been spent "pump-priming" the US economy. Additionally, the Federal Reserve has flooded the US economy with easy money that will rob Americans of the purchasing power of their hard-earned dollars. Ironically, all of this intervention is aimed at "stabilizing" the market and at reducing unemployment. But what has all this intervention accomplished? Not much. The unemployment rate remains stubbornly high at over 9 percent. Additionally, the U6 index a broad measure of unemployment that takes into account underemployment and discouraged workers is almost 16 percent. As the employment numbers are released, it becomes increasingly clear that job growth is anemic. So what is causing this jobless "recovery"? To answer this question, we must look at the plight of small

business. Small business in the United States is a major engine of job growth. But as the recession deepened in 2009, 60 percent of all job losses were in the small-business sector. small business has not recovered. In fact, from 2009 to 2010, entrepreneurs started the fewest new businesses in more than a decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. If the financial position of small business does not improve, neither will the employment picture. Therefore, it is necessary to understand what is keeping small business depressed. Why is there a lack of capital formation in this vital sector of the economy? To this day,

The Importance of Small Business

The Small Business Administration defines a small business as an establishment employing fewer than 500 persons. In reality, most small businesses employ far fewer than that. Many small businesses have few employees, and a good number of them simply operate out of the proprietor's home. Nevertheless, the statistics concerning the contributions of small business to overall economic health are staggering. Over the past

15 years, small businesses have produced 64 percent of net new jobs in the United States. They also pay the salaries of 44 percent of all those working in the private sector. Furthermore, small business creates more than half of the nonfarm private gross domestic product (GDP). In 2007, small business produced a little over 30 percent of known export value. Small business is the backbone of the US economy. Many new ideas are generated by people working in small businesses. For example, Microsoft and Apple once started as small businesses. The same could be said of Sam Walton, who borrowed money from a relative to open a store in Rogers, Arkansas, and went on to revolutionize the retail business.

It is obvious from the above that small business performs an incubator function whereby ideas are developed and tested in a small setting and then, if successful, introduced to a broader

market. Small business provides much of the employment for the lowskilled workforce. Just look at landscapers, construction contractors, and restaurant servers, and you will find mostly unskilled labor. Small business affords workers on-the-job training for possible advancement into more skilled employment. The small-business owner also provides services that most of us need. We buy groceries, get a haircut, and go out for a meal at local establishments all run by small-business owners. Where would we be without the landscaper, the pool guy, and the local electrician?

Market Uncertainty
The policies pursued by Washington policymakers are causing a disequilibrium in the market. This disequilibrium is clouding the business community with uncertainty, which is the greatest detriment to small-business growth and expansion. Most small-business owners and venture capitalists are uncertain as to where the economy is heading. Spending is out of control,

budget deficits are in the trillions of dollars, and the result of an inflationary Federal Reserve policy is starting to show up in commodity prices. All of this recklessness does not induce the small-business owner to open up the purse strings and invest in economic activities that will result in job creation. There is also uncertainty concerning the regulatory environment. People do not invest to "spread the wealth" around; they invest to make a profit. Investors don't react well to talk of "fundamentally transforming the United States of America." Indeed, there has been more government intrusion into the market during the last few years than since the Great Society programs. We have economic tsars, national health insurance, and de facto government ownership of industry. The following statement made by Raymond J. Keating, chief economist for the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, sums it all up nicely: For the most part, entrepreneurs want federal policymakers to impose a light tax and regulatory touch, keep spending under control, maintain low inflation, and otherwise get out of the way

so entrepreneurship and investment can thrive. Until federal policymaking moves in a clear pro-entrepreneur, pro-growth direction, most small-business owners face great uncertainty.

"Entrepreneurs are the real heroes of the American story."

William Dunkelberg, an economist at the National Federation of Independent Business, puts it more succinctly: "There's just a huge amount of uncertainty. And when you're uncertain, you don't make bets." And with this uncertainty, there is no expansion of production a requirement for creating employment opportunities. Why take the risk?

Lack of Financing
According to Federal Reserve governor Elizabeth Duke, seven out of ten small-business owners use personal savings to start or expand their business. They do not have the benefit of being "too big to fail." Therefore, they are not injected with cash to improve their liquidity position by government planners fearful of systemic collapse.

In fact, these small-business owners are the greatest risk takers of all. If they are successful, they can make a substantial profit. However, if they fail, all of their accumulated wealth can be destroyed. Many of them have left secure jobs to pursue their ambitions. They are the remnants of the rugged individualists that once turned the United States from an agrarian society to the world's foremost economic power. The current recession (or should I be politically correct and say the past recession?) has destroyed an enormous amount of personal wealth in the United States. Therefore, there is less money available for small-business expansion. Because of the uncertainties listed above, most venture capitalists the financial lifelines of small-business owners are sitting on the sidelines. In this economy, most investments are simply not worth the risk. When such a vital source of financing runs out, the small-business owner must turn to the banking system. Banks are flush with cash thanks to the government infusion of your tax dollars. But are the banks lending? The answer to this question is a resounding no.

Bank lending to small business is at its lowest since 2008. It is down an astonishing $15 billion in the first quarter of this year alone! Banks are simply sitting on cash in spite of the taxpayer bailouts an example of crony capitalism at its best.

The Burden of Regulation

As a small-business owner myself, I can tell you that the burden of regulation is overwhelming. It adds a significant cost to operating a business, and this cost is often impossible to quantify at the outset.

I was once fined a significant amount of money for not putting bales of hay along the width of a waterfront property during the demolition of a small house. The purpose, I was told, was to prevent any soil from being blown into the water. I was a bit confused, because the entire surface of the property was concrete! Fortunately, given the facts, I had the fine reduced to almost nothing, but I still incurred a sufficient amount of

unnecessary legal fees. Currently, retailers in California are under legal attack for failing to provide seating, as required by a state labor law, for employees whose job it is to stand for most of the day. According to the attorney for the retailers, any employee can bring suit in this matter even if he wasn't the party aggrieved. Is there any doubt as to why businesses are fleeing California? It is comical to repeat the experience of a small construction contractor who was visited by an OSHA inspector: He [the contractor] said the inspector had written several citations. The first thing she told him was his scaffold wasn't level. [H]e pulled out his level and put it on the scaffold to show that the scaffold was level. [T]he inspector then wrote down the brand name of the level, as if there might be something wrong with his equipment. He said he offered to let the inspector walk on the scaffold, but she declined and said she was afraid of heights. Unfortunately, these obstructions happen every day to smallbusiness owners everywhere. And although they are comical, they are costly and cumbersome to deal with. The fines paid to cover

these nonsensical violations could very well add up to enough money to hire an additional employee. According to economists from Lafayette University, for businesses with fewer than 19 employees, the cost of complying with federal regulations alone is $10,585 per worker. Add to this the cost of complying with state and municipal requirements, and the burden of regulation is clear. Then add in the cost of tax compliance, and one begins to wonder if it makes more sense to flip burgers at the local diner!

Conclusion
The importance of small business to the US economy is overwhelming. Without increased capital formation in this sector, we will not see the significant job growth necessary to bring down the unemployment numbers. We could, of course, simply put all of the unemployed on government payrolls. Or I suppose we could follow the advice of Mr. Keynes and have the Treasury fill bottles with bank notes, bury them at suitable depths, and have private enterprise dig them up again.

This would certainly alleviate unemployment in the short run. But what economic dislocation would such a policy cause in the long run? To answer this question, look no further than to the disastrous performance of the US economy in the '60s and '70s.

$29.95 $22.00

Therefore, there is only one sure way to cure unemployment: restore the entrepreneurial drive by alleviating the plight of small business. This can be done by simply restoring confidence in the marketplace. Balanced budgets, reduced spending, and reduced regulation will go a long way in achieving this goal. This will alleviate a lot of uncertainty by providing a signal that sound economic policy is once again the goal of policymakers.

But of equal importance, a probusiness attitude must be restored. Entrepreneurs are the real heroes of the American story. They are the risk takers who provide us with the necessities of everyday life. Unfortunately, they are currently being taxed and regulated out of existence.

4fun
2011-07-08 22:44:48 | 344 | 4 Tags: | |

NBER20096

CBS

9% U6 16%

2009 60%

20092010

500

1564% 44% GDP 200730%

the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council

the National Federation of Independent Business

too big to fail

2008 150

OSHA

19 10585

6070

Are South Koreans losing

respect for elders? (652)

A couple of recent high-profile incidents in which young people showed disrespect for elders highlight what some see as a shift away from traditional Confucian values.

0 and 6
By Bryan Kay, Correspondent / July 7, 2011

Seoul, South Korea It's an oft-heard superlative that conservative South Koreans remain the most committed Confucianists in East Asia. So much so it often sounds like a statement that is supposed to be interpreted as some sort of bad thing. Skip to next paragraph

Related stories South Korea: World breakdancing capital? Reports of North Korea food shortages overblown, say US, South Korea South Korean students protest rising college tuition Topics Hip-Hop Culture Culture and Lifestyle

Yet the reality of the country's ingrained societal codes has made it perhaps one of the few places where elders still attract great respect. Few, many might argue, would oppose such an orderly set-up.

However, a couple of recent high-profile incidents suggest there might be a major social shift in the works. RELATED: South Korea: World breakdancing capital In a recent case which grabbed national headlines, a youth traveling on a subway train launched an aggressive, foul-mouthed torrent of abuse at an elderly man when the latter asked him to refrain from crossing his legs so that his feet did not brush the older individual's trousers. It sparked national outrage. Some called for the young man to be dealt with by authorities. Others tried to out his identity on the Internet. A similar case earlier late last year involving a teenage girl and an older woman drew a similar level of public abhorrance. While some was directed at the youngster for what was described as her failure to show respect for her elders, others accused the older woman of obtusely demanding piety. These cases, and others like them, have raised the question of whether South Korea's traditional values which place respect for elders at the very center of society are being eroded.

Indeed, statistics released this week appear to support such claims. Quoting the Seoul city government, a report carried by the government-backed Yonhap News Agency said mistreatment of senior citizens in the capital where about 20 percent of the country's 48-million population resides shot up by nearly a quarter over the last year.

Is the West to blame?

For Um Sun-hye, an editor at a Seoul-based culture magazine, the trend is rooted in ignorance not the pressures of a rapidly changing society. "We know that in Western countries, its more informal and casual between the young and the old they call each other names and young people dont hesitate to give their personal opinion to older people," she says. "But the young generation in Korea now misunderstands that it looks 'cool' to go against social rules and that way they become 'westernized,' or being liberal from conventional custom." Yang Myoung-hwa, a woman about to enter her retirement years who spent the past 34 years dividing her time between her homeland and the United States, says she was disgusted by the youth's actions when she saw footage of the latest incident on the

Internet. "Most of our old generation cannot accept that kind of rude and impolite attitude of the younger generation against old generations," she says, indicating that any such social change would likely come with a fight from the older generation. And while Ms. Yang accepts that changes to time-honored traditions that saw elders given reverential respect without condition has been a good thing, she agrees with the sentiment that many young people may be misintepreting the parameters of today's de rigeur. "In most Asian countries, people have learned that we must respect and honor the old whtaever they do without any conditions, but it has changed rapidly and positively," she says. But, adds Yang, "I think some people do not understand Western culture, its individualism and freedom of expression correctly."

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Why the Internet is Americas greatest weapon(986)

By Bobbie Johnson Jul. 4, 2011, 7:30am PT 13 Comments

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Alexander Lukashenko is no fan of the internet. True, the President of Belarus, widely seen as the last remaining dictator in Europe, dislikes many things democratic opposition, for one. But he reserves a special place for the Web. In the past hes railed against the anarchy of the Internet. More recently The Economist reported that his attitude towards the rebels of the online world leans on familiar stereotypes he described Internet users as nothing more than deluded teenage rebels:

16 or 17 years old, a cigarette dangling from his lips and a girl under his left arm. This weekend, however, Lukashenko took things a step further by cracking down on protesters who organized themselves online, and pushing his statewide ban on Facebook, Twitter and the popular Russian social networking site Vkontakte. Why? Because he is worried that young people are using it to try and give momentum to their political protests. Claiming that opposition to his regime is being run by foreign countries, he told AFP that the opposition in Minsk is using social networks to call for strikes. I will watch and observe and then whack them in such a way that they wont even have time to run across the border. This marks another interesting point in the seemingly endless conversation about how social media and political activism work together. You might remember how Malcolm Gladwell, famously, kicked off a huge debate when he argued that the ability of Facebook or Twitter (or any other Internet service) to power a revolution is vastly over-represented. He suggested that social media makes it easier for activists to express

themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact. Plenty of people disagreed, and as the Arab Spring got underway, it seemed as if the pendulum might swing in the other direction: Egypt turned off the Internet, Tunisian bloggers found places in government and protesters even named their children after websites. All the way along, our own Mathew Ingram has painstakingly detailed the arguments over social media and activism. In the end, though, I think Lukashenkos moves to block Facebook, Twitter and VKontakte tells us something different. Understanding how social media might foment social unrest is interesting, but things are more complex than the back-andforth would suggest because for all of that arguing, whether or not social media can cause revolutions doesnt matter if everyone in a position of power treats it like it does. Whether its Belarus shutting down access in a fit of paranoia, or Egypts Hosni Mubarak hitting the kill switch in an attempt to prop up his failing regime, the possibility of organization taking place on the Internet is as much or more of a threat as the reality. As we see action become increasingly pre-

emptive (the chosen method of protest against Lukashenko? clapping), we see the shift take place. The added twist, of course, is that most of these dictators see the use of social networking as a proxy for American intervention. Lukashenkos people were quick to put forward the theory that these online protests were somehow linked to a visit to neighboring Lithuania by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. And while that might seem like mere delusion, theres evidence to suggest it has some truth to it: Clinton was visiting Eastern Europe to promote a Tech Camp that teaches activists web savvy and subversion. She explicitly called out Belarus while she was there, and the Moscow Times quoted a Belarusian activist who had attended the camp to learn how to keep his group safe online when it uses social media to organize protests at home. This is all sides or at least all the ones who matter treating social media as a truly disruptive, revolutionary force. And this is what Alec Ross, one of Clintons advisers, meant when he said the Internet was the Che Guevara of the 21st century.

Even the services themselves admit that they are being used in this way: Alexis Madrigal recently noted how Twitters Biz Stone seemed ambivalent about the services relationship with the US government:

The thing were facing now is that, you know, the State Department is suddenly really cozy with Twitter because theyre like Oh wow, we were trying to get this done with AK-47s and you guys got it done with Tweets. Can we be friends? But I maintain that it has to be a neutral technology because there are different forms of democracy. You dont want your technology, you dont want Twitter, to look like its simply a tool for spreading U.S. democracy around the world. You want it to help but you dont want it to look like youre in the pocket of the U.S. government. So we try to speak out and say that they have no access to our decisionmaking.
But it seems hes already too late. Twitters now part of the U.S. governments narrative, which means social media is part of the geopolitical story all over the world; and when the White

House says social media can have an impact, people begin to think it can have an impact. That in turn means it starts to have an impact (even in an indirect sense) which leads the White House to say its having an impact. Its turned into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Its fitting that were discussing this on the 4th of July, since the real fear of dictatorships is that the Internet is ultimately a way of America using soft power. In the minds of dictators like Lukashenko, the Internet has the ability to make everyone an American subject to the same cultural beliefs, the same politics, the same rights. Thats something they are terrified by. And that means that the question now isnt whether social media can start a revolution, but whether dictators believe it can.

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The Key To Disaster Survival? Friends And Neighbors (1488)

by SHANKAR VEDANTAM

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Enlarge Jiji Press/AFP/Getty Images

Residents check an earthquake-damaged house in Sukagawa city on March 11, in the Fukushima prefecture in Japan. A researcher says that after large-scale natural disasters, it's frequently friends and neighbors who are key to survival. text size A A A

July 4, 2011

When Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, one victim was political scientist Daniel Aldrich. He had just moved to New Orleans. Late one August night, there was a knock on the door. "It was a neighbor who knew that we had no idea of the realities of the Gulf Coast life," said Aldrich, who is now a political scientist at Purdue University in Indiana. He "knocked on our door very late at night, around midnight on Saturday night, and said, 'Look, you've got small kids you should really leave.' " The knock on the door was to prove prophetic. It changed the course of Aldrich's research and, in turn, is changing the way many experts now think about disaster preparedness. Officials in New Orleans that Saturday night had not yet ordered an evacuation, but Aldrich trusted the neighbor who knocked on his door. He bundled his family into a car and drove to Houston. "Without that information we never would've left," Aldrich said. I think we would've been trapped." In fact, by the time people were told to leave, it was too late and thousands of people got stuck.

Enlarge Hector Mata/AFP/Getty Images

Residents of the Faubourg Marigny neighborhood of New Orleans printed T-shirts during a community meeting on Sept. 9, 2005. The neighborhood organized a cleanup effort even as mandatory evacuation of the city was under way. Refusing to obey the order to evacuate, many residents remained in their houses.

Social Connections And Survival: Neighbors Matter Because of his own experience in Katrina, Aldrich started thinking about how neighbors help one another during disasters. He decided to visit disaster sites around the world, looking for data. Aldrich's findings show that ambulances and firetrucks and government aid are not the principal ways most people survive during and recover after a disaster. His data suggest that while official help is useful in clearing the water and getting the power back on in a place such as New Orleans after Katrina, for example government interventions cannot bring neighborhoods back, and most emergency responders take far too long to get to the scene of a disaster to save many lives. Rather, it is the personal ties among members of a community that determine survival during a disaster, and recovery in its aftermath. When Aldrich visited villages in India hit by the giant 2004 tsunami,

he found that villagers who fared best after the disaster weren't those with the most money, or the most power. They were people who knew lots of other people the most socially connected individuals. In other words, if you want to predict who will do well after a disaster, you look for faces that keep showing up at all the weddings and funerals. "Those individuals who had been more involved in local festivals, funerals and weddings, those were individuals who were tied into the community, they knew who to go to, they knew how to find someone who could help them get aid," Aldrich says. The Japan Example: 'I Was Just Running Around And Talking To People' In Japan, Aldrich found that firetrucks and ambulances didn't save the most lives after earthquakes. Neighbors did. "In Kobe in 1995, if you knew where your neighbors slept, because the earthquake was very early in the morning, you knew where to dig in the rubble to find them early enough in the process for them to survive," he says. Because of his research, when a powerful earthquake struck

Japan this March, Aldrich was certain that good neighbors would play a decisive role. Michinori Watanabe of Miyagi prefecture, about 100 miles from Fukushima in northern Japan, said the same thing. Watanabe's father is paralyzed, and he needs a machine to breathe. When the earthquake struck and the power went out, the machine stopped working. Watanabe ran outside. He begged strangers: "Do you have a generator? Do you? Do you?" "I was running around and talking to people, and after I talked to several people, a person who I just met actually, I knew him from before and he said, 'I got one,' so I told him, 'Please bring that in,' " said Watanabe, 43, a truck driver. "So I got that and I went back to my house and connected the equipment to the generator." Watanabe's father survived, but it was a close call. But why not just call the Japanese equivalent of 911? "At that time all the electricity was down, and the telephone land lines were down and my mobile was not working, so there was no other way than I myself go out running around, asking people,"

Watanabe said. Local Knowledge Is Key Not only did no professionals come to help Watanabe those first few minutes, there was no sign of them the first day. Watanabe emptied his house of water and blankets and started helping neighbors who were homeless and shivering. They were still without help days later. And Watanabe did what good neighbors do when friends are in trouble: He improvised.
Related NPR Stories

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Experts say pervasive myths can prevent people from knowing the safest way to protect themselves.

In Japan, A City Left In Shambles By A 'Mighty Woosh'

The northeast port of Kesennuma is no stranger to tsunamis. But this one's different, survivor says.

"I went on the street and stopped any car from outside, which has

the number from outside the prefecture I stopped them," said Watanabe. "I think it is not the proper way to do it, but I kind of pretended I was giving directions and I found out who are they and what they have and then I asked them, "if you have anything, please leave it with us." It's this passion for a local community and granular knowledge about who needs what that makes large-scale government interventions ineffective by comparison. It's even true when it comes to long-term recovery. Beloit College economist Emily Chamlee-Wright has studied why some communities in New Orleans came back more quickly than others. "One of the communities that in the post-Katrina context was the most successful was the Mary Queen of Vietnam community in New Orleans East," said Chamlee-Wright. "It's important to recognize that one of the reasons why they were so successful is that they ignored government warnings not to come back and start rebuilding too soon." 'The Second Tsunami'

Governments and big nongovernmental organizations which are keenly aware of the big picture are often blind to neighborhood dynamics. In Southeast Asia, Aldrich found that well-intentioned NGOs actually hurt the fishing communities they were trying to help. They saw the damage caused by the tsunami in fishing villages and started giving new boats to all the fishermen.

Really, at the end of the day, the people who will save you, and the people who will help you, they're usually neighbors.
- Daniel Aldrich

"Fishing is a very social activity. It is organized, really, not in a hierarchy but in a network," Aldrich said. "So you have someone who drives the boat, the person who steers, you have two people fishing in the water, some person who carries the net and some person who goes takes the fish to market. Once every person is given their own boat, you've gone from five people working together to each individual working by themselves." Fishermen who used to work together now became competitors.

Trust broke down. Fights broke out. "Some of the local activists I talked to called this 'the second tsunami,' " Aldrich said. The problem isn't that experts are dumb. It's that communities are not the sum of their roads, schools and malls. They are the sum of their relationships. The Japanese government seems to get this. The government there actually funds block parties to bring communities together. That might never happen in America, but Aldrich thinks each of us can do something on our own: Instead of practicing earthquake drills and building bunkers, we could reach out and make more friends among our co-workers and neighbors. "Get more involved in neighborhood events," Aldrich said. "If there is a planning club, a homeowners association if there are sports clubs nearby, PTAs those groups have us in contact with people we wouldn't normally meet and help us build up these stocks of trust and reciprocity." "Really, at the end of the day, the people who will save you, and

the people who will help you," he added, "they're usually neighbors."

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A Chinese Dissidents Literary Roll Call

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By Muhammad Cohen

Nico Di Mattia

Ma Jian

More In Top Five

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Ma Jian is one of modern Chinese literatures most famous exports. His books, including The Noodle Maker, Beijing Coma and Red Dust, have earned critical acclaim in the West. Within his home country, though, the Qingdao-born author is a controversial figure. His books have long drawn the ire of Beijing, and the government has banned his work. Mr. Ma left mainland China in 1986 for Hong Kong, and vacated that city with the British in 1997. He eventually wound up in London via Germany. These days, the winner of several international literary awards is an established speaker on the global book festival circuit. Here are five authors hed like to meet. Gabriel Garcia Marquez The 1982 Nobel Laureates One Hundred Years of Solitude reveals a world in which the surreal and mundane coexist, says Mr. Ma. At first reading, this world felt very familiar to me, and inspired me to find a way to write about the absurdities and mysteries of life in todays China. Orhan Pamuk In My Name is Red, Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk examines tensions between tradition and Westernization that are still important in modern Turkey. Mr. Pamuks tale of miniature painting and murder in 16th century Istanbul is beautifully constructed, like an intricate palace that seems to exist outside time and that has no exit, says Mr. Ma. J.M. Coetzee Mr. Ma says he admires the post-apartheid novel that earned the South African natives second Booker Prize. In a concise and poetic

style Disgrace powerfully explores moral ambiguities and the brutality of modern society, Mr. Ma says. Like the other two Nobel winners on Mr. Mas list, Mr. Coetzee has lived much of his life overseas and uses his writing and literary fame for political causes. Franz Kafka To me, Kafka is the most alive of dead writers, no doubt because of his acute understanding of the modern condition, Mr. Ma says of the early 20th century Czech surrealist. In China, I feel his presence everywhere. I often reread The Castle and am moved by the protagonists relentless but futile struggles with the all-powerful and unknowable authorities. Wu Chengen Wu Chengens stories from the 16th century captivated the young Mr. Ma. As a child, the monsters, immortals and bodhisattvas from Journey to the West populated my dreams, says Mr. Ma. The Ming Dynasty chronicler of the Monkey King legend also pioneered writing in vernacular rather than classical Chinese. To this day, Im still enchanted by Monkeys adventures along the Silk Road. How dull the world would be without such ludicrous, miraculous stories.

Nico Di Mattia

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America's debt

Shame on them (655)

The Republicans are playing a cynical political game with hugely high economic stakes
Jul 7th 2011 | from the print edition

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IN THREE weeks, if there is no political deal, the American government will go into default. Not, one must pray, on its sovereign debt. But the country will have to stop paying someone: perhaps pensioners, or government suppliers, or soldiers. That would be damaging enough at a time of economic fragility. And the longer such a default went on, the greater the risk of provoking a genuine bond crisis would become. There is no good economic reason why this should be

happening. Americas net indebtedness is a perfectly affordable 65% of GDP, and throughout the past three years of recession and tepid recovery investors have been more than happy to go on lending to the federal government. The current problems, rather, are political. Under Americas elaborate separation of powers, Congress must authorise any extension of the debt ceiling, which now stands at $14.3 trillion. Back in May the government bumped up against that limit, but various accounting dodges have been used to keep funds flowing. It is now reckoned that these wheezes will be exhausted by August 2nd. The House of Representatives, under Republican control as a result of last Novembers mid-term elections, has balked at passing the necessary bill. That is perfectly reasonable: until recently the Republicans had been exercising their clear electoral mandate to hold the government of Barack Obama to account, insisting that they will not permit a higher debt ceiling until agreement is reached on wrenching cuts to public spending. Until they started to play hardball in this way, Mr Obama had been deplorably insouciant about the mediumterm picture, repeatedly failing in his budgets and his state-of-

the-union speeches to offer any path to a sustainable deficit. Under heavy Republican pressure, he has been forced to rethink. Related topics

Barack Obama Republican Party (United States) United States

Now, however, the Republicans are pushing things too far. Talks with the administration ground to a halt last month, despite an offer from the Democrats to cut at least $2 trillion and possibly much more out of the budget over the next ten years. Assuming that the recovery continues, that would be enough to get the deficit back to a prudent level. As The Economist went to press, Mr Obama seemed set to restart the talks. The sticking-point is not on the spending side. It is because the vast majority of Republicans, driven on by the wilder-eyed members of their party and the cacophony of conservative media, are clinging to the position that not a single cent of deficit reduction must come from a higher tax take. This is economically illiterate and disgracefully cynical.

A gamble where you bet your countrys good name This newspaper has a strong dislike of big government; we have long argued that the main way to right Americas finances is through spending cuts. But you cannot get there without any tax rises. In Britain, for instance, the coalition government aims to tame its deficit with a 3:1 ratio of cuts to hikes. Americas tax take is at its lowest level for decades: even Ronald Reagan raised taxes when he needed to do so. And the closer you look, the more unprincipled the Republicans look. Earlier this year House Republicans produced a report noting that an 85%-15% split between spending cuts and tax rises was the average for successful fiscal consolidations, according to historical evidence. The White House is offering an 83%-17% split (hardly a huge distance) and a promise that none of the revenue increase will come from higher marginal rates, only from eliminating loopholes. If the Republicans were real tax reformers, they would seize this offer. Both parties have in recent months been guilty of fiscal recklessness. Right now, though, the blame falls clearly on the Republicans. Independent voters should take note.


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Timothy Lee
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Microsofts Android Shakedown(889)

Jul.

7 2011 - 8:00 am | 44,953 views | 2 recommendations | 15 comments

Image via CrunchBase

In the 1980s, attorney Gary Reback was working at Sun Microsystems, then a young technology startup. A pack of IBM employees in blue suits showed up at Sun headquarters seeking royalties for 7 patents that IBM claimed Sun had infringed. The Sun employees, having examined the patents, patiently explained that six of the seven patents were likely invalid, and Sun clearly hadnt infringed the seventh. Reback explains what happened next in this classic Forbes article:
An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. OK, he said, maybe you dont infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just

pay us $20 million? After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list.

This story sheds light on the recent string of stories about Microsoft demanding royalty payments from various companies that produce smart phones built on Googles Android operating system. Intuitively, this doesnt make much sense. Most people would say that Google has been more innovative than Microsoft in recent yearsespecially in the mobile phone marketso why is Microsoft the one collecting royalties? The reason is that Microsoft has more patents than Google. A lot more. The patent office has awarded Google about 700 patents in its 13-year lifetime. Microsoft has received 700 patents in the last four months. Microsofts total portfolio is around 18,000 patents, and most of those were granted within the last decade. Even if you think Microsoft is more innovative than

Google, the engineers in Redmond obviously havent been 25 times as innovative as those in Mountain View. So why the huge discrepancy? Getting software patents takes a lot of work, but its not primarily engineering effort. The complexity of software and low standards for patent eligibility mean that software engineers produce potentially patentable ideas all the time. But most engineers dont think of these relatively trivial ideas as inventions worthy of a patent. Whats needed to get tens of thousands of patents is a re-education campaign to train engineers to write down every trivial idea that pops into their heads, and a large and disciplined legal bureaucracy to turn all those ideas into patent applications. Creating such a bureaucracy has a high opportunity cost for small, rapidly growing companies. Most obviously, it requires spending scarce capital on patent lawyers. But it also means pulling engineers away from doing useful work to help lawyers translate their inventions into legal jargon. And

that, in turn requires a shift in corporate culture. Startups are innovative precisely because they avoid getting bogged down in paperwork. Convincing engineers to pay more attention to patent applications necessarily means that they spend less time doing useful work, and that can be fatal to a young startup. The opportunity costs to getting patents is much lower for mature software companies like Microsoft or IBM. They tend to have more money and engineers than they know what to do with. And their software development processes are already slow and bureaucratic. So its much easier to add a fill out patent applications step to the official software development process, and the negative effect on engineers productivity is much smaller. These differences are exacerbated by the long time lag between when applications are filed and patents are granted. Most of the 52 patents Microsoft received this week were filed between 2006 and 2008. One was filed as early as 2003. In 2006,

Microsoft had been steadily cranking out patent applications for years, while Google was only just becoming large and profitable enough justify devoting serious resources to patent filings. So even if Google cranks up its patenting machine to Microsofts level this year, it wont start seeing the fruits of that effort until around 2015. You might think Google could deal with this by just not infringing Microsofts patents, but thats not how software patents work. Android has roughly 10 million lines of code. Auditing 10 million lines of code for compliance with 18,000 patents is an impossible taskespecially because the meaning of a patents claims are often not clear until after they have been litigated. Most Silicon Valley companies dont even try to avoid infringing patents. They just ignore them and hope theyll be able to afford good lawyers when the inevitable lawsuits arrive. So Android, like every large software product on the planet, infringes numerous Microsoft patents. And Microsoft is taking full advantage. Theyre visiting

Android licensees and giving the same sales pitch Reback remembers from a quarter century ago. Do you really want us to go back to Redmond and find patents you infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us? Once again, many of the targets are writing checks to make the problem go away. The result is a transfer of wealth from young, growing, innovative companies like Google to mature, bureaucratic companies like Microsoft and IBMprecisely the opposite of the effect the patent system is supposed to have.

Android

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Father Discussed Adoption for Obama, Records Show

By SEAN COLLINS WALSH Published: July 7, 2011 RECOMMEND TWITTER SIGN IN TO E-MAIL PRINT REPRINTS SHARE

WASHINGTON Before Barack Obama was born, his parents may have considered putting him up for adoption, according to documents obtained by a reporter for The Boston Globe.

Obama Presidential Campaign, via Associated Press

Barack Obama with his mother, Ann Dunham. She talked of a future with their child.

Mr. Obamas father, Barack Hussein Obama Sr., told immigration officials that Ann Dunham, whom he had

recently married, would make arrangements with the Salvation Army to give the baby away, one document said. The revelation came from 1961 immigration forms obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by Sally Jacobs, a reporter who has written a book called The Other Barack, The Bold and Reckless Life of President Obamas Father. An excerpt from the book, which will be released next week, appeared Thursday in The Globe. President Obamas father, then a student at the University of Hawaii, was questioned about his marital status by immigration officials when he applied for an extension of his visa, which he had to do each year. An immigration official had become leery of his playboy ways and thought Mr. Obama might have more than one wife, which can be grounds for deportation. Mr. Obama said at the time falsely that he had divorced his Kenyan wife, with whom he had two children. The excerpt of the book says it is unclear whether Mr. Obama intended to have his son adopted or if he was fabricating the story to appease immigration officials. Mr. Obama often gave

contradictory answers on the forms, sometimes leaving questions about his marital status blank. Additionally, Ms. Dunham, who was also studying at the University of Hawaii, talked optimistically at the time about a future with her new husband and their child, according to an interview with a family member of Ms. Dunham. Robert Gibbs, the former White House press secretary, who was also interviewed by Ms. Jacobs, said that the president did not know about the adoption question before the Freedom of Information Act request and that he did not believe his mother ever seriously considered it. The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

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Shanghai now more expensive than New York(609)

Among other findings from the Economist Intelligence Unit's latest Worldwide Cost of Living report: bread in Moscow is three times costlier than in London
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Tokyo is still the worlds most expensive city to live in and Oslo and Osaka still make the top five, but the Worldwide Cost of Living 2011 survey just released from the Economist Intelligence Unit also revealed some dramatic changes in the last year. Australia has become one of the biggest risers, with the strong Aussie dollar lifting costs in Sydney (6th most expensive city), Melbourne (7th), Perth (13th) and Brisbane (14th) to their highest levels. Europe accounts for half the top 50 most expensive cities, with Paris in fourth spot, Zurich in fifth and Frankfurt and Geneva in eighth and ninth.

More than US$7 for bread in Moscow, less than US$3 in London. The survey shows how economies have shifted over the past 10 years, with especially Asian cities becoming cheaper. Hong Kong, from third place 10 years ago is now 22nd, Shanghai falls from 16th to 48th and Beijing falls from 11th to 64th. Some Asian countries whose economies have shifted up the gears have bucked this trend however. Bangkok, the 108th most expensive city in 2001 is now the 66th. Jakarta moves up 35 spots from 2001 to 77th. American cities have also generally moved down the rankings, with New York only just squeaking into the top 50, in 49th spot. New York is now cheaper than Chicago and Los Angeles while Atlanta, the United States' cheapest city, is on a par with Kiev in Ukraine. Although inflation in Japan has been stagnant for a long time, the rapid strengthening of the Yen in recent years has fuelled the relative cost of living in Japanese cities," says Jon Copestake, editor of the Worldwide Cost of Living survey. "This trend is also evidenced by the contrary movement of other Asian cities. Hong Kong and China, which peg their currencies to the US dollar, have seen the relative cost of living fall as the US dollar has declined from highs of 2001. That said, many of these cities have seen local inflation rising and it is interesting to note that Shanghai has now become a more expensive location than New York and Washington DC in the United States."

Top 10 cities in Worldwide Cost of Living Index

1. Tokyo2. Oslo3. Osaka4. Paris5. Zurich6. Sydney7. Melbourne8. Frankfurt9. Geneva10. Singapore

Bottom 5 cities
129. New Delhi130. Tehran131. Mumbai132. Tunis133. Karachi

Some interesting comparisons:

A loaf of bread costs: US$7.61 in MoscowUS$7.42 in TokyoUS$6.06 in New York US$3.35 in Berlin US$2.36 in London A pack of cigarettes costs: US$15.11 in OsloUS$10.79 in LondonUS$8.99 in New YorkUS$5.99 in MadridUS$1.85 in Moscow A daily business trip costs:(Where daily business trip comprises one night's accommodation in a hotel, one two-course meal, one simple meal, two fivekilometer journeys by taxi, one drink in the hotel bar and one international foreign daily newspaper) US$746.21 in New YorkUS$626.87 in SydneyUS$610 in ParisUS$554.87 in Hong KongUS$518.20 in LondonUS$452.28 in SingaporeUS$375.46 in Tokyo US$315.62 in Mexico City

Notable points in the 2011 survey:

The biggest rise in the past twelve months is Budapest, Hungary, up 17 places to 76 The sharpest drop is Istanbul, Turkey, down 24 places to 52 American cities generally drop down the rankings -- New York is now the 49th most costly world city Australias five main cities all rise, with four now in the top 15 Half of the top 50 most expensive cities in the world are in Europe

CNN 2011

2011-07-08 21:50:36 | 756 | 0 2011 Tags: | | | | | | | |

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ADHD's roots are complex

To claim attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder is genetic is to dangerously simplify the nature of the condition
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Johnjoe McFadden guardian.co.uk, Thursday 30 September 2010 20.00 BST Article history

Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder is the bane of many parents, nurseries and schools. Children who suffer from the condition find it difficult to concentrate, and they can be disruptive and difficult at home and in the classroom. The argument over what causes the disorder has been raging for decades. Many blame bad parenting, whereas others point the finger at disorders of brain chemistry or hormonal disturbances in

the womb. But research that has just been published in the Lancet claims to have found the answer: it's all down to genes. The study, headed by Professor Anita Thapar from Cardiff University, examined 366 children with ADHD and 1,047 in a control group. They searched for mutations that occur when a chunk of DNA is either duplicated or deleted. The study found these in 14% of children with ADHD, but only 7% of the controls. The Lancet press release claimed that the study "is the first to find direct evidence that ADHD is a genetic disorder". Thapar stated: "Now we can say with confidence that ADHD is a genetic disease and that the brains of children with this condition develop differently to those of other children." But is 14% compared to 7% sufficient evidence for claiming that ADHD is a genetic disease? It's easy to turn the numbers around and show that seven out of eight children with ADHD had no detectable genetic abnormality. That sounds very different from the kind of disease, such as cystic fibrosis or muscular dystrophy, that we normally describe as "genetic". The genetic lesions discovered in the Cardiff study occur in only a small minority of patients and half as frequently in perfectly healthy children. To put it in yet another way, of 100 children who inherit the kind of mutation

identified by the Cardiff group, only four of them will develop ADHD. The study is clearly not strong evidence for ADHD being a genetic disease. However, to make their case, Thapar and other geneticists would cite heritability. This is a measure of how much conditions tend to run in families. Earlier studies report a rather high heritability for ADHD of about 76%. So where are the missing genes? It is of course possible that more genes will turn up in further studies that might close the gap. But perhaps we need to look again at the evidence for these high levels of heritability. And heritability itself is a funny thing that isn't as heritable as people often imagine. For instance, lung cancer was mostly an inherited disease until people starting smoking, and then it became a disease that was caused mostly by cigarettes. Heritability only really works as a measure of the influence of genes if the environment of the individuals concerned is held constant. And that clearly is not the case for children with and without ADHD, as many studies have found plenty of evidence for environmental influences.

Of course Thapar knows this and, when questioned, is keen to stress that it's not just genes but rather a complex mix of genes and environmental factors that cause ADHD. But that is very different from asserting that ADHD is a genetic disease. Conditions such as tuberculosis show relatively high levels of heritability in some studies, despite having a well-known environmental cause: the tuberculosis bacterium, for example. Indeed, all diseases are caused by "a complex mix of genes and environmental factors". Claiming that a particular disease is genetic when the evidence is, at best, suggestive is misleading and potentially dangerous.

ADHD

LePreChaun
2010-10-07 18:24:21 | 854 | 2 Tags: ADHD | |

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ADHD ThaparADHD

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 ADHD Thapar ADHD ADHD

July 8, 2011, 2:44 PM

What She Has to Offer(942)

By CELIA WATSON SEUPEL

Pali Rao/Getty Images

Im in the kitchen starting the coffee when Mom comes in. What can I do to help? she asks before she even clears the door. It is very important to Mom to feel useful. She doesnt like others doing things for her. I try to make sure there is always a job she is able to do. Sometimes that is difficult, but this morning I am prepared. Theres Windex and paper towels on the table there, I say. Can you just wipe the table off for me? She cleaned it last night, but she wont remember that. K.O., Ill do it! she says, tearing off several paper towels with alacrity. Is this the Windex? She motions toward the blue spray

bottle. I turn from the coffeemaker. Yep, thats it. But before she can start, Mom sits abruptly in the large kitchen armchair, wincing. Oooh, she murmurs, rubbing her legs, the paper towels still in one hand. Mom does not show pain often, so Im alarmed. What?

Well, its just She pulls both soft cotton pant legs up to her thighs. Her lower legs are puffy above her tight ankle socks and around her knees. Ma, that doesnt look right, I say. Thats more swollen than usual. Its just old age, says Mom. Its nothing. Its probably not serious, I tell her sternly, but you havent been putting your feet up like the doctor told you. You have to lie down and put your feet up right now. Mom looks at the table and the Windex reluctantly. What about

the? She motions with her paper towels. You can do it later, I assure her. After getting Mom to lie down on the couch, I remove her shoes, prop her feet up on a pillow and put a cold pack on her legs. She calls me her ministering angel and various other sentimental epithets, to which I roll my eyes. Mom is always over the top when it comes to saying thank you. I hate it. It seems artificial and insincere. It isnt until I bring her coffee and juice and cereal on a tray that I realize Mom is actually upset. At first she utters her usual hyperbolic cries of delight. Then, as I head back to the kitchen, she starts to mutter: I dont know why you do all this for me. You shouldnt be waiting on me like this. Ma, I say, a little stung, Im not waiting on you. Im taking care of you. I speak with more heat than warranted, and I wonder why Im feeling hurt. Im not a maid here. Youre my mother, and Im taking care of you. Well, she says, Im very lucky. And two tears slide out of the corners of her eyes.

I shake my head, move the hassock over, press my cheek to hers. Its no big deal, I say. Come on. You took care of me for 18 years. I hand her a tissue. Suddenly, I remember that my mothers mother did not take care of her for 18 years. Mom was handed off to her grandparents when she was 7. I wonder what that does to a person. She clears her throat, raises her glasses and dries her eyes. Im just useless. Thats not true, I say, exasperated. Why do you have to work all the time to be useful? Take a break. Youre 92 years old, for goodness sake. Youre keeping me company, you make funny jokes and I love you. Youre not useless, youre my mother! But she doesnt get it. I can see it in the flatness of her eyes, the way she holds her shoulders. Ill have to think of a couple of new jokes, she says. Shall I bark like a dog? I put my hands over my ears as she does her famous excitedPekingese yip. O.K., Im getting the sugar now, I say, running back to the kitchen.

I know it must be terrible to grow old and infirm and to lose your intellect, but I want my mother to know she is valuable because she is loved, not because she is useful. Is that a tall order? It certainly is for my mother, who always held achievement as the international gold standard of human worth. Which is, of course, why the whole thing annoys me. I am much the same way. By the time I return with the sugar and a banana for her cereal, Mom has thrown off self-pity. What a splendid banana, she says, taking and waving it like a baton. I am very fond of bananas, as you know. Thank you, Madame, you are the crme de la crme. I bow with a little flourish. My pleasure, Madame. I mean it, she continues. You are such a good cook and a splendid driver and a very, very good daughter. And I really mean that. One of the blessings of living with your parent after 40 years on your own is that you get to re-evaluate all those judgments you made at age 18. Not until this moment do I realize that Moms thanks and praise are always excessive not because she is insincere, but because her need to give is excessive. She feels that

her praise and gratitude are two things of sure value, so she gives as much of them as she possibly can. Thank you. You are the crme de la crme of mamas, I announce, kissing her on the head. When the swelling in your legs goes down, I add, just to give her a little boost, I could really use your help with the dishes.

By Celia Watson Seupel

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A $22 Billion Question for India: What to Do With a Treasure?

By VIKAS BAJAJ Published: July 8, 2011 RECOMMEND TWITTER SIGN IN TO E-MAIL PRINT SINGLE PAGE REPRINTS SHARE

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, India What should India, rising but still plagued by poverty, do with a newly discovered treasure of gold coins, statues and jewels in the vault of a Hindu temple, valued at some $22 billion?
Enlarge This Image

Sanjit Das for The New York Times

The treasure discovered in the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple, in India, has brought various suggestions for its use.

Related

Beneath a Temple in Southern India, a Treasure Trove of Staggering Riches (July 5, 2011)
Enlarge This Image

The New York Times

Suggestions are pouring in from across the country and the world. Some say it should be used to establish universities and colleges. The man who brought the court case that resulted in the unveiling wants it handed over to the Kerala state government. Others want a subway system. But here in Thiruvananthapuram, the capital of Kerala formerly known as Trivandrum, many people including the states top elected official, Hindus and the royal family that once ruled this part of India and still oversees the temple

argue that the treasure should remain, largely untouched, at the Sri Padmanabhaswamy temple where it has been housed for centuries. Their attitude partly reflects a suspicion that public officials entrusted with large sums of money will pocket much of it and mismanage the rest. Recent scandals, including one involving telecom licenses that cost the government an estimated $40 billion, have reinforced that cynicism. (That scandal has already sent one former minister to jail; on Thursday, another former telecom minister, Dayanidhi Maran, offered to quit the national cabinet in light of allegations that he used his position to benefit companies owned by his family.) Unlike in much of India, where royal families have used their kingdoms assets to build luxuriant palaces, here the royal family has had a reputation for living modestly and for its devotion to the Hindu god Vishnu, known here as Padmanabhaswamy. They should just measure its value, said Krishna Kumar, a coconut oil producer who came to pray at the temple this

week. And then they should leave it here. The royal family will protect it. Oommen Chandy, Keralas chief minister, echoed that sentiment. Even though his idyllic coastal state has a debt of $16 billion and wants to build a subway system in its largest metropolitan area of Kochi, he said the state would not seek to seize the treasure. Rather, the state is digging into its own pockets to secure the temple with dozens of police and commando officers and is planning to install a high-tech surveillance system. This wealth belongs to the temple, Mr. Chandy said. Sri Padmanabhaswamy is a symbol of the Kerala culture. The government will not agree with the view that this belongs to the state. Political analysts say his position will serve him in good stead with Hindus, who make up a little more than half of Keralas population. Mr. Chandy is Christian and led the Congress Party and its coalition partners to a narrow victory in state elections recently. Indias Supreme Court will ultimately decide who should

control the temples wealth, which an archeological expert and the royal family say is probably worth less than the $22 billion estimate but is still likely to be monumental. On Friday, the court put off the opening of the last of six vaults under the temple and ordered the state government and royal family to come up with a plan to secure the treasure. Previous attempts to open the vault have been unsuccessful because the entrance is sealed with a thick steel door and granite pillars, said Shashi Bhushan, the archeologist who is also an informal adviser to the royal family. A previous king failed in an effort to enter that vault in 1931. Local legend has it that the vault is filled with snakes, but Mr. Bhushan, who wrote a 120-page history of the temple for the Supreme Court, dismisses those tales as hearsay. He said the court-appointed committee opening the vaults was searching for blacksmiths who may be familiar with ancient metallurgical methods to assist them. Mr. Bhushan said most of the temples assets were deposited by the royal family and came from the pepper that the Travancore kingdom used to sell to Europeans and others. In

times of economic stress, the assets served as a lender of last resort to the royals and the debts were later repaid, according to detailed records written on palm leaves, said K. Jaya Kumar, a Kerala government official who is a member of the committee. The first structures in the temple grounds were built in the 800s, though much of the temple that exists today was built in the 1700s. The main sanctuary is a dimly lighted room with a statue of Vishnu lying on Sheshnag, the multiheaded king of snakes.
Enlarge This Image
Sanjit Das for The New York Times

Sri Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma leads the royal family in Kerala state.

Related

Beneath a Temple in Southern India, a Treasure Trove of Staggering Riches (July 5, 2011)

The current leader of the royal family, Sri Uthradom Thirunal Marthanda Varma, has stayed away from the public debate about what should be done with the treasure. But in an interview at his modest home, he seemed to suggest that it should be preserved for future generations. Wearing a white dhoti, or wrapped pantaloon, and a faded

striped shirt, the 90-year-old king looked less like the man sitting on a $22 billion windfall and more like a retired scholar. He has not seen the treasure, he said, but he acknowledged that he had long known that the vaults contained gold and other valuables. Mr. Varma, who said he goes to the temple every morning to pray, declined to speak about the case because the court has ordered those involved not to. But asked if he had a message to convey to the world, he suggested that people be more patient and spend more time comprehending the world. You can gobble up the thing, he said, or you can try to understand it. The man who brought the case is a lawyer and former intelligence officer, T. P. Sundara Rajan, who is a devotee of the temple. He contends that the royal family has mismanaged temple assets and protected them poorly. He declined to be interviewed, citing the court order. One Kerala politician, a former minister of education and culture, said the large size of the temples assets proved that the royal family had done a good job preserving them. But he

suggested that leaving aside the items that may have religious or archeological significance, the treasure could be used to help better society by funding education a traditional activity of religious institutions. Teaching the new generation is the most important responsibility of society, said the former minister, M. A. Baby. Along with the church, there should be the church school.

Q&A: natural resources exploration

in the Arctic (600)

Development in the Arctic has consequences for maritime law, conservation and human rights
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reddit this Terry Macalister guardian.co.uk, Monday 4 July 2011 16.39 BST Article history

Seqi Olivine mine in Godthab, Greenland. Global warming is opening up the Arctic for exploration. Photograph: Kent Klich/Getty

What is the Arctic? The Arctic is the area around the north pole as opposed to Antarctica, which surrounds the south pole. The Arctic can be defined in a number of different ways but is generally considered to

be the region inside or near to the Arctic Circle.

But some will define it on the basis of air or sea temperature, the native territories of the Arctic indigenous peoples, or the area north of where trees stop growing.

Why is it regarded as special? Very little industrial development has taken place in the Arctic region and there are fears about the impact on the environment if as expected human use accelerates fast. The environment is largely unspoiled but global warming is having a rapid impact. There are fears that diminishing sea ice is shrinking one of the Earth's ways of deflecting heat from the sun. This damages the habitat of microscopic plants and animals living on the underside of the ice.

What part do indigenous people such as Inuit play?

Human rights advocates demand that the Inuit and other indigenous people from the area are consulted in any development process. But there are practical skills in survival that must be retained for the good of everyone. Signatories to the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity are under an obligation to respect traditional ways of life. Many local groups such as the Sami in Finland and Siberia often feel that their views are not given the same weight as others'. Indigenous groups have often argued that their traditional way of life around hunting and fishing will be damaged most by new oil projects. There is concern about spills and wider environmental damage. However, indigenous communities have also benefited from investment by oil and mining companies.

What has triggered new interest in the Arctic now?

Global warming is opening up the Arctic Ocean to transit by ships, which can cut east-west voyage times by one-third. Warmer weather allows oil and mining companies to tap into previously

inaccessible new reserves with which to feed growing demand from the fast-growing economies of China and India.

What rules govern the far north now? The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea is at the centre of contractual arrangements. The convention regulates the use of the sea and provides a framework for settling territorial issues. What it does not do is give a clear formula for how shared maritime space such as the Arctic Ocean is to be divided. But issues can also be discussed inside another UN body: the London-based International Maritime Bureau.

Should there be an Arctic treaty? The south pole is the subject of an Antarctic treaty but there is no similar arrangement for the far north. Organisations such as the European Union and the wildlife group WWF have argued one is needed. But most coastal states around the Arctic are not keen to have their hands tied by an international agreement of this kind.

They argue the Convention on the Law of the Sea provides much of the right framework while other issues can be discussed inside the Arctic Council.

What is the Arctic Council? The Arctic Council is a forum set up in 1996 made up of eight member states, of which five have "continental shelf" land, which stretches into the Arctic Ocean. The five coastal states are Norway, Canada, Denmark (through Greenland), the United States and Russia. The three other council members are Sweden, Finland and Iceland.

Why do other countries want to join? China and the European Union and have applied for observer status to the Arctic Council. They argue that developments in the Arctic have important consequences for future generations worldwide. Equally, EU industrial activities and policies can significantly affect the Arctic, they argue. Key issues are climate change, oil drilling, fishing and shipping in the far north area.

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COUNTRY SNAPSHOTS EMBASSY FINDER CHINA, WHAT'S NEXT? AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT EVENT CALENDAR PHOTO ESSAYS

Back to China Power

How China Kills Creativity(973)

By Jiang Xueqin July 2, 2011

Nowadays people may admire Chinas economy, but not Chinese creativity. Chinese architecture and art, music and movies are derivative, and many a Chinese enterprise is merely a carbon copy of an American one. Chinas best schools may produce the worlds best testtakers, but the United States best schools produce the worlds most creative talent. In his book The Social Animal, David Brooks outlines the four-step learning process that teaches students to be creative: knowledge acquisition (research), internalization (familiarity with material), selfquestioning and examination (review and discussion), and the ordering and mastery of this knowledge (thesis formulation and essay writing). However, this isnt a linear process, Brooks points out, which means that the learner (surfs) in and out of his unconscious, getting the conscious and unconscious processes to work together first mastering core knowledge, then letting that knowledge marinate playfully in his mind, then wilfully trying to impose order on it, then allowing the mind to consolidate and merge the data, then returning and returning until some magical insight popped into his consciousness, and then riding that insight to a finished product. The process was not easy, but each ounce of effort and each moment of frustration and struggle pushed the internal construction project

another little step, David Brooks continues. By the end, (the learner) was seeing the world around him in a new way. But what permits our brains to turn a chaotic sea of random facts and knowledge into an island of calm understanding? Believe it or not, its our emotions that permit us ultimately to become creative thinkers. In his book The Accidental Mind, the neuroscientist David J. Linden explains how emotions organize our memories: In our lives, we have a lot of experiences and many of these we will remember until we die. We have many mechanisms for determining which experiences are stored (where were you on 9/11?) and which are discarded (what did you have for dinner exactly 1 month ago?). Some memories will fade with time and some will be distorted by generalization (can you distinctly remember your seventeenth haircut?). We need a signal to say, This is an important memory. Write this down and underline it. That signal is emotion. When you have feelings of fear or joy or love or anger or sadness, these mark your experiences as being particularly meaningfulThese are the memories that confer your individuality. And that function, memory indexed by emotion, more than anything else, is what a brain is good for. What this means is that memories are ultimately emotional experiences, and that effectively learning must involve the learner emotionally. The very best US schools are seen as such because they inspire their students to be curious, interested, and excited; Chinas very best schools gain their reputation by doing the opposite. Thinking is the conscious effort of applying our memories to understand a new external stimulus, and creativity is asserting individual control over this process to create a synthesis between memory and stimuli. In other words, thinking is really about applying previous emotional experiences to understand a new emotional experience, whilst creativity is the mixing of old and new emotional experiences to a create an entirely new and original emotional experience. The best US education institutions endow students with creativity by providing a relaxed and secure learning environment in which students share in the refined emotional experiences of humanity by reading books and developing the logic necessary to share in collective emotional experiences through debate and essay writing. A dynamic learning environment allows students at many US schools to feel joy and despair, frustration and triumph, and its these ups and downs that encode the creative learning process into our neural infrastructure and

make it so transformative. A Chinese school is both a stressful and stale place, forcing students to remember facts in order to excel in tests. Neuroscientists know that stress hampers the ability of the brain to convert experience into memory, and psychologists know that rewarding students solely for test performance leads to stress, cheating, and disinterest in learning. But ultimately, the most harmful thing that a Chinese school does, from a creativity perspective, is the way in which it separates emotion from memory by making learning an unemotional experience. Whatever individual emotions Chinese students try to bring into the classroom, they are quickly stamped out. As I have previously written, from the first day of school, students who ask questions are silenced and those who try to exert any individuality are punished. What they learn is irrelevant and de-personalized, abstract and distant, further removing emotion from learning. If any emotion is involved, its pain. But the pain is so constant and monotonous (scolding teachers, demanding parents, mindless memorization, long hours of sitting in a cramped classroom) that it eventually ceases to be an emotion. To understand the consequences of Chinese pedagogy, consider the example of Solomon Shereshevskii, a Russian journalist born in 1886, who could remember everything, whom David Brooks writes about in The Social Animal: In one experiment, researchers showed Shereshevskii a complex formula of thirty letters and numbers on a piece of paper. Then they put the paper in a box and sealed it for fifteen years. When they took the paper out, Shereshevskii could remember it exactlyShereshevskii could remember, but he couldnt distil. He lived in a random blizzard of facts, but could not organize them into repeating patterns. Eventually he couldnt make sense of metaphors, similes, poems, or even complex sentences. Shereshevskii had a neural defect that prohibited his brain from prioritizing, synthesizing, and controlling his memories to permit him to formulate an understanding of self and the world. Like many a Chinese student today, he could experience, but he could not feel. Chinese schools are producing a nation of Shereshevskiis, students with photographic memory and instant recall, but who can never be creative.


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LETTER FROM CHINA

Dispatches by Evan Osnos.

Chinese Idol: Han Han Main Travel

JUNE 29, 2011

HAN HAN FUNNY (559)

Posted by Evan Osnos

Pinning down exactly what it is that makes Han Han so famous can be difficult. Why him? And what does his stature say about China? Han Han, as the Profile in the magazine this week explains (available to subscribers), is Chinas most popular personal blogger; he is a novelist; he is a race-car driver. None of those, on the face of each, is perhaps enough to explain why he ranks as one of the most heavily sought-after terms on Baidu, the Chinese search engine. But spend a few months around his fans and his writing and it becomes clear that his most successful innovation is a rare brand of humor. Like Henry Ford and the automobile, Han hardly invented Chinese political irony, but he has helped make it available to the young masses. He can be subtle and arch. When he wants to mention a name that is politically sensitive enough to draw the attention of censors, Han is known to write, sensitive word. At times he resorts to a scatological riff, but like young gadflies anywhere, he is at his best when pointing out the flickers of hypocrisy or falsehood or pomposity that alienate Chinese young people from the system. Writing in Foreign Policy in January, the writer and

translator Eric Abrahamsen captured the new era of Internetenabled Chinese humor, with Han as a key player with work that runs the gamut from sarcastic to subtle without skipping past righteous fury:

In 2009, a group of river boatmen, with the backing of local cadres, retrieved the bodies of students who had accidentally drowned in the river and then refused to hand the bodies over to the students parents without an exorbitant fee. Han Hans recommendation was that all Chinese citizens carry the bodyrecovery fee on their persons at all times: If you or a friend should fall in the water, you can hold the cash up above your headthats the only way these half-official body-recovery teams will bother fishing you out.

Taken together, Han is telling his readers that solemnity and seniority are not to be trusted. That will get more difficult as he gets older and the stakes for him politically and financially continue to grow. But, for now, he is his generations keenest observer of the absurd. When I asked him if he was comfortable

among political types, he described the specific form of discomfort that accompanies overly formal occasions in China:

I never know where Im supposed to sit. I always find myself taking the mayors seat by accident. If I see a place, I just sit down, and everyone gasps. But then nobody will actually say anything! I dont really understand all these things. There are a lot of these hidden rules in China. For example, there are certain things you can never dowhen a leader is reaching for a dish, you mustnt turn the lazy susan. Or when the leader is singing karaoke, you cant accidentally switch to the next song. These are terrible things to do. Also, the rules about who sits on the left, and who sits on the right, what is appropriate to say, what is notthese are not the things you can change. If you really want to [become one of them], you will have to put up with it and become someone you hate.

Han Han in Hong Kong, 2010. Photograph by Laihiuyeung Ryanne, Wikimedia Commons.


2011-06-30 15:06:575040 20

Profile

Foreign Policy

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 [ ] http://pro.yeeyan.org/hanhan

Wit or Wisdo m
But never both.

Freedom by E.B. White2000

leave a comment I have often noticed on my trips up to the city that people have recut their clothes to follow the fashion. On my last trip, however, it seemed to me that people had remodeled their ideas tootaken in their convictions a little at the waist, shortened the sleeves of their resolve, and fitted themselves out in a new intellectual ensemble copied from a smart design out of the very latest page of history. It seemed to me they had strung along with Paris a little too long. I confess to a disturbed stomach. I feel sick when I find anyone adjusting his mind to the new tyranny which is succeeding abroad. Because of its fundamental strictures, fascism does not seem to me to admit of any compromise or any rationalization, and I resent the patronizing air of persons who find in my plain belief in freedom a sign of immaturity. If it is boyish to believe that a human being should live free, then Ill gladly arrest my development and let the rest of the world grow up.

I shall report some of the strange remarks I heard in New York. One man told me that he thought perhaps the Nazi ideal was a sounder ideal than our constitutional system because have you ever noticed what fine alert young faces the young German soldiers have in the newsreel? He added, Or American youngsters spend all their time at the movies theyre a mess. That was his summation of the case, his interpretation of the new Europe. Such a remark leaves me pale and shaken. If it represents the peak of our intelligence, then the steady march of despotism will not receive any considerable setback at our shores. Another man informed me that our democratic notion of popular government was decadent and not worth bothering aboutbecause England is really rotten and the industrial towns there are a disgrace. That was the only reason he gave for the hopelessness of democracy; and he seemed mightily pleased with himself, as though he were more familiar than most with the anatomy of decadence, and had detected subtler aspects of the situation than were discernible to the rest of us. Another man assured me that anyone who took any kind of government seriously was a gullible fool. You could be sure, he said, that there is nothing but corruption because of the way Clemenceau acted at Versailles. He said it didnt make any difference really about this war. It was just another war. Having relieved himself of this majestic bit of reasoning, he subsided. Another individual, discovering signs of zeal creeping into my blood, berated me for having lost my detachment, my pure skeptical point of view. He announced that he wasnt going to be swept away by all this nonsense, but would prefer to remain in the role of innocent bystander, which he said was the duty of any intelligent person. (I noticed, that he phoned later to qualify his remark, as though he had lost some of his innocence in the cab on the way home.) Those are just a few samples of the sort of talk that seemed to be going roundtalk which was full of defeatism and disillusion and sometimes of a too studied innocence. Men are not merely annihilating themselves at a great rate these days, but they are telling one another enormous lies, grandiose fibs. Such remarks as I heard are fearfully disturbing in their cumulative

effect. They are more destructive than dive bombers and mine fields, for they challenge not merely ones immediate position but ones main defenses. They seemed to me to issue either from persons who could never have really come to grips with freedom so as to understand her, or from renegades. Where I expected to find indignation, I found paralysis, or a sort of dim acquiescence, as in a child who is duly swallowing a distasteful pill. I was advised of the growing anti-Jewish sentiment by a man who seemed to be watching the phenomenon of intolerance not through tears of shame but with a clear intellectual gaze, as through a well-ground lens. The least a man can do at such a time is to declare himself and tell where he stands. I believe in freedom with the same burning delight, the same faith, the same intense abandon which attended its birth on this continent more than a century and a half ago. I am writing my declaration rapidly, much as though I were shaving to catch a train. Events abroad give a man a feeling of being pressed for time. Actually I do not believe I am pressed for time, and I apologize to the reader for a false impression that may be created. I just want to tell, before I get slowed down, that I am in love with freedom and that it is an affair of long standing and that it is a fine state to be in, and that I am deeply suspicious of people who are beginning to adjust to fascism and dictators merely because they are succeeding in war. From such adaptable natures a smell rises. I pinch my nose. For as long as I can remember I have had a sense of living somewhat freely in a natural world. I dont mean I enjoyed freedom of action, but my existence seemed to have the quality of free-ness. I traveled with secret papers pertaining to a divine conspiracy. Intuitively Ive always been aware of the vitally important pact which a man has with himself, to be all things to himself, and to be identified with all things, to stand self-reliant, taking advantage of his haphazard connection with a planet, riding his luck, and following his bent with the tenacity of a hound. My first and greatest love affair was with this thing we call freedom, this lady of infinite allure, this dangerous and beautiful and sublime being who restores and supplies us all. It began with the haunting intimation (which I presume every child receives) of his mystical inner life; of God in man; of

nature publishing herself through the I This elusive sensation is moving and memorable. It comes early in life; a boy, well say, sitting on the front steps on a summer night, thinking of nothing in particular, suddenly hearing as with a new perception and as though for the first time the pulsing sound of crickets, overwhelmed with the novel sense of identification whith the natural company of insects and grass and night, conscious of a faint answering cry to the universal perplexing question: What is I? Or a little girl, returning from the grave of a pet bird leaning with her elbows on the window sill, inhaling the unfamiliar draught of death, suddenly seeing herself as part of the complete story. Or to an older youth, encountering for the first time a great teacher who by some chance word or mood awakens something and the youth beginning to breathe as an individual and conscious of strength in his vitals. I think the sensation must develop in many men as a feeling of identity with Godan eruption of the spirit caused by allergies and the sense of divine existence as distinct from mere animal existence. This is the beginning of the affair with freedom. But a mans free condition is of two parts: the instinctive freeness he experiences as an animal dweller on a planet, and the practical liberties he enjoys as a privileged member of human society. The latter is, of the two, more generally understood, more widely admired, more violently challenged and discussed. It is the practical and apparent side of freedom. The United States, almost alone today, offers the liberties and the privileges and the tools of freedom. In this land the citizens are still invited to write plays and books, to paint their pictures, to meet for discussion, to dissent as well as to agree, to mount soapboxes in the public square, to enjoy education in all subjects without censorship, to hold court and judge one another, to compose music, to talk politics with their neighbors without wondering whether the secret police are listening, to exchange ideas as well as goods, to kid the government when it needs kidding, and to read real news of real events instead of phony news manufactured by a paid agent of the state. This is a fact and should give every person pause. To be free, in a planetary sense, is to feel that you belong to earth. To be free, in a social sense, is to feel at home in a democratic framework. In Adolph Hitler, although he is a freely flowering individual, we do not detect either type of sensibility.

From reading his book I gather that his feeling for earth is not a sense of communion but a driving urge to prevail. His feeling for men is not that they co-exist, but that they are capable of being arranged and standardized by a superior intellectthat their existence suggests not a fulfillment of their personalities but a submersion of their personalities in the common racial destiny. His very great absorption in the destiny of the German people somehow loses some of its effect when you discover, from his writings, in what vast contempt he holds all people. I learned, he wrote, to gain an insight into the unbelievably primitive opinions and arguments of the people. To him the ordinary man is a primitive, capable only of being used and led. He speaks continually of people as sheep, halfwits, and impudent foolsthe same people to whom he promises the ultimate in prizes. Here in America, where our society is based on belief in the individual, not contempt for him, the free principle of life has a chance of surviving. I believe that it must and will survive. To understand freedom is an accomplishment which all men may acquire who set their minds in that direction; and to love freedom is a tendency which many Americans are born with. To live in the same room with freedom, or in the same hemisphere, is still a profoundly shaking experience for me. One of the earliest truths (and to him most valuable) that the author of Mein Kampf discovered was that it is not the written word, but the spoken word, which in heated moments moves great masses of people to noble or ignoble action. The written word, unlike the spoken word, is something which every person examines privately and judges calmly by his own intellectual standards, not by what the man standing next to him thinks. I know, wrote Hitler, that one is able to win people far more by the spoken than by the written word. Later he adds contemptuously: For let it be said to all knights of the pen and to all the political dandies, especially of today: the greatest changes in this world have never been brought about by a goose quill! No, the pen has always been reserved to motivate these changes theoretically. Luckily I am not out to change the worldthats being done for me, and at a great clip. But I know that the free spirit of man is persistent in nature; it recurs, and has never successfully been wiped out, by fire or flood. I set down the above remarks

merely (in the words of Mr. Hitler) to motivate that spirit, theoretically. Being myself a knight of the goose quill, I am under no misapprehension about winning people; but I am inordinately proud these days of the quill, for it has shown itself, historically, to be the hypodermic which inoculates men and keeps the germ of freedom always in circulation, so that there are individuals in every time in every land who are the carriers, the Typhoid Marys, capable of infecting others by mere contact and example. These persons are feared by every tyrantwho shows his fear by burning the books and destroying the individuals. A writer goes about his task today with the extra satisfaction which comes from knowing that he will be the first to have his head lopped offeven before the political dandies. In my own case this is a double satisfaction, for if freedom were denied me by force of earthly circumstance, I am the same as dead and would infinitely prefer to go into fascism without my head than with it, having no use for it any more and not wishing to be saddled with so heavy an encumberance.

E.B.
2011-07-07 16:03:521619 28

 Clemenceau

 Typhoid Mary

Clemenceau18411929

E.B.18991985

 198510 11939 823 nazi-soviet pactMolotovRibbentrop Pact 19407 Harpers Magazine 1942 One Mans Meat one mans meat is another mans poison

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China's Confucian makeover (760)

The revolutionaries of 1911 might recognise the system they fought in today's communist China
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Isabel Hilton guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 29 June 2011 22.00 BST Article history

A statue of Confucius at the entrance to the renovated Confucian Temple in Beijing. Photograph: Adrian Bradshaw/EPA

Staff in the lavish library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences last week were assembling huge display boards to commemorate one of 2011's significant moments: the 90th birthday of the Chinese Communist party, China's only governing party for the last 60 years. Once such displays carried images of workers, peasants

and soldiers, united under the party's red banner. Today, they speak of science, technology and modernity. The party's birthday is being celebrated at what seems a moment of triumph in all these categories: China has never been richer or more engaged in the world; investment in science and technology is sky high; the economy is booming while others splutter. Beijing is crowded with skyscrapers and grandiose cultural monuments, built to show that China's capital wants to be a world-class city. It seems like a happy event. There is another significant anniversary this year of a milestone on the way to this moment of economic power: the centenary of the 1911 revolution, which brought an end to the Qing dynasty and with it some 2,000 years of imperial tradition. Unlike the birthday of the party, however, it is being oddly underplayed. Surely the overthrow of what the party still calls the "semi-feudal system" that had delivered a weakened China into the hands of foreign powers is a moment any revolutionary party would celebrate? So why the official reticence? One easy answer is that the revolution preceded the appearance of the Communist party by a full decade. Since the party's

preferred historical narrative casts it as the only begetter of China's liberation and subsequent rise, this awkward complication is hard to overlook. The fact is that the 1911 revolution was a messy and virtually unplanned affair. Nor was it led by the next best thing to the unborn Communist party Sun Yatsen, a tireless nonCommunist revolutionary later adopted by the party as a semipaternal figure: he happened to be away in the US on a fundraising trip. The revolution happened without him. The events of 1911 are simply too messy to lend themselves to the heroic narrative of leadership that underpins revolutionary history. There was no masterplan, no clear leader, no single ideology just a ferment of ideas, as intellectuals, officials and revolutionaries devoured new theories in science, technology, history and politics, arguing about China's decline. Some blamed the Manchu emperors, others the suffocating dominance of a backward-looking Confucianism, with its stress on social hierarchy that had ended in stagnation. A republic with representative democracy was a widely shared aspiration. A century later the Communist party's rule has begun to resemble the system that 1911's accidental revolutionaries overthrew: a large and privileged bureaucracy, hereditary privileges in the ruling

elite, a mass of toiling workers and farmers and, finally, the embrace of Confucius, the man the revolutionaries rejected 100 years ago, as someone with a lot to say about hierarchical government. In January a 31ft statue of the sage, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the artist Ai Weiwei, was erected outside the National Museum in Tiananmen Square, hitherto the preserve of revolutionary heroes. In April, without explanation, the statue disappeared. Confucian influence, however, remains. The official doctrine today is not class struggle but harmony. In China's parks and city squares ever larger numbers of people are coming together to sing the stirring songs of the Maoist era the latest wave of nostalgic cultural revolution kitsch to be reinvented as a social trend. But in the party schools, theorists labour to refashion the Marxist theoretical canon to a task as painful and difficult and finally pointless as the legendary Confucian eight-legged essay, the gold standard examination that imperial bureaucrats had to pass. But if its ideology is hard to define, there is one area in which the party remains true to form: it is still, in its organisation, a Leninist party, dedicated to its own destiny of perpetual rule though Lenin might have raised an eyebrow at the fact that it is also heavily

involved in business: by the time the party is 100 years old, perhaps it will be clearer whether it is a business with a party attached, or a party with a business on the side. Its story is not over yet. Meanwhile, it continues to select and enforce a single version of its own and the nation's history that for now, in a neatly executed circle, embraces Confucius over both Marx and its former supreme leader, Mao Zedong now reduced to the empty homage of a photograph on Tiananmen Gate, and, in the last irony, a portrait on every banknote.

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Can Science Explain Heaven? (800)

Scientists try to explain near-death experiences.
There are those who believe that science will eventually explain everythingincluding our enduring belief in heaven. The thesis here is very simple: heaven is not a real place, or even a process or a supernatural event. It's something that happens in your brain as you die. I first encountered this idea as I was researching my new book, Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife. I was having lunch with my friend and colleague Christopher Dickey, who told me that his father, the writer James Dickey, had a fantasy of heaven in which all of his closest friends were

sitting around a swimming pool, chatting. "There was nothing special about the pool itself," wrote Chris in Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son. "Nobody walked on the water. And he never told me who the friends were ... But what he took away from the dream was a sense of contentment, of being at ease with himself and the world, as if he had gotten a preview of heaven. He called that place 'The Happy Swimming Pool.' " Chris believes that everything we think we know about heaven happens in the moments before death. After that, there's nothing. Science cannot definitively proof or disprove Chris's theory, but some scientists are willing to take guesses. And these guesses are based, in part, on a growing body of research around near-death experience (NDE). According to a 2000 article in The Lancet, between 9 and 18 percent of people who have been demonstrably near death report having had such an experience. And surveys of NDE accounts show great similarities in the details. People who have had NDEs describe like some religious visionariesa tunnel, a light, a gate, or a door, a sense of being out of the body, meeting people they know or have heard about, finding themselves in the presence of God, and then returning, changed.

Andrew Newberg is an associate professor in the radiology department at the University of Pennsylvania who has made his reputation studying the brain scans of religious people (nuns and monks) who have ecstatic experiences as they meditate. He believes the "tunnel" and "light" phenomena can be explained easily. As your eyesight fades, you lose the peripheral areas first, he hypothesizes. "That's why you'd have a tunnel sensation." If you see a bright light, that could be the central part of the visual system shutting down last. Newberg puts forward the following scenario, which, he emphasizes, is guesswork. When people die, two parts of the brain, which usually work in opposition to each other, act cooperatively. The sympathetic nervous systema web of

nerves and neurons running through the spinal cord and spread to virtually every organ in the bodyis responsible for arousal and excitement. It gets you ready for action. The parasympathetic systemwith which the sympathetic system is entwinedcalms you down and rejuvenates you. In life, the turning on of one system prompts the shutting down of the other. The sympathetic nervous system kicks in when a car cuts you off on the highway; the parasympathetic system is in charge as you're falling asleep. But in the brains of people reporting mystical experiencesand, perhaps, in deathboth systems are fully "on," giving a person the sensation both of slowing down, being "out of body," and of seeing things vividly, including memories of important people and past events. Does Newberg believe, then, that visions of heaven are merely chemical-neurological events? He laughs nervously. "I don't know." He laughs again. "It's, um I don't think we have enough evidence to say." Since at least the 1980s, scientists have theorized that NDEs occur as a kind of physiological self-defense mechanism. In order to guard against damage during trauma, the brain releases protective chemicals that also happen to trigger intense hallucinations. This theory gained traction after

scientists realized that virtually all the features of an NDEa sense of moving through a tunnel, and "out of body" feeling, spiritual awe, visual hallucinations, and intense memories can be reproduced with a stiff dose of ketamine, a horse tranquilizer frequently used as a party drug. In 2000, a psychiatrist named Karl Jansen wrote a book, Ketamine: Dreams and Realities, in which he interviewed a number of recreational users. One of them, who called himself K.U., describes one of his drug trips this way: "I came out into a golden Light. I rose into the Light and found myself having an unspoken interchange with the Light, which I believed to be God." Dante said it better, but the vision is astonishingly the same. Adapted from the forthcoming book Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination With the Afterlife by Lisa Miller. To be published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins. Copyright 2010 by Lisa Miller. Reprinted by arrangement with the author.

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80 2000. .U.

A LEGAL HISTORY OF RAW MILK IN THE UNITED STATES (1600)

POSTED BY BILL MARLER ON DECEMBER 31, 2007

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Winston Churchill once said, There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies. Perhaps he was right, but at the turn of the 20th century, the process of pasteurizing milk was still in its infancy, and the safety of milk was a preeminent public health challenge. As people in the United States moved from the countryside into cities, their milk supply became increasingly unhealthy. Milk from cows in the country was transported further and stored at higher temperatures than in the past. Milk produced closer to cities came from cows kept under crowded and unsanitary conditions, and as a result, many city residents, especially children, were increasingly getting sick and dying after consuming contaminated milk. (1) Public health reformers and activists of the late 19th century put milk at the top of their agenda, and the safety of the milk supply increasingly became a matter of regular public concern, discussed in newspapers, medical journals, public health circles, and the legal system. In a 1914 decision, the Illinois Supreme Court described the importance of the question, saying, "There is no article of food in more general use than milk; none whose impurity or unwholesomeness may more quickly, more widely, and more seriously affect the health of those who use it" Koy v. City of Chicago , 104 N.E. 1104 (1914). Urban areas were first to act, but by 1920, milk regulations had reached every part of the country, with regulations beginning to appear in state statutes. The U.S. Public Health Service considered milk health to be such a high priority that it drafted the Model Milk Health Ordinance and promoted it actively for adoption at the local level (U.S. Public Health Service, 1939). (1) Milk producers and sellers attacked the first regulations as unconstitutional and unwarranted governmental limitations on their rights to produce and sell their products as they wished. In response, local and state authorities relied on their intrinsic legal police power duty and authority to protect the publics welfare. Presented with growing evidence of the potential danger created by the sale of raw milk, most courts found these regulations to be valid, as a legitimate exercise of the governments police power. In the representative case of Pfeffer v. Milwaukee, 171 Wis. 514 (1920), milk dealers claimed that a Milwaukee ordinance requiring that all milk sold within the city be pasteurized would hurt their business, and that the ordinance was an invalid exercise of the police power because it did not promote the public health. The Wisconsin Supreme Court, however,

disagreed. Public health demands that milk and all milk products should be pure and wholesome. It is also common knowledge that milk containing deleterious organisms is an unsuitable article of food. Milk is known to be a product easily infected with germ life and to require special attention and treatment in its production and distribution for consumption as an article of food. Scientific knowledge concerning these facts and the best method of pasteurizing milk for human use in course of production and distribution as a pure and wholesome food is so generally understood and known that courts take judicial notice of these facts. The regulation of raw milk sales in the first half of the 20th century proved to be a major public health success in this country. In 1938, milk-borne outbreaks constituted approximately 25% of all diseaseoutbreaks from contaminated food and water. As of 2005, that figure was down to about 1%. Outbreaks of illness linked to the consumption of contaminated milk did continue, however. The ban on the sale of raw milk was not universal because at the time no federal law or regulation prohibited the sale of raw milk on a national level. The regulatory scheme controlling the sale of raw milk on a state and local level was spotty; some states banned the sale of milk that was not pasteurized, some states did not. In states that did not ban the sale of raw milk, some cities and counties did. The ability to sell and purchase raw milk was thus determined more by the social and political nature of the individual jurisdiction than by scientific knowledge. The impact of regulations was clear: forty (87%) of the forty-six raw milk outbreaks reported by the CDC during the period from 1973 through 1992 occurred in states in which the intrastate sale of raw milk was legal. (2) Efforts to comprehensively ban the sale of raw milk continued. In 1973, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) proposed and adopted a regulation requiring that all milk moving in interstate commerce be pasteurized; but certified raw milk became exempt from the regulation after FDA received an objection from a producer of certified raw milk. Between 1974 and 1982, FDA accumulated evidence of the association of certified raw milk with human disease, and in 1982, began drafting a proposed regulation to ban all interstate sales of raw milk and raw milk products. In an attached memorandum supporting the regulation, FDA concluded that consumption of raw milk "presents a significant public health problem" and that pasteurization was the only feasible way to assure the safety of milk. The proposed regulation, however, was again not adopted. (3)

Public Citizen v. Heckler, 602 F. Supp. 611 (1985) was filed on September 19, 1984. Public Citizen, a public service organization, the American Public Health Association, and others brought the suit to compel the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) to ban all domestic sales of raw milk and raw milk products. Claiming that federal officials had long known of serious risks to human health from consumption of raw milk, plaintiffs contended that the Secretary had unreasonably delayed her decision, in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. The Courts opinion was explicitly direct, and its ruling simple. The facts here speak for themselves and need little elaboration. Officials at the highest levels of the Department of Health and Human Services have concluded that certified raw milk poses a serious threat to the public health. Leading health organizations are unanimous in proposing that sales of any raw milk should be banned. The Department's justification for its continued delay is lame at best and irresponsible at worst. When the public health may be at stake, the agency must move expeditiously to consider and resolve the issues before it. Public Citizen Health Research Group v. Commissioner of Food and Drugs, 740 F.2d at 34. The Department has wholly failed to meet that mandate here. The court then ordered that the Department publish a proposed regulation within 60 days of its order. On August 10, 1987, the FDA published in 21 CFR Part 1240.61, a final regulation mandating the pasteurization of all milk and milk products in final package form for direct human consumption. This regulation banned the shipping of raw milk in interstate commerce, and became effective September 9, 1987. In the Federal Register notification for the final rule to 21 CFR Part 1240.61, the FDA made a number of findings, including the following: "Raw milk, no matter how carefully produced, may be unsafe." (3) Today, it is a violation of federal law to sell raw milk packaged for consumer use across state lines (interstate commerce), but each state regulates the sale of raw milk within the state (intrastate), and some states allow it to be sold. Nationally, the distinctions between applicable laws in individual states are bewildering. In 2006, 25 states had laws making the sale of raw milk for human consumption illegal. In the remaining states, dairy operations may sell raw milk to local retail food stores or to consumers directly from the farm, or at agricultural fairs or other community events, depending on the state law. Restrictions vary from specific labeling requirements, to requirements that milk only be bought with personal bottles, to purchase of raw milk through cow shares exclusively, to permitting a sale only with a written prescription

from a doctor, to sales of raw goat milk only, and to sales of a limited daily quantity only if made without advertising. Even in states that prohibit intrastate sales of raw milk, some people have tried to circumvent the law by "cow sharing or "cow leasing." Because raw milk sales have not been outlawed altogether, outbreaks associated with raw milk continue to occur. There have been numerous documented outbreaks of E. coli, Salmonella, and Campylobacter infections directly linked to the consumption of unpasteurized milk in the past 20 years. During 1998--2005, a total of 45 outbreaks of foodborne illness were reported to CDC in which unpasteurized milk (or cheese suspected to have been made from unpasteurized milk) was implicated. These outbreaks accounted for 1,007 illnesses, 104 hospitalizations, and two deaths (CDC, unpublished data, 2007). (4) Because not all cases of foodborne illness are recognized and reported, the actual number of illnesses associated with unpasteurized milk likely is greater. In December 2005, following an outbreak that sickened at least nineteen people in Washington State, the FDA again publicly warned consumers to avoid drinking raw milk. (5) Government regulation of the food industry is commonly accepted as a means both to protect public health and to maintain public confidence in the food supply. Despite its great success in reducing raw milk outbreaks during the past hundred years, government regulation and enforcement has not yet succeeded in wholly eradicating the sale of raw milk. The sale of raw milk continues to be legal, in some form or another, in almost half of our states, and the attendant risk of raw milkrelated outbreaks therefore also continues to be present. REFERENCES: (1)R. Wright, P. Huck, Counting Cases About Milk, Our Most Nearly perfect Food, 36 Law & Socy Rev 51 (2002). (2) M L Headrick, et al, The epidemiology of raw milk-associated foodborne disease outbreaks reported in the United States, 1973 through 1992, Am J Public Health. 1998 August; 88(8): 12191221. (3) Sale/Consumption of Raw Milk-Position Statement, U. S. Food and Drug Administration, Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, March 19, 2003. (4) Salmonella Typhimurium Infection Associated with Raw Milk and Cheese Consumption --- Pennsylvania, 2007, MMWR, (CDC),

November 9, 2007 / 56(44);1161-1164. (5) FDA Warns Consumers to Avoid Drinking Raw Milk, FDA NEWS, December 16, 2005.

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 1920Pfeffer 20 1938 25%20051% 19731992CDC 4640

1973 FDA FDA 19741982 FDA1982 FDA 1984919 HHS HHS HHS HHS HHS60

1987810FDA 21 1240.61 19879921 CFR 1240.61FDA 200625 20 19982005 45 10071042 CDC2007

 20051219 FDA

FYI: What is the Hottest Pepper in the World?

(1240)

Or, which pepper will make the most hilarious YouTube video when you film yourself eating it?
By Paul Adams Posted 07.07.2011 at 3:07 pm 1 Comment

Fiery Peppers iStockphoto

It is very hard to say. In February, the editors of The Guinness Book of World Records announced that the Infinity chili, grown by Nick Woods, the proprietor of a hot-sauce company in Lincolnshire, England, was the hottest pepper ever more than 250 times as hot as Tabasco sauce. Just two weeks later, Guinness declared that the Infinity had been unseated by another Britishgrown hybrid, the Naga Viper. Then things got complicated. The Naga Vipers creator, Gerald Fowler, who runs the Chilli Pepper Company in Cumbria, England, says he simply crosspollinated his pepper from three existing varieties: the Naga Morich, the Trinidad Scorpion and the Bhut Jolokia (also known as the ghost pepper, it has been studied extensively by the Indian Defence Research and Development Organisation, and took the Guinness title in 2006). Both Woods and Fowler had sent their peppers to be tested for spiciness at the horticultural research center at the University of Warwick, and the results were submitted to Guinness.

You might wonder if any of these pepper fiends has died. Not yet.
When Warwicks labs rated Fowlers Naga Viper equivalent to the combined strength of some 250 jalapeos, pepper experts balked. Jim Duffy, a chili grower in San Diego, criticizes Guinness for bestowing the title on insufficiently authenticated fruits. Dave DeWitt, the founder of Chile Pepper magazine, author of 35 books about chilies and an adjunct professor at New Mexico State University, flatly dismisses the Guinness record as well. This is science, and they are a beer company, he says, adding that test results should be corroborated by at least two labs. With one test, the most you can show is that a single pepper--or a part of a single pepper--had that heat rating. To establish that a variety of pepper is consistently the worlds hottest, you need more than that. Even Andrew Jukes, who conducted the pepper tests at Warwick on which Guinness based the Naga Viper and Infinity records, concurs: I am surprised that all record values are not verified on additional samples in other labs. Ive suggested to customers in the past that this would be required, but it seems that it is not. Duffy also says that there is no way Fowler could have created his record pepper in such a short time. Its a fairy tale, he says. Its scientifically impossible. If you were going to try to create a new variety by cross-pollinating two varieties, it would take you five years. And the Naga Viper, which is a three-way hybrid? That would take you 10 to 12 years. DeWitt would like to see an independent certifying authority that takes the place of Guinness and requires at least two separate tests for each submission, maintaining a totally scientific list of the worlds hottest peppers. Yet no matter how scientific that list might be, heat is quite difficult to measure. In 1912, chemist Wilbur Scoville determined that no chemical test for spiciness could be as accurate as the human tongue, and so he devised a subjective scale, the Scoville Organoleptic test. An alcohol-based pepper extract is progressively diluted in sugar water and tasted until its spiciness can no longer be discerned. The amount of water required dictates the rating; a jalapeo takes about 5,000 parts water to one part pepper to neutralize the heat, so it is rated at 5,000 Scoville heat units (SHUs). The Bhut Jolokia registered 1,001,304 SHUs when it took the record, breaking the millionScoville barrier for the first time. Today a peppers heat is measured in a lab, using high-performance liquid chromatography to precisely gauge the concentration of pungent compounds within peppers called capsaicinoids. Capsaicinoids make peppers hot; the relative proportion of various capsaicinoids (such as dihydrocapsaicin and nordihydrocapsaicin) is the reason some peppers burn lingers in the mouth while others are potent but fleeting. (For more info on how capsaicinoids affect the mouth, check out our video explainer.) Lab tests that measure the

concentrations of capsaicinoids first issue the results in American Spice Trade Association pungency units. One ASTA pungency unit is equivalent to about 15 SHUs. Out of tradition, the Scoville scale remains, so ASTA pungency units are multiplied by 15 and the results are given in SHUs. Yet even with precise tools, determining which strain of pepper is consistently the hottest is tricky. The pungency in chili peppers is 50 percent genetic and 50 percent environmental, DeWitt says. Pods that grow lower down on the plant are hotter. Stress on the plants, if water is withheld perhaps, makes them hotter. In March, one month after the Guinness announcement, the controversy deepened. A group of Australians announced that they had grown a pepper that rated 1,463,700 SHUs, far hotter than the Infinity and the Naga Viper. The Australians pepper was cultivated from a strain of the Trinidad Scorpion that the developers called the Butch T. They are now marketing a sauce called Scorpion Strike with the tagline Stupidly Hot BBQ Sauce. The Trinidad Scorpion, which has a pod that comes to a point like a stinger, was tested last year by Marlin Bensinger, a chemical engineer who has worked with peppers extensively for more than 40 years. He rated it 1.2 million SHUs and calls it the hottest pepper we have seen with the most consistent analytical performance. The SHU rating was corroborated by Analytical Food Laboratories in Dallas. A pepper so hot has market potential beyond barbecue sauce and designer salsa. There are economic perks that come with laying claim to having, developing, or engineering the hottest pepper in the world, Bensinger says. Unlike the Guinness records for eating the most hot dogs or packing the most people in a VW Beetle, this type of record could change the microeconomics of small geographic areas of the world. For example, Blairs Reserve 16 Million Crystals hot sauce claims an SHU of 16 million and retails for $595 a bottle. Some people love to eat the hottest of all peppers raw, or take their hot sauce by the spoonful. Watch videos of such fire-eaters (British men mostly, and alarmingly pale) on YouTube, where they stare into the camera sweating and hiccuping while describing the exact nature of their excruciation. You might wonder if any of these pepper fiends has died in the process. The answer is no, at least not yet. In a 1980 study called Acute Toxicity of Capsaicin in Several Animal Species, researchers administered pure crystalline capsaicin to a variety of rodents. Capsaicin was given orally, intravenously and topically. Rabbits were least sensitive to the spice, while guinea pigs were particularly pained by it. Assuming we have about the same pepper sensitivity as mice, the lethal dose for humans is about 13 grams (0.5 ounces) of solid capsaicin, swallowed, for a 150-pound person. Three pounds of the hottest peppers in the world could kill you. But we have been ingesting plenty of capsaicin for centuries with no ill effects. Sure, there will be sweating, flushing and temporary gastric inflammation, but

the bulk of the medical research on capsaicin focuses on its benefits. Several university studies have suggested that capsaicin consumption can aid in weight loss and inhibit tumor growth. When it is applied topically, nerves can be overwhelmed and the skin goes numb. Theres even a capsaicin patch for joint pain. But the scientists at the Indian Defence Research and Development Organisation have a more nefarious plan for the Bhut Jolokia--pepper-bomb hand grenades.

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Pictures: First True Cocaine Submarine(834)

Main Content

Swamp Thing
Photograph courtesy Carlos Hernandez, National Geographic Channel ON TV: Cocaine Sub Hunt premieres at 9 p.m. ET/PT on Sunday, June 26, on the National Geographic Channel. A recently discovered drug-smuggling submarine lies half submerged, deep in a mangrove swamp in Colombia. The diesel vehicle is the first fully submersible drug sub ever to be captured by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in the South American country. (Also see "Cocaine Submarine Pictures: New Seizure Shows Advances.") The hundred-foot-long (30-meter-long) fiberglass sub can carry a crew of six underwater for more than a week, dive some 30 feet (9 meters) below the surface, and ferry about eight tons of drugs worth an estimated quarter of a billion U.S. dollars. "That's a far greater payload than a speedboat can transport and certainly more than a human drug mule can carry in their stomach," said Steven

Hoggard, the writer and director of a new National Geographic Channel documentary detailing the DEA agents' hunt for the sub. (The Channel is partowned by the National Geographic Society, which owns National Geographic News.) (Related: Get cocaine-submarine pictures and facts from the National Geographic Channel.) Ker Than
Published June 24, 2011

Next

Sophisticated Sub
Photograph courtesy Carlos Hernandez, National Geographic Channel Until recently, the technology for cocaine-smuggling subs has been crude the vehicles were cramped and could only partially submerge, for instance. But the recently captured fully submersible drug sub (pictured) displayed a level of sophistication that impressed even the DEA agents. The vehicle, for example, includes a GPS-tracking satellite dish for navigation, advanced plumbing and electricity, air conditioning, bunks, a periscope with remote cameras, and even a proper toilet. "As you can see, we don't have to bend down here at all to move around," DEA team commander Misha Piastro says from inside the submarine in the documentary. "I can stand up without any trouble at all. There's a lot of space down here. This is a whole different animal." (See "Cocaine to Blame for Rain Forest Loss, Study Says.")
Published June 24, 2011

Next Two small windows in the cockpit of a previously captured semisubmersible drug sub (pictured) would have allowed crew members to watch for obstacles and law-enforcement officials. The submarine is currently dry-docked at Colombia's Tumaco Coast Guard station. By contrast, the newly captured, fully submersible cocaine sub can dive completely underwater, leaving no hint of its passage from the surface. The documentary follows Piastro as well as two DEA field agents, "Tony" and "Rich"whose true identities are withheldin one of the most dangerous regions of Colombia as they attempt to find and impound subs. "A typical [cocaine] sub yard that we find on the west coast is in the mangroves with lean-tos [and] a tarp covering it," Tony says in the documentary. "It's not going to show up on any great satellite pictures. They're designed to be stealth." The DEA thinks drug smugglers are using the subs to transport millions of dollars' worth of cocaine long distances virtually undetected. The subs probably "transport the drugs to the water off the Mexican shoreline on the Pacific coast, or to Central America, where they offload in the middle of the night," Hoggard, the director, said. "Some [cocaine subs] are more than likely making their way to Africa as well on the other side of South America." (Watch cocaine-submarine videos.) A member of the Colombian Coast Guard drives a previously captured semisubmersible drug sub. The new documentary also includes an interview with one of the very first cocaine-sub inventors, nicknamed "Dr. Sub," who is hiding out in Mexico. "When we went to interview the drug-sub inventor, we told him that [the DEA had] just found these fully submersibles, and he said, 'Oh yeah, I knew about those six years ago,'" documentary director Hoggard said. "So without question there are more [subs] under construction." According to the DEA, engineering documents written in Russian and French have been found at some of the sub-construction sites. "That suggests there's someone helping them do this, because it's a pretty sophisticated endeavor," Hoggard said. (Related pictures: "World War II 'Samurai Subs' FoundCarried Aircraft.")
Published June 24, 2011

Next

Cocaine Sub Test Run

Photograph by Ryan Hill, National Geographic Channel Standing aboard a previously seized semisubmersible cocaine sub, a member of the Colombian Coast Guard helps test the vehicle's seagoing capabilities. The DEA is uncertain how many fully submersible drug subslike the one recently found in a Colombian mangrove swampare currently in operation. What's more, the agency sees an even greater threat looming on the horizon: remote control cocaine subs. "Think about how drones function," Hoggard said. "A remote sub could be steered to its destination from an apartment in [the Colombian capital of] Bogot." In the documentary, Dr. Sub says he thinks remote control drug submarines already exist. "We definitely did not have the technology, but we were already working on a solution. We are talking about 10 to 12 years ago," he said. "Today, I'm certain the technology exists and is being deployed." (Related: "Cocaine on Money: Drug Found on 90 Percent of U.S. Bills.")
Published June 24, 2011

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Why did LOL infiltrate the language?(1340)

COMMENTS (309)

By James Morgan
BBC News

Continue reading the main story

In today's Magazine

When tabloid reporters crossed the line Quiz of the week's news How to spot British ladybirds What does it say on the tin? The internet slang term "LOL" (laughing out loud) has been added to the Oxford English Dictionary, to the mild dismay of language purists. But where did the term originate? And is it really a threat to our lexicon? "OMG! LOL's in the OED. LMAO!" If you find the above string of letters utterly unintelligible, you are clearly an internet "noob". Let me start again. Golly gosh! The popular initialism LOL (laughing out loud) has been inducted into the canon of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary. Blimey! What is going on? The OED defines LOL as an interjection "used chiefly in electronic communications... to draw attention to a joke or humorous statement, or to express amusement". It is both "LOL" where all the letters are pronounced separately, but

also commonly "lol" where it is pronounced as a word. The phrase was ushered in alongside OMG (Oh My God), with dictionary guardians pointing to their growing occurrence "in emails, texts, social networking... and even in spoken use". As well as school playgrounds, words like "lolz" and "lolling" can be heard in pubs and offices - though often sarcastically, or in parody.
Continue reading the main story

OED definition
LOL (ll/ll) colloq. A. int. Originally and chiefly in the language of electronic communications: 'ha ha!'; used to draw attention to a joke or humorous statement, or to express amusement. B. n. An instance of the written interjection 'LOL'.

Love it or loathe it, "lol" is now a legitimate word in our lexicon, says Graeme Diamond, the OED's principal editor for new words. "The word is common, widespread, and people understand it," he explains. The word serves a real purpose - it conveys tone in text, something that even the most cynical critics accept. "I don't 'LOL'. I'm basically someone who kind of hates it," says

Rob Manuel of the internet humour site b3ta. "But the truth is, we do need emotional signifiers in tweets and emails, just as conversation has laughter. 'LOL' might make me look like a twit, but at least you know when I'm being arch."

Death of the dictionary

But for young internet entrepreneurs like Ben Huh, of the Cheezburger Network of comedy sites, "LOL" is much more than a necessary evil. It's both a tool and a toy.

Ben Huh says LOL is 'a part of everyday life'

"'LOL' is a part of everyday life. I use it all the time in e-mail exchanges. It's a polite way of acknowledging someone," he says. "And yes, I do say 'LOL' out loud. In almost an ironic sense, like a

slow handclap after a bad joke. 'Lol' means 'yes, I understand that was funny, but I'm not really laughing'." But no matter how much irony we cake it in, the L-word grinds the ears of many people over the age of 25. "The death of the dictionary" is how one blogger greeted its induction to the bastion of English. While on Facebook, there are at least half a dozen "anti-LOL" groups, where lol-ophobes dream of loll-ageddon: "If something is funny, 'ha', 'hehehehe', or 'hee hee' is perfectly fine depending on the joke, and more descriptive than 'lol'," writes one hater. Another complains that lol "doesn't sound anything like laughter. In fact you physically CAN'T say it while smiling. I'm all for bastardisation of the language, but with lol, that thing you thought was rubbish really is rubbish". Wags point out that "LOL" is almost always disingenuous. "How many people are actually laughing out loud when they say LOL?" asks David Crystal, author of Language and the Internet.

Continue reading the main story

LOL around the world

mdr (and derivatives) French version, from the initials of "mort de rire" which roughly translated means "dying of laughter"

/ Hebrew version. The letter is pronounced 'kh' and is pronounced 'h'. Putting them together makes "khakhakha"

555 Thai variation of LOL. "5" in Thai is pronounced "ha", three of them being "hahaha"

asg Swedish abbreviation of the term Asgarv, meaning intense laughter

mkm Afghan abbreviation of the Dari phrase "ma khanda mikonom", which means "I am laughing" Source: Know Your Meme

But those laughing least of all are the language purists, who lament "LOL" as a hallmark of creeping illiteracy. "There is a worrying trend of adults mimicking teen-speak," says Marie Clair of the Plain English Campaign, in the Daily Mail. "They [adults] are using slang words and ignoring grammar. Their language is deteriorating." But is "LOL" really a lazy, childish concoction?

When the OED traced the origins of the acronym, they discovered 1980s computer fanatics were responsible. The oldest written records of "LOL" (used to mean laughing out loud) are in the archives of Usenet, an early internet discussion forum. And the original use was typed by Wayne Pearson, in Calgary, who says he wrote the first ever LOL in reply to a gag by someone called "Sprout". "LOL" was "geek-speak that filtered through to the mainstream", says Manuel. "I first saw it in the 1990s - at the end of emails. Then it got picked up by the young kids. Then it went naff. But it came back ironically - with people saying things like 'megalolz'."

Lolcats brought the phrase to a whole new audience

Grandparents, for example, often adopt "LOL" as one of their first "internet words", says Huh. "'LOL' and 'OMG' are like momma and dada." But many mistake "LOL" for "lots of love", leading to some unintended "LOLs", such as the infamous tale of the mother who wrote: "Your grandmother has just passed away. LOL." It has also lent its name to some wildly popular internet crazes, like Lolcats, whose appeal spread far beyond the realms of cybergeeks.

More than funny

So why has "LOL", above all other web phrases, become such a phenomenon? Because it's simple and multipurpose, says Tim Hwang, founder of ROFLCon, a whole festival dedicated to "internet awesome". "The magic of LOL is that it's both exclusive and inclusive," he says. "On one level, it's simple to understand. "But it also conveys something subtle - depending on the situation. It means more than just 'funny'. For example, if I had my bike

stolen, my friend might reply 'LOL'. It helps overcome an awkward moment." For school kids, acronyms like "LOL" and "KMT" (kiss my teeth) are a kind of secret code, a badge of belonging, says Tony Thorne, author of the Dictionary of Contemporary Slang.
Continue reading the main story

LOL-ternatives
:D (smileys) Simple and clear but may appear childish. Are you a Comic Sans fan? ROFL, LMAO, BWL Even more annoying than LOL. !!! One is fine, three reeks of desperation: 'Look!!! I made a joke!!!' Yes, we noticed. Haha, Hehehe, Arf arf The safe option. Effective but not very imaginative. Were you really laughing? Hilarious! How funny! You are living in the dark ages.

"I go into schools and record slang words - all the new terms kids are saying - words like 'lolcano'. And if you talk to kids they will say this is our language - this is what identifies us." But aren't these slang words also harmful to children's vocabulary?

Not at all, says Thorne. "Government educationalists get all worked up about words like LOL - they see them as substandard and unorthodox. "But the small amount of research on this issue shows that kids who use slang abbreviations are the more articulate ones. It's called code switching." If we have a literacy crisis, it's among adults as well as children, says Thorne. And slang is not the culprit. In fact, it is enriching the language. Diamond agrees: "There will always be a minority who want the English language to remain as a frozen beast, that doesn't admit changes," he says. "But language is a vibrant, evolving animal."

BBC LOL
2011-04-20 16:51:032353 14

LOLlaughing out loud OED

BBCLOL201148BBC LOLlaughing out loud OED

"OMG! LOL's in the OED. LMAO!"LOL OED LAMOlaugh my ass off LOLlaughing out loud OED LOL

 LOLlol OMGOh My God lolzlolzlol lolling Graeme Diamond lol LOL B3TA Rob Manuel LOL

 CheezburgerBen Huh LOL LOL LOL LOL L25 FacebookLOL anti-LOL lollol-ophobelolllollageddon lollol lol bastardisationlol LOL (David Crystal)LOL

 LOL Plain English CampaignMarie Clair LOL LOLUsenet Wayne Pearson LOL LOL megalolz

LOL LOLOMG LOLlots of love LOLs LOL Lolcats LOL ROFLConROFL Rolling On the Floor LaughingROFLCon ROFLTim Hwang LOL LOL

Tony Thorne LOLKMTkiss my teeth lolcano LOL

Top 10 Causes of Hair Loss(1051)

[] askmen kira86

Those who have it love it.

Those who dont miss it. And those who are in the process of losing it, well, theyll do anything to keep it. Were talking of course about hair. While its easy to blame your parents for your thin hair or balding scalp, not all causes of hair loss trace back to genetics.

You might be surprised to learn that there are dozens of reasons for it. And, while some are a little less common than others, its still important to understand how you lose your hair so that youll know how to prevent it. Here are the top 10 causes of hair loss.

No.10 Tight Braids Or Pulled-Back HairThis cause is probably a bit more relevant to women, but even men should know that wearing hair in tight braids (like dreadlocks or cornrows) or having

hair tightly pulled back (like in a ponytail) can lead to hair loss -- or what is medically known as traction alopecia. It is caused by chronic pulling of the hair, leading to gradual hair loss, mostly at the hairline. While its most commonly seen in African women, its also seen in men who wear hairpieces in the same location on the scalp for long periods of time.

No.9 TrichotillomaniaTrichotillomania is the name given to the habitual plucking or pulling of the hair from the head or other parts

of the body. While its still unclear whether trichotillomania should be classified as a habit or as an obsessive-compulsive disorder, the end result is the same. Over time, a bald spot will develop. If the habit stops, hair will typically regrow, but with excessive and long-term trichotillomania, scarring of the scalp can result, leading to permanent hair loss in the affected location!

No.8 HypothyroidismThe thyroid is a small gland located in the front of the neck just below the voice box. It plays an important role

in regulating the bodys metabolism through the release of various hormones. Hypothyroidism is an underproduction of certain hormones and is the most common cause of patchy hair loss known as alopecia areata (which can affect the whole body and not just the head). Hypothyroidism itself is caused by birth abnormalities, autoimmune diseases or surgery involving the removal of the thyroid.

No.7 Autoimmune DiseaseIf you have diabetes or have arthritis,

you've already been dealing with autoimmune diseases that arise when the bodys own immune system mistakenly attacks and destroys healthy body tissue. When the bodys immune system attacks hair follicles or other cells or tissues important to hair growth and maintenance, it can result in hair loss of various kinds, including cicatricial alopecia (a form of permanent hair loss) and telogen effluvium (which occurs when hair's growth cycle is disrupted).

No.6 InfectionAlthough a number of infections can lead to hair loss, the most common infection that affects the scalp and hair is ringworm. Dont let the name fool you: Ringworm is actually caused by a fungus. Tinea capitis, as its more scientifically known, is caused by mold-like fungi called dermatophytes that thrive in warm, moist conditions and typically arise due to poor hygiene. While it affects mostly children, it can be caught at any age.

No.5 ChemotherapyCancer cells typically divide and grow faster

than the bodys healthy cells. What allows chemotherapy to be so effective in stopping cancer is that it stops those cells that grow rapidly. Unfortunately, there are other cells in the body that grow rapidly as well -- like those in hair follicles. While there are cancer myths out there, experiencing near-total hair loss after chemotherapy isn't one of them. The loss could be gradual or dramatic, depending on the type of drug, but the end result is usually the same. Thankfully, the hair usually grows back!

No.4 MedicationMost of the human population is well aware that chemotherapy drugs can lead to hair loss, but there are, in fact, dozens of other drugs that might cause hair to fall out. These include anti-thyroid medications, hormonal therapies (like birth control), anti-convulsants (for epilepsy), anti-coagulants, betablockers, and many others. These medications tend to cause telogen effluvium, a rapid shedding of the hair that arises when a large number of hairs suddenly shift from a growth phase (known as anagen) to a resting phase (known as telogen), and then fall out when new hairs begin to grow.

No.3 Vitamin/Mineral DeficiencyWhether its because of a crash diet, general malnutrition or some genetic or biological defect, deficiencies in certain nutrients can cause hair loss. Probably the most common deficiency thought to contribute to hair loss is iron. Being severely low in iron can lead to iron-deficiency anemia, a condition that causes the body not to have enough red blood cells. Red blood cells are important because they carry oxygen to nearly every cell in the body, helping those cells maintain normal function.

Deficiencies in other nutrients -- such as vitamin B (specifically B12) and protein -- are thought to contribute to hair loss as well.

No.2 StressSevere physical stress (like surgery) or severe psychological stress (like a death in the family) can have strange effects on the body. Severe stress typically sends the body into a state of shock, flooding it with various hormones and metabolites. This may lead to telogen effluvium, a shedding of the hair that we mentioned above. While the effects of acute stress on hair are well

understood, what isnt as clear is how chronic or long-term stress affects hair loss.

No.1 Male Pattern BaldnessDespite all the different causes of hair loss, the leading cause is one that we cant do much about. Male pattern baldness, medically known as androgenetic alopecia, refers to hair thinning in an M-shaped" pattern that is typically mentioned when men talk about balding. Over time, the hair follicles will change and shrink, leading to thinning hair. While

many treatments are available, they arent guaranteed to work and most only slow progression (although some can lead to hair regrowth) and are not permanent solutions for hair loss. In the end, were all victims of our genes -- and thats something that will never change.

2011-07-01 21:56:001367 4

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Madagascar's 'tortoise mafia' on the attack(804)

By Hannah McNeish
BBC News, Madagascar

Madagascar's tortoises sell for thousands of dollars on the black market Continue reading the main story

Related Stories

Madagascar's forests plundered for rare rosewood Mammals 'floated to Madagascar' In pictures: inside the illegal logging gangs

Madagascar's poachers, known in conservation circles as "the tortoise mafia", are increasingly hunting down the Indian

Ocean island's reptiles, threatening them with extinction. The tortoise mafia, who allegedly include corrupt government officials and smuggling syndicates, are satisfying a growing demand locally for tortoise meat and abroad for exotic pets and tortoise shells used in aphrodisiacs. "Everybody is eating them and everybody is trafficking them and as soon as people are brought to trial, there are mafia organisations who help to get them out," says the head of Madagascar's Alliance of Conservation Groups, Ndranto Razakamanarina. Another conservationist, Tsilavo Rafeliarisoa, says two poachers were caught last year in southern Madagascar with 50 tortoises. This was a small breakthrough in efforts to protect the island's endangered tortoises, which include the Ploughshare, Spider, Radiated and Flat-tailed species. Often, poachers roam villages in groups of up to 100, picking up thousands of tortoises over several weeks.

Guns and machetes

They are heavily armed, fending off attempts to stop them. "When a gang of poachers with guns and machetes come and take tortoises, the villagers are defenceless," Mr Rafeliarisoa says.

Tortoise meat is a favourite dish on the island

He says with food prices rising, more people are eating tortoise meat. It has become a favourite snack in southern towns such as Tsiombe and Beloka, even among government officials who ought to be at the forefront of campaigns to save the reptiles from extinction. "They say: 'Give me the special' - and the special is tortoise meat. It is a huge market," Mr Rafeliarisoa says. Herilala Randriamahazo of Madagascar's Turtle Survival Alliance says he recently went on a research trip to Tsiombe and Beloka, posing as a tourist to see how common tortoise meat has become

on restaurant menus. To his horror, a bowl of tortoise meat, stewed in tomatoes, garlic and onion, was sold for a mere $2.50 (1.50). It was served to him in less than 30 minutes.
Continue reading the main story

People respected tortoises. They did not even touch them

Ndranto Razakamanarina Madagascar's Alliance of Conservation Groups

"I sent it back. The waiter said he could get me something different, even a live one right away," Mr Randriamahazo says. He says the streets of Tsiombe and Beloka are littered with tortoise shells - an unfortunate sign of the insatiable appetite people have acquired for them. Yet, Madagascar's tortoises were once protected by the cultural beliefs of some of the island's communities.

"People respected tortoises. They did not even touch them," Mr Randriamahazo says. Now, if tortoises do not end up in the rubbish heaps of restaurants, they end up in the suitcases of tortoise smugglers.

Sexual potions
Madagascar is known for its rich biodiversity but this has attracted smugglers interested in everything from its precious rosewood to minerals and tortoises - and the famous lemurs. An alliance of 27 national conservation groups recently accused the government of being complicit in the illegal trade, as it had not cracked down on the "looting and plunder" of natural resources. A WWF report on Madagascar's biodiversity earlier this month said more than 600 new species had been discovered in the "Treasure Island" over the last 10 years, but many were already endangered. With only a few hundred of the world's most endangered Ploughshare Tortoises left, hundreds of species are crawling towards extinction behind them.

Tortoise shells litter towns in Madagascar

Hasina Randriamanampisoa, of the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, says the smuggling rings are well-organised, selling tortoises on the black market in Asian countries such as Thailand. Wealthy Asians see tortoises as exotic pets, and are prepared to pay up to $10,000 (6,250) for them. Traditional doctors in Asia also buy the shells of baby tortoises, using them in medicine concoctions that allegedly enhance the sexual performance of men. Conservationists say smugglers pack up to 400 baby tortoises in suitcases, before flying to cities such as Bangkok. Increasingly, they are also smuggling out adult tortoises to breed in captivity in Asian countries. Mr Randriamanampisoa says tortoise numbers are rapidly dwindling and they risk extinction over the next decade.

"Even if the poaching stops now, the natural habitat is so vast, there are chances that the females cannot meet the males in the wild to mate and to have babies," he says. Mr Randriamanampisoa said there four species of tortoise "are endemic to Madagascar, so if they disappear here you will only be able to see them in zoos".

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Your number's up: Why mathematicians are campaigning for pi to be replaced with alternate value tau (660) By DAILY MAIL REPORTERS Last updated at 8:10 AM on 29th June 2011

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Slicing up Pi? Experts believe the number (represented by top left figure) should be replaced in calculations by tau (bottom right)

It has long been regarded as the most important number in the world - but now mathematicians are suggesting that pi may have had its day. Experts are claiming that the number - the constant which references the circumference of a circle to its diameter - is wrong, and should be replaced with an alternate value called tau. And they have said that while 3.14159265, the number's value, is not incorrect, the mathematicians making the claims say it is the wrong figure to be associated with the properties of a circle as a matter of course. They are also campaigning for school textbooks to be rewritten using tau, which has a value twice that of pi of approximately 6.28 - and have even declared today, June 28, to be tau Day in its honour. 'For all these years, we have been looking at the wrong number when we have been looking at pi,' Kevin Houston, of the School of Mathematics at the University of Leeds told The Times. 'Pi simply isnt the most natural number that we should associate with a circle. The proper number is 2pi, or tau.' The number has long been seen as being essential to many mathematical formulae as well as being vital to equations in science and engineering.

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It is used when calculating the circumference of a circle - by multiplying the diameter by the value of pi - while its area can be deduced by multiplying pi by the square of its radius. However, mathematicians campaigning for its replacement argue that since so many formulae require the use of tau, that should be used as the main circle constant instead. 'Mathematicians dont measure angles in degrees, we measure them in radians, and there are 2pi radians in a circle,' Dr Houston said. That leads to all sorts of unnecessary confusion. If you take a quarter of a circle, it has a quarter of 2pi radians, or half pi. For the number of radians in three quarters of a circle, you have to think about it. It doesnt come naturally. Scroll down for video

Experts at Leeds University are backing the campaign for pi to be replaced by tau, saying it would make certain mathematical problems easier

'How much simpler it would be if we just used tau instead of pi,' Dr Houston added. 'The circle would have tau radians, a semicircle would have half tau, a quarter of a circle a quarter tau, and so on. You dont have to think.' Dr Houston has promoted Tau Day by making a YouTube video on the subject entitled Pi is wrong! which attempts to explain why tau would be a better alternative when making such calculations. He argues that it would also would make A-level maths considerably easier while it would help people to better understand such complex topics as calculus. 'We should be changing the textbooks,' he insisted. 'It would be much simpler than the shift from imperial to metric. If we were to start teaching tau from the moment kids start maths, they would take to it straight away, as its more natural.' Pi - taken from the first letter of the Greek word for 'perimeter' - was first given its name in 1706 by mathematician William Jones. Both the Ancient Egyptians and the Babylonians were believed to have known an approximate value of pi, while a version also appears in the Bible. It was also the subject of a cult 1998 film by Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky, in which a mathematical genius discovers a mysterious 216-digit number, and is pursued by Hasidic Jews and Wall Street experts keen to know its true meaning

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2008963/Why-mathematicianscampaigning-pi-replaced-alternate-value-tau.html#ixzz1Ri5gOUr6


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By Manesh Shrestha, CNN700

Kathmandu, Nepal (CNN) -- When census gatherers went doorto-door visiting 5.6 million households across Nepal this month, they collected information not only on the country's men and women, but also on a so-called third gender. In what is believed to be a world first, Nepal's Central Bureau of Statistics is giving official recognition to gay and transgender people -- a move seen as major victory for equality in a country that only decriminalized homosexual relationships three years ago. Among those happy to stand up and be counted in the third gender

category is Dilu Buduja, 35. "I was born as a girl, but as I grew up I felt I was a boy. Today I totally feel like a man," he said. A spokesman for the statistics bureau, Bikash Bista, said the new categorization was an attempt to open up the traditionally conservative country up to different points of view. But the state's recognition of the rights of gender minorities, gays and lesbians has not come without a fight. "We had to put in a lot of pressure to have the third gender counted in the census," said gender minority rights activist Sunil Babu Pant. "It was only after we said that we would go to court that the officials agreed to include the third gender as a category." If the case had gone to court, it would likely have been upheld thanks to a landmark 2007 Supreme Court ruling that directed the state to end discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity and decriminalize "unnatural sex." It also decreed the issue of citizenship certificates that clearly indicate an individual's choice of gender identity. Citizenship certificates, which work as national identity papers, are needed in Nepal to open a bank account, own property, secure a job and get a passport among other things. "The court also directed the government to form a committee to

study what kind of laws can be made for same-sex marriage or civil union," said Hari Phuyal, a human rights lawyer who made the lead argument in the case. "Nepal's 2007 ruling was an inspiration to even India and the ruling document was studied by the Delhi High Court [of India ] when it decriminalized sodomy last year," he said. Pant, Nepal's first openly gay lawmaker, described the ruling as "very satisfying," but said its implementation was an "extremely slow and painful process." His claim is underscored by the fact that Nepal 's Ministry of Home Affairs is yet to direct the country's 75 administrative districts to issue citizenship certificates that indicate gender identity. "Local authorities did not know about third gender and they were afraid that they would lose their jobs if they gave such a citizenship," said Buduja, who last month became only the second person in the country to obtain a citizenship certificate indicating gender. Pradeep Khadka, of sexual and gender minority rights advocacy group Blue Diamond Society -- founded by Pant nearly a decade ago -- say delays in fully enforcing the 2007 ruling represent a struggle between conservative and liberal elements in Nepalese society.

Though discrimination persists, there is progress. The government is also finalizing a list of discriminatory laws that need to be changed so that gender minorities can enjoy the same rights as others, including inheritance rights. Two years ago it also formed a committee to make recommendations on legislation governing same-sex marriage or civil union. It is in the final stages of the completing the report. "We visited several districts in the country and Norway to look at its experience and use it as a case study," said sociologist Chaitanya Mishra, a member of the recommendation committee. According to another member of the committee, it will recommend that the government legalize same-sex marriage, which would be a first in South Asia. "There are 50 to 60 couples waiting to get married on the day same-sex marriage is legalized," said Buduja, who is among those hoping to tie the knot. But activists say, reluctance among officials to issue the sexualityspecific citizenship certificates means that day may be far away. And without the certificates, many may be reluctant to disclose sexuality to census gatherers. "But this is an encouraging step forward," Pant said.
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Why are we so emotional about money? (971)

COMMENTS (121)

By Megan Lane
BBC News Magazine

Continue reading the main story

In today's Magazine

When tabloid reporters crossed the line Quiz of the week's news How to spot British ladybirds What does it say on the tin? The US has its debt downgraded, UK inflation suddenly falls, the Eurozone interest rate rises and China's growth rate stabilises. Ordinary people across the world are faced with a wealth of economic news, but are their decisions on money really governed by emotion? Money is emotional. Debt sparks worry. A windfall is exciting. And many people dose up on retail therapy, shopping to feel better. "Ask people what emotions are most frequently associated with money, and this is the rank-ordered list: anxiety, depression, anger, helplessness, happiness, excitement, envy, resentment," says psychologist Adrian Furnham. He is co-creator of BBC Lab UK's new Big Money Test, which explores links between personality and money behaviour.

Because even financially astute people have bad money habits, he says, and there are five archetypes:
Continue reading the main story

The Big Money Test takes about 25 minutes Results include advice from money saving expert Martin Lewis Take Lab UK's Big Money Test

misers fear becoming penniless and have trouble enjoying the benefits of their money

spenders shop in an often uncontrolled manner, particularly when feeling low - and get a short-lived high, often followed by guilt

tycoons see money as a route to power and approval, and believe wealth will make them happy

bargain hunters feel superior when they get discounts, and feel angry if expected to pay full price

gamblers feel exhilarated when taking chances, and find it hard to stop - even when losing - as a win brings a sense of power.

Brian Capon, who in the 1970s was assistant manager at Midland bank branches in the UK says state of mind affects the way people approach financial decisions. "Someone who has just found the car or house of their dreams can be so focused on borrowing the cash to buy it that they might not be too bothered about the interest rate they pay, or how accurate the information is.
Continue reading the main story

'Mood' spending had to be in cash - so if you didn't have the cash, you couldn't spend it
Brian Capon on the 1970s

"Often the focus can be much more on getting the cash rather than whether they can afford to repay it," says Capon, who now works for the British Bankers' Association. In his day, a bank knew customers' lives - and money habits inside out. "The manager or assistant manager used to look through all the

credit slips and cheques every day, and over a period of time could build up a picture of customers' spending habits. "The general feeling was that you shouldn't spend what you didn't have, and you should save up to buy something you wanted. Because not many people had a bank account or easy access to credit, 'mood' spending had to be in cash - so if you didn't have the cash, you couldn't spend it." How times have changed. Britain's debt mountain, including mortgages and credit cards, is 1.46tn, close to a record high - even though homeowners paid off more of their mortgage borrowings in 2010 than in any other single year.

Instead of spending, many are paying off mortgages

Levels of personal debt started to shoot up in the 1980s when relaxation of the rules made lending and borrowing far easier than

ever before. But this hasn't been matched with success in educating people to manage their money well. While today's school pupils are taught how to read bank statements and unpick financial abbreviations, Which? consumer magazine money editor James Daley says those schooled before this curriculum change rarely seek advice - unless they hit crisis point. Too many people are in denial about their finances, he says, because thinking about it makes them feel bad. "In Britain we have a tendency to be spenders rather than misers. People get locked into a lifestyle they can't afford. They should meet somebody who's been made bankrupt and find out how awful it is."
Continue reading the main story

In Britain we have a tendency to be spenders rather than misers

James Daley Which? money editor

The government should switch from campaigns, like patiently explaining annual percentage rate on loans, to shock tactics, he says. "I'm surprised we don't have public safety films about overspending and debt like the ones for smoking. That would break through to the older generations." Open University psychologist Mark Fenton-O'Creevy, another codesigner of the money test, says a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. "People whose higher education had a financial component are more likely to make mistakes with their investments. They think they know what they're doing, and make rash choices. "Think about how people get into financial trouble. A person told their credit card is about to be taken away because of serious debt cheers themselves up with a spending spree while they've still got it."

The national pastime

They know this will put further strain on their parlous finances, but shopping is their way of dealing with stress of debt. He's involved in the pan-European project xDelia to test whether innovative techniques such as immersive games might help people gain the necessary skills to make better financial decisions. The aim of the money test is to test the theory that how we manage our emotions - particularly when stressed or in an unpleasant situation - affects how we manage our money. Because knowing what APR means - or how to work out the best discount, or read a bank statement - is just a part of it.

2011-04-23 14:43:011258 0

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 (Mark Fenton-OCreevy)

xDeliathe pan-European project xDelia

How China Will Crash And Burn (663)

Jul.

6 2011 - 5:56 pm | 7,789 views | 0 recommendations | 5 comments

posted by VITALIY KATSENELSON

Will it end badly?

Party rulers in China are trapped in a position that chess players deeply fear zugzwang where any move made puts you at disadvantage. In China, the potential cost of both action and inaction is economic collapse. China is slowly starting to face the consequences of its actions loans grew over 30% a year over the last few years and inflation is rising fast. Inflation in developed countries is unpleasant, but it

is tolerable. For a developing country and China, despite its size, is still a developing country it can be catastrophic. In developed countries, we spend two or three times less on food as a percentage of our income as do people in developing countries. Therefore, though food inflation is unpleasant, we have a much greater tolerance (margin of safety) for it. While food inflation the U.S. can mean fewer trips to restaurants or no summer vacation, food inflation in China leads to hunger. The Chinese government is desperately trying to put the brakes on the economy. It is shutting off lending to land developers and has raised bank reserve requirements five times this year. However, its success on the inflation front will likely lead to a slowdown of the economy and high unemployment. Ironically, those were the issues party planners tried to cure when they stimulated the hell out of the economy over the last few years. China bulls are arguing that the almighty Chinese

government will be able to soft-land the economy. Unlikely, Id say. Forced lending was at the core of Chinese economic growth. Simply put, there is too much debt to go bad. According to Ernst and Young, one-third of the $700 billion in loans taken out by local governments may face repayment problems. The Peoples Bank of China estimates that Chinese banks exposure to local government loans is 14 trillion yuan ($2.2 trillion), according to the June 17 South China Morning Post. Once lending is cut off, property prices will stop appreciating (and likely collapse that is what usually happens in a Ponzi scheme). Also, the overcapacity in the industrial sector and commercial real estate will come to the surface. And suddenly everyone will discover that the venerable emperor has no clothes. I often hear the argument that China will not have a real estate crisis of U.S. proportions because home and condo owners have to put 30-40% down when they buy. So where do people get the money to buy

a house that costs, on average, 8 times their annual income (a figure several times higher than in the U.S.)? Some of it comes from savings, and some comes from borrowing from relatives. Lets pause for a second. In the 1990s, the Chinese banking system basically collapsed. To revive it, the Chinese government took bad loans from banks balance sheets and put them into off-balance-sheet vehicles (Enron would be proud of that financial ingenuity). Banks started to function as though nothing had happened. To finance the off-balancesheet assets, the government set deposit interest rates at very low levels: 1% or so. In a country with a very high savings rate and 5% inflation, this resulted in a 4% annual loss of purchasing power. Chinese consumers were punished severely over the last 10 years for the banking crisis of the late 90s. And theyll be punished even more soon. Keeping money in the bank didnt make that much sense, and investment alternatives were limited. However, they could invest in an asset that supposedly never

declines in price a house or condo. So they did. As China slams the brakes on the economy and as housing prices fall, the banks will lose plenty of money. But more importantly, it is the people who bought tremendously overpriced houses, and their relatives who lent them money, who will lose. The wealth and hard work of more than one generation will be lost, and this kind of pain leads to political unrest. That is the Chinese blacks swan!

iDo98
2011-07-11 20:19:15 | 716 | 4 Tags: | | | |

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Gay rights

Late starter's advantage in China

(409)
Jul 7th 2011, 13:41 by M.S.

WHO said this on Monday?

There is no doubt that the sexual orientation of certain people in our midst are different from the rest of us. But they are also diligently contributing to society. Gay people, like us, have the right to exist and develop themselves in society, and this right should not be overtaken by any other concept.

If you said "an anchorman on official Chinese state media", you either live in Shanghai or you're just crazily well-informed. The statement by CCTV presenter Qiu Qiming was part of a harsh criticism of L Liping, the Chinese film star who won the Golden Horse Best Actress Award in 2010. L is a born-again Christian, and she apparently approvingly retweeted some harsh anti-gay comments by a Chinese evangelical pastor in Rochester, New York, after that state approved gay marriage last week. As a result, she was

uninvited from this year's Golden Horse Awards in relatively gay-friendly Taiwan. A lot of the immense economic growth in China over the past three decades has been fueled by Late Starters' Advantage, the ability of underdeveloped countries to achieve extremely rapid development just by implementing technologies and forms of organisation that have already been worked out in more advanced countries. It would be nice if, in some areas at least, the Late Starters' Advantage also allowed societies to leapfrog quickly over decades of social struggle on other issues, such as gay rights. I think this actually does happen to a limited extent; autocratic societies that go democratic these days usually don't have to pass through a long phase in which only men have the franchise. And here we have semi-official Shanghai opinion surprisingly close behind public opinion in Shanghai-on-the-Hudson. In other ways things are obviously much more complicated, and gay rights in Confucian-Communist societies are likely to develop in very different ways due to different ideas about romance, marriage, familial duties and procreation. But this does seem to me to be in part a sign that the "liberal" aspects

of liberal capitalism may not be doing as badly in autocratic East Asia as Amy Chua thinks. Democratic political rights may be a long way off, but the idea that people should basically leave each other alone to enjoy the pursuit of wealth and the good life as they see it is, I think, broadly appealing in contemporary East Asian urban society.

Sleepwalking into the future

Posted By David E. Hoffman Share Monday, July 11, 2011 - 2:57 PM

Only two countries on Earth possess thousands of nuclear warheads: the United States and Russia. Together, they account for 95 percent of the existing 20,500 weapons; no other nation has more than a few hundred. Despite the new U.S.-Russia strategic arms limitation treaty, there is plenty of room for deeper reductions in these two arsenals, including tactical nuclear weapons, which have never been covered by a treaty, and strategic nuclear weapons held in reserve.This December will mark the 20th anniversary of the Soviet collapse and end of the Cold War, a largely peaceful finale to an enormous, costly competition between two blocs and two colossal military machines. Todays threats are different: terrorism, cyber attacks, pandemics, proliferation and conventional wars. As Leon Panetta told the Senate Armed Services Committee at his confirmation hearing to be Secretary of Defense: We are no longer in the Cold War. This is more like the

blizzard war, a blizzard of challenges that draw speed and intensity from terrorism, from rapidly developing technologies and the rising number of powers on the world stage.Yet the United States and Russia, no longer adversaries, seem to be sleepwalking toward the future. Perhaps the drift is the result of the approaching election season in both countries. Unfortunately, politics makes it harder to embrace new thinking. But honestly, havent we learned anything in two decades?Instead of moving to the next stage in reducing nuclear arsenals, the two countries are debating stale arguments of yesteryear.Take missile defense. A generation ago, President Reagan proposed research into a global shield to defend against ballistic missiles. At the Reykjavik summit in 1986, Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev came close to a deal that would have dramatically slashed offensive strategic nuclear arms. But it fell apart because Reagan insisted on his dream of a global missile defense shield. Even today, many Americans remember this dramatic moment as a triumph by Reagan. The globestraddling shield was never built, although one legacy of that era is that missile defense still enjoys enormous political support in Congress. Many of the vexing technical hurdles to building an effective sheild remain unresolved.Today, a fresh divide over missile defense separates East and West. It should not be as

momentous as the last one. NATO and Russia are discussing a U.S. plan to build a limited European ballistic missile defense system, known as the Phased Adaptive Approach, largely aimed at defending against medium-range missiles from Iran. The scope would be more modest than Reagans 1983 idea. Nonetheless, Russian officials have expressed fear that improvements in the NATO system by the end of this decade could threaten Moscows nuclear deterrent. Russia has asked NATO for legal guarantees that the system would not be used to neutralize its strategic missiles. In response, NATO has been trying to hammer out a method of cooperationtwo hands on the joystick?to meet the Russian concerns, so far without success. The Russians have been warning that should this effort stall, it may not be possible to negotiate deeper cuts in existing nuclear arsenals. Also, partly in response to uncertainty over missile defense, Russia has taken the first steps to design a new liquid-fueled, multiple-warhead intercontinental ballistic missile. Such a project would take years, huge investments, and might never materialize, but it has appeared on the drawing boards.These may be just negotiating feints. But it will be a real shame if an impasse over missile defense prevents progress on negotiations for deeper cuts in existing nuclear arsenals, or if it begets a new weapons system.

Last week, one of Russias leading defense industry chiefs, Yuri Solomonov, who heads the Moscow Heat Technology Institute, which built the Topol-M and Bulava missiles, presented some hard truths in an interview published by the newspaper Kommersant. He called plans to build a new heavy liquid-fueled missile outright stupidity. On missile defense, he said there has been talk about a shield for half a century; nothing has come of it, and nothing will come of it. He said ballistic missile defense would always be easier to defeat with countermeasures, which Russia has developed. So, lets hope NATO and Russia can find a way to agree on limited missile defense, if only to pave the way for genuine cooperation on whats really important: reducing the existing outsized nuclear arsenals. Should arms control negotiations stall, and Russia builds the new heavy missile, it will stimulate a response in the United States, where the military services are already preparing modernization plans for the next generation of subs, missiles and aircraft to carry nuclear weapons. A new Russian heavy missile would be just the threat they need to justify massive new spending. A revived nuclear arms race is the last thing the world needs to mark the 20th anniversary of the end of the Cold War.

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2011-07-12 23:34:03 | 98 | 0 Tags: | | |

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Chinas economic chess game

July 11, 2011 12:01 pm by Josh Noble

What would stagflation with Chinese characteristics look like? While the traditional meaning of the word is negative or sluggish growth coupled with rising inflation, China could be experiencing its own version, based on recent data. Weekend figures for trade and CPI showed that, yes, China is slowing while inflation is picking up. Inflation in June hit 6.4 per cent, above market consensus, while import figures pointed to softening domestic demand. So is stagflation looming over the horizon? Not in the traditional sense. Chinese growth rates are still miles off being negative or even sluggish. Wednesdays upcoming GDP release for the second quarter will surely confirm this, though the risk of some level of disappointment looks

to be growing. But a mild form of stagflation where growth moderates and inflation remains sticky doesnt look too far-fetched. Though many analysts say price rises have peaked, few expect CPI readings to tumble in the coming months. The fact that core inflation rates hit a three-year high in June adds some weight to this view inflation rates wont be brought down by one good harvest (though a sudden drop in pork prices would help). Growth, meanwhile, is clearly moderating. Recent manufacturing data have shown slowing production growth, and government statements that declare inflation to be the top priority suggest policy will remain focused on reining in credit, not giving exporters a boost. Perhaps a better way of describing the situation has been put forward by Vitaliy Katsenelson of Investment Management Associates, writing for Forbes.com. China, he says, is stuck in zugzwang. The term comes from chess and describes a situation in which any move will put a

player in a worse position. How does that apply to China? Raise rates much further, and a lending shock could force a hard landing (something most analysts insist is still a very remote possibility). But raise rates too slowly, and inflation could speed back to dizzying levels (2008 was bad but the mid-1990s, when CPI hit almost 30 per cent, were frightening). No wonder the market is split over whether further rate hikes are coming. Traders, meanwhile, are trimming their bets on the renminbi.