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When Charles Dickens fell out with America

2012-02-14T05:18:00.000-08:00

When Charles Dickens fell out with America

Photography was in its infancy in the 1840s. These portraits date from 1860

In today's Magazine

On his first visit to America in 1842, English novelist Charles Dickens was greeted like a modern rock star. But the trip soon turned sour, as Simon Watts reports.

On Valentine's Day, 1842, New York hosted one of the grandest events the city had ever seen - a ball in honour of the English novelist Charles Dickens.

Dickens was only 30, but works such as Oliver Twist and the Pickwick Papers had already made him the most famous writer in the world.

The cream of New York society hired the grandest venue in the city - the Park Theatre - and decorated it with wreaths and paintings in honour of the illustrious visitor.

There was even a bust of Dickens hanging from one of the theatre balconies, with an eagle appearing to soar over his head.

Dickens and his wife, Catherine, danced most of the night in the company of around 3,000 guests.

"If I should live to grow old," the novelist told a dinner the following night, "the scenes of this and other evenings will shine as brightly to my dull eyes 50 years hence as now".

But a visit which had started so well quickly turned into a bitter dispute, known as the "Quarrel with America".

Enthusiastic fans

“Start Quote

I am disappointed.... This is not the republic of my imagination”

Charles Dickens in a letter to his friend, William Macready

As a committed social reformer, Dickens wanted to use his trip to find out if American democracy was an improvement on class-ridden Victorian England.

The novelist particularly enjoyed Boston, his first port of call.

His hosts watched in amazement as he charged through the snowy streets with delight, reading aloud the signs on the shops.

But little by little, the enthusiasm of his American fans began to overwhelm him.

When Dickens's boat made a stopover in Cleveland, he awoke to find a "party of gentlemen" staring through the cabin window as his wife lay in bed.

"If I turn into the street, I am followed by a multitude," Dickens complained in a letter.

"I can't drink a glass of water, without having 100 people looking down my throat when I open my mouth to swallow."

'Fellow animals'

The novelist was particularly irritated by Americans who tried to make money out of his fame.

Find out more

Dickens in America by Simon Watts was broadcast on the BBC World Service history programme Witness

In New York, the jewellers Tiffany's had made copies of a Dickens bust and an enterprising barber is said to have tried to sell locks of the writer's hair.

Then, there were the table manners of the Americans that Dickens was forced to share meals with as he travelled around the country.

In his travel book, American Notes, Dickens describes Mid-Westerners at dinner as "so many fellow animals", who "strip social sacraments of everything but the mere satisfaction of natural cravings".

"The longer Dickens rubbed shoulders with Americans, the more he realised that the Americans were simply not English enough," says Professor Jerome Meckier, author of Dickens: An Innocent Abroad.

"He began to find them overbearing, boastful, vulgar, uncivil, insensitive and above all acquisitive."

'Tobacco-tinctured saliva'

Dickens had scheduled a whole week in Washington to see if American politics lived up to his high hopes.

Martin Chuzzlewit was written after Charles Dickens returned to England from his North American trip

He visited the Capitol, met American politicians and attend President John Tyler's morning reception at the White House.

But by now Dickens was in such a foul mood that his enduring memory of the city was the tobacco-spitting he saw in the streets.

"Washington may be called the head-quarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva," Dickens fumed in American Notes. "The thing itself is an exaggeration of nastiness, which cannot be outdone."

As for the politicians, Dickens concluded that, like everyone else in America, they were motivated by money, not ideals.

"I am disappointed," he wrote in a famous letter. "This is not the republic of my imagination."

Washington, Dickens blasted in American Notes, was the home of: "Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public officers; and cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers".

Pirated editions

By this stage in the trip, Americans were as annoyed with Dickens as the novelist was with them.

The issue was a very modern one - intellectual property.

Courier and Enquirer's furious response to American Notes:

Mr Dickens is a young man who knows nothing of this world, of society, or of government, but what he picked up as a "flash reporter" and penny-a-liner when connected with some of the most scurrilous of the vile presses with which London abounds. No person of ordinary intelligence can get up from the perusal of these "notes" without feeling that the great aim of the writer is produce the impression among the English readers that he is really somebody, and possesses all those niceties of feeling and sensitiveness of contact with the vulgar mass, so frequently assumed by the low-bred scullion unexpectedly advanced from the kitchen to the parlour...

Courier and Enquirer, 17 November 1842

In 1842, there were no international copyright laws so Americans could read Dickens's works for free in pirated editions.

Once Dickens saw how popular he was in the US, he realised he could virtually double his income if his American fans started paying a going rate for his work.

"I am the greatest loser alive by the present law," he complained in letters home.

Dickens raised the matter with his American audiences as tactfully as he could.

At literary dinners, he argued that a copyright law would help American writers as much as him, and he stressed that he would "rather have the affectionate regard of my fellowmen as I would have heaps and mines of gold".

But the American press turned on Dickens, accusing him of mixing pleasure and business.

"We are mortified and grieved that he should have been guilty of such great indelicacy and impropriety," said the New York Courier and Enquirer, then the country's most popular paper.

"The entire press of the Union was predisposed to be his eulogist, but he urged those assembled (not just to) do honour to his genius, but to look after his purse also."

Dickens's visit to America ended with both sides accusing each other of being vulgar money-grabbers.

'Traitor'

On his return to England, Dickens published two books about his American trip.

As well as the scathing travel writing of American Notes, he satirised the country viciously in a section of Martin Chuzzlewit, his next major novel.

To the American press, the books were a libel on their country.

"We are all described as a filthy, gormandizing race," raged an article in the Courier and Enquirer, which was edited by James Watson Webb.

It described Dickens as a "low-bred scullion... who for more than half his life has lived in the stews of London".

Many of the friends Dickens had made in America, such as the novelist, Washington Irving, were also outraged and struggled to forgive him for ridiculing their country in print.

"Americans felt they'd welcomed Dickens into their country as a hero," says Prof Meckier, "and now there was a sense he was a traitor."

'Silver sunshine'

For some Dickens scholars, the "Quarrel With America" marks a significant shift in his work.

"Dickens had a traumatising experience in America," argues Prof Meckier. "He became less radical, less optimistic, and he downgraded his view of human nature."

Highlights of Charles Dickens's 1842 itinerary

January 22: Arrived Boston
February 2: Visited mills at Lowel, Massachusetts
February 13: Arrived New York by boat
February 14: Ball at Park Theatre
March 2: Visited Tombs Prison and Public Department
March 6: Arrived Philadelphia
March 10: Visited Capitol and White House
March 13: Dinner at the White House
March 29: Arrived Pittsburgh
April 4: Arrived Cincinnati
April 10: Arrived St Louis
April 26- May 3: Niagara Falls
May 4- 29: Visited Canada
June 7: Left New York for England

Source: Charles Dickens in America by William Glyde Wilkins

Dickens expressed his darker world view in later novels such as David Copperfield and Bleak House.

But despite the "quarrel", these books sold as well as his early works. And it was the novelist's enduring popularity with American readers that eventually ended the dispute.

Towards the end of his life, Dickens began holding wildly popular public readings from works such as A Christmas Carol.

He sent a scout to assess if the American public would react as well as his fans in England, and after getting favourable reports, he returned to the US in 1867 and 1868.

Dickens needn't have worried about his reception.

"To say that his audience followed him with delight hardly expresses the interest with which they hung upon his every word," wrote the Boston Journal.

"It was not Dickens, but the creation of his genius, that seemed to live and talk before the spectators."

Almost all of Dickens's American critics were won over by his performances, and the quarrel was declared to be over.

"Dickens' second coming was needed to disperse every cloud and every doubt," said the New York Tribune, "and to place his name undimmed in the silver sunshine of American admiration".

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Google Motorola bid approved in EU and US

2012-02-14T05:16:00.000-08:00

Google Motorola bid approved in EU and US

Google aims to strengthen its patent portfolio with the Motorola takeover

US regulators have approved Google's $12.5bn (£7.9bn) bid for phone maker Motorola Mobility, hours after it won clearance from European authorities.

The European Commission ruled the deal would not raise competition issues in the market for operating systems for devices like mobile phones or tablets.

Regulators in the US agreed, although both authorities vowed to monitor the company and rivals' use of patents.

Approval from China, Taiwan and Israel is needed before the deal is completed.

Motorola split in two last year, prompting Google to bid for the section that makes phones and tablet computers in a bid to gain access to more than 17,000 of Motorola Mobility's patents.

'Important milestone'

EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said in a statement that regulators did not think the deal would diminish competition.

But he added: "The commission will continue to keep a close eye on the behaviour of all market players in the sector, particularly the increasingly strategic use of patents."

Last month, European regulators launched an investigation into whether Samsung was using some of its key patents to hinder competitors.

Google vice-president Don Harrison said in a blog post the EU approval was an "important milestone" which moved the company closer to closing the deal.

Android access

"As we outlined in August, the combination of Google and Motorola Mobility will help supercharge Android," he said.

"It will also enhance competition and offer consumers faster innovation, greater choice and wonderful user experiences."

The European Commission had originally intended to rule on the deal by 10 January but delayed its decision after requesting more information.

It wanted to examine whether Google might favour Motorola Mobility by making it harder for big-selling handset manufacturers, like Samsung or HTC, to use its Android operating system.

However, the commission concluded: "It is unlikely that Google would restrict the use of Android solely to Motorola, a minor player in the European Economic Area."

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Masdar - the carbon neutral city

2012-02-13T01:47:00.001-08:00

Masdar - the carbon neutral city

Powered by the sun, cooled by wind, the car-free environment of Masdar is working to become the world's first carbon neutral city in the United Arab Emirates.

Fiona Foster investigates whether the city is a model for the future or just a green mirage.

Get in touch with Fast Track via email or Facebook.

Watch Fast Track on the BBC World News channel on Saturdays at 04:30, 13:30 and 19:30 GMT or Sundays at 06:30 GMT.

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Poor America: 'Some kids are making ketchup soup'

2012-02-12T23:43:00.000-08:00

Poor America: 'Some kids are making ketchup soup'

Panorama's Hilary Andersson travelled to Whitney Elementary School in Las Vegas to meet some of America's youngest poor.

Children told of going to bed hungry and worrying about their families, while school officials said some children were resorting to eating "ketchup soup".

Panorama: Poor America, BBC One, Monday, 13 February at 20:30 GMT then available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer.

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Immune cells use 'starvation tactics' on HIV

2012-02-12T21:00:00.000-08:00

Immune cells use 'starvation tactics' on HIV

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News

The human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) attacks the immune system

Scientists have shown how some cells in the body can repel attacks from HIV by starving the virus of the building blocks of life.

Viruses cannot replicate on their own; they must hijack other cells and turn them into virus production factories.

A study, published in Nature Immunology, showed how some parts of the immune system destroy their own raw materials, stopping HIV.

It is uncertain whether this could be used in therapy, experts caution.

HIV attacks the immune system and can weaken the body's defences to the point that everyday infections become fatal.

However, not all parts of the immune system become subverted to the virus' cause. Macrophages and dendritic cells, which have important roles in orchestrating the immune response, seem to be more resistant.

Raw materials

Last year researchers identified the protein SAMHD1 as being a critical part of this resistance. Now scientists believe they know how it works.

They have shown that SAMHD1 breaks down the building blocks of DNA. So if a cell needs to make a copy of itself it will have a pool of these building blocks - deoxynucleoside triphosphates or dNTPs - which make the new copies of the DNA. However, they can also be used by viruses.

“Start Quote

How we can use the anti-retroviral action of this protein is not clear to me”

Dr Jonathan Stoye National Institute of Medical Research

The study, by an international team of researchers, showed that SAMHD1 lowered the levels of dNTPs below that needed to build viral DNA and prevented infection. When they removed SAMHD1 then those cells had higher levels of dNTPs and were infected by HIV.

The report said: "By depleting the pool of available dNTPs, SAMHD1 effectively starves the virus of a building block that is central to its replication strategy."

It is possible for macrophages and dendritic cells to produce SAMHD1 as they are "mature cells" which do not go on to produce new cells.

Prof Baek Kim, one of the researchers from the University of Rochester Medical Center, said: "It makes sense that a mechanism like this is active in macrophages.

"Macrophages literally eat up dangerous organisms, and you don't want those organisms to have available the cellular machinery needed to replicate and macrophages themselves don't need it, because they don't replicate.

"So macrophages have SAMHD1 to get rid of the raw material those organisms need to copy themselves. It's a great host defence."

Is a world without Aids possible?

Dr Jonathan Stoye, virologist at the Medical Research Council National Institute of Medical Research, was part of the team which determined the chemical structure of SAMHD1 last year and predicted that it would attack the dNTPs.

"We hypothesised that it works in this fashion and the paper tells us we were right. It is depleting cells of these dNTPs, in cells which are not proliferating (dividing)."

However, some cells do need to divide to boost numbers as part of the immune defence. Such as CD4 cells which are the prime target for HIV infection.

"Cells which are proliferating would be in trouble if we took dNTPs away," Dr Stoye said.

He added: "How we can use the anti-retroviral action of this protein is not clear to me."

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Ape versus machine: Do primates enjoy computer games?

2012-02-08T00:09:00.000-08:00

Ape versus machine: Do primates enjoy computer games?

By Ella Davies & Anna-Louise Taylor Reporters, BBC Nature

Liz Bonin witnesses Ayumu's incredible skill

A chimp genius can complete a computer memory test in less time than it takes the average person to blink - and much faster than any human rival. But do the world's cleverest animals enjoy these cognitive tasks?

Ayumu, who was born and raised in Japan's Kyoto University, can remember the location and order of a set of numbers in record time. Sixty milliseconds to be precise.

Of course, it is not "natural" behaviour for a chimp to interact with a computer screen, but scientists suggest this type of task could be good for captive apes.

Ayumu's record stands at 60 milliseconds

"Unfortunately, captive great apes often exhibit behavioural signs of boredom, frustration and stress," says Fay Clark from the Royal Veterinary College's Centre for Animal Welfare.

Working with the Zoological Society of London, Ms Clark has recently published a review of research investigating whether challenges that get captive apes thinking can enhance their well-being.

"If an ape does not receive enough cognitive challenge in life, this can lead to abnormal behaviours or a lack of interest in the environment," she tells BBC Nature.

"The key is for scientists to develop challenges which are relevant, motivating, and ultimately solvable if they are going to be used as enrichment."

Chimp's challenge

Intelligent animals:

Killer whale: Different pods have developed unique "dialects". A killer whale calf is most likely to learn a dialect from its mother.

Chimp: Wild chimpanzees use at least 66 distinct gestures to communicate with each other.

Octopus: The creatures have been filmed scooping up halved coconut shells and using them as shelters.

Carrion crow: Drop hard nuts on to roads and collect the food after passing cars have cracked them.

Dolphin: Dolphins often make "play" activities more challenging for themselves as time goes on, research suggests.

Otters: Pass down shell-cracking skills to their young. It can take a pup six months to learn how to crack a shell against a stone rested on its belly.

Sumatran orangutan: Observed using objects as tools, including leaves as "toilet paper", large leaves as "umbrellas" and modifying sticks to gather insects.

Watch the world's smartest animals in action

As one of the world's longest-running laboratory-based studies of chimpanzees, the Ai Project has been investigating chimp intelligence for over 30 years.

Professor Tetsuro Matsuzawa began his research with a one-year-old female chimp Ai, the namesake of the project, in 1977.

Over the years the team investigated Ai's brain power by observing her as she learned to complete tasks including number and object recognition.

In 2000, Ai gave birth to a son, Ayumu, who has since become the number-crunching star of the study, and features in the series Super Smart Animals, for BBC One and the Discovery Channel.

Ayumu's daily routine resembles that of many 11-year-olds: sleep, eat, play and learn.

During his "study sessions" he receives a treat every time he correctly remembers the location of the numbers on screen and selects them in order.

"Ayumu and others can do the task with social praise. Food reward is not the essential matter," Prof Matsuzawa says.

He says the chimps all go to the testing room of their own free will, and "they love to do so".

"It is not only Ayumu but also the other young ones who have the better memory than naive human adults," he says.

Because great apes are "highly individual", it is important to tailor challenges to them, says Ms Clark.

"Some will not be motivated to interact with computer screens," she says. "Some are highly motivated by food rewards; some by human contact."

Ayumu completes his tasks for food but also social praise, says Prof Matsuzawa

At Zoo Atlanta in Georgia, US, a group of orangutans are being closely watched. In 2007, a touch screen cunningly disguised in a tree was installed in their enclosure.

"We have specific programmes to look at how they learn," says Dr Tara Stoinski, who leads the study. "They are not games, [the orangutans] are doing problem-solving."

The apes currently have the opportunity to match symbols to photographs on the screen and their moves are studied by researchers at Emory University.

When they correctly categorise a photograph they are rewarded with a small pellet of food.

"It's not like they're getting jackpot of sweets," says Dr Stoinski, who explains that the orangutans are content to interact with the screen even when the dispenser runs out of pellets.

"For some of them it is inherently rewarding," she tells BBC Nature.

The research team say they have made careful observations to ensure the apes are not negatively influenced by the presence of the "learning tree".

Orangutans at Zoo Atlanta continue problem solving even when food rewards run out

"We were aware that introducing the tasks could cause competition in the group which could have negative effects - it could create some tension.

"So we evaluated it from that standpoint but we didn't find that.

"Our animals they seem to be very happy with the division of labour."

In contrast to the "undercover" enrichment in Atlanta, orangutans in Milwaukee County Zoo, Wisconsin have been presented with the latest in modern technology.

Apes with iPads

Last Christmas, charity Orangutan Outreach began trialling iPad interaction with the apes.

"They've been using the paint application, they love watching videos on them but they haven't really played many complex games," says Richard Zimmerman.

Zoo keepers want to build reinforced tablets so they can leave the orangutans to play without human help

It is early days for the project yet but Mr Zimmerman tells BBC Nature that researchers at Toronto Zoo are now helping to quantify how the apes are interacting with the tablets.

"It's not really toy-like because they are engaging with them as devices... it's definitely going in the cognitive direction."

As a conservation charity, Mr Zimmerman says Orangutan Outreach's key concern is enrichment and helping to raise people's awareness of the animal's plight in the wild.

But by introducing devices to more research-focused centres, including Zoo Atlanta, they hope they will provide more scientific insights.

Orangutans are clearly fascinated by unfamiliar objects but does it matter that these tasks do not mirror natural challenges?

"Tasks do not need to be 'naturalistic', by resembling a tree or a fruit, to be effective," says Ms Clark.

"Research suggests that in terms of animal welfare, it's more important for tasks to be motivating and 'functional' rather than looking natural."

Joystick games

We share 97% of our DNA with orangutans and 99% with chimpanzees so it is perhaps unsurprising that we have common interests.

But it is not just the great apes getting in on the interaction.

Professor John David Smith, from State University of New York at Buffalo and Michael Beran, from Georgia State University have trained macaque monkeys to use a joystick-based computer game.

When uncertain of the correct answer, macaques choose to skip the question and continue the game

To indicate whether the density of a pixel box that appeared at the top of the screen was either sparse or dense the monkeys had to simply move the cursor towards a letter S or a letter D.

"Rhesus monkeys can be trained to use joysticks to complete a variety of computer 'games' or tasks, and the animals readily and freely engage with these tasks for many hours of the day," explains Dr Beran.

"A number of studies suggest that the monkeys come to prefer having the computer apparatus available, to not having it available, even when the alternative is free food."

For Dr Beran, the computer games do not just enrich the lives of the monkeys, they can offer other important insights.

"In our lab perhaps the clearest indicator to us of impending illness or psychological distress in a monkey is a drop in his performance or in his production on his computer games," he explains.

Professor Smith adds: "In a sense, I think, the tasks are their 'Sudoku'.

"I have the impression that our tasks are appropriate and positive aspects of our animals' lives."

As advances in technology improve our lives they are also providing opportunities for us to learn more about our primate cousins, and enrich the experiences of those we study.

Ayumu the chimp features in Super Smart Animals on Wednesday 8 February, 20:00 GMT on BBC One.

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Lessig: 'Money Buys Results in Congress'

2012-02-04T00:39:00.000-08:00

Lessig: 'Money Buys Results in Congress'

AMAZING video and must watch for everyone!

http://fora.tv/2012/01/17/How_Money_Corrupts_Congress_and_a_Plan_to_Stop_It#fullprogram

Science meets art in annual contest

2012-02-02T23:07:00.000-08:00

In pictures: Science meets art in annual contest

In cell division, the cell membrane (blue) stretches, while the genetic storehouses called chromosomes (yellow) split into identical sets. This illustration from University of California and Salk Institute researchers is built up of real image "slices" of a cell caught in the act, assembled into a striking 3-D whole.

Next image |

Previous image |

|previous

Source(Go to source to see all pictures)

Pakistan helping Afghan Taliban - Nato

2012-02-01T00:49:00.000-08:00

Pakistan helping Afghan Taliban - Nato

The report comes at a sensitive time in Pakistan-Nato relations

Taliban Conflict

The Taliban in Afghanistan are being directly assisted by Pakistani security services, according to a secret Nato report seen by the BBC.

The leaked report, derived from thousands of interrogations, claims the Taliban remain defiant and have wide support among the Afghan people.

A BBC correspondent says the report is painful reading for international forces and the Afghan government.

A Pakistani foreign ministry spokesman called the accusations "ridiculous".

"We are committed to non-interference in Afghanistan and expect all other states to strictly adhere to this principle," Abdul Basit told the BBC.

"A stable and peaceful Afghanistan is in our own interests. We cannot indulge in any activity which takes us away from achieving that objective," he added.

The report alleges that Pakistan knows the locations of senior Taliban leaders.

"We have long been concerned about ties between elements of the ISI [Pakistan's intelligence service] and some extremist networks," said US Pentagon spokesman Captain John Kirby, adding that the US Defence Department had not yet seen the report.

Pakistan Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar is currently in Kabul for talks with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

'Informational'

“Start Quote

The Taliban are not Islam - the Taliban are Islamabad”

Senior al-Qaeda detainee, quoted by the report

The BBC's Quentin Sommerville in Kabul says the report - on the state of the Taliban - fully exposes for the first time the relationship between the ISI and the Taliban.

The report is based on material from 27,000 interrogations with more than 4,000 captured Taliban, al-Qaeda and other foreign fighters and civilians.

It notes: "Pakistan's manipulation of the Taliban senior leadership continues unabatedly".

It says that Pakistan is aware of the locations of senior Taliban leaders.

Analysis

Aleem Maqbool BBC News, Islamabad

Pakistan is finding it harder to convince outsiders it is not helping the Afghan Taliban and giving safe haven to its leaders.

In effect, the accusation is that Pakistan is betting on the insurgents being the strongest power in Afghanistan and most likely ally once Nato leaves - something Islamabad of course strenuously denies.

The leak of this report comes at a particularly sensitive time. Pakistan is already blocking the supply route to coalition forces in Afghanistan, following a Nato attack in which 24 Pakistani soldiers were killed.

With increasing pressure being heaped on Pakistan, public support here for formally ending co-operation with the West simply grows.

"Senior Taliban representatives, such as Nasiruddin Haqqani, maintain residences in the immediate vicinity of ISI headquarters in Islamabad," it said.

It quotes a senior al-Qaeda detainee as saying: "Pakistan knows everything. They control everything. I can't [expletive] on a tree in Kunar without them watching."

"The Taliban are not Islam. The Taliban are Islamabad."

Our correspondent says the report seems to suggest that the Taliban feel trapped by ISI control and fear they will never escape its influence.

However, it states: "As this document is derived directly from insurgents it should be considered informational and not necessarily analytical."

Despite Nato's strategy to secure the country with Afghan forces, the secret document details widespread collaboration between the insurgents and Afghan police and military.

Lt Col Jimmie Cummings, a spokesman for Nato's International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) in Afghanistan, said the document was "a classified internal document that is not meant to be released to the public".

"It is a matter of policy that documents that are classified are not discussed under any circumstances," he said.

The report also depicts the depth of continuing support among the Afghan population for the Taliban, our correspondent says.

It paints a picture of al-Qaeda's influence diminishing but the Taliban's influence increasing, he adds.

Taliban influence

Villagers often prefer the Taliban to "corrupt" Afghan authorities, the report alleges

In a damning conclusion, the document says that in the last year there has been unprecedented interest, even from members of the Afghan government, in joining the Taliban cause.

It adds: "Afghan civilians frequently prefer Taliban governance over the Afghan government, usually as a result of government corruption."

The report has evidence that the Taliban are purposely hastening Nato's withdrawal by deliberately reducing their attacks in some areas and then initiating a comprehensive hearts-and-minds campaign.

It says that in areas where Isaf has withdrawn, Taliban influence has increased, often with little or no resistance from government security forces. And in many cases, with the active help of the Afghan police and army.

When foreign soldiers leave, Afghan security forces are expected to take control.

The report says that surrender is far from their collective mindset.

"For the moment, they believe that continuing the fight and expanding Taliban governance are their only viable courses of action," it adds.

According to the report, rifles, pistols and heavy weapons have been sold by Afghan security forces in bazaars in Pakistan.

The report adds that Taliban members "do not receive salaries or other financial incentives for their work", but their operations are funded by the narcotics trade and they frequently take a cut from the trade.

Their main revenue, though, is from donations, and they travel around the country from door to door making no secret of their affliation, it says.

Follow BBC Kabul correspondent Quentin Sommerville on Twitter @mrsommerville

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Skin transformed into brain cells

2012-01-31T23:32:00.000-08:00

Skin transformed into brain cells

By James Gallagher Health and science reporter, BBC News

Skin cells have been converted directly into cells which develop into the main components of the brain, by researchers studying mice in California.

The experiment, reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, skipped the middle "stem cell" stage in the process.

The researchers said they were "thrilled" at the potential medical uses.

Far more tests are needed before the technique could be used on human skin.

Stem cells, which can become any other specialist type of cell from brain to bone, are thought to have huge promise in a range of treatments. Many trials are taking place, such as in stroke patients or specific forms of blindness.

One of the big questions for the field is where to get the cells from. There are ethical concerns around embryonic stem cells and patients would need to take immunosuppressant drugs as any stem cell tissue would not match their own.

An alternative method has been to take skin cells and reprogram them into "induced" stem cells. These could be made from a patient's own cells and then turned into the cell type required, however, the process results in cancer-causing genes being activated.

“Start Quote

We are thrilled about the prospects for potential medical use of these cells”

Prof Marius Wernig Stanford University School of Medicine

Direct approach

The research group, at the Stanford University School of Medicine in California, is looking at another option - converting a person's own skin cells into specialist cells, without creating "induced" stem cells. It has already transformed skin cells directly into neurons.

This study created "neural precursor" cells, which can develop into three types of brain cell: neurons, astrocytes and oligodendrocytes.

These precursor cells have the advantage that, once created, they can be grown in a laboratory into very large numbers. This could be critical if the cells were to be used in any therapy.

Brain cells and skin cells contain the same genetic information, however, the genetic code is interpreted differently in each. This is controlled by "transcription factors".

The scientists used a virus to infect skin cells with three transcription factors known to be at high levels in neural precursor cells.

After three weeks about one in 10 of the cells became neural precursor cells.

Lead researcher Prof Marius Wernig said: "We are thrilled about the prospects for potential medical use of these cells.

"We've shown the cells can integrate into a mouse brain and produce a missing protein important for the conduction of electrical signal by the neurons.

"More work needs to be done to generate similar cells from human skin cells and assess their safety and efficacy."

Dr Deepak Srivastava, who has researched converting cells into heart muscle, said the study: "Opens the door to consider new ways to regenerate damaged neurons using cells surrounding the area of injury."

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Stephen A. Smith destroys two Laker fans.

2012-01-21T01:14:00.001-08:00

Stephen A. Smith destroys two Laker fans.

Rick Perry Drops Out, Endorses Gingrich

2012-01-21T00:57:00.002-08:00

Santorum Hits Gingrich at Republican Presidential Debate

2012-01-21T00:57:00.001-08:00

Santorum Hits Gingrich at Republican Presidential Debate

The disruptive future of printing

2012-01-21T00:35:00.000-08:00

The disruptive future of printing

Will we all have printers like this in the future?

bill board

Printing solid objects is getting cheap and simpler, and the possibilities excite Bill Thompson

Imagine a school where a student could sketch out an idea for a new design of bicycle and not only draw it in 3D using a computer-aided design package but actually create a scale-model and test it out, using inexpensive materials and a special printer that they can build themselves in the classroom.

That's the vision put forward by Ben O'Steen, a software engineer with a social conscience who is thinking about the implications of a world where 3D printers are no longer just expensive prototyping systems for large companies but have fallen into the hands of the masses.

He has been inspired by the RepRap, a desktop 3D printer capable of printing plastic parts by extruding a heated thermoplastic polymer under computer control, which then sets as it cools and makes a usable object.

The RepRap project was started in 2005 by Adrian Bowyer, who teaches mechanical engineering at Bath University.

The schematics and all aspects are freely licensed for anyone to implement or adapt, and the current version, called "Mendel", can be built for around £350.

It makes objects from a cheap plastic made from corn starch, so is well within school budgets.

Future's here

“Start Quote

3D printing will soon come up against laws made in a world of factories and machine tools, and the battle is likely to be even more intense than that over music and films”

Bill Thompson

The project has inspired thousands of people around the world, with websites dedicated to helping people make their own RepRap and get it working, and online schematics for objects from coat hangers to working whistles to models of Gothic cathedrals - that one is available at a website called the 'Thingiverse'

Although I'd come across the RepRap before it had always been an abstract idea, but seeing Ben talk - at a recent conference organised by the Open Knowledge Foundation - with such enthusiasm about its potential in education and elsewhere brought home its transformative potential, and made me realise that the future has already arrived, even if it is not yet widely distributed.

And while a technology that offers people the ability to manufacture complex objects at home or in the office is enormously disruptive, we can at least see this one coming.

Some writers of speculative fiction have already started engaging with it, including Bruce Sterling, in his lovely short story "Kiosk", and Cory Doctorow, whose novel "Makers" offers us an imagined world of printed objects and an emergent culture of 3D makers who directly challenge many of the core assumptions of industrial society.

I heard Ben speak about the RepRap, along with many other programmers, scholars and activists committed to making all kinds of information available to be freely used, reused, and redistributed, from "sonnets to statistics, genes to geodata" as their website puts it.

His talk was the highlight of the day for me, partly because he had brought a collection of props with him but also because his focus on real-world objects bridged the gap between the sometimes dry discussion of open databases and LinkedData and the day-to-day experiences of the vast majority of people whose lives don't revolve around technology.

As with so many advocates of free and open source solution, Ben and his friends are also planning to turn engagement into action by offering to help groups that want their own RepRap get off the ground by printing off the plastic parts needed to build your own.

Because one of the really exciting things about the RepRap is that it can make its own parts, or at least it can make the plastic ones - you can't yet print circuit boards or metal components - so once someone has one they can help to spread the technology.

Just as the easy availability of powerful computers, large hard drives and fast networks has exposed the inadequacies of copyright laws designed in an age when infringement required a printing press or a CD-burning factory, 3D printing will soon come up against laws made in a world of factories and machine tools, and the battle is likely to be even more intense than that over music and films.

Fortunately for those of us who believe in open data and an open society the intellectual ground for a remodelling of old forms of regulation is already being prepared by the Open Knowledge Foundation and others, so I'm slightly optimistic that we won't be arguing about the provisions of the "Digital Modelling Bill" in ten years time.

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet. He is currently working with the BBC on its archive project.

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Can a company live forever?

2012-01-19T00:55:00.000-08:00

Can a company live forever?

By Kim Gittleson BBC News, New York

In 1288, Stora Enso issued the first share ever granted in a company, giving a bishop an eighth of a copper mountain

The past few years have seen previously unthinkable corporate behemoths - from financial firms such as Lehman Brothers to iconic car manufacturers such as Saab - felled by economic turmoil or by unforgiving customers and tough rivals.

And do not put away the black garb yet - the pace of corporate funerals is set to pick up.

The average lifespan of a company listed in the S&P 500 index of leading US companies has decreased by more than 50 years in the last century, from 67 years in the 1920s to just 15 years today, according to Professor Richard Foster from Yale University.

Today's rate of change "is at a faster pace than ever", he says.

Professor Foster estimates that by 2020, more than three-quarters of the S&P 500 will be companies that we have not heard of yet.

So in a world where former titan General Motors was brought to its knees a couple of years ago, requiring a government cash injection to escape bankruptcy, it seems apt to ask: How long can a company survive?

Looking eastward

The implications can be enormous when large companies go under

It is perhaps unsurprising that the country where people live the longest is also home to some of the oldest companies in the world.

In Japan, there are more than 20,000 companies that are more than 100 years old, with a handful that are more than 1,000 years old, according to credit rating agency Tokyo Shoko Research.

The list includes Nissiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a hotel founded in 705, which is thought to be the oldest company in the world.*

There is even a specific word for long-lived companies in Japanese: shinise.

So what is the key to their longevity?

"Japanese companies can survive for so long," according to Professor Makoto Kanda at Meiji Gakuin University, "because they are small, mostly family-run, and because they focus on a central belief or credo that is not tied solely to making a profit."

Local factors could be another key to their success, he says.

Shinise focus primarily on the Japanese market, from Kikkoman's products to small sake manufacturers, and they benefit from a corporate culture that has long avoided the mergers and acquisitions that are common among their Western counterparts.

"Those conditions must be sustained," says Professor Kanda. "Otherwise it will be a little bit difficult for them to continue live long."

Predicting the future

But, of course, conditions do change - and what then?

Changing with the times is essential for companies that want to survive for a long time

Although there are exceptions to every rule, the most important factor for survival is an emphasis on innovation and reinvention.

Nokia was a pulp manufacturer before it got into electricity and then mobile phones; at some point its brand name was even used on galoshes. Or take Berkshire Hathaway, which began as a textile mill in Rhode Island.

However, innovation for the sake of it is not the goal, says Vicki TenHaken, a professor of management at Hope College.

It is a focus on "little bets" that helps companies grow and keep up with the competition, she says.

In fact, the world's oldest limited liability corporation, the Finnish paper and pulp manufacturer Stora Enso, first started out as a copper mining company in 1288.

Now the company is looking into expanding into bio-energy and green construction materials, areas that it has spent several years developing.

"The next 40 years look very different from the 700 years behind us," says Stora Enso spokesman Jonas Nordlund, emphasising the company's desire to expand outside Europe in Brazil, China and Uruguay, as well as its investment in cross-laminated timber, a building material that sequesters carbon dioxide.

Balancing act

Research and development may be expensive, but it might help secure long-term survival

Innovation in general is not always easy, however, especially for publicly listed companies that must balance the concerns of capital markets and shareholders, who demand quarterly profits and who are not necessarily interested in decades-long research projects.

"Research and development is always a delicate balance between maintaining a long-term view and remaining sensitive to short-term financial objectives," observes Mark Vergnano, executive vice president of innovation at DuPont.

Mr Vergnano cites DuPont's trove of more than 37,000 patents and its early history as a gunpowder manufacturer as proof of its commitment to innovation - but acknowledges that inventions are not enough to keep the company operating from day to day.

DuPont implemented a new rule in 2010 that mandated that 30% of revenue must come from innovations the company has created in the last four years - a move that could help reassure investors who might balk at the company's $2bn research and development budget.

The problems of living forever

Yet even if a company can innovate and conditions do remain favourable, immortality does have its downsides.

For instance, there is no real proof that age makes a company any more profitable than younger companies. On the contrary, evidence from the stock market actually suggests that age could be a hindrance.

When GM filed for bankruptcy, the US government had to come to the rescue to prevent its downfall

Of the 74 or so companies that have stayed in the S&P 500 for more than 40 years, only a dozen or so have managed to beat the average, according to a study by consultancy McKinsey.

In fact, if the S&P 500 were made up of only the companies that were part of the index in 1957, overall performance would have been some 20% worse.

"When a company has run its course it gets bought," says Professor Foster.

"This is a good thing, because if the economy stops changing then productivity would go away.

"All companies would like to think that they're going to be the Methuselah, but they're not."

When to die?

Ms TenHaken agrees, although she also emphasises the toll that unplanned for or sudden deaths can have on surrounding communities - particularly her home of Michigan, which has seen its fair share of corporate funerals.

"I don't know that it's necessary to say that companies should live forever," she says.

"I think the tragedy is that companies die premature deaths. If a company dies too soon we have to ask what went wrong."

As more and more companies look set to take their final bow, the real question for those who are left may not be how to survive, but when to die.

*There is some debate over the oldest company designation. There is an older organisation, Ikenobo Kadokaia, which was founded in Kyoto in 587 AD. However, its stated purpose is the promotion of traditional floral arranging, which is not necessarily commercial in nature.

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The Big Winner of the Great Recession Is … Large Corporations

2012-01-19T00:46:00.000-08:00

The Big Winner of the Great Recession Is …

By Michael Sivy | January 18, 2012 | 13

Getty Images

The recent recession has been the most brutal since the Great Depression and has caused enormous hardship for many American families, as well as immense financial problems for governments around the world. As a result, it’s hard to see the downturn that began at the end of 2007 as anything but a catastrophe. With household incomes generally lower and poverty rates significantly higher than they were 10 years ago, it’s easy to feel that everything is falling apart. But amid the wreckage, there are some success stories that are vitally important for the recovery and the future prosperity of America.

The big winners of the recent Great Recession have been the largest U.S. corporations. This isn’t simply because they are greedy and rapacious, or because they can steamroller everything in their path. Rather, it reflects the fact that they are in a position to use the recession as a positive opportunity to restructure and become more efficient, while government, small businesses and most American households are forced by circumstances to play defense.

In every economic system, there have to be occasional corrective phases, where inefficient and uncompetitive businesses and services are eliminated, costs are lowered, and ground is cleared for new growth. But not every part of the economy is equally well positioned to do this. Government usually has to worry first about unemployment. It therefore tries to preserve current jobs and existing businesses, rather than focusing on restructuring government services to make them more effective or reforming social programs to lower their long-term costs. Most households and many small businesses give top priority to immediate concerns in a recession, because they have to respond to the short-term pain rather than the potential for long-term gain.

(More: What S&P’s Downgrades Mean for the Euro’s Future)

The organizations that have the resources to think about the future and position themselves accordingly are typically the largest corporations. Sure, some big companies have failed – most notably banks – but most have been able to take advantage of reduced labor costs and low interest rates to boost their productivity at the same time that they are strengthening their balance sheets. Consider the following:

Labor costs are down while productivity is up. The most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that quarterly productivity in manufacturing rose 5%, while unit labor costs declined 5.1%. Basically, as companies shut down their least successful business operations, they are left with the most efficient and productive ones. Moreover, wages are not keeping pace with inflation right now. In fact, adjusted for inflation, they are down 2.3% from a year ago, the biggest such decline since 1948. The overall result is that companies are getting more from their workers without having to pay them more.

Top companies are able to refinance their debt at low interest rates. The Federal Reserve’s policy of quantitative easing has made plenty of money available at low interest rates. Giant corporations with excellent credit ratings can therefore restructure their balance sheets any way they want – boosting cash on hand or locking in long-term borrowing exceptionally cheaply. As a result, the value of corporate balance sheets has risen by 28% since late 2009. Much of the needed refinancing has now been completed, although some companies, such as GM and Ford, still have big bond offerings coming up.

(VIDEO: The 99ers: The Real Lives of the Long-Term Unemployed)

Money is rolling in. Higher productivity, moderate labor costs and restructured balance sheets combine to make companies more profitable. In fact, corporate profits are now at a peak in dollar terms and close to an all-time high as a percentage of GDP. Overall, profits have more than doubled since 2000, while stock prices are actually lower than they were 12 years ago. What that means is that lots of great stocks are now cheap by historical standards.

Corporate cash holdings are immense. Nonfinancial companies are taking in hundreds of billions of dollars more than they need to fund current operations. Total cash reserves at U.S. corporations total more than $2 trillion, close to a 50-year high in relative terms. Perhaps not surprisingly, some of the companies with lots more cash on hand than they need are paying ample dividends. Oil giant Chevron, with $20 billion in cash, now offers a 3.1% yield. Chipmaker Intel, with $15 billion, now pays 3.3%. And health-care conglomerate Johnson & Johnson, with $30 billion, yields 3.5%. (I give a longer list of companies that are likely to grow dividends here.)

In part, these huge cash reserves reflect the uncertainty corporate executives feel about whether to expand right now. Demand is still soft, government policy on taxes and regulations is confused, and risks of a currency collapse in Europe are impossible to gauge. As a result, many U.S. companies are simply hunkering down and hanging onto their money until the picture gets clearer.

There’s no guarantee, of course, that the U.S. economy will continue to get better. Recent small improvements could suddenly be reversed – for example, by upheaval in Europe that leads to a worldwide double-dip recession. But at least most U.S. businesses are in better shape than they were a couple of years ago. And once a sustainable recovery does get under way, the companies that have been able to make the most of the recession’s opportunities are likely to prosper in the years to come.

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North Korea’s Runaway Sushi Chef Remembers Kim Jong Un

2012-01-19T00:45:00.000-08:00

North Korea’s Runaway Sushi Chef Remembers Kim Jong Un

By Krista Mahr | January 18, 2012 | 1

KCNA / Reuters

North Korea's new leader Kim Jong-un visits the Seoul Ryu Kyong Su 105 Guards Tank Division of the Korean People's Army (KPA) in Pyongyang, in this picture released by KCNA January 1, 2012.

Kenji Fujimoto is easy to recognize, if only because of the trademark disguise he has been wearing for the past decade or so. The long-time sushi chef to North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, Fujimoto has been laying low since returning to his native Japan in 2001, moving house frequently and wearing a variety of head gear and dark sunglasses to avoid any unwanted attention. Indeed, Kenji Fujimoto’s name is not actually Kenji Fujimoto: that is the nom de plume he has been writing under since his first book, I Was Kim Jong Il’s Chef was published in 2003.

Despite his efforts, Fujimoto does not exactly blend in with the black-clad office crowd making their way home in the purplish light of a Tokyo dusk. Sporting a silver goatee, a blue scarf wrapped snugly around his skull and blue-tinted sunglasses, the middle-aged chef-turned-author walks past Tokyo Station with a battered brown leather briefcase in hand. In a country fixated on the behavior of its secretive nuclear-armed neighbor, Fujimoto’s years of proximity to North Korea’s first family have gained him a regular spot on Japanese television, particularly in the month since the death of the Kim Jong Il on Dec. 17.

(READ: After Kim Jong Il — a look at the Kim family tree.)

Why? Fujimoto is one of the few people outside the regime’s inner circle to have been tight with the Great Leader’s heir apparent, Kim Jong Un. So tight, he says, that he insisted to his publisher that his fourth book, Successor of the North: Kim Jong Un be published on Oct. 10, 2010 – the day he predicted, through a complicated formula having to do with Kim Jong Il’s penchant for baccarat and the number 9, that Kim would name his youngest son as the next leader of North Korea.

The announcement was made to the world that day, but Fujimoto says it was years earlier, on Jong Un’s 9^th birthday, that the boy’s future came into focus. “Kim Jong Il gave him a song as a birthday gift,” he says over dinner at a Sichuan restaurant in central Tokyo. The song, whose title translates as “Sound of Footsteps,” made it clear that Jong-Un, not either of his older brothers, was the chosen one.

Fujimoto, who first moved to North Korea in 1982 and started working for Kim Jong Il in 1988, did not meet Jong Un until the boy was 7. Until then, he says, neither he nor the majority of the officials in Kim Jong Il’s entourage had even seen his two younger sons, Kim Jong Un and Kim Jong Chul. (Fujimoto has never met Kim’s eldest son, Kim Jong Nam, who is estranged from his family and lives in Macau.) Their initial greeting was tense, the former chef recalls. He put out his hand, but the young Jong Un left him hanging, staring sharply up at him as if he were “one of the notorious Japanese Imperial soldiers.” Eventually, at the urging of his father, Jong Un gave Fujimoto a limp handshake.

Nevertheless, not long after, Fujimoto was chosen to be one of the boys’ regular companions, and would play with the brothers and other kids in the family every day. From that early age, he says, “Jong Un was always the leader. He decided what to play. He always spoke for the group.” And Jong Chul, who Fujimoto describes as having a “warm heart” and being “non-aggressive,” was happy to let his younger brother take the lead. “If I was their father, I would have chosen Kim Jong Un too,” he says.

Fujimoto has high hopes for the young leader’s tenure in one of the world’s most isolated and impoverished nations. In Successor of the North: Kim Jong Un, he describes how the teenager would, unbeknownst to his father, come to Fujimoto’s room to bum an Yves Saint Laurent cigarette from the chef. (The book includes a small photograph of one of the cigarette packs.) During one of these clandestine smoke breaks, Jong Un reportedly wondered aloud how, while he was enjoying rollerblading and horseback riding on the family compound , the North Korean people were faring. “He can lead North Korea in a good direction,” Fujimoto says. “What his grandfather Kim Il Sung couldn’t do, and what his father Kim Jong Il couldn’t do, will be done by Kim Jong Un… I believe he will choose a path of change and reform.” When asked about reports that he would closely follow the policy of his father, Fujimoto says, flatly, “You are wrong.”

While Fujimoto stops short of calling Jong Un bright — “he’s not the intelligent type,” he says — he clearly had a soft spot for the kid. Under increasing state surveillance, the chef decided to leave North Korea permanently in 2001. The day before, he had a bad fall off a horse. Jong Un, who was 18 at the time, called to check on him. He insisted his childhood buddy come to a nearby guesthouse in Pyongyang where he and some friends were having a get together. “I ran over there,” recalls Fujimoto, and saw that Jong Un was drinking a bottle of expensive vodka with some of his favorite basketball players from the national team. Jong Un knew Fujimoto was leaving for Japan the next day, as he regularly did to get supplies for his kitchen. “You’re coming back, right?’” Fujimoto says he asked. He told him he would. “Then he ordered me, ‘Come back.’”

Fujimoto tears up at the recollection. “I lied to him,” he says, wiping at his eyes under his glasses. “I had already made up my mind to stay in Japan… Whenever I think about that it makes me cry.” He did, however, get a last souvenir: Kim Jong Un had been looking through old photos at the guesthouse with his friends, and gave Fujimoto an old black and white photo of himself as a young boy. Jong Un told him that he could have it, but he “could never show it to the public.” The photo – a grainy headshot of a smiling Un – graces the cover of Fujimoto’s last book.

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The Bigger Ball Drops Faster — and Other Myths of Physics

2012-01-19T00:29:00.000-08:00

The Bigger Ball Drops Faster — and Other Myths of Physics

Our minds are filled with folk science — and it gets in the way of real learning

By Annie Murphy Paul | @anniemurphypaul | January 18, 2012 | 8

Paul's latest book is Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives.

Seasons are caused by the earth’s distance from the sun. Motors and other machines use up energy. A heavier ball falls faster than a lighter one. If these propositions sound right to you, that’s only natural — they’re examples of folk science, widely-shared but faulty assumptions about how the physical world works. The prevalence and the tenacity of such beliefs poses a dilemma for science educators and for anyone who would like to claim a worldview closer to Issac Newton’s than Conan the Barbarian’s: how do we get rid of notions that hold so much intuitive appeal? Learning researchers are investigating just where these folk ideas come from and developing surprising new ways to counter them.

(MORE: Paul: What Your Eyes Say About Who You Are)

One thing is clear from the outset: traditional teaching methods don’t do much to uproot folk beliefs. Students in conventional classrooms listen to the correct explanation, read it in a textbook and may even produce it on an exam, but their bedrock assumptions remain untouched. In A Private Universe, a classic 1987 film produced by the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Harvard graduates are shown offering patently false explanations for common natural events. The problem with conventional science instruction, according to cognitive scientist Susan Carey, is that it assumes that its goal is to fill a gap in a student’s knowledge — when really the issue “is not what the student lacks, but what the student has, namely alternative conceptual frameworks for understanding the phenomena covered by the theories we are trying to teach.” In order to persuade students to embrace new and more accurate ideas about how the world operates, science teachers need to find out which “alternative conceptual frameworks” — myths — they already hew to. To that end, researchers have developed student surveys that can help instructors identify the beliefs their pupils have when they walk through the classroom door. These surveys show the same handful of misconceptions showing up again and again, espoused by strong students as well as weak ones.

Another promising approach is to directly confront individuals with the differences between their understanding and the correct one: to “offend the student’s intuition,” in the words of University of Wyoming astronomy professor Tim Slater. In a study to be published next month in the journal Learning and Instruction, scientists from the University of Pittsburgh asked one group of students to compare a diagram of their own inaccurate conception of the body’s circulatory system to an accurate drawing; a second group was required simply to explain the correct version. The students who engaged in a “confrontation” with the facts, the investigators reported, were more likely to acquire a valid mental model and a deeper understanding of the material. Researchers are now developing a variety of ways of presenting students with disconfirming evidence, such as live demonstrations, online videos, computer simulations, animated visualizations and interactive tutoring programs tailored to the student’s particular misconceptions.

(MORE: Paul: How Your Dreams Can Make You Smarter)

A third intriguing possibility is suggested by an experiment conducted by Laura-Ann Petitto and Kevin Dunbar of Dartmouth University. Two groups — one made up of advanced physics students, the other of students with very little knowledge of the subject — were shown a pair of films depicting two balls of apparently different masses falling from above and hitting the ground. The first film, which the authors called the Newtonian movie, showed the balls hitting the ground at the same time (as they would in reality.) The second clip, dubbed the naive movie, showed the larger and presumably heavier ball hitting the ground first. The students watched these films while having their brains scanned by an fMRI machine. The scans revealed that both groups recognized the naive scenario — but only the advanced students’ brains showed activation patterns that indicated an effort to suppress that knowledge. In other words, the difference between the two groups lay in their capacity to suppress inaccurate information.

This finding offers a clue as to why metacognitive skills like focus, attention and self-control are so key to learning. Sometimes, learning something new requires ignoring what we already know — and not just in science. It takes mental strength and flexibility, for example, to let go of the syntax of our native tongue and adopt instead the patterns of a foreign language or to set aside the attitudes of the present and imagine life from the perspective of historical figures. We may never get rid of our inner ignoramus, but we can train it to stay quiet.

Paul, the author of Origins, is at work on a book about the science of learning. The views expressed are solely her own.

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The Weird Ways Gender Ratios Affect Dating, Spending, Saving—and the Size of Your Engagement Ring

2012-01-19T00:26:00.000-08:00

The Weird Ways Gender Ratios Affect Dating, Spending, Saving—and the Size of Your Engagement Ring

By Brad Tuttle | @bradrtuttle | January 18, 2012 | 2

A new study shows that when women are scarce, they expect men to spend more on engagement rings.

Men are known to go to great lengths—and great expense—to impress women. This is most obviously the case when the male population outnumbers that of females, and laws of supply and demand kick in.

A new report from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management finds that men are prone to spend more, save less, and even be willing to go into debt when they believe women are scarce in their neck of the woods:

“What we see in other animals is that when females are scarce, males become more competitive. They compete more for access to mates,” says Vladas Griskevicius, an assistant professor of marketing at the Carlson School and lead author of the study. “How do humans compete for access to mates? What you find across cultures is that men often do it through money, through status and through products.”

(MORE: How 401(k)s Make Many Americans Poorer)

In the study, entitled “The Financial Consequences of Too Many Men: Sex Ratio Effects on Savings, Borrowing, and Spending” and set to be published next month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, volunteers read stories indicating that the local population had either more men or more women. Then, they were asked how much money they’d save each month from their paycheck, and how much they’d be likely to spend using credit cards when they don’t have enough cash for immediate expenditures.

Men, it seems, turn into spendthrifts when women are in short supply. When women are scarce, savings rates for guys drop 42%, and dudes say they’re willing to borrow 84% more each month via credit cards.

For a real-life example of this phenomenon, USA Today points to a pair of communities in Georgia:

In Columbus, Ga., where there are 1.18 single men for every single woman, the average consumer debt was $3,479 higher than it was 100 miles away in Macon, Ga., where there were 0.78 single men for every woman.

The study indicates that the ratio of the sexes isn’t likely to affect how women spend money. But it does have an impact on women’s expectations regarding how much cash a guy will spend to woo the ladies. When women hear that guys outnumber girls, they expect men to drop more money on dates, Valentine’s gifts, and engagement rings. Griskevicius, the report’s lead author, explains that women know that being outnumbered puts them in the driver’s seat:

“When there’s a scarcity of women, women felt men should go out of their way to court them.”

(MORE: Is It a Bad Idea to Friend a Co-worker on Facebook?)

I’d love to see how varying sex ratios change the likelihood of how often men and women go to the gym.

Brad Tuttle is a reporter at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @bradrtuttle. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.

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Andrew Sullivan Is Wrong About Obama's Liberal Critics

2012-01-19T00:07:00.001-08:00

Andrew Sullivan Is Wrong About Obama's Liberal Critics

'Weak-Kneed' Obama Killed Public Option - New Book

Scots turn Cuban weed into 'gold' - Marabu Carbon

2012-01-18T05:55:00.000-08:00

Scots turn Cuban weed into 'gold'

18 January 2012 Last updated at 05:50 ET Help

Could the collapse of the Soviet bloc lead to more efficient electric cars and cheaper rum?

Engineers at the University of Strathclyde have found a way of turning a Cuban weed into one of the world's most sought-after substances.

Their work has paved the way for cleaner drinking water for Latin America and mobile phones that only need recharged every three months.

SOURCE(Click for Video)

'U.N. Membership Will Give Palestine Hope'

2012-01-17T17:04:00.000-08:00

World IPv6 launch day set to aid net address switchover

2012-01-17T16:59:00.000-08:00

World IPv6 launch day set to aid net address switchover

Internet firms carried out a successful trial of the new net address system last June

Leading internet firms have set 6 June as the World IPv6 launch day.

IPv6 is the new net address system that replaces the current protocol IPv4, which is about to run out of spaces to allocate.

Web companies participating in the event have pledged to enable IPv6 on their main websites from that date.

The Internet Society, which made the announcement, said the day represented "a major milestone" in the deployment of the standard.

Facebook, Google, Microsoft Bing and Yahoo are the inaugural web firms involved.

Future-proof

Every device connected to the internet is assigned an internet protocol (IP) address, which is a string of numbers that allows other devices to recognise where data comes from or should be sent to.

The IPv4 system has approximately four billion IP addresses.

The growth in the number of smartphones, PCs and other web devices and services meant that net regulator Icann had already handed out its last IPv4 sets to regional registries.

At the time it said businesses needed to start preparing themselves for a switch to the IPv6 standard, which offers more than 340 trillion trillion trillion addresses.

To put that number in context BBC Future Media blogged last year that if "every man, woman and child on Earth had a billion devices each with an IPv6 address, you haven't even come close to scratching the surface of the number of addresses available".

Experts say the new system should ensure there are enough addresses for the foreseeable future.

Problem solving

IPv6 is incompatible with IPv4, so the transition has required old hardware to be replaced or updated.

Internet service providers (ISP) taking part have promised that by the launch date they will have enabled at least 1% of their fixed line subscribers to visit IPv6-enabled websites. The ISPs involved include the US firms AT&T and Comcast, and the Dutch firm XS4all.

The home networking equipment manufacturers Cisco and D-Link say they aim to enable IPv6 on all their home router products by the date.

And Akami and Limelight - two firms that help improve third parties' delivery of content over the net - have also promised to allow their customers to join the list of firms participating in the scheme by enabling the new protocol throughout their infrastructure.

Amsterdam-based RIPE NCC, which allocates IP addresses in Europe, the Middle East and parts of Asia, said: "Operational experience and measurements on World IPv6 Launch will help content providers and ISPs to identify and rectify any potential problems with delivering services."

Facebook's vice president of infrastructure engineering, Jay Parikh, added: "Last year's industry-wide test of IPv6 successfully showed that the global adoption of IPv6 is the best way to keep web devices communicating in the future.

"Permanently enabling IPv6 is vital to keeping the internet open and ensuring people stay connected online as the number of web users and devices continue to grow."

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IBM researchers make 12-atom magnetic memory bit

2012-01-15T01:13:00.000-08:00

IBM researchers make 12-atom magnetic memory bit

The groups of atoms were built using a scanning tunneling microscope

Researchers have successfully stored a single data bit in only 12 atoms.

Currently it takes about a million atoms to store a bit on a modern hard-disk, the researchers from IBM say.

They believe this is the world's smallest magnetic memory bit.

According to the researchers, the technique opens up the possibility of producing much denser forms of magnetic computer memory than today's hard disk drives and solid state memory chips.

"Roughly every two years hard drives become denser," research lead author Sebastian Loth told the BBC.

"The obvious question to ask is how long can we keep going. And the fundamental physical limit is the world of atoms.

"The approach that we used is to jump to the very end, check if we can store information in one atom, and if not one atom, how many do we need?" he said.

Below 12 atoms the researchers found that the bits randomly lost information, owing to quantum effects.

A bit can have a value of 0 or 1 and is the most basic form of information in computation.

"We kept building larger structures until we emerged out of the quantum mechanical into the classical data storage regime and we reached this limit at 12 atoms."

“Start Quote

As a scientist [I] would totally dig having a scanning tunnelling microscope in every household”

Sebastian Loth Research lead author

The groups of atoms, which were kept at very low temperatures, were arranged using a scanning tunnelling microscope. Researchers were subsequently able to form a byte made of eight of the 12-atom bits.

Central to the research has been the use of materials with different magnetic properties.

The magnetic fields of bits made from conventional ferromagnetic materials can affect neighbouring bits if they are packed too closely together.

"In conventional magnetic data storage the information is stored in ferromagnetic material," said Dr Loth, who is now based at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science in Germany.

"That adds up to a big magnetic field that can interfere with neighbours. That's a big problem for further miniaturisation."

Other scientists thought that was an interesting result.

"Current magnetic memory architectures are fundamentally limited in how small they can go," Dr Will Branford, of Imperial College London, told the BBC.

"This work shows that in principle data can be stored much more densely using antiferromagnetic bits."

But the move from the lab to the production may be some time away.

"Even though I as a scientist would totally dig having a scanning tunnelling microscope in every household, I agree it's a very experimental tool," Dr Loth said.

Dr Loth believes that by increasing the number of atoms to between 150 to 200 the bits can be made stable at room temperature. That opens up the possibility of more practical applications.

"This is now a technological challenge to find out about new manufacturing techniques," he said.

Source

What future for Afghan woman jailed for being raped ?

2012-01-14T23:53:00.000-08:00

What future for Afghan woman jailed for being raped ?

By Caroline Wyatt BBC News, Kabul

Gulnaz gave birth to her daughter, Moska, in jail

Two high profile cases of violence have sparked domestic and international outcry over the treatment of Afghan women, but campaigners fear a winding down of the military campaign will mean the international community will no longer be interested.

Outside it was a gloriously sunny winter's day. The mountains that loom above the city silhouetted against a cloudless blue sky. But inside the house was dark and the curtains drawn, so that the neighbours could not see in.

This was the safe house in Kabul where Gulnaz and her child had found refuge. The women there asked not to be identified in case their house was burnt down.

Just 21, Gulnaz had been released that week from prison, where she had given birth to her daughter Moska. Gulnaz seemed younger than her years, but she held my gaze almost defiantly as she told her story.

She had been imprisoned in a Kabul women's jail after her cousin's husband raped her.

The crime came to light when the unmarried Gulnaz became pregnant.

The police came and arrested both Gulnaz and her attacker. Under Afghan law she too was found guilty of a crime known as "adultery by force", with her sentence increased on appeal to 12 years.

From Our Own Correspondent

Broadcast on Saturdays at 11:30 GMT on BBC Radio 4, and weekdays on BBC World Service

When the case aroused condemnation abroad, President Hamid Karzai intervened and Gulnaz was pardoned.

Looking bewildered at her sudden freedom, she told me all she wanted was to go home to her family. In order to do that, she was prepared to marry the man who raped her - otherwise their families would be enemies.

The problem for Gulnaz is that if her attacker will not marry her - or cannot come up with a substantial dowry - the "stain" on her family's honour will remain, perhaps with lethal consequences for Gulnaz and her child. That may mean she can never go home.

For a single mother, unskilled and unqualified, there are few ways for a woman to survive in Afghanistan without family support.

An American lawyer in Kabul, Kim Motley, has taken up Gulnaz's case. She is trying to raise money for her to fund a new life, somehow, somewhere, if Gulnaz cannot go home.

Rescued from violence

I was still wondering what would happen to her when we went to meet 15-year-old Sahar Gul, as she lay in a hospital bed recovering from her injuries, too traumatised to talk.

Sahar's injuries caused public outcry in Afghanistan

Married off to a 30-year-old man for a dowry of about $4,500 (£3,000), Sahar had been kept locked in a cellar for several months, starved and tortured by her husband and his family. It is still not really clear why.

Sahar may not have been able to speak, but her injuries did.

Burns to her arm and her fragile body, a swollen black eye, clumps of hair torn out. One small hand was scarred, where her fingernail had been pulled out.

“Start Quote

Tradition and family or community honour is often seen as more important than an individual's misery or misfortune”

The abuse aroused public indignation in Afghanistan, as well as horror abroad.

But Sahar was perhaps, in a strange way, lucky.

She did not run away from a violent marriage, as some Afghan brides have, but was instead rescued from it by police. So she cannot be found guilty of what might otherwise be deemed a "moral crime", as other young Afghan women have been.

Both Sahar and Gulnaz's stories are extreme. But they made me wonder how many other women in Afghanistan still suffer in silence, 10 years after the fall of the Taliban.

There are laws banning violence against women, but enforcing them is hard. Tradition and family or community honour is often seen as more important than an individual's misery or misfortune.

Poverty and lack of education also mean under-age marriage remains common.

When Sahar did try to escape her torturers, it was apparently the neighbours who brought her back to them, before the police intervened.

Dr Samar is concerned about the future of women's rights in Afghanistan

In a quiet, book-lined office in Kabul - a world away from the controlled chaos of the hospital and the dimly-lit safe house - I asked the head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission what she thought.

A no-nonsense woman with steely grey hair, Dr Sima Samar has long risked her own life to speak out for the principles she believes in, equality and justice.

Her answer was clear: She and her colleagues in Afghanistan will carry on fighting to improve the lives of women like Gulnaz and Sahar.

But Dr Samar, like many others, fears the international community is no longer quite so interested in keeping up the pressure on women's rights, as the West seeks to wind down its military campaign.

When Western soldiers no longer patrol the streets of Afghanistan, it will be easier to ignore what goes on behind locked doors and closed curtains in a faraway place.

How to listen to From Our Own Correspondent:

BBC Radio 4: A 30-minute programme on Saturdays, 11:30 GMT.

Second 30-minute programme on Thursdays, 11:00 GMT (some weeks only).

Listen online or download the podcast

BBC World Service:

Hear daily 10-minute editions Monday to Friday, repeated through the day, also available to listen online.

Read more or explore the archive at the programme website.

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Mohamed ElBaradei will end Egypt presidency bid

2012-01-14T23:52:00.000-08:00

Mohamed ElBaradei will end Egypt presidency bid

Mr ElBaradei has been an outspoken critic of Egypt's military govenrment

Egypt's Revolution

Egyptian politician and former head of the UN nuclear watchdog Mohamed ElBaradei is dropping his candidacy in presidental elections later this year.

Mr ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, said he had taken his decision in protest at the way Egypt's military rulers governed "as though no revolution had taken place".

A military council has run Egypt since President Hosni Mubarak was ousted.

The election is scheduled to take place in June 2012.

A BBC Arabic reporter in Cairo said Mr ElBaradei - seen as one of the leading liberal candidates - had been the subject of a smear campaign even before he declared his candidacy.

Constitution

In his statement, Mr ElBaradei praised the young people who led the uprising against Mr Mubarak, who was toppled in February 2011 after 18 days of street protests.

"My conscience does not permit me to run for the presidency or any other official position unless it is within a democratic framework," he said.

The BBC's Jon Leyne, in Cairo, says the comments are fairly damning, coming from someone with such international prestige.

However, Mr ElBaradei's critics will say he never stood much chance of becoming president, our correspondent adds.

Mr ElBaradei had wanted a new constitution to be drawn up from scratch before any elections took place.

However, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) opted to go ahead with parliamentary elections first.

The third round of voting has just concluded. The lower house of parliament will elect a 100-member assembly which will then draft a new constitution.

Mr ElBaradei played a prominent role in the Egyptian uprising but his secularist politics have been eclipsed by the main Islamist parties, the Muslim Brotherhood and the conservative Salafist Nour party.

The Islamists took the lion's share of the vote in the first two rounds of elections and will dominate the new parliament.

Even on the liberal wing of Egyptian politics, feelings about Mr ElBaradei are very mixed, our correspondent says.

Source

Heroes Discussing Poverty in America

2012-01-12T19:46:00.000-08:00

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/Remaki

Amazing panel on Poverty in America.

Muslim Woman and Med Student Sexually Harassed, Labeled a Terrorist, Thrown out of University, Even Though She's innocent. All this in 2012

2012-01-12T19:06:00.000-08:00

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_MUSLIM_STUDENT_FBI?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

Inside Story US 2012: Is the American dream fading?

2012-01-12T18:46:00.000-08:00

Inside Story US 2012: Is the American dream fading?

Israel upholds citizenship bar for Palestinian spouses

2012-01-12T15:47:00.000-08:00

Israel upholds citizenship bar for Palestinian spouses

The law is thought to have prevented thousands of Palestinians from living with their Israeli spouses

Palestinian UN membership bid

Israel's Supreme Court has upheld a law banning Palestinians who marry Israelis from gaining Israeli citizenship.

Civil rights groups had petitioned the court to overturn the law, saying it was unconstitutional.

"Human rights do not prescribe national suicide," Judge Asher Grunis wrote in the judgement.

The law was introduced in 2003, with its backers citing security concerns and the need to ensure Israel remains a Jewish-majority state.

Human rights activists and Arab politicians condemned the court's decision.

The court "had failed the test of justice", said Arab-Israeli MP Jamal Zahalka of the Balad party.

"It is a dark day for the protection of human rights and for the Israeli High Court," lawyers from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel told AFP.

"The ruling proves how much the situation regarding the civil rights of the Arab minority in Israel is declining into a highly dangerous and unprecedented situation", Arab-Israeli civil rights group Adalah, one of those that brought the petition, said in a statement.

The Citizenship and Entry Law was passed in 2003, during the second Palestinian intifada (uprising), as waves of suicide bombings targeted Israel.

Many were launched from the West Bank, some with the help of Israeli Arabs.

Initially, the law was emergency legislation which has since been extended periodically.

It was amended in 2005, allowing women over 25 and men over 35 to apply for temporary permits to live in Israel, but still ruling out citizenship for all but a handful of cases.

In 2007, it was expanded to apply to citizens of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.

Source

Can anyone disagree with the fact that Israel is an Apartheid state now? This ruling confirms that sentiment.

World's smallest frog discovered

2012-01-12T01:31:00.000-08:00

World's smallest frog discovered

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News

The tiny frog sits easily on a US dime, whose diameter is 18mm

A frog species that appears to be the world's smallest has been discovered in Papua New Guinea by a US-based team.

At 7mm (0.27 inches) long, Paedophryne amauensis may be the world's smallest vertebrate - the group that includes mammals, fish, birds and amphibians.

The researchers also found a slightly larger relative, Paedophryne swiftorum.

Presenting the new species in PLoS One journal, they suggest the frogs' tiny scale is linked to their habitat, in leaf litter on the forest floor.

What are amphibians?

First true amphibians evolved about 250 million years ago
Three orders: frogs (inc. toads), salamanders (inc. newts) and the limbless caecilians
Adapted to many aquatic and terrestrial habitats
Present on every continent except Antarctica
Many metamorphose from larvae to adults

Amphibians videos, news and facts: BBC Nature

Finding the frogs was not an easy assignment.

They are well camouflaged among leaves on the forest floor, and have evolved calls resembling those of insects, making them hard to spot.

"The New Guinea forests are incredibly loud at night; and we were trying to record frog calls in the forest, and we were curious as to what these other sounds were," said research leader Chris Austin from Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, US.

"So we triangulated to where these calls were coming from, and looked through the leaf litter.

"It was night, these things are incredibly small; so what we did after several frustrating attempts was to grab a whole handful of leaf litter and throw it inside a clear plastic bag.

"When we did so, we saw these incredibly tiny frogs hopping around," he told BBC News.

Littering the leaves

The Paedophryne genus was identified only recently, and consists of a number of tiny species found at various points in the eastern forests of Papua New Guinea.

The tiny limbs of amauensis (top) and swiftorum are rendered translucent

"They're occupying the relatively thick leaf litter of tropical forest in low-lying parts of the island, eating incredibly small insects that typically are much smaller than insects that frogs eat," said Professor Austin.

"And they're probably prey for a large number of relatively small invertebrates that don't usually prey on frogs."

Predators may well include scorpions.

Intriguingly, other places in the world that also feature dense, moist leaf litter tend to possess such small frog species, indicating that amphibians are well placed to occupy this ecological niche.

Before the Paedophrynes were found, the title of "world's smallest frog" was bestowed on the Brazilian gold frog (Brachycephalus didactylus) and its slightly larger Cuban relative, the Monte Iberia Eleuth (Eleutherodactylus iberia). They both measure less than 1cm long.

The smallest vertebrates have until now been fish.

Adult Paedocypris progenetica, which dwells in Indonesian swamps and streams, measure 7.9-10.3 mm long.

Male anglerfish of the species Photocorynus spiniceps are just over 6mm long. But they spend their lives fused to the much larger (50mm long) females, so whether they should count in this contest would be disputed.

Paedophryne amaunensis adults average 7.7mm, which is why its discoverers believe it how holds the crown.

The remote expanses of Papua New Guinea rank alongside those of Madagascar as places where hitherto undiscovered amphibian species are expected to turn up, as they are largely undeveloped and not well explored.

Source

Unable to Work, Retirees Move in with Kids and Find it’s not So Bad

2012-01-11T23:54:00.000-08:00

Unable to Work, Retirees Move in with Kids and Find it’s not So Bad

Bunching family under one roof isn’t the Holy Grail of retirement. But for those with few choices at least it’s an answer with some unexpected benefits.

By Dan Kadlec | @dankadlec | January 11, 2012 |

Getty Images

You’ve heard it over and over: the Holy Grail of retirement security is working longer. By sticking around for a few extra years or phasing into retirement with a part-time job, you can defer Social Security benefits and avoid tapping your nest egg right away—and boost your retirement income by 30% or so.

But what if you can’t work longer? What if you are physically unable or, as many have found since the financial crisis, no one will hire you? The next best thing to the Holy Grail seems to be moving in with the kids, if your resources are lacking and they’ll have you.

(MORE: Americans Are Expected to Buy a Million More Cars in 2012)

More than 51 million Americans—about one in six encompassing 12 million homes—live in a multigenerational household. That is a 10% increase since 2007 and while it includes struggling young adults who have moved in with Mom and Dad, struggling parents moving in with the kids are a big part of the mix, according to a report from Generations United.

In the survey, 66% of those who live in a multigenerational household said economic considerations were part of the reason and 21% said economic considerations were the only reason they live that way. Other findings:

40% reported that job loss, change in job status, or underemployment was a reason their family became a multigenerational household.
20% reported that health care costs prompted them to form a multigenerational household.
14% reported that foreclosure or other housing loss prompted them to form a multigenerational household.

Evidently Robert Frost was correct when he wrote that “home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” Yet the living arrangement may not be as awful as you imagine. Some 72% report that living with multiple generations has improved their finances; 82% say it has forged closer bonds with family; and 75% say it has relieved the hardship of finding elder care or childcare.

Multigenerational living brings occasional stress, 78% in the survey report. But in general they agree that the benefits are significant and make it financially possible, for example, to go back to school or get additional job training.

(MORE: One Promising Economic Sign: Demand for Coins is Up)

This is a back to the future trend. When America was primarily an agricultural country, multiple generations routinely lived together on the farm. We may have been headed back this direction even without economic problems. Immigrant populations are growing and, as a matter of culture, often house multiple generations under one roof. Aging and suddenly single boomers, meanwhile, are choosing to take in family or roommates for companionship.

But the biggest driver going forward would seem to be the giant boomer generation now hitting age 66 at a clip of 10,000 a day and, after a lost decade for stocks, looking at retiring with fewer resources than they had planned. According to the report:

“Many boomers may end up turning to their adult children for help—and a place to live in the near future. Even if relatively few baby boomers follow this course, the sheer size of the baby boom population guarantees that their economic struggles will have a significant impact.”

Bunching family under one roof isn’t the Holy Grail of retirement. But for those with few choices, at least it’s an answer with some unexpected benefits.

Source

Warren Buffett Ready to Take Republicans’ Tax Challenge

2012-01-11T23:51:00.000-08:00

Warren Buffett Ready to Take Republicans’ Tax Challenge

By Rana Foroohar | January 11, 2012

Mark Seliger for TIME

Updated, 6:10 p.m. E.T.

Warren Buffett is ready to call Republicans’ tax bluff. Last fall, Senator Mitch McConnell said that if Buffett were feeling “guilty” about paying too little in taxes, he should “send in a check.” The jab was in response to Buffett’s August 2011 New York Times op-ed, which made hay of the fact that our tax system is so unbalanced, Buffett (worth about $45 billion) pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Senator John Thune promptly introduced the “Buffett Rule Act,” an option on tax forms that would allow the rich to donate more in taxes to help pay down the national debt. It was, as Buffett told me for this week’s TIME cover story, “a tax policy only a Republican could come up with.”

Still, he’s willing to take them up on it. “It restores my faith in human nature to think that there are people who have been around Washington all this time and are not yet so cynical as to think that [the deficit] can’t be solved by voluntary contributions,” he says with a chuckle. So Buffett has pledged to match 1 for 1 all such voluntary contributions made by Republican members of Congress. “And I’ll even go 3 for 1 for McConnell,” he says. That could be quite a bill if McConnell takes the challenge; after all, the Senator is worth at least $10 million. As Buffett put it to me, “I’m not worried.” (See below for a statement from McConnell’s office.)

Listen to Buffett’s retort to McConnell’s contribution theory:

(PHOTOS: The Life and Career of Warren Buffett)

Buffett doesn’t want to sound ungrateful, especially since McConnell and other Republicans have lobbied to keep taxes low for the über-rich, saving him between $6 million and $7 million this year. Oddly, though, conservatives can’t seem to make up their mind about taxes. On Wednesday in the Wall Street Journal, supply sider Arthur Laffer bashed Buffett for, among other things, shielded income, because he doesn’t pay taxes on unrealized capital gains (currently taxed at 0%) or charitable contributions (which are tax deductible). “Well, I had a net unrealized loss in 2011,” says Buffett. “But if Arthur has a plan for how he wants to tax unrealized capital gains, I’d love to hear it — it’s an interesting thing for a Republican to put forward!”

If Buffett had his way, he’d pay more than the 17% rate he currently forks over on his net adjusted income — and he’d have the government put that additional money to work by making sure that whatever portion of the 99% that isn’t thriving in the market economy gets some help. As Buffett wrote in Fortune a few years back, “I’ve worked in an economy that rewards someone who saves the lives of others on a battlefield with a medal, rewards a great teacher with thank-you notes from parents, but rewards those who can detect the mispricing of securities with sums reaching into the billions.”

Listen to Buffett discuss why a capitalist system should take care of good citizens:

(PHOTOS: The Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders’ Meeting)

Buffett doesn’t want to hobble capitalism. He just wants to give it a heart. And he says the way to do that is to change our tax policy to ensure that people who earn their money from investments rather than by working for a paycheck contribute their fair share. “We need a tax system that takes very good care of people who just really aren’t as well adapted to the market system and to capitalism but are nevertheless just as good citizens and are doing things that are of use in society.” Note to bond traders: your higher taxes should help subsidize the building of bridges and the running of state-sponsored day-care centers.

Buffett has plenty of other prescriptions for America — from more progressive consumption taxes to penalties for errant corporate directors to an overhaul of health care. He’s also got a few choice words for the Republican field and their ideas about bootstrapping and “merit” economies: “This whole business about [Newt] Gingrich going down to Occupy and saying, ‘They ought to be getting a job,’ that’s just … you know, maybe they can be historians for Freddie Mac too and make $600,000 a year.” When I ask whether Mitt Romney is a job creator or destroyer, Buffett says that while businesses shouldn’t keep people they don’t need, “I don’t like what private-equity firms do in terms of taking out every dime they can and leveraging [companies] up so that they really aren’t equipped, in some cases, for the future.”

(SPECIAL: See Warren Buffett in TIME’s List of the People Who Mattered in 2011)

Listen to Buffett explain why education can’t solve all the U.S.’s problems:

Despite Buffett’s disenchantment with conservatives and partisan politics, he’s more than ever a bull on America’s future. What would Warren do to get the U.S. back on track? Read TIME’s cover story this week, available Thursday morning online and Friday on newsstands, to find out.

Listen to Buffett talk about why housing will bounce back:

(MORE: What Politicians Have to Lose — and Gain — from the “Buffett Rule”)

Listen to Buffett discuss the tensions between the U.S. and China:

UPDATE: Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senator McConnell, provided the following response to Buffett’s remarks:

Sen. McConnell says that Washington should be smaller, rather than taxes getting bigger. And since some, like President Obama and Mr. Buffett, want to pay higher taxes, Congress made it possible for them to call their own bluff and send in a check. So I look forward to Mr. Buffett matching a healthy batch of checks from those who actually want to pay higher taxes, including Congressional Democrats, the President and the DNC.

Source

Will an Aspirin Prolong Your Life? It Depends

2012-01-11T23:48:00.000-08:00

Will an Aspirin Prolong Your Life? It Depends

Heart patients benefit from taking a low-dose aspirin daily, but the same same protection doesn't extend to healthy people hoping to prevent a first heart attack

By Laura Blue | January 11, 2012

Mark Weiss

For a pill that costs just pennies per dose, aspirin can do an awful lot. It prevents heart attack and stroke in people with a history of cardiovascular events. It’s recommended for angina and heart attack patients as soon as they arrive at the hospital. It may lower risk of colon and other types of cancer. And, yes, it’s good for the occasional aches and pains, too.

So it’s no wonder that in recent years, some health experts have been wondering whether everyone, whether or not they have heart troubles or headaches, should be taking low-dose aspirin as a preventive for some chronic illnesses. But the evidence doesn’t seem to support that idea, including a new review of nine clinical trials, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. The study shows that aspirin does reduce the risk of heart attack in middle-aged adults without known heart disease, but that those benefits are “modest,” according to the study authors. The review showed that aspirin appeared to confer no protection against stroke or fatal heart attack, and the limited benefits against non-fatal heart attack were offset by relatively rare but dangerous side effects.

Aspirin helps to prevent heart attacks by preventing blood clots from forming, which can impede blood flow to the heart and brain. Recent studies also hint that it works to lower inflammation, which not only inhibits clot formation, but may protect unstable plaques in heart vessels from rupturing. Unfortunately, however, limited blood clotting can be dangerous as well. People who take a regular aspirin appear to be at increased risk of internal bleeding, which in some cases can be life-threatening.

MORE: This Isn’t Your Mother’s Bayer Aspirin

The new study in Archives is the largest of its kind to date. It includes nine clinical trials which together involve more than 100,000 study participants from a number of developed countries. In each of the nine trials, participants were randomly assigned either to take a daily aspirin or to take a placebo. On average, the aspirin-takers took their pills for six years.

The analysis finds that, on average among the trials, one cardiovascular disease event was averted for every 120 people who took a daily aspirin. But there was one “nontrivial bleeding event” for every 73 people on the daily aspirin regimen. And the researchers found no significant difference in mortality between the aspirin groups and the placebo groups.

Because more people were likely to experience a bleeding episode than be protected from a heart-related event, the study authors conclude: “routine use of aspirin for primary prevention is not warranted and treatment decisions need to be considered on a case-by-case basis.” For most people, the benefits of a daily aspirin simply don’t outweigh the risks.

MORE: Aspirin Doesn’t Increase Chances of Pregnancy with IVF

That’s not the case for people who have already suffered heart attack or stroke, however. This new study did not look at those individuals, since that benefit has been well documented in other studies. The bigger debate in recent years has been the effect of aspirin on adults without known cardiovascular problems.

In a separate statement to the public, lead researcher Rao Seshasai said:

The beneficial effect of aspirin on preventing future cardiovascular disease events in people with established heart attacks or strokes is indisputable. We urge people with these conditions not to discontinue their medication unless advised to do so by their physicians for valid reasons.

For everyone else, it’s back to basics if you want to protect yourself from heart disease — eat a low-fat, low-sodium diet, and get enough exercise to get your heart pumping. And no, you can’t get that in a pill.

Source

Skyscrapers 'linked with impending financial crashes'

2012-01-11T02:34:00.000-08:00

Skyscrapers 'linked with impending financial crashes'

"The world's tallest buildings - tend to complete in a recession," Andrew Lawrence, Barclays Capital

There is an "unhealthy correlation" between the building of skyscrapers and subsequent financial crashes, according to Barclays Capital.

Examples include the Empire State building, built as the Great Depression was under way, and the current world's tallest, the Burj Khalifa, built just before Dubai almost went bust.

China is currently the biggest builder of skyscrapers, the bank said.

India also has 14 skyscrapers under construction.

"Often the world's tallest buildings are simply the edifice of a broader skyscraper building boom, reflecting a widespread misallocation of capital and an impending economic correction," Barclays Capital analysts said.

The bank noted that the world's first skyscraper, the Equitable Life building in New York, was completed in 1873 and coincided with a five-year recession. It was demolished in 1912.

Other examples include Chicago's Willis Tower (which was formerly known as the Sears Tower) in 1974, just as there was an oil shock and the US dollar's peg to gold was abandoned.

And Malaysia's Petronas Towers in 1997, which coincided with the Asian financial crisis.

The 27-storey home of one Indian family in Mumbai

The findings might be a concern for Londoners, who are currently seeing the construction of what will be Western Europe's tallest building, the Shard.

That will be 1,017ft (310m) tall on completion.

China bubble?

Investors should be most concerned about China, which is currently building 53% of all the tall buildings in the world, the bank said.

A lending boom following the global financial crisis in 2008 pushed prices higher in the world's second largest economy.

In a separate report, JPMorgan Chase said that the Chinese property market could drop by as much as 20% in value in the country's major cities within the next 12 to 18 months.

In India, billionaire Mukesh Ambani built his own skyscraper in Mumbai - a 27-storey residence believed to be the world's most expensive home.

Local newspapers said the house required 600 members of staff to maintain it. Reports suggest the residence is worth more than $1bn (£630m).

"Today India has only two of the world's 276 skyscrapers over 240m in height, yet over the next five years it intends to complete 14 new skyscrapers," according to Barclays Capital.

Barclays Capital's Skyscraper Index has been published every year since 1999.

Source

Obama Fails On Minimum Wage Pledge

2012-01-09T23:19:00.001-08:00

Obama Fails On Minimum Wage Pledge

Ron Paul Hits Gingrich With Chickenhawk Label At Debate

2012-01-09T23:18:00.000-08:00

Ron Paul Hits Gingrich With Chickenhawk Label At Debate

Samsung's 'future-proof' voice-controlled television

2012-01-09T23:17:00.000-08:00

Samsung's 'future-proof' voice-controlled television

By Leo Kelion Technology reporter, BBC News, Las Vegas

Samsung was one of many companies that unveiled new connected TV facilities at CES

A "smart" internet-connected television that has the ability to have its hardware upgraded every year has been unveiled by Samsung.

The device has a slot which allows new kit to be added to boost processing performance and add new features.

The innovation may help reassure shoppers concerned about their screen becoming outdated.

The move is aimed at helping the South Korean tech giant retain its lead as the world's best-selling TV maker.

Samsung's president of consumer electronics, Boo-keun Yoon, unveiled the firm's flagship LED television at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas noting that his firm currently sells two televisions every two seconds.

In addition to its "smart evolution capability" Samsung has also added gesture, voice and face recognition features to the ES8000 model.

Familiar faces

A built-in camera allows users to browse the internet with a wave of their hand and to change channel by speaking in one of the more than 20 languages that the set can "understand".

A facial recognition facility also allows the set to recognise users, pulling up the relevant selection of their favourite apps.

“Start Quote

It's been the year of connected TV ever since 2008”

James McQuivery Forrester

The device is the latest in a run of so-called Smart TVs launched by the firm since 2008.

Samsung is on course to hit a milestone of 20 million global TV app downloads before the end of January, said its president of consumer electronics America Tim Baxter.

New apps announced at the trade show included Rovio's Angry Birds video game.

Samsung also announced its users would be given free access to a new Angry Birds on-demand animated television channel, marking the latest evolution of the hit title.

Smart TV surge

Connected televisions with built-in processors are tipped as one of the hottest trends at this years CES.

Angry Birds, by Rovio, was announced as one of the new application by Samsung

Event organiser, the US Consumer Electronics Association, has said it expects that about half of all shipped TVs would have internet capabilities in 2012.

By contrast it said the figure was 12% of all units shipped in 2010.

While Samsung pursues its own software solution, its rival LG has announced a television with built-in Google TV facilities for the US market.

The firm's chief technology officer, Scott Ahn, only briefly mentioned the move at his firm's CES press conference saying that the step "will form the basis of a strong future working relationship" with the US search giant.

LG also promised voice-recognition via a new remote control.

Left unconnected

Meanwhile, Sony continues to hedge its bets.

Its new HX850 LED TV shares the same connected features as its predecessor including access to the Sony Entertainment Network and its Video Unlimited and Music Unlimited streaming services.

However, the firm also unveiled two new devices powered by the revised Google TV - a media streamer and a Blu-ray player.

Panasonic and Haier are among several other companies also showing off new connected TV facilities at CES.

Although sales of internet capable TVs are on the rise, analysts said the trend can be explained by the fact that the facility is offered on most of the biggest and highest quality sets.

"It's been the year of connected TV ever since 2008," said James McQuivery, television industry analyst at Forrester.

"Every year you see these at CES. However, the manufacturers have struggled with the fact that around half of all people who buy connected TVs never put them on the internet.

"So the challenge going forward is getting people to use the new functionality."

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The Greek parents 'too poor' to care for their children

2012-01-09T23:15:00.000-08:00

The Greek parents 'too poor' to care for their children

By Chloe Hadjimatheou BBC World Service, Athens

Unemployed and homeless, Natasha's mother said she could no longer cope

Greece's financial crisis has made some families so desperate they are giving up the most precious thing of all - their children.

One morning a few weeks before Christmas a kindergarten teacher in Athens found a note about one of her four-year-old pupils.

"I will not be coming to pick up Anna today because I cannot afford to look after her," it read. "Please take good care of her. Sorry. Her mother."

In the last two months Father Antonios, a young Orthodox priest who runs a youth centre for the city's poor, has found four children on his door step - including a baby just days old.

Another charity was approached by a couple whose twin babies were in hospital being treated for malnutrition, because the mother herself was malnourished and unable to breastfeed.

Cases like this are shocking a country where family ties are strong, and failure to look after children is socially unacceptable - they feel to Greeks like stories from the Third World, rather than their own capital city.

One of the children cared for by Father Antonios is Natasha, a bright two-year-old brought to his centre by her mother a few weeks ago.

The woman said she was unemployed and homeless and needed help - but before staff could offer her support she had vanished, leaving her daughter behind.

"Over the last year we have hundreds of cases of parents who want to leave their children with us - they know us and trust us," Father Antonios says.

"They say they do not have any money or shelter or food for their kids, so they hope we might be able to provide them with what they need."

Requests of this kind were not unknown before the crisis - but Father Antonios has never until now come across children being simply abandoned.

Handouts

One woman driven by poverty to give up her child was Maria, a single mother who lost her job and was unemployed for more than a year.

Emotional scars

Stefanos Alevizos - Greek psychologist

Parents who are not able to provide for their child will feel despair, loneliness and anger. They will carry an enormous weight of cultural sigma and shame.

Children absorb the emotions of their parents, so the child will internalise all the feelings of their parent - particularly guilt. Often they feel they are to blame.

Children taken into care may avoid forming a bond with their carers because they are afraid it would be a betrayal of their parent, and might mean their mother or father will not return for them.

When they get older, they are likely to have problems with trust and that will manifest itself in difficulties with relationships.

"Every night I cry alone at home, but what can I do? It hurt my heart, but I didn't have a choice, she says.

She spent her days looking for work, sometimes well into the evening and that often meant leaving eight-year-old Anastasia alone for hours at a time. The two of them lived on food handouts from the church. Maria lost 25 kilos.

In the end she decided to Anastasia into foster care with a charity called SOS Children's Villages.

"I can suffer through it but why should she have to?" she asks.

She now has a job in a cafe, but makes just 20 euros (£16) a day. She sees Anastasia about once a month, and hopes to take her back when her economic situation improves - but when that might be she has no idea.

SOS Children's Villages' director of social work, Stergios Sifnyos, says the charity is not accustomed to taking children from families for economic reasons and does not want to.

"The relationship between Maria and Anastasia is very close. You can say you cannot see any problem, [any reason] why this child has to be far away from her mother," he says.

"But it's very difficult for her to feel comfortable to take back the child when she is not sure she will [still] have a job the next days."

'Act of violence'

“Start Quote

The truth is that the biggest need any child has is to feel the love of its parents”

Father Antonios Head of Kivotos youth centre

In the past when SOS Children's Villages took children into its care, the cause was mostly drug and alcohol addiction in the family. Now the main factor is poverty.

Another charity, Smile of a Child, also focused in the past on cases involving child abuse and neglect. It too is now catering for the destitute of Athens.

Its chief psychologist Stefanos Alevizos, says that when a parent puts a child into care, the child feels its entire foundations have been shaken.

"They experience the separation as an act of violence because they cannot understand the reasons for it," he says.

But Smile of a Child's Sofia Kouhi says the biggest tragedy, in her eyes, is that those parents who ask for their kids to be taken into care may be the ones who love their children the most.

Damaged safety net

Greece's crisis has caused more poverty than its welfare system is equipped to deal with, so charities fill the gap
However, donations are down and charities now have to pay taxes they were once exempt from
"Charity associations like ours are doing 50% of the work that the Greek state should be doing and instead of thanking us they are penalising us," says director of SOS Children's Villages, George Protopapas
Most cases of families giving up children occur in Athens, where traditional family and neighbourhood ties are diluted

"It is very sad to see the pain in their heart that they will leave their children, but they know it is for the best, at least for this period," she says.

Father Antonios disagrees.

He believes that no matter how poor parents may be, the child is always better off with its family.

"These families will be judged for abandoning their children," he says.

"We can provide a child with food and shelter, but the truth is that the biggest need any child has is to feel the love of its parents."

The names of children in this report have been changed to protect their identities.

Source

Leopard in deadly attack in Indian city of Guwahati

2012-01-09T15:25:00.000-08:00

Leopard in deadly attack in Indian city of Guwahati

By Amitabha Bhattasali BBC News, Calcutta

One of the victims, Kripesh Dey, was badly injured in the attack

One person has been killed and several others injured in an attack by a leopard in the Indian state of Assam.

The man died after the leopard attacked several people in a densely populated area of the city of Guwahati.

The leopard strayed into the Shilpukhuri area of the city on Saturday and attacked residents, one of whom died the next day of his injuries.

The animal has now been released into the Manas Wildlife Sanctuary, forest officials said.

For the people of Guwahati, bomb blasts and other terror attacks were not uncommon till recently, because of repeated attacks by the secessionist United Liberation Front of Assam (Ulfa), but a leopard straying into a town is rare, particularly during the day.

Chased out

The leopard was first sighted on Saturday morning near a crematorium in the town.

As the funeral of a Congress Party leader's son was going on, the place was full of dignitaries, ministers and other VIPs.

Police sent them to a safer place and chased the leopard out, but it turned towards the Shilpukhuri residential area.

"First, it jumped across several multi-storey buildings, including a bank, then jumped on to the ground," said Manas Paran, photojournalist for the Sunday Indian magazine and an eyewitness.

Local people armed with sticks and iron rods tried to chase the leopard away. The enraged animal then started attacking locals, Mr Paran told BBC.

Mr Paran kept following the big cat at extremely close quarters to get good pictures for his magazine.

Deb Kumar Das, aged around 50, was one of the first people whom the leopard clawed at. He suffered severe wounds to the head, ear and neck.

He was treated in hospital but later returned home, where he was found dead on Sunday.

Several others suffered the ire of the big cat. One of them, Kripesh Dey, had part of his scalp removed in the attack.

Later, when the leopard entered a shop, locals locked it up. Forest officials and vets reached the scene after some time with tranquilisers and were able to capture it.

"After it was tranquilised and treated in Guwahati Zoo, we released it in the Manas Wildlife Sancturary today", said Utpal Borah, head of the zoo.

This incident has once again brought to fore the conflict between humans and animals in India.

Assam's forest officials say humans are encroaching onto leopard habitats. Residential areas built right in leopard habitats have become vulnerable to such attacks.

This is the second death from leopard attacks in five years.

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Why is the US marriage rate falling sharply?

2012-01-09T14:27:00.000-08:00

Why is the US marriage rate falling sharply?

By Brian Wheeler BBC News, Washington

For the first time in memory, unmarried Americans will soon outnumber those who are married, according to the latest research. So is this a watershed moment?

At first glance it would appear that, in common with many Western countries, marriage is in terminal decline in the United States.

In 1960, 72% of all American adults were married; in 2010 just 51% were, according to the Pew Centre. The number dropped sharply by 5% in the most recent year, 2009-10.

"I think we are on the cusp of seeing marriage becoming less central to our life course and in framing the lives of our nation's children. So I think it is a major moment in that regard," says Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project and a sociology professor at the University of Virginia.

Americans are certainly waiting longer before they tie the knot - the average age for a first marriage is at an all-time high of 26.5 years for women and 28.7 for men - or else opting to cohabit, live alone or not re-marry when they get divorced.

In the UK, women are, on average, waiting until the age of 30 before getting married, while the average age of a UK bridegroom is 32. In both countries the number of weddings is at an all-time low.

Happily married...

Alisa Kraut Happily married

"We had been together for a while by then, already, and just wanted to celebrate it.

"We just felt really strongly about being together forever and working at it, with all the difficulties that that might include.

"We are a very modern couple, we have very progressive views on a lot of things.

"I am not really sure that human beings are destined to be with the same person for the rest of their lives.

"My commitment to Chris is to try and to work as hard as we can to make it work because we both gain something out of that."

Chicago Tribune syndicated advice columnist Amy Dickinson believes the increase in no-fault divorces and tougher child support laws are two reasons behind the falling popularity of married life in America.

"It is no longer necessary to be married to someone in order to pursue financial support and I believe this has had a huge impact on couples who have children together and, let's say, 20 years ago would get married in order to establish legitimacy and then, hence, get financial support."

In some communities single parenthood is now the norm, she argues, and Americans have become more comfortable with "non-traditional" households.

America also has the world's highest divorce rate - and that has undoubtedly shaken the confidence of many young people in the institution of marriage.

Rhyan Romaine and her partner Seth have been together for six years but have resisted pressure from friends and family to rush into marriage.

"Seth comes from a family of divorce and has seen how it's affected his life and his family.

"He says he couldn't imagine even thinking about marriage until we had been together for 10 years and I said as long as we are happy together we will stay together," says Miss Romaine.

"I think it's a fear that I have too, even though my parents are married. It's scary, having seen personal friends who have got married right out of college and who now are in their early thirties and dating again."

But Miss Romaine, a regional grant director for the American Loan Association, believes there is still a "lot of pressure" on young women to get married in America, where the idealised, fairytale wedding remains a staple of Hollywood romantic comedies and reality TV shows.

"I call it the 'marriage crazy'," she says. "All of a sudden this fever comes over women at a certain age. They get to about 24 or 25 and they have to hurry up and get married."

For many young people, marriage is simply the next item on their personal "checklist" after high school, college and career, she argues.

'Latin model'

The Pew Centre research, which suggests marriage is falling out of favour far less quickly among college graduates than less educated groups, would appear to bear this argument out.

Happily unmarried...

Jessica Bennett

"Women don't necessarily need a husband to make ends meet or to raise children. They can do a lot of these things on their own.

"Our definition of what you want in a husband has changed. At one time it was a nice enough dude who is also going to support you.

"In this day and age we really have this glorified notion of the soulmate. This needs to be a life partner, a best friend, a lover, everything in one.

"We are cynical but we have this really idealised notion of what a marriage should be still, and it's almost impossible to achieve that. Nothing is that perfect."

Read a Newsweek article about marriage co-authored by Jessica

Nearly two-thirds of American adults with college degrees (64%) are married, compared with just 47% among those with a high school education. That is in sharp contrast to 1960, when the most educated and the least educated were about equally likely to be married.

"There has been a realisation among college-educated Americans that marriage is actually a pretty good idea, even if they don't like to talk about it in public," argues Bradford Wilcox.

"On things like abortion, on hot-button global social issues, Americans who are college educated are more liberal.

"But when it comes to thinking about how they are going to govern their own lives, their own family lives, our sense from the data is that they are more marriage-minded, they are more conventional about family life."

Mr Wilcox, whose Virginia University team researched the impact of the recent recession on American marriages, is concerned that marriage is "withering" among middle and lower income groups, with potentially disastrous effects on American society and the economy.

"I think we are moving more towards a classically Latin model, where the powerful and the privileged have strong, stable families and access to decent income and decent assets. And everyone who is not in that upper third is worse and worse off."

The traditional nuclear family is still held up as an ideal in American politics and society, certainly more so than in many other Western democracies such as the UK.

Mr Wilcox argues that it has been the key to America's prosperity over the years.

He believes the decline in marriage is largely down to a sharp fall in the earning power and job prospects of non-college educated American men, many of whom now lack the means to get married, leaving their offspring "doubly disadvantaged" - lacking both assets and a stable home.

But perhaps it is a little premature to write the obituary for the American marriage just yet.

The sharp 5% decline in the number of new marriages in the US between 2009 and 2010, revealed by the Pew research, may simply be down to short-term economic factors.

With the cost of the average wedding running at about $20,000 (£12,946) many couples are opting for a longer engagement to give them more time to save up, according to Kyle Brown, of the American Bridal Association, which represents America's multi-billion dollar wedding industry.

But, he adds, his members have noticed "an increase in the beginning process of wedding planning, on items such as gowns, in the past three months".

"I would expect to see an uptick in the number of weddings in 2012 and 2013," he says. "It is purely down to economics."

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Build a Killer Website: 19 Dos and Don'ts

2012-01-02T12:27:00.000-08:00

Build a Killer Website: 19 Dos and Don'ts

If you do it right, your website can be the best marketing tool you have. Ilya Pozin, founder of the Web design firm Ciplex, on how not to screw it up.

By Ilya Pozin | @ilyaNeverSleeps | Nov 21, 2011

iStock

At bottom your website is a marketing tool. For many businesses, it’s the only source of business. If done right, it can be a major part of yours.

I’m continually surprised by how many people call my design company with very firm ideas about what they want on their business website and yet, they haven’t thought through some of the most basic questions first. For this reason, our first question is always “Why do you need a site?,” not “What do you want on it?”

At bottom your website is a marketing tool. For many businesses, it’s the only source of business. If done right, it can be a major part of yours.

Here’s my quick-hit list of the top dos and don’ts before you get started:

Do:

Set smart goals. And make sure they’re measurable. Here are a few great ones a Web designer wants to hear: increase conversion rates, increase sales, generate more leads, reduce overhead, and improve brand awareness.
Plan on becoming an SEO wizard. Sure, you’re going to want help from the pros and eventually you might even need your own in-house SEO expert, but search engine optimization is something you need to know about too. It has one of the highest ROIs in marketing. Plus, do it right and SEO can literally put your marketing on autopilot, allowing you to focus on improving the quality of your business, instead of figuring out how to bring in customers to your site. Start reading SEOmoz and stay up to date with SEO changes by reading sites like search engine land.
Use open source tools. You could go with a proprietary content management system (CMS) but that means you’re typically stuck with one company and paying hefty license fees to boot. Do yourself a favor and go with an open-source system—I like WordPress and Magento—that any developer can access.
Think about your mobile strategy simultaneously. Research the percentage of your visitors that are likely to use mobile devices to access your site. If it’s high, you may want to consider building a separate mobile version of your site, or even an app. If it’s relatively low, just make sure your website works on smart phones, but don’t invest into a mobile version.
Steal from your competitors. Before you build your site, check out your competitors and write down the things they do well. If you like the look and feel of another site, there’s no reason not to start with something you like and then make it your own.
Develop your content. The biggest slow-down in the Web design process is content. If you’re going to sell products on your site, get product photos and product descriptions ready. If you sell services, you’ll need a description of each service. Get as much of your content together before you start building your site—it will save you weeks. And while you’re at it…
Write with calls to action in mind. Good calls to action allow visitors to quickly decide what they want to do next. Having a big sale? Don’t just write a banner that says “50% off all products.” Write one that says “50% off all products, CLICK HERE to view them.”
Always answer the question “why?” Have you ever walked up to someone you’ve never met, handed them a business card, and walked away without saying a word? Likely not. If you want people to do something on your website, such as sign up for your newsletter, don’t just put up a box that says “enter email” or even “sign up for newsletter”—you’ll get a very weak conversion rate. Tell them why they should do it: “Sign up for our newsletter to receive weekly specials.” Same thing goes for Twitter and Facebook logos. Just putting them up isn’t smart. Tell people why they should follow you on Twitter or friend you on Facebook. What will they get out of it?
Trust your Web designer. I tend to see the worst end results with customers who come in with a “I know what I want, just do what I tell you” attitude. You hired an expert because they know more than you, right? Let them do what they do best and they’re more likely to meet and often exceed your goals.

Don’t:

Do it yourself. I know—I run a Web design firm, so of course I’m going to say this. But seriously, your website is often where your customers’ first experience your brand. If it looks homemade, they’re going to make assumptions about your business that you want to avoid.
Make people think. When visitors come to your website, they typically already know what they want out of it. Do a three-second test: If within three seconds a visitor can’t figure out what to do next, go back to the drawing board.
Expect visitors. Lose the “if you build it, they will come” mentality. Simply putting up your site will not result in any visitors.
Spend all your money. Don’t max out your entire budget on the website. You can get a well-designed site for under $1,000 from a freelancer, or a few thousand dollars from a professional agency. And you can always make improvements as your business grows. It’s far more important initially to have some money left over for a marketing budget so you can actually make a return on your investment.
Add a blog. Are you really going to write posts? Be honest. If you won’t, then forget about a blog. A website with an outdated blog can create the perception that your company is small or even out of business.
Add Twitter and Facebook buttons. If a potential client clicks through to your social pages and sees hardly any followers, they may lose trust in you. First build up your social presence, then commit to posting and engaging your fans on a regular basis, and only then promote them on your website. Also keep in mind that some businesses simply don’t belong on Twitter or Facebook.
Try to please everyone. Your website will be a mess if you try to accommodate every type of visitor who might come along. Figure out who is likely to be your most frequent users and focus on creating the best experience for them.
Add testimonials. Building credibility is important, but too often testimonials sound fake. “’They are great!’ says John Smith” simply isn’t believable. If you’re going to have testimonials make sure they are specific, and something people can relate to.
Use Flash. Some sites still need it, but if you can, avoid it. Adobe just announced that it will no longer support Flash on mobile devices and set-top-boxes. The last thing you want is for a potential customer to be unable to open your site.
Expect a killer website overnight. Good websites take time to build. If you want the best results out of your site, be prepared for several months of work.

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7 Things Highly Productive People Do

2012-01-02T12:21:00.000-08:00

7 Things Highly Productive People Do

You have more important things to focus on than, um, focusing. Get back on track with these tips.

By Ilya Pozin | @ilyaNeverSleeps | Dec 13, 2011

Flickr/ryantron

You probably don’t want to admit it but you love distractions. In fact, just like monkeys, you get a shot of dopamine every time something pulls you in another direction. Why do you think you check your email so much?

Want to be more productive and get your focus back? There are no secret tricks here… do one thing at a time. Stop multitasking—it’s just another form of distraction.

Easier said than done, I know.

Recently I sat down with Tony Wong, a project management blackbelt whose client list includes Toyota, Honda, and Disney, to name a few. He’s an expert in keeping people on task, so I thought he’d be a good person to ask.

Here are his tips for staying productive:

Work backwards from goals to milestones to tasks. Writing “launch company website” at the top of your to-do list is a sure way to make sure you never get it done. Break down the work into smaller and smaller chunks until you have specific tasks that can be accomplished in a few hours or less: Sketch a wireframe, outline an introduction for the homepage video, etc. That’s how you set goals and actually succeed in crossing them off your list.
Stop multi-tasking. No, seriously—stop. Switching from task to task quickly does not work. In fact, changing tasks more than 10 times in a day makes you dumber than being stoned. When you’re stoned, your IQ drops by five points. When you multitask, it drops by an average of 10 points, 15 for men, five for women (yes, men are three times as bad at multitasking than women).
Be militant about eliminating distractions. Lock your door, put a sign up, turn off your phone, texts, email, and instant messaging. In fact, if you know you may sneak a peek at your email, set it to offline mode, or even turn off your Internet connection. Go to a quiet area and focus on completing one task.
Schedule your email. Pick two or three times during the day when you’re going to use your email. Checking your email constantly throughout the day creates a ton of noise and kills your productivity.
Use the phone. Email isn’t meant for conversations. Don’t reply more than twice to an email. Pick up the phone instead.
Work on your own agenda. Don’t let something else set your day. Most people go right to their emails and start freaking out. You will end up at inbox-zero, but accomplish nothing. After you wake up, drink water so you rehydrate, eat a good breakfast to replenish your glucose, then set prioritized goals for the rest of your day.
Work in 60 to 90 minute intervals. Your brain uses up more glucose than any other bodily activity. Typically you will have spent most of it after 60-90 minutes. (That’s why you feel so burned out after super long meetings.) So take a break: Get up, go for a walk, have a snack, do something completely different to recharge. And yes, that means you need an extra hour for breaks, not including lunch, so if you’re required to get eight hours of work done each day, plan to be there for 9.5-10 hours.

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The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis

2011-12-30T16:53:00.000-08:00

The Older-and-Wiser Hypothesis

By STEPHEN S. HALL

Published: May 6, 2007

In 1950, the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, in a famous treatise on the phases of life development, identified wisdom as a likely, but not inevitable, byproduct of growing older. Wisdom arose, he suggested, during the eighth and final stage of psychosocial development, which he described as “ego integrity versus despair.” If an individual had achieved enough “ego integrity” over the course of a lifetime, then the imminent approach of infirmity and death would be accompanied by the virtue of wisdom. Unfortunately for researchers who followed, Erikson didn’t bother to define wisdom.

As an ancient concept and esteemed human value, wisdom has historically been studied in the realms of philosophy and religion. The idea has been around at least since the Sumerians first etched bits of practical advice — “We are doomed to die; let us spend” — on clay tablets more than 5,000 years ago. But as a trait that might be captured by quantitative measures, it has been more like the woolly mammoth of ideas — big, shaggy and elusive. It is only in the last three decades that wisdom has received even glancing attention from social scientists. Erikson’s observations left the door open for the formal study of wisdom, and a few brave psychologists rushed in where others feared to tread.

In some respects, they have not moved far beyond the very first question about wisdom: What is it? And it won’t give anything away to reveal that 30 years after embarking on the empirical study of wisdom, psychologists still don’t agree on an answer. But it is also true that the journey in many ways may be as enlightening as the destination.

From the outset, it’s easier to define what wisdom isn’t. First of all, it isn’t necessarily or intrinsically a product of old age, although reaching an advanced age increases the odds of acquiring the kinds of life experiences and emotional maturity that cultivate wisdom, which is why aspects of wisdom are increasingly attracting the attention of gerontological psychologists. Second, if you think you’re wise, you’re probably not. As Gandhi (who topped the leader board a few years ago in a survey in which college students were asked to name wise people) put it, “It is unwise to be too sure of one’s own wisdom.” Indeed, a general thread running through modern wisdom research is that wise people tend to be humble and “other-centered” as opposed to self-centered.

“Wisdom is really hard to study — really hard,” says Robert J. Sternberg, a former president of the American Psychological Association who edited “Wisdom: Its Nature, Origins and Development,” one of the first academic books on the subject, in 1990, and also edited, with Jennifer Jordan, “A Handbook of Wisdom” in 2005. “People tend to pooh-pooh wisdom because, well, you know, what’s that? And how could you possibly define it? Isn’t it culturally relative?” And yet Sternberg, who is the dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Tufts University, says he believes the cultivation of wisdom — even though the concept is “big, important and messy” — is essential to the future of society.

Certain qualities associated with wisdom recur in the academic literature: a clear-eyed view of human nature and the human predicament; emotional resiliency and the ability to cope in the face of adversity; an openness to other possibilities; forgiveness; humility; and a knack for learning from lifetime experiences. And yet as psychologists have noted, there is a yin-yang to the idea that makes it difficult to pin down. Wisdom is founded upon knowledge, but part of the physics of wisdom is shaped by uncertainty. Action is important, but so is judicious inaction. Emotion is central to wisdom, yet detachment is essential.

If you think all those attributes sound fuzzy, vague and absolutely refractory to quantification, you’ve got a lot of company in the academic community. But there is a delicious paradox at the heart of the study of wisdom. As difficult as it is to define, the mere contemplation of a definition is an irresistible exercise that says a lot about who we aspire to become over the course of a lifetime and what we value as a society. And little pieces of that evolving definition of wisdom — especially the ability to cope with adversity and the regulation of emotion with age — have begun to attract researchers with brain-scanning machines and serious chops in neuroscience.

“It’s very intriguing, and it’s becoming a big issue in our field,” says Suzanne Kunkel, director of the Scripps Gerontology Center at Miami University in Ohio. She noted that the number of formal talks about wisdom and the aging process has increased significantly at professional meetings. “Part of me is a little skeptical,” she says, reflecting the compelling ambivalence the subject elicits, “and part of me thinks there’s something there.”

The formal study of wisdom as a modern academic pursuit can legitimately trace its roots back to the 1950s, to an apartment building on Newkirk Avenue, just off Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn. That is where a keenly observant young girl named Vivian Clayton became fascinated by special qualities she attributed to two prominent elders in her life: her father, a furrier named Simon Clayton, and her maternal grandmother. There was something that distinguished them from everyone else she knew. Despite limited education, they possessed an uncanny ability to remain calm in the midst of crises, made good decisions and conveyed an almost palpable sense of emotional contentment, often in the face of considerable adversity or uncertainty. Long before she went to college, Clayton found herself contemplating the nature of wisdom.

“My father was 41 when I was born,” she said recently. “By far, he was the oldest parent among all my friends, almost the age of my friends’ grandparents. He had emigrated from England but had lived through World War II there and experienced the blitz and had to care for his dying mother, who was so sick that she refused to go down into the shelters during air raids in London. She lived in the East End, where the docks were, and they were always getting bombed. So he would sit with her while the bombs were falling, and when it was over, she would say, ‘Now we can have a cup of tea!’ He was a very humble man, and very aware of his limitations, but he always seemed to be able to weigh things and then make decisions that were right for the family. He knew what to respond to quickly, and what you had to reflect on.” Clayton’s maternal grandmother, Beatrice Domb, was the other central figure in her early life. “My mother saw my grandmother as a simple person,” Clayton says. “But her simplicity I saw as a sign of deep contentment in her own life. She, who had less than a high-school education, was the matriarch of this very large family.”

During her childhood and adolescence, Clayton obsessed over the differences between her mother and father, her grandmother and grandfather. She recalls pondering these differences as a teenager, dipping her toes in Mahwah Creek during family outings in Suffern, northwest of the city; as an undergraduate studying psychology at Buffalo University; and more formally, as a graduate student in the early 1970s at the University of Southern California, working with one of the country’s leading gerontological psychologists, James E. Birren. Clayton is generally recognized as the first psychologist to ask, in even faintly scientific terms, “What does wisdom mean, and how does age affect it?”

Clayton’s study of wisdom began with a bias, but one that counterbalanced a pre-existing bias that pervaded the biomedical literature on aging in the ’60s and ’70s. Half a century ago, although only 5 percent of the elderly lived in nursing homes, almost all the gerontological research focused on this frail and struggling population. Not surprisingly, these researchers found plenty of negative things about being old. Memory, especially working memory, began to fade. The speed with which the brain processed information slowed down. Older people were more likely to be cognitively impaired.

One of the leading voices pushing for a more balanced view of the aging process was Birren. In what might be viewed as a battle between modern psychology and cultural attitudes toward the elderly, Birren was one of the leaders of an effort to investigate positive aspects of aging. At the time Clayton was at U.S.C., Birren’s graduate students were exploring the relationship of aging to topics like love, creativity and wisdom — topics so big and unwieldy that they almost defied study.

Clayton went off to consult the “literature” on wisdom, which almost mirrored the central canon of Western civilization. She rummaged through the Hebrew Bible for clues to wise behavior, analyzed the stories of Job and King Solomon, parsed the meaning of ancient proverbs. “What emerged from that analysis,” she says, “was that wisdom meant a lot of different things. But it was always associated with knowledge, frequently applied to human social situations, involved judgment and reflection and was almost always embedded in a component of compassion.” The essential importance of balance was embodied in the Hebrew word for wisdom, chochmah, which ancient peoples understood to evoke the combination of both heart and mind in reaching a decision. At that point, Birren advised Clayton to “become more scientific” and treat wisdom as a psychological construct that could be defined well enough to be measured and studied (“operationalized,” in psychological lingo).

Between 1976, when she finished her dissertation, and 1982, Clayton published several groundbreaking papers that are now generally acknowledged as the first to suggest that researchers could study wisdom empirically. She identified three general aspects of human activity that were central to wisdom — the acquisition of knowledge (cognitive) and the analysis of that information (reflective) filtered through the emotions (affective). Then she assembled a battery of existing psychological tests to measure it.

Clayton laid several important markers on the field at its inception. She realized that “neither were the old always wise, nor the young lacking in wisdom.” She also argued that while intelligence represented a nonsocial and impersonal domain of knowledge that might diminish in value over the course of a lifetime, wisdom represented a social, interpersonal form of knowledge about human nature that resisted erosion and might increase with age. Clayton’s early work was “a big deal,” Sternberg says. “It was a breakthrough to say wisdom is something you could study.” Jacqui Smith, who has conducted wisdom research since the 1980s, says it “was seminal work that really triggered subsequent studies.”

As Clayton began to describe her research at psychological meetings in the late ’70s, the work on wisdom created considerable buzz. One of the people who grasped its significance immediately was Paul B. Baltes, a legendary psychologist then at Pennsylvania State University. Baltes helped pioneer life-span developmental theory, which argues that in order to understand, say, a 60-year-old person, you need to take into account the individual’s biology, psychology and sociological context at various stages of life, as well as the cultural and historical era in which he or she lived.

Baltes closely monitored the initial wisdom studies, Clayton recalls, and regularly peppered her with questions about her progress. “I went to all these meetings,” she says, “and we would have lunch or dinner at every meeting. He was always asking, where was I with this wisdom stuff?”

The answer would soon be: nowhere. In 1982, Clayton published her last paper on wisdom. By then, she had applied for, but failed to receive, a grant from the National Institute on Aging to pursue the wisdom studies, had quit her position as assistant professor at Columbia University Teachers College and left academia for good. Part of the reason was that she recognized her own limitations in studying a very diffuse topic. “I was lost in the Milky Way of wisdom,” she admits, “and each star seemed as bright as the next. Ultimately that’s why I didn’t continue with it.” The universe shifted to Berlin, and the working definition of wisdom acquired a German accent.

The Berlin Wisdom Paradigm, as it came to be called, was built in part on research using hypothetical vignettes to discern wise and unwise responses to life dilemmas. “A 15-year-old girl wants to get married right away,” one vignette suggested. “What should one/she consider and do?”

A wise person, according to the Berlin group, would say something like: “Well, on the surface, this seems like an easy problem. On average, marriage for 15-year-old girls is not a good thing. But there are situations where the average case does not fit. Perhaps in this instance, special life circumstances are involved, such as the girl has a terminal illness. Or the girl has just lost her parents. And also this girl may live in another culture or historical period. Perhaps she was raised with a value system different from ours. In addition, one has to think about adequate ways of talking with the girl and to consider her emotional state.”

That reply may seem tentative and relativistic, but it reflects many aspects of wisdom as defined by the Berlin Wisdom Project, which began in 1984 under the leadership of Baltes, who along with Birren had championed the search for late-life potential. Born in 1939 in Germany, Baltes had established a reputation as a leading quantitative psychologist by the time he returned to Germany in 1980 to become director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. There, Baltes and many collaborators — including Jacqui Smith (now at the University of Michigan), Ursula M. Staudinger and Ute Kunzmann — embarked on an ambitious, large-scale program to, as they put it, “take wisdom into the laboratory.”

Boiled down to its essence, the “Berlin Paradigm” defined wisdom as “an expert knowledge system concerning the fundamental pragmatics of life.” Heavily influenced by life-span psychology, the Berlin version of wisdom emphasized several complementary qualities: expert knowledge of both the “facts” of human nature and the “how” of dealing with decisions and dilemmas; an appreciation of one’s historical, cultural and biological circumstances during the arc of a life span; an understanding of the “relativism” of values and priorities; and an acknowledgment, at the level of both thought and action, of uncertainty. “We picked up from the philosophical literature that wisdom is like a peak performance,” Smith says. “It’s the highest level of potential or achievement that a human mind might be able to achieve.” And so the Berlin group focused more on expertise and performance than on personality traits, because such an approach lent itself to more rigorous measurement than the typical self-report tests of psychological research.

“Wisdom in action,” as the Berlin group put it, might manifest itself as good judgment, shrewd advice, psychological insight, emotional regulation and empathetic understanding; it could be found in familial interactions, in formal writing and in the relationship between a student and mentor or a doctor and patient. Yet by its very nature, the researchers conceded, wisdom was a utopian concept that was virtually unattainable. Baltes and Staudinger pointed out in one paper that “wisdom is a collectively anchored product and that individuals by themselves are only ‘weak’ carriers of wisdom.” They generally did not see wisdom as the function of personality. As Smith puts it: “We went in the other direction and tried to define what a product might be. Not the person as such, but rather some sort of performance that we could assess.” In evaluating the wisdom of Gandhi, for example, they focused on his speeches and writings.

One instrument the Baltes group developed to measure wisdom was posing open-ended, hypothetical questions like the one about the 15-year-old girl who wanted to marry. (In their view, a reply garnering a low wisdom-related score would be an inflexible, authoritative response like: “No, no way, marrying at age 15 would be utterly wrong. One has to tell the girl that marriage is not possible. . . . No, this is just a crazy idea.”) These vignettes located wisdom firmly in the universe of problem-solving around significant life events — from issues like choosing a career versus child-rearing to facing decisions about early retirement to dealing with a diagnosis of cancer.

The Germans were among the first to reach what is now a widespread conclusion: There’s not a lot of wisdom around. Of the 700 people assessed, “we never found a single person who gained top scores across the board,” Smith wrote in an e-mail message. They also punctured one conceit about growing old when they found no evidence, in four different studies, that wisdom, as they defined it, necessarily increases with age. Rather, they identified a “plateau” of wisdom-related performance through much of middle and old age; a separate study by the group has indicated that wisdom begins, on average, to diminish around age 75, probably hand in hand with cognitive decline. Nonetheless, the Baltes group suggested in one paper that there might be an optimal age and that “the ‘world record’ in wisdom may be held by someone in his or her 60s.”

The Berlin Wisdom Project made a huge impact on the handful of people interested in wisdom research; by one account, academic “wisdom” publications numbered only two or three a year before 1984 but had grown to several dozen a year by 2000. But the German research, though much admired, did not overcome many of the mainstream reservations in academia. Jacqui Smith, who was collaborating with Baltes on one of his final wisdom papers when he died of cancer last fall at age 67, says wisdom studies remain on the fringe of academic respectability.

Even some wisdom researchers found the Berlin wisdom studies to be abstract and difficult to understand, and although emotion was always part of the formula, it struck some people as secondary to the emphasis on expert knowledge. “It’s great work, and they’ve looked at it more closely than anybody else,” says Laura L. Carstensen, a psychologist who directs the Center on Longevity at Stanford University. “But one of the critiques people have had is that they left emotion out of it. I don’t think you can have wisdom without having emotional regulation be a part of it.”

How might emotion be important to wisdom? Consider C., a 67-year-old mother of seven children who lives in Gainesville, Fla. Her life has not been without heartache or emotional tumult. She grew up poor, and she has been drawn into custody battles and financial imbroglios with in-laws. More significant, one of her children was born withcerebral palsy; rather than place the child in a home, as some urged her to do, she insisted on caring for and raising him at home with the rest of the family. “I would put my healthy kids in a home first,” she told doctors at the time, “instead of putting a baby in there that can’t talk for himself.” Despite years of challenge (the son eventually died at age 12), C. managed to maintain a kind of emotional equilibrium. “I don’t sit around and dwell on bad things,” she said. “I don’t have time for it, really. There’s so many good things you can do.”

C., who appears as a pseudonym in the psychological literature, is arguably one of the few certifiably wise people in the world —“certified” in the sense that she scored well above average in a “Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale” developed by Monika Ardelt, a German-born sociologist at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

In 1990, as a graduate student at the University of North Carolina, Ardelt wanted to identify factors that contributed to a sense of life satisfaction and well-being in old age and began to focus on the acquisition of wisdom. She discovered Vivian Clayton’s early research, which made emotion a central part of wisdom, and she began to build upon Clayton’s framework. By 1997, Ardelt had joined the faculty at the University of Florida, and she received a grant from the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Aging to develop a psychological test to assess wisdom. She was interested in investigating measures of wisdom and looking at a trait that often goes by the name “resilience” — how some older people are able to deal with adversity and bounce back emotionally while others cannot. Indeed, as she has noted, “successfully coping with crises and hardships in life might not only be a hallmark of wise individuals but also one of the pathways to wisdom.”

Thus, beginning in December 1997, Ardelt began to recruit 180 senior citizens at churches and community groups in north-central Florida to participate in what she called a “Personality and Aging Well Study.” The participants did not know that one purpose of the study was to road-test a series of questions designed to assess general wisdom. In Ardelt’s working definition, wisdom integrated three separate but interconnected ways of dealing with the world: cognitive, reflective and emotional. Hence, a “three-dimensional” wisdom scale, which, according to the habit of psychological measures, is designated “3D-WS.” The cognitive aspect, for example, included the ability to understand human nature, perceive a situation clearly and make decisions despite ambiguity and uncertainty. The reflective sphere dealt with a person’s ability to examine an event from multiple perspectives — to step outside oneself and understand another point of view. And the emotional aspect primarily involved feeling compassion toward others as well as an ability to remain positive in the face of adversity. In the initial phase, participants responded to 132 questions that probed for these qualities. Later, Ardelt settled on 39 questions that, in her judgment, captured the elusive concept of wisdom.

There is, of course, something utterly quixotic about assessing human wisdom on the basis of a self-report test in which subjects agree or disagree with statements like “People are either good or bad” and “I always try to look at all sides of a problem.” Yet the Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale, Ardelt argues, distinguished “how relatively wise older people cope with life crises in comparison to older people relatively low on wisdom.” And when Ardelt went back and intensively interviewed some of the subjects (including C.), a seasoned, pragmatic, everyday version of wisdom — wisdom with a small “w,” you might say — emerged in their life stories.

J., who was also described in the literature, is an 86-year-old African-American man who is also no stranger to adversity. He went off to fight in World War II and, after experiencing the horrors of battle, suffered severe depression upon his return to the United States. He acquired an advanced degree and became a successful school administrator, although his marriage had fallen apart. He was devastated when his mother died. Yet he managed to step outside his immediate troubles to assess the situation with a detachment and graceful calm that helped him cope during times of adversity. “I’ve had as much bad things to happen as good things, but I’ve never allowed any outside force to take possession of my being,” he explained. “That means, whenever I had a problem, I went to something wholesome to solve it.” One of the “wholesome” things that helped, he said, was bowling.

The popular image of the Wise Man usually does not include a guy in a bowling shirt, but several qualities have emerged again and again in older people like J. who score high on Ardelt’s wisdom scale. They learn from previous negative experiences. They are able to step outside themselves and assess a troubling situation with calm reflection. They recast a crisis as a problem to be addressed, a puzzle to be solved. They take action in situations they can control and accept the inability to do so when matters are outside their control.

All these sound like noble attributes, but the litany of qualities is so squishy that the definition of wisdom begins to resemble a multicar pileup of platitudes. One person’s positive attitude might be another person’s form of self-delusion; perceiving one’s limitations might be another name for passivity or indecision or lack of persistence. The common-sense language of wisdom often teeters between proverb and cliché. In fact, the Berlin group mounted an extensive study of proverbs as a way of thinking about wisdom, and Ardelt cites the well-known serenity prayer as an example of a proverb that emphasizes the discernment implicit in wisdom. (This is the saying that goes, “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.”)

But as I read the undeniably self-satisfied profiles in wisdom published by Ardelt, they reminded me that wisdom unfolds on many stages and very much depends on the dramatis personae. We tend to think of wisdom as a Cecil B. De Mille production in human enlightenment, with Biblical sets and King Solomon (or some similarly commanding figure) talking down to us from a position of social and moral authority. But in our daily negotiation with the improvident turns of an imperfect world, we probably need a more personal form of wisdom in dealing with in-laws or coping with financial stresses. Perhaps the most important yin-yang of wisdom may be the different shapes it takes in the public and private domains. The public face of wisdom has to do with leadership, judgment and a responsibility to the collective future, offering a kind of moral inspiration to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people; this is the face that emerges when people are asked in surveys to name people they consider to be wise (the nominees invariably include people like Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa and again Gandhi). The private face of wisdom may be Vivian Clayton’s father, my parents, your Uncle Myron. By comparison, the example of their wisdom is invisible to all but the inner circle of kin and acquaintances that benefit each day, in myriad specific ways, from the exercise of wisdom.

If nothing else, the 3D-WS studies suggest that a kind of wisdom can arise in ordinary people from unexpected backgrounds. With Ardelt’s help, I had an opportunity to speak with some of the people who ranked high on her wisdom scale. C., it turns out, grew up on a tobacco farm in Kentucky, never finished high school and harbored no greater ambition than to have children. “We’re not mountaineers,” she told me, “but we are hillbillies.”

Ardelt is now testing her wisdom scale on a different population. In collaboration with George E. Vaillant, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist affiliated with Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, she is assessing a group of Harvard University graduates who have been faithfully filling out psychological surveys every two years since they began college in the late 1930s. “I have identified people I consider wise and people I consider relatively low in wisdom,” says Ardelt, who is still analyzing the data. People who rated high in wisdom, she adds, were “very generous,” both financially and emotionally; among those who rated low in wisdom, “there was this occupation with the self.”

Ardelt acknowledges that no one really knows what wisdom is. “I like my definition,” she says. “The Baltes people like their definition, and Sternberg likes his. There’s no agreement on what wisdom is, and that’s the fuzzy part. We’re not there yet.”

The “fuzziness” of wisdom studies scares many people away from the subject; as James Birren and Cheryl Svensson noted recently, the 13 chapters of Sternberg’s 1990 collection “Wisdom” offer 13 different approaches, and many self-respecting psychologists and neuroscientists fairly flee from the suggestion that they are investigating the biological basis of wisdom. Yet many of the emotional and cognitive traits that rank high on current research agendas — resilience, positivity, expert knowledge systems, cognitive processing and especially the regulation of emotion — closely overlap with qualities that have been consistently identified by Clayton, Baltes, Ardelt and other social scientists as crucial to wisdom.

One of the most interesting areas of neuroscience research involves looking at the way people regulate their emotions and how that regulation can change over the course of a lifetime. Laura Carstensen of Stanford University has produced a substantial body of research over the past two decades showing that the ability to focus on emotional control is tightly linked to a person’s sense of time and that older people in general seem to have a better feel for keeping their emotions in balance. This has emerged in part from a long-running research project known informally at Stanford as the “beeper study.”

In 1994, Carstensen and her colleagues provided nearly 200 Northern California residents, young and old, with electronic pagers; since then, in several waves of data collection, the subjects have been beeped at random times, up to five times a day over the course of a week, and asked to describe the emotions they are feeling at that exact moment. For Jan Post, who lives north of San Francisco, several of these beeps arrived when she was, as she put it, “doing what husbands and wives are supposed to do.” Daniel Zucker’s pager pulsed on occasion when he was in meetings at work or driving on the highway. Whatever they were doing, the subjects paused to fill out a questionnaire reporting the intensity of 19 emotions ranging from anger to happiness to boredom. As part of the ongoing study, participants are now coming into the Stanford lab for intense psychological testing, which often includes a session in brain-scanning machines.

What the Stanford researchers have found — in the laboratory and out in the world — is that despite the well-documented cognitive declines associated with advancing age, older people seem to have figured out how to manage their emotions in a profoundly important way. Compared with younger people, they experience negative emotions less frequently, exercise better control over their emotions and rely on a complex and nuanced emotional thermostat that allows them to bounce back quickly from adverse moments. Indeed, they typically strive for emotional balance, which in turn seems to affect the ways their brains process information from their environment.

On a recent spring day in Palo Alto, Calif., for example, the Stanford researchers put 67-year-old N., a very nice, good-natured subject of the beeper study, through a battery of cognitive and emotional assessments. She repeatedly filled out questionnaires asking her to gauge the intensity of her emotions; took a vocabulary test; endured a wearying series of tasks designed to assess the quality of her memory; and before the two-day gantlet of testing was done, would also undergo functional magnetic resonance imaging (f.M.R.I.) of her brain while she performed a monetary-reward task and viewed pictures laden with positive and negative emotional content. Every once in a while, she was asked to chew on a piece of cotton until it was saturated with saliva (a test for the stress hormone cortisol).

These laboratory sessions are not without their frustrating moments, and the low point for N. occurred in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon, when she was asked to perform two different tasks: public speaking and a maddening mathematical task that involved a formula for counting backward as fast as she could. Every time N. made a mistake, and she made quite a few, a humorless examiner would say, “Error,” and ask her to start again. She became so flustered that she’d pretzeled her body into an ampersand and kept repeating, “Gosh, I can’t even think. . . .” Later she confided, “I was almost in tears right after doing those numbers.” But by the time N. completed the final task of the day, which asked her to rate her emotions on a scale of one (for low) to seven (for high), she appeared to have rebounded quite nicely.

“Happiness is a seven,” she said with a triumphant laugh, checking the last box on the questionnaire. “I’m getting out of here!”

That, in a sense, is the take-home message of the “beeper study,” too. The results suggest that older people on average are more even-keeled and resilient emotionally. “Younger people tend to be either positive or negative at any given point in their daily life,” Carstensen says, “but older people are more likely to experience mixed emotions, happiness and a touch of sadness at the same time. Having mixed emotions helps to regulate emotional states better than extremes of emotion. There’s a lot of loss associated with aging, and humans are the only species that recognizes that time eventually runs out. That influences the motivation to savor the day-to-day experiences you have, it allows you to be more positive. Appreciating the fragility of life helps you savor it.” Fredda Blanchard-Fields of the Georgia Institute of Technology has produced a series of studies showing that the emotional equilibrium of older people allows them to negotiate solutions to interpersonal problems better than younger people. “She wouldn’t call it research on wisdom,” Carstensen says of Blanchard-Fields, “but I would.”

Carstensen and her colleagues believe that this motivation to focus less on the negative is probably unconscious and shaped by one’s sense of time. “According to our theory, this isn’t a quality of aging per se, but of time horizons,” she says. “When your time perspective shortens, as it does when you come closer to the ends of things, you tend to focus on emotionally meaningful goals. When the time horizon is long, you focus on knowledge acquisition.” As time horizons shorten, she added, “things become much clearer, because people are letting their feelings navigate what they do, who they spend time with, what are the choices they’re making in life, and it’s about right now.”

Carstensen calls this “socioemotional selectivity theory” and says that in the shortened time perspective of old age, people are motivated to focus on the positive in a way that registers as a difference in cognitive processing in the brain. “I’m not a ‘wisdom person,’ ” she said in a recent conversation in her office. But she readily agreed that many elements of emotional regulation seen in older adults are “absolutely” consistent with qualities that have long been identified by the wisdom researchers.

This is all of a piece with life-span development theory (Carstensen got her Ph.D., in a program founded by Paul Baltes), which has as a central precept the idea that the decisions one makes at each stage of life involve trade-offs. As Carstensen puts it, “There’s always a cost, always a tension, between selecting any goal.” She and her colleague Corinna E. LÃ¶ckenhoff have speculated that there may even be good evolutionary reasons for this division between knowledge acquisition and emotional fulfillment. Acquiring knowledge (and paying close attention to threat and danger) increases the likelihood that young people will survive to reproductive age; emphasizing emotional connection and kinship at an older age may increase the survival ability of one’s children and grandchildren (and their genes) in the future. “If you invest increasingly in those people related to you,” Carstensen says, “then you are investing in your own genes’ survival.”

This “positivity” effect may even have long-term health consequences. Although the findings haven’t been peer-reviewed or published, Carstensen said preliminary results from the small sample in the ongoing “beeper” experiment indicate that people who didn’t regulate their emotions well as adults and were relatively more negative at the start of the study “were more likely to be dead” 10 years later, independent of their health status at the beginning of the experiment.

This intriguing correlation between positivity and longevity has been seen elsewhere. In 2002, Becca Levy, a psychologist at Yale University, collaborated with researchers for the Ohio Longitudinal Study, who have been following aging in a cohort of people since 1975, and they made a very surprising finding: older people with a more positive attitude toward old age lived seven and a half years longer. “It’s a pretty robust effect,” says Suzanne Kunkel, the gerontologist who heads the Ohio study. “People with a positive perception of aging, of themselves as an aging person, seem to have a longevity advantage.” But there may also be downsides to positivity, and Carstensen’s lab is investigating that possibility. Older people who are inclined to tune out the negative and focus on the positive, she says, might be more vulnerable to confidence scams and make bad, overly trusting decisions.

Richard J. Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin, has been looking at patterns of brain activity associated with emotional regulation in a small group of older people who have participated in the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study. In a paper published last year, the Wisconsin team reported that older adults (the average age was 64) who regulated their emotions well showed a distinctly different pattern of brain activity than those who didn’t. These people apparently used their prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that exerts “executive control” over certain brain functions, to tamp down activity in the amygdala, a small region deep in the brain that processes emotional content, especially fear and anxiety. In people who are poor regulators of emotion, activity in the amygdala is higher, and daily measurements of the stress hormone cortisol follow a pattern that has been associated with poor health outcomes.

“Those people who are good at regulating negative emotion, inferred by their ability to voluntarily use cognitive strategies to reappraise a stimulus, show reductions in activation in the amygdala,” says Davidson, who added that such regulation probably results from “something that has been at least implicitly trained over the years.” It is difficult (not to say dangerous) to generalize from such a small, focused study, but the implication is that people who learn, or somehow train themselves, to modulate their emotions are better able to manage stress and bounce back from adversity. Although they can register the negative, they have somehow learned not to get bogged down in it. Whether this learning is a form of “wisdom” accumulated over a lifetime of experience, as wisdom researchers see it, or can be acquired through training exercises like meditation, as Davidson’s previous research has shown, the recent message from neuroscience laboratories is that the optimal regulation of emotion can be seen in the brain.

Similarly, several years ago, Carstensen; Mara Mather of the University of California at Santa Cruz; John Gabrieli, a neuroscientist now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and several colleagues performed f.M.R.I. studies of young and old people to see whether the ability to regulate emotions left a trace in the amygdala. The study indicated that the amygdala in young people becomes active when they view both positive and negative images; the amygdala in older people is active only when they view positive images. Put another way, young people tend to cling to the negative information, neurologically speaking, while older people seem better able to shrug it off and focus more on positive images. This neural selectivity, this focus on the positive, is virtually instantaneous, Gabrieli says, and yet probably reflects a kind of emotional knowledge or experience that guides cognitive focus; Carstensen says older people “disattend” negative information. This “disattention” also echoes some very old thoughts on wisdom. In his 1890 book “The Principles of Psychology,” William James observed, “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.” In modern neuroscience parlance, Gabrieli says, “you could say that in older people the amygdala is overlooking the negative.”

Much of the research to date has reflected a predominantly Western notion of wisdom, but its definition can be further muddied by cultural vagaries. In one cross-cultural study, researchers found that Americans and Australians essentially equated being wise with being experienced and knowledgeable; being old and discreet were seen as less-than-desirable qualities. People in India and Japan, by contrast, linked wisdom to being discreet, aged and experienced.

Nevertheless, the notion of wisdom is sufficiently universal that it raises other questions: Where does it come from, and how does one acquire it? Surprisingly, a good deal of evidence, both anecdotal and empirical, suggests that the seeds of wisdom are planted earlier in life — certainly earlier than old age, often earlier than middle age and possibly even earlier than young adulthood. And there are strong hints that wisdom is associated with an earlier exposure to adversity or failure. That certainly seems to be the case with emotional regulation and is perfectly consistent with Carstensen’s ideas about shifting time horizons. Karen Parker and her colleagues at Stanford have published several striking animal studies showing that a very early exposure to mild adversity (she calls it a “stress inoculation”) seems to “enhance the development of brain systems that regulate emotional, neuroendocrine and cognitive control” — at least in nonhuman primates. Some researchers are also exploring the genetic basis of resilience.

The Berlin group reported that the roots of wisdom can be traced, in some cases, to adolescence. Jacqui Smith points out that many of the people in the Berlin Aging Study survived two world wars and a global depression; the elderly people who scored high on Monika Ardelt’s wisdom scale also reported considerable hardship earlier in their lives.

This notion that wise people might have been “vaccinated” earlier in life by adversity reminded me of Vivian Clayton’s father, sitting next to his frail mother in London while the German bombs rained down around them, celebrating their survival each time with a cup of tea. It also made me curious about Clayton, who disappeared from academia in 1981. I managed to track her down through a short item on the Internet, which described a psychologist of the same name who tended bees as a hobby in Northern California. It turned out to be the same Vivian Clayton, and she agreed to meet with me at her office in Orinda on a sunny March morning, a few hours before seeing her first patient of the day.

Now 56 — “and proud of it,” she said — Clayton turned out to be a vivacious woman with a soothingly enthusiastic voice. After all the abstraction involved in thinking about wisdom, she had turned to a more pragmatic role as a geriatric neuropsychologist, helping families and lawyers determine mental capacity in older people experiencing cognitive declines; in fact, she helped write the California State Bar manual for making these determinations. She never contributed anything to the wisdom field after 1982, although Paul Baltes continued to send her papers from Berlin and Monika Ardelt has occasionally sought her counsel. I asked her if she regretted not continuing in the field, and she said not at all. “I reached a fork in the road,” she said. “Wisdom can be a very abstract concept, and as I got older, I gravitated to more practical approaches.”

We talked about wisdom in contemporary culture, and gradually the conversation turned to bees. “You know, bees have been around for hundreds of million of years, at least, as living creatures,” Clayton said. “And when you work a hive, and you’re there with that hive alone, and you hear how contented the bees are, you just have the sense that they have the pulse of the universe encoded in their genes. And I really feel that the concept of wisdom is like that, too. Somehow, like the bees, we are programmed to understand when someone has been wise. But what wisdom is, and how one learns to be wise, is still somewhat of a mystery.”

WISE COUNSEL

How researchers elecit the advice people give to judge their wisdom.

Since 1984, researchers affiliated with the Berlin Wisdom Project at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin have tried to develop psychological tests to measure wisdom. In one common test, more than 700 subjects have been asked to respond to hypothetical situations concerning pivotal life events like divorce and job loss, as well as life assessments; the replies were then analyzed according to the criteria of the Berlin Wisdom Paradigm and rated on such qualities as knowledge about human nature, acknowledgment of uncertainty and an appreciation of relativistic attitudes. Here are some examples of the situations and questions presented.

Michael, a 28-year-old mechanic with two preschool-aged children, has just learned that the factory in which he is working will close in three months. At present, there is no possibility for further employment in this area. His wife recently returned to her well-paying nursing career. Michael is considering the following options: He can plan to move to another city to seek employment, or he can plan to take on full responsibility for childcare and household tasks. What should Michael do and consider in making his plans? What additional information is needed?

Mary was given a diagnosis of cancer. The doctors told her that she has one year to live. Mary is now thinking about what she should do. Among other options, she can try, as much as possible, to continue living the way she has been, or she can make a drastic change in her life. What should Mary do and consider in making her plans? What additional information is needed?

A middle-aged woman had once decided to concentrate on her family and not take up a profession. Her children are about to leave home. One day she meets an old friend whom she has not seen in a long time. This friend had decided to concentrate on her career rather than starting a family. She is well established in her profession. The meeting prompts the woman to review the life she has led so far. What might such a life review look like? Which aspects of her life might she recall? How might she explain her life course and the motives for her actions? How might she evaluate her life in retrospect?

Stephen S. Hall is the author, most recently, of “Size Matters: How Height Affects the Health, Happiness and Success of Boys — and the Men They Become.”

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Important Videos Before the end of 2011

2011-12-24T19:56:00.000-08:00

The scandal of the Alabama poor cut off from water

2011-12-16T23:58:00.001-08:00

The scandal of the Alabama poor cut off from water

By Brian Wheeler BBC News, Alabama

Sheila Tyson, a community activist in the deprived West End area of Birmingham, tells the BBC how her community has been affected

Altered States

Banks stand to lose millions of dollars in debt repayments if the biggest municipal bankruptcy in American history is allowed to proceed.

But the real victims of the financial collapse in the US state of Alabama's most populous county are its poorest residents - forced to bathe in bottled water and use portable toilets after being cut off from the mains supply.

And there is widespread anger in Jefferson County that swingeing sewerage rate hikes could have been avoided but for the greed, corruption and incompetence of local politicians, government officials and Wall Street financiers.

Tammy Lucas is the human face of a financial and political scandal that has brought one of the most deprived communities in America's south to the point of what some local people believe is collapse.

She says: "If the sewer bill gets higher, my light might get cut off and if I try to catch up the light, my water might get cut off. So we're in between. We can't make it like this."

Mrs Lucas's monthly sewerage rate bills - the amount levied by the county to flush away waste and provide water for baths and showers - has quadrupled in the past 15 years. She says it is currently running at $150 (£97) a month, which leaves little left out of her $600 social security cheque for food and electricity.

"We need to keep the water running because we're women," she says. "We need to take baths. I try to pay the sewer bill and the water bill together and then what little I got left I try to put on my lights. I got to have lights."

'Just outrageous'

Her neighbour in one of the poorest districts of Jefferson County's largest city, Birmingham, a father of four who asked not to be named, has already made that choice.

The poorest citizens in Birmingham, Alabama, say they can no longer afford running water

His modest rented home, next to a busy freight train line, is one of a growing number in the area that now has a blue portable toilet next to it.

He says he finds it cheaper to buy drums of water from a petrol station and pay a sanitation company about $14 a month to remove waste from his "porta-potty" than pay the combined sewer and water rate bill, which some months can reach $300.

"Most people who live here are on social security," he said.

"They can't spend this kind of money on sewerage. It's just outrageous. It's too high.

"I pay my sewerage bill, then I'm going to slack on my groceries. Then what am I going to eat?"

Sewerage rates and water rates, which are levied on drinkable water, vary widely across the United States.

But they are generally rising faster than inflation as cities are forced by federal government to replace worn-out sewerage facilities.

The two rates have been combined into a single bill in Jefferson County, which has increased by 329% over the past 15 years, making it among the highest in America, as the county has struggled to service the mountain of debt it took on to pay for a new sewer system.

Corruption scandal

The facility, which has been under construction since 1996, was meant to cost about $300m.

But the bill soared to $3.1bn after construction problems and a series of bond and derivatives deals that went sour in the financial meltdown of 2008.

“Start Quote

If they let this stuff happen they are going to get the biggest riot the South has seen”

Sheila Tyson Community activist

Investment bank JP Morgan Securities and two of its former directors have been fined for offering bribes to Jefferson County workers and politicians to win business financing the sewer upgrade.

Six of Jefferson County's former commissioners have been found guilty of corruption for accepting the bribes, along with 15 other officials.

New county commissioners, struggling to service the debt they inherited from their crooked predecessors, took the decision to file for Chapter 9 bankruptcy last month.

But the county's bondholders, who stand to lose about $4.5m a month in repayments if the bankruptcy is allowed to proceed, are contesting it in court.

A Birmingham bankruptcy judge, Thomas B Bennett, has yet to make a final ruling.

Breaking point

Prior to the bankruptcy filing, the county's sewer rates had been due to go up by a further 8.2% a year for the next three years in a deal with the county's creditors, to the dismay of local residents.

Now that is more likely to be 10% a year or even, according to the court appointed receiver John S Young, as much as 25%.

Sheila Tyson, a community activist in the deprived West End district of Birmingham, says people in the city are reaching breaking point.

"These people are going to end up rioting about this," she says. "If they let this stuff happen they are going to get the biggest riot the South has ever seen. Over this sewer business. I can see it coming."

She says soaring sewer-rate bills have traditionally hit the poorest parts of the county hardest, as better-off people in the suburbs installed septic tanks at their properties.

But the people affected are embarrassed to speak out about living in such unsanitary conditions, she tells BBC News.

"This is not even a race issue, if I'm telling the truth," says Ms Tyson. "It's just so happens that it's affecting black people. It's a class issue. They don't give a doo-doo about poor people period."

Budget shortfall

And she adds: "Somebody from Washington DC needs to come down here and take these sewer bills to where they are affordable for the people in these districts. Injustice - that's all this is. They need to come down here and fix it."

“Start Quote

When you look at the amount of debt, and you look at the revenue that is produced from the rate payers, there is no way it is going to come down”

Tony Petelos Jefferson County manager

To add further to Jefferson County's woes, it faces a budget shortfall next year of $40m after a local tax was declared illegal.

The county is appealing to the Alabama state legislature for financial aid, but there are still likely to be cuts to public services.

More than 500 county workers were laid off over the summer and are having to get by on unemployment benefit, while their jobs hang in the balance.

Tony Petelos, the county manager appointed by the new commissioners to sort the mess out, admits it could take years to get the area back on its feet.

"The public has lost confidence in Jefferson County over the last decade and a half, because of the mismanagement, because of the corruption. We have got to rebuild that confidence," he says.

He insists there is "light at the end of the tunnel" and that some of residents' worst fears about looming public service cuts are groundless, with most savings likely to be made through efficiencies and property sales.

Troubled project

But he can offer few assurances to citizens struggling with soaring sewer and water rate bills.

The decision is in the hands of the bankruptcy court, he stresses, but even if the judge decides to hand control of sewer rates back to the county - and Mr Petelos has offered to manage the troubled project himself - there is no prospect of the bills being reduced.

"When you look at the amount of debt, and you look at the revenue that is produced from the rate payers, there is no way it is going to come down," says Mr Petelos.

When he was Republican mayor of Birmingham's neighbouring city of Hoover, Mr Petelos recalls attending a presentation by a Wall Street bank about the same kind of bonds that would later prove to be the downfall of Jefferson County.

He says: "I turned to my finance director and said, 'did you understand that?' He said, 'no I didn't'. So I said, 'we had better not buy it then'."

Perhaps if Jefferson County's previous commissioners had made the same decision, some of their poorest residents would not be facing daily life without basic sanitation and running water.

Source

Wikileaks: Bradley Manning military hearing bias row

2011-12-16T23:47:00.000-08:00

Wikileaks: Bradley Manning military hearing bias row

Bradley Manning is accused of leaking 720,000 diplomatic and military documents

A military officer overseeing the hearing of the US Army analyst accused of leaking government secrets has rejected a request to recuse himself.

The request was made by a defence lawyer for Private Bradley Manning, 23, as he appeared at a military court.

He faces 22 charges of obtaining and distributing government secrets - which he allegedly leaked to anti-secrecy site Wikileaks.

The Article 32 hearing will determine whether Pte Manning is to stand trial.

During the hearing, which is expected to last around five days according to the defence team, prosecution and defence lawyers will each make their initial cases and are permitted to cross-examine witnesses.

Friday's session has adjourned and the hearing is due to resume on Saturday.

Proceeding to trial

The hearing offers the first opportunity for Pte Manning's defence team to present their case since he was arrested in Iraq in May 2010 and placed in military custody.

It is taking place under tight security at an army base at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Pte Manning sat in the courtroom dressed in military khaki and wearing black-rimmed glasses.

But his defence team quickly switched focus by asking for the investigating officer - equivalent to a judge in a civilian court - to withdraw from the case.

Defence lawyer David Coombs said Lt Col Paul Almanza, the investigating officer, was "biased".

At the scene

Paul Adams BBC News, Fort Meade

For almost everyone present, this is our first glimpse of the man accused of the biggest leak of confidential material in American history. Private Manning sat in uniform, wearing thick-rimmed glasses, hands clasped before him. In his only remarks so far, he said he understood his rights and confirmed the identities of the one civilian and two military officers representing him.

But the focus of attention was the investigating officer. Manning's civilian lawyer demanded he recuse himself, arguing that as prosecutor for the Department of Justice, Lt Col Paul Almanza works for an organisation actively pursuing a separate case against Wikileaks.

Mr Coombs said Lt Col Almanza's decision to reject defence witnesses, as well as the government's alleged reluctance to put forward witnesses to explain the damage done by the leaks suggested Almanza was biased.

"Where's the damage? Where's the harm?" Mr Coombs demanded, in an early indication of part of his defence strategy. Lt Col Almanza announced a recess to consider the defence plea. It could last some time.

Lt Col Almanza is a former military judge who now works for the Department of Justice, which has its own investigation into Wikileaks. His refusal to accept all but two of 38 defence witnesses meant the defence could not adequately make their case, Mr Coombs said.

Following two recesses and arguments by the prosecution and the defence, the investigating officer refused to recuse himself and the hearing continued.

Afterwards, recommendations will be made to a military general, who will decide whether to proceed to a full trial.

The BBC's Paul Adams says the soldier's defence team is likely to argue that little harm came of the leaks, and that their release was in the greater public interest.

Assange link?

Pte Manning has also been charged with "aiding the enemy", a charge that could carry the death penalty. However, reports say prosecutors will only seek a prison sentence.

He is accused of the unauthorised possession and distribution of more than 720,000 secret diplomatic and military documents.

"If it is the case that Bradley Manning is indeed the source of this and other Wikileaks materials, Manning would have single-handedly changed hundreds of thousands of people's lives for the better," Wikileaks said in a statement.

The Wikileaks disclosures

"This material has contributed to ending dictatorships in the Middle East, it has exposed torture and wrongdoing in all the corners of the world and it has held diplomatic bodies and politicians accountable for the words, deals and pacts held behind close doors," Wikileaks said.

One of the key questions is expected to be whether Pte Manning had any kind of relationship with Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, our correspondent at Fort Meade says.

Mr Assange is also embroiled in a legal battle, facing extradition to Sweden from the UK to face sexual assault charges. As Pte Manning was preparing for his own court appearance on Friday, the UK Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal from Mr Assange against his extradition ruling.

Detention conditions

Pte Manning was arrested after a computer hacker went to US authorities with details of an online exchange he had had with Pte Manning in which he allegedly confessed to the data theft.

The conditions of Pte Manning's confinement since his arrest have been denounced in the US and abroad.

PJ Crowley: "I think it is a necessary prosecution"

State department spokesman PJ Crowley resigned after publicly criticising the detention conditions of Pte Manning, and British politicians and members of the European Parliament have also spoken out on the subject.

Pte Manning was brought to the maximum security prison at Quantico in July 2010, where he was held in isolation and was reported to have had his clothing removed at night as a suicide-prevention measure.

But in April 2011 Pte Manning was moved to a lower-security prison at Fort Leavenworth, where his lawyers say conditions are better.

Source

MIT's trillion frames per second light-tracking camera

2011-12-16T23:37:00.000-08:00

MIT's trillion frames per second light-tracking camera

The equipment captures images at a rate of roughly a trillion frames per second (Footage courtesy of MIT)

A camera capable of visualising the movement of light has been unveiled by a team of scientists in the US.

The equipment captures images at a rate of roughly a trillion frames per second - or about 40 billion times faster than a UK television camera.

Direct recording of light is impossible at that speed, so the camera takes millions of repeated scans to recreate each image.

The team said the technique could be used to understand ultrafast processes.

The process has been dubbed femto-photography and has been detailed on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab's website.

"There's nothing in the universe that looks fast to this camera," said Andrea Velten, one of the researchers involved in the project.

Scan lines

To create the technique, the scientists adapted a "streak tube" - equipment used to take data readings from light pulses.

It works in a similar fashion to the way pictures are created on traditional television cathode ray tubes, scanning one thin horizontal line at a time.

Since each image is only equivalent to one scan line on the television set, many hundred scans had to be taken to create a single frame.

The scientists did this by repeating each shot, angling the camera's view with mirrors to record a different scan line of the object.

As a result, the technique is only suitable for capturing an event that can be recreated exactly the same way multiple times.

A pulse of light can be seen as it reaches the top of a soft drink bottle

Laser illumination

To create a moving picture, a laser pulse was used to illuminate the scene - flashing briefly once every 13 billionth of a second.

These pulses triggered the streak tube, which captured the light that returned from the scene.

The laser and the camera were carefully synchronised to ensure each pulse was identical. When the scan lines were stitched together, they appeared to have been taken at the same time.

It took about an hour to take enough shots to make a final video representing a fraction of a second of real time, leading one member of the team to dub the equipment "the world's slowest fastest camera".

Light analysis

Software was then used to turn all the images into movies lasting roughly 480 frames.

One showed a pulse of light, less than a millimetre long, travelling through a soft drink bottle at a rate of half a millimetre per frame.

Another showed different wavelengths of light rippling over the surface of a tomato and the table it was sitting on.

In addition to revealing new ways of seeing the world, the MIT scientists say the process could have some practical uses.

"Applications include industrial imaging to analyse faults and material properties, scientific imaging for understanding ultrafast processes and medical imaging to reconstruct sub-surface elements, ie 'ultrasound with light,'" they say on their website.

Source

Pepper spray: US campus police suspended

2011-11-20T17:56:00.001-08:00

Pepper spray: US campus police suspended

An officer appeared to spray the protesters at close range

A US university has suspended two campus police officers over the use of pepper spray on students at a peaceful protest on Friday in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Video of the incident shows police blasting seated protesters in the face with the chemical at close range.

The chancellor of the University of California, Davis, who had called in the police, criticised the use of pepper spray on the protesters.

However, she says she will not resign.

The demonstration was intended to show solidarity with protesters at another branch of the University of California, in Berkeley, who were hit with batons by police on 9 November.

The footage of the pepper spray incident, which has been circulated widely on the internet, caused outrage among students.

The protesters are seen sitting in a line on the floor with their arms interlocked, refusing to move.

“Start Quote

The violence was unprovoked, disproportional and excessive”

Davis Faculty Association statement

They try to cover their faces as officers in riot gear walk along emptying canisters of the spray onto them.

'Excessive force'

Linda Katehi, Chancellor of the University of California, Davis, near Sacramento, described the use of pepper spray as "chilling".

She said the university was launching an investigation into what had happened.

A task force comprised of students, staff and faculty members would be set up and asked to report back within 30 days, she said.

"The use of pepper spray as shown on the video is chilling to us all and raises many questions about how best to handle situations like this," Ms Katehi said in a message on the university's website.

The Davis Faculty Association, which represents academic staff, has condemned the University of California's approach to protests on several different campuses.

"This week, we have seen excessive force used against non-violent protesters," said a statement on the association's website.

"Student, faculty and staff protesters have been pepper-sprayed directly in the eyes and mouth, beaten and shoved by batons, dragged by the arms while handcuffed, and submitted to other forms of excessive force."

'Occupy' protests have been held on several University of California campuses, including in this rally at Berkeley

"The violence was unprovoked, disproportional and excessive," it said.

"We demand that the Chancellors of the University of California cease using police violence to repress non-violent political protests."

The association said Ms Katehi should resign, a call she rejected.

"I do not think that I have violated the policies of the institution," she said.

"I have worked personally very hard to make the campus a safe campus for all."

The Occupy Wall Street protests began in New York more than two months ago against perceived corporate greed and economic inequality.

Similar protests have since sprung up in other places around the United States and elsewhere in the world.

Source

Snorting cocaine 'threatens Colombian national security'

2011-11-20T17:52:00.000-08:00

Snorting cocaine 'threatens Colombian national security'

20 November 2011 Last updated at 19:10 ET

Colombia's president is calling on foreign governments to take more responsibility for illegal drug use in their countries.

President Santos, who is in the UK for a two-day visit, told the BBC that "as long as people in London, New York and Paris are sniffing cocaine, we will suffer".

He described it as a matter of national security for Colombia and said drug consumption overseas helped finance both local mafia and political groups involved in a decades-old violent struggle to overthrow the government.

Mr Santos claimed a victory earlier this month when the leader of the Revolutionary Forces of Colombia, or Farc, was killed.

He told the BBC's Alastair Leithead that it was an important step towards peace in his country.

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Scientists at MIT replicate brain activity with chip

2011-11-20T17:50:00.000-08:00

Scientists at MIT replicate brain activity with chip

The chip replicates how information flows around the brain

Scientists are getting closer to the dream of creating computer systems that can replicate the brain.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have designed a computer chip that mimics how the brain's neurons adapt in response to new information.

Such chips could eventually enable communication between artificially created body parts and the brain.

It could also pave the way for artificial intelligence devices.

There are about 100 billion neurons in the brain, each of which forms synapses - the connections between neurons that allow information to flow - with many other neurons.

This process is known as plasticity and is believed to underpin many brain functions, such as learning and memory.

Neural functions

The MIT team, led by research scientist Chi-Sang Poon, has been able to design a computer chip that can simulate the activity of a single brain synapse.

Activity in the synapses relies on so-called ion channels which control the flow of charged atoms such as sodium, potassium and calcium.

The 'brain chip' has about 400 transistors and is wired up to replicate the circuitry of the brain.

Current flows through the transistors in the same way as ions flow through ion channels in a brain cell.

"We can tweak the parameters of the circuit to match specific ions channels... We now have a way to capture each and every ionic process that's going on in a neuron," said Mr Poon.

Neurobiologists seem to be impressed.

It represents "a significant advance in the efforts to incorporate what we know about the biology of neurons and synaptic plasticity onto ...chips," said Dean Buonomano, a professor of neurobiology at the University of California.

"The level of biological realism is impressive," he added.

The team plans to use their chip to build systems to model specific neural functions, such as visual processing.

Such systems could be much faster than computers which take hours or even days to simulate a brain circuit. The chip could ultimately prove to be even faster than the biological process.

Source

World's 'lightest material' unveiled by US engineers

2011-11-20T17:49:00.001-08:00

World's 'lightest material' unveiled by US engineers

Engineers say the material is less dense than aerogels and metallic foams

A team of engineers claims to have created the world's lightest material.

The substance is made out of tiny hollow metallic tubes arranged into a micro-lattice - a criss-crossing diagonal pattern with small open spaces between the tubes.

The researchers say the material is 100 times lighter than Styrofoam and has "extraordinarily high energy absorption" properties.

Potential uses include next-generation batteries and shock absorbers.

The research was carried out at the University of California, Irvine, HRL Laboratories and the California Institute of Technology and is published in the latest edition of Science.

"The trick is to fabricate a lattice of interconnected hollow tubes with a wall thickness 1,000 times thinner than a human hair," said lead author Dr Tobias Schaedler.

Low-density

The resulting material has a density of 0.9 milligrams per cubic centimetre.

By comparison the density of silica aerogels - the world's lightest solid materials - is only as low as 1.0mg per cubic cm.

The metallic micro-lattices have the edge because they consist of 99.99% air and of 0.01% solids.

The engineers say the material's strength derives from the ordered nature of its lattice design.

By contrast, other ultralight substances, including aerogels and metallic foams, have random cellular structures. This means they are less stiff, strong, energy absorptive or conductive than the bulk of the raw materials that they are made out of.

William Carter, manager of architected materials at HRL, compared the new material to larger low-density structures.

"Modern buildings, exemplified by the Eiffel Tower or the Golden Gate Bridge are incredibly light and weight-efficient by virtue of their architecture," he said.

"We are revolutionising lightweight materials by bringing this concept to the nano and micro scales."

Robust

To study the strength of the metallic micro-lattices the team compressed them until they were half as thick.

After removing the load the substance recovered 98% of its original height and resumed its original shape.

The first time the stress test was carried out and repeated the material became less stiff and strong, but the team says that further compressions made very little difference.

"Materials actually get stronger as the dimensions are reduced to the nanoscale," said team member Lorenzo Valdevit.

"Combine this with the possibility of tailoring the architecture of the micro-lattice and you have a unique cellular material."

The engineers suggest practical uses for the substance include thermal insulation, battery electrodes and products that need to dampen sound, vibration and shock energy.

Source

US university investigates campus pepper spray use

2011-11-20T17:48:00.001-08:00

US university investigates campus pepper spray use

An officer appeared to spray the protesters at close range

A US university says it is launching an investigation into the use of pepper spray by riot police trying to clear a demonstration.

Video of the incident at the University of California, Davis, shows officers blasting seated protesters in the face with the chemical at close range.

The university chancellor, who had called in the police, described the pepper spray incident as "chilling".

The protest, on Friday, was in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

It was intended to show solidarity with protesters at another branch of the University of California, in Berkeley, who were hit with batons by police on 9 November.

The footage of the pepper spray incident, which has been circulated widely on the internet, has caused outrage among students.

The protesters are seen sitting in a line on the floor with their arms interlocked, refusing to move.

“Start Quote

The violence was unprovoked, disproportional and excessive”

Davis Faculty Association statement

They try to cover their faces as officers in riot gear walk along emptying canisters of the spray onto them.

'Excessive force'

Linda Katehi, Chancellor of the University of California, Davis, near Sacramento, says she is forming a task force to investigate what happened.

"The use of pepper spray as shown on the video is chilling to us all and raises many questions about how best to handle situations like this," she said in a message on the university's website.

The Davis Faculty Association, which represents academic staff, has condemned the University of California's approach to protests on several different campuses.

"This week, we have seen excessive force used against non-violent protesters," said a statement on the association's website.

There have been 'Occupy' protests on several campuses of the University of California, including in this rally at Berkeley

"The violence was unprovoked, disproportional and excessive," it said.

"We demand that the Chancellors of the University of California cease using police violence to repress non-violent political protests."

The Association said Ms Katehi should resign, a call she rejected.

"I do not think that I have violated the policies of the institution," she said.

"I have worked personally very hard to make the campus a safe campus for all."

The Occupy Wall Street protest began in New York more than two months ago against perceived corporate greed and economic inequality.

Similar protests have since sprung up in other places around the United States and elsewhere in the world.

Source

Sea salt health claims 'flawed'

2011-11-18T00:13:00.000-08:00

Sea salt health claims 'flawed'

By Helen Briggs Health editor, BBC News

Don't add salt to your food, say health experts

Rock and sea salt is no different from ordinary table salt, despite claims it is natural and more healthy, say consumer groups.

Research for Which? and Consensus Action on Salt and Health found no difference in chemical content between regular salt and costly gourmet brands.

Manufacturers dispute the report saying it does not give the full picture.

Most UK adults eat too much salt, far above the recommended guideline of about a teaspoon a day.

Eating a diet high in salt is linked with high blood pressure, a risk factor for stroke, heart failure and heart disease.

The research analysed the chemical content of several gourmet brands of sea and rock salt, and compared this with ordinary table salt.

“Start Quote

This report is not giving a full picture by not going into the other things in either sea salt or the additives in table salt”

David Lea-Wilson Co-owner of the Anglesey Salt Company

They say all contain almost 100% sodium chloride and are equally damaging to health in large quantities.

Celebrity chefs should not be encouraging people to sprinkle sea salt on food, the report claims, as you can get all the salt you need from a balanced diet.

Professor Graham MacGregor of the Wolfson Institute of Preventive Medicine is chairman of Consensus Action on Salt and Health (CASH).

He said it was "disgraceful" that chefs still encouraged people to use so much sea and rock salt.

He told the BBC: "The most important message is that you don't need to add a chemical [sodium chloride] to your food.

"Food without salt tastes much better. There's quite enough already present in fruit, vegetables, meat and fish."

Cheaper option

The report says brands claiming some salts are more natural and contain essential minerals are confusing the public.

An online survey of 1,358 members of Which? found around one in three admitted thinking that rock and sea salts were healthier than table salt.

Which? chief policy adviser Sue Davies said: "Many of us are trying to reduce the amount of salt in our diet, but our research shows that people are needlessly spending more money on 'premium' salt as they often believe it's healthier than traditional table salt.

"Given that most of the salt we eat is already in the food we buy, the cheapest - and healthiest - option would be to stop adding extra salt to food altogether.

"Which? is calling on food manufacturers to reduce the amount of salt in their foods, and we'll be monitoring their progress over the coming months."

David Lea-Wilson, co-owner of the Anglesey Sea Salt Company, which makes Halen Mon Pure White Sea Salt, disputed the research.

He told the BBC: "This report is not giving a full picture by not going into the other things in either sea salt or the additives in table salt."

Romi Alexander of So Natural, which supplies Himalayan Crystal Salt, said: "Table salt is a highly refined, processed white substance that's devoid of nutrients."

Source

Cenk Uygur Evaluates David on TYT, Talks WolfPAC & Current TV

2011-11-08T17:13:00.001-08:00

Cenk Uygur Evaluates David on TYT, Talks WolfPAC & Current TV

Sarkozy called Israeli PM Netanyahu 'liar'

2011-11-08T17:12:00.000-08:00

Sarkozy called Israeli PM Netanyahu 'liar'

The comments - embarrassing for President Sarkozy - have only just emerged

French President Nicolas Sarkozy called Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a "liar" in remarks to US President Barack Obama overheard by journalists.

"I can't stand him any more, he's a liar," Mr Sarkozy said in French.

"You may be sick of him, but me, I have to deal with him every day," Mr Obama replied.

The exchange at the G20 summit was quoted by a French website, Arret sur Images, and confirmed by other media.

The remarks - during a private conversation - were overheard by a few journalists last week but were not initially reported, the BBC's Christian Fraser in Paris says.

Journalists at the bilateral press conference had been handed translation boxes but had been told not to plug in their headphones until the backroom conversation had finished. But those who did heard the revealing comments.

For several days there was media silence in France about the exchange - a decision had been taken not to embarrass the French president, our correspondent says.

A correspondent for Le Monde newspaper referred to the conversation without the quotes.

But Israeli newspapers have reported it in full.

It is said Mr Obama was taking Mr Sarkozy to task for voting in favour of the Palestinian bid for full membership of the UN cultural organisation, Unesco, a bid that was approved despite American opposition.

The remarks indicate a breakdown of trust with the Israeli leader which could have wider implications for the Middle East peace process, our correspondent says.

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Xenophobia and the Maintanence of Muslim Hate

2011-11-06T00:22:00.000-07:00

Yet ANOTHER Right Wing Terror Incident...Ricin Attacks Planned

~~~~~~~~~

Halal and Kosher hit by Dutch ban

6 November 2011 Last updated at 00:05 ET Help

Next month the Dutch parliament is expected to approve a ban on halal and kosher methods of slaughtering animals for food.

Those who proposed the ban say it is simply an issue of animal welfare, but it received strong support from the right-wing Freedom Party.

Many see it as a violation of their religious freedom, and among the Jewish community it is a worrying echo of a similar ban brought in by Hitler.

Anna Holligan reports from The Hague.

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The US economy: A lost decade?

2011-11-03T18:41:00.001-07:00

The US economy: A lost decade?

30 August 2011 Last updated at 19:02 ET Help

First the dot.com bust, then the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and other targets. The United States economy started the decade shaken to the core, but it responded with an astounding economic boom.

Ten years on, however, the US economy is in dire straits again, and most people are poorer than they were before. How did it happen?

Find out more at our special report on the global economy.

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Chinese entrepreneur found freedom in French furniture

2011-11-03T18:33:00.000-07:00

Chinese entrepreneur found freedom in French furniture

Entrepreneur Ning Li found having both a French and Chinese perspective meant he saw clearly how the markets could benefit each other

Start-up Stories

Ning Li, co-founder and CEO of the online furniture store Made.com, already has two start-up companies under his belt. He launched his first business selling furniture over the internet to customers in France after he left a career in investment banking.

He says he went into banking to prove he could do it but soon realised he had a different itch to scratch.

"As an entrepreneur we like… freedom," he says. He found investment banking to be at the "opposite [end] of the scale".

"It's extremely useful in terms of experience but it didn't fit me," he admits. Ning realised he needed to get out quickly. "The longer you go into investment banking, the more you are paid and the more difficult [it is] to leave your job and start something on your own," he explains.

Ning set up his first company in France selling furniture online when he was 25 years old. To him, launching a start-up seemed like a natural progression.

"When you look at what Chinese people do abroad, a lot of them open restaurants and that's a very entrepreneurial approach," he says.

Two perspectives

MADE.COM

Employees: 40
HQ Location: London
Year founded: 2010
Ownership: Private
Annual turnover: N/A

Ning left China to continue his studies in France when he was 15 years old and he says the result was an exposure to a "double culture of Chinese and French".

The experience made it easy to spot how one market could benefit from the other.

"I come from… a medium-sized town which happens to be one of the biggest furniture manufacturing bases in China," he says. Yet he found the price difference between goods manufactured in Asia and sold in the West astounding. "How could a $300 sofa sell at 3,000 euros?" he asks. "Just crazy."

It was something he asked himself again when he realised that the costs of manufacturing designer furniture were the same or less than regular brands.

Pitching designer brands at more affordable prices whilst still making a healthy profit was a clear business model for Ning Li.

"It's always an opportunity when you see a big market that hasn't changed so much," he says.

Many furniture manufacturers find it uneconomic to supply products in small quantities. Using the internet to aggregate orders helps matters - once enough orders have come in to fill a shipping container, it's possible for the goods to be manufactured and despatched. Ning Li says this approach helps to keep costs down.

Indeed, he says the success of it was apparent from the start. "We had about 300 orders for day one," he recalls. "Three hundred orders for a furniture business - just amazing."

Know your weaknesses

Ning Li: "Some people are very good at creating a business, some people are better at managing"

Ning Li admits that rapid growth posed challenges for him.

Managing a surge of staff numbers and expanding product lines required skills he didn't yet have.

"Some people are very good at creating a business, some people are better at managing," he says. "I didn't feel I was a manager good enough for the size of that business anymore."

In 2009 Ning Li sold his share of his business in France and took a year off to backpack around the world. He says it gave him the breathing space to start afresh.

It was in London that he met entrepreneur Brent Hoberman who encouraged him to start again with the same idea and the same business model, but this time selling to a British market.

Now Ning Li's online company also works directly with designers to custom-make exclusive products. He says it is harder than buying "off the shelf" products from factories to sell but that "you can still feel in the UK market today a huge gap for designer furniture at a good price".

Modernising business

Online furniture retail means the ability to take more risks with new talent and designers

For Ning Li, putting the furniture retail market online has helped revolutionise what he calls a "dusty industry."

"Buying furniture is a conventional thing," he says, adding that in the past retailers were reluctant to take risks with new designs or new designers, and talent could become stifled. Now the internet has changed all that.

"If a new designer comes to see us with a new amazing table that looks risky, we say 'Why not?' because the only risk that we have is taking the photo.

"We put it online, if it doesn't sell, we pull it off. And if it sells, then everybody wins," he explains.

But it's not just about risks and exposure. Ning Li believes that speed is also important when it comes to marketing in the modern age.

"The internet allows us to launch products much faster than traditional business," he says. "Speed is king."

"The speed of designing new products and also renewing your catalogue is key… to keep people's interest… keep them coming back to the website."

Buying from China

Many British and European manufacturing industries have outsourced various processes abroad in recent decades.

The result, says Ning Li, is that it can be difficult to find good manufacturers based in the West.

Although some 20% of their suppliers are British, they buy from China - not just because of the cost, but because China has developed an "ecosystem of manufacturing" over the last 30 years.

He believes China's reputation for making goods for worldwide consumption allows the country to understand the global market.

"They have all the insight of what people are looking for," he elaborates.

Alone at the top

Although Ning Li believes being an entrepreneur can leave you isolated, sharing is important in a start-up

Entrepreneurship can be a solitary occupation, according to Ning Li.

"As an entrepreneur, you always feel kind of lonely," he confesses. "There are lots of things you cannot share necessarily with all your investors and your employees."

He believes there's one thing that can lessen this: co-founders who you get along with.

"It's really about sharing," he laughs. "And sharing is a nice thing to have in a start-up."

Although the entrepreneur has never failed, he says one shouldn't underestimate the trials of setting up a business from scratch, nor the lessons that can be learned.

"There are so many failures of start-ups," he says. "But you will see the people that actually survive and succeed… are actually the strongest believers."

Indeed, Ning Li believes that the initial struggles and despair of launching a start-up mean many successful entrepreneurs never do it for the money alone.

"What I really enjoy in my daily life is having the liberty of deciding what I want to do when I wake up," he says. "That's a huge thing that I didn't get from my investment banking background anyway."

Source

Signs of ageing halted in the lab

2011-11-03T18:21:00.000-07:00

Signs of ageing halted in the lab

By James Gallagher Health reporter, BBC News

Will it one day be possible to stop ageing?

The onset of wrinkles, muscle wasting and cataracts has been delayed and even eliminated in mice, say researchers in the US.

It was done by "flushing out" retired cells that had stopped dividing. They accumulate naturally with age.

The scientists believe their findings could eventually "really have an impact" in the care of the elderly.

Experts said the results were "fascinating", but should be taken with a bit of caution.

The study, published in Nature, focused on what are known as "senescent cells". They stop dividing into new cells and have an important role in preventing tumours from progressing.

These cells are cleared out by the immune system, but their numbers build up with time. The researchers estimated that around 10% of cells are senescent in very old people.

“Start Quote

I've never seen anything quite like it”

Dr James Kirkland

Cleanup

Scientists at the Mayo Clinic, in the US, devised a way to kill all senescent cells in genetically engineered mice.

The animals would age far more quickly than normal, and when they were given a drug, the senescent cells would die.

The researchers looked at three symptoms of old age: formation of cataracts in the eye; the wasting away of muscle tissue; and the loss of fat deposits under the skin, which keep it smooth.

Researchers said the onset of these symptoms was "dramatically delayed" when the animals were treated with the drug.

When it was given after the mice had been allowed to age, there was an improvement in muscle function.

One of the researchers, Dr James Kirkland, said: "I've never seen anything quite like it."

His colleague Dr Jan van Deursen told the BBC: "We were very surprised by the very profound effect. I really think this is very significant."

The treatment had no effect on lifespan, but that may be due to the type of genetically engineered mouse used.

Eternal youth?

The study raises the tantalising prospect of slowing the signs of ageing in humans. However, senescent cells cannot be just flushed out of human beings.

Dr Deursen said: "I'm very optimistic that this could really have an impact. Nobody wants to live longer if the quality of life is poor."

He argued that young people were already clearing out their senescent cells.

"If you can prime the immune system, boost it a little bit, to make sure senescent cells are removed, that might be all it needs.

"Or develop a drug that targets senescent cells because of the unique proteins the cells make."

Dr Jesus Gil, from the Medical Research Council's Clinical Sciences Centre, said the findings needed to be "taken with a bit of caution. It is a preliminary study".

However, he said it was a fascinating study which "suggests if you get rid of senescent cells you can improve phenotypes [physical traits] associated with ageing and improve quality of life in aged humans".

Source

Israeli settlements condemned by Western powers

2011-11-02T11:21:00.001-07:00

Israeli settlements condemned by Western powers

Israel decided to build more houses for settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem

Palestinian UN membership bid

The US has joined criticism of Israel's decision to accelerate settlement building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem after Palestinians joined UN cultural agency, Unesco.

White House spokesman Jay Carney said the US was "deeply disappointed".

Earlier, the EU said it was "deeply concerned" by the announcement. The UK, France and Germany said it would hinder efforts for peace.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said it was a "basic right of our people".

'Unjustifiable'

Mr Carney told a White House briefing that Israel's decision did not help bring peace talks any nearer.

"Unilateral actions work against efforts to resume direct negotiations, and they do not advance the goal of a reasonable and necessary agreement between the two parties," Mr Carney said.

"That is the only way to achieve the two-state solution that both sides have as their goal."

EU policy chief Catherine Ashton urged Israel to reverse the decision and called on both sides to return to the negotiating table.

"Israeli settlement activity is illegal under international law including in East Jerusalem and an obstacle to peace. We have stated this many times before," she said.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague called the Israeli move "provocative and unhelpful".

"This settlement building programme is illegal under international law and is the latest in a series of provocative and unhelpful settlement announcements," Mr Hague said in a statement.

He also criticised Israel's temporary withholding of Palestinian tax revenues, which was announced at the same time, and called for a reversal of both decisions.

French foreign ministry spokesman Bernard Valero said the proposed settlement building "is illegal in international law and is a threat to the two-state solution".

“Start Quote

We are building in Jerusalem because it is our right and our duty to this generation and future generations”

Benjamin Netanyahu Israeli Prime Minister

Steffen Seibert, German Chancellor Angela Merkel's spokesman, said building settlements in occupied areas "hinders the goal we all must have of a two-state solution and is unjustifiable".

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon also said he was "deeply concerned" by the development.

"The secretary general calls on the government of Israel to freeze all settlement activity and to continue to transfer VAT and customs revenues that belong to the Palestinian Authority and are essential to enable it to function, in line with Israel's obligations," his spokesman Martin Nesirky said.

'Not punishment'

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said on Tuesday that a plan to build 2,000 new apartments in the West Bank and East Jerusalem would be accelerated.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has said the move would speed up the destruction of the peace process.

The step has been seen by Palestinians as a response to their Unesco membership bid.

On Monday, Unesco member states overwhelmingly backed the Palestinians' membership bid, despite opposition from the US and Israel. The US says it will no longer make payments to Unesco.

Israel also said it would temporarily freeze transfers to the Palestinian Authority, which amount to around half of the PA's domestic revenue base.

An Israeli foreign ministry spokesman said on Tuesday the move was "a response to unilateral measures aimed at confronting Israel at the UN and elsewhere on the international scene".

But Mr Netanyahu denied that his government's decision was "punishment".

"We are building in Jerusalem because it is our right and our duty to this generation and future generations, not as punishment but as the basic right of our people to build in its eternal city," he said on Wednesday.

"Jerusalem will never return to the state it was in on the eve of the (1967) Six-Day War, that I promise you."

Peace talks between the Palestinians and Israel broke down more than a year ago. The Palestinians are demanding an end to settlement building.

Almost 500,000 Jews live in settlements on occupied territory. The settlements are illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

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