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Scientist’s Proposal for Climate Modeling Bypasses Supercomputers

2015-07-16T07:26:00.001-07:00

Scientific studies on climate helped establish a consensus. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BY JOHN MARKOFF

Creating a supercomputer that can model the future of the planet is perhaps the most daunting challenge facing climate and computer science experts.

The task would require running an immense set of calculations for several weeks and then recalculating them hundreds of times with different variables. Such machines will need to be 100 times faster than today’s supercomputers. If such a computer were built today, a so-called exascale computer would consume electricity equivalent to 200,000 homes and might cost $20 million annually to operate, contributing to global warming.

For the reason, scientists are waiting for low-power computing techniques capable of significantly reducing the power requirements for an exascale computer.

But Krishna Palem, a computer scientist at Rice University in Texas, believes he has found a shortcut. By stripping away the transistors that add accuracy, it will be possible to cut the energy demands of calculating while increasing performance speeds, he claims.

“Scientific calculations like weather and climate modeling are generally, inherently inexact,” Dr. Palem said. “We’ve shown that using inexact computation techniques need not degrade the quality of the weather-climate simulation.”

To create models, scientists turn the world into a three-dimensional grid and compute the equations. Current climate models used with supercomputers have cell sizes of about 100 kilometers, representing the climate for that area of Earth’s surface. To accurately predict the long-term impact of climate change will require shrinking the cell size to a kilometer. Such a model would require more than 200 million cells and roughly three weeks to compute one simulation of climate change over a century.

“We can’t do a lab experiment with the climate,” said Tim Palmer, a University of Oxford climate physicist. “We have to rely on these models which try to encode the complexity of the climate, and today we are constrained by the size of computers.”

Dr. Palem says computing the rate of global warming may be possible with a computer that would use specialized low-power chips to solve a portion of the problem. He describes his approach as “inexact” computing.

The stated goal of the engineers who are trying to design an exascale computer is to stay within a power budget of 30 megawatts, experts say.

Dr. Palem has been imploring the computing world to back away from its romance with precision for more than a decade. He has recently developed allies among climatologists like Dr. Palmer, who in the journal Nature recently called on the climate community to form an international effort to build a machine fast enough to solve basic questions about the rate of global warming.

Not everyone is convinced Dr. Palem’s computer architecture ideas will be applicable. “For consequential problems, where inexact results could cause a bridge to be mis-designed, or erroneous conclusions about the mechanics of climate, the inexactness is problematic,” said John Shalf, department head for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Dr. Palem and Dr. Palmer are trying to overcome these objections.

“It’s a trivial amount of money when you think of climate impact being in the trillion of dollars,” Dr. Palmer said. “It’s actually an existential question. If it’s at one end of the spectrum, we can adjust, but if it’s at the other of the spectrum, we’re not going to come out of it unless we cut emissions in the next decade.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, May 23, 2015

Monetize Your Passion

2015-05-18T07:29:00.003-07:00

English: icon for mailing lists (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

18-May-2015

Have you been wondering how you can monetize your passion? A burning question that has taken you days, weeks, months, or even years, and still searching until now?

Or have tried and joined 'some' groups, only to find that you've been ripped off?

If you are keen to give it another try, to prove that one system really works, with real people, and real results, here is one that I can recommend:

My online business community

You see, I have also been searching, paid a package or two, took a lesson here and there, joined many mailing lists, and in the end, I am still in the same exact scenario: just looking at other make it big.

But if you want to give it another go, rest assured, I know this one. I tried it myself, and what I would get for a free membership, I would already pay $xxxx somewhere else. Even if you do get to become a Premium member, the monthly payment is but just a very small fraction if you were to take a similar course elsewhere.

And the community is great. 200,000+ members can't be all wrong.

To say that the lessons are arranged so learning and doing gives you maximum assimilation is to say the least.

'Nuff said!

Try it, so you prove it yourself, not just because I say so.

You get 2 free websites, to begin with.

My online business community - my internet marketing platform

Leave me comments when you've been there, and how it went.
Will ya?

Thanks!

Lee Kuan Yew – a tribute to a great leader

2015-04-12T06:31:00.000-07:00

Lee Kuan Yew (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I first posted this in LinkedIn, but I feel that it is appropriate to have it in my blog. Read on...
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March 29, 2015

I am penning this down, to pay my respect for Singapore’s founding father – in a few more years, half of my life would have been lived in the country he has built. I will pay my respect by being a good (foreign) worker, and if I ever become one, a good citizen.

My family and I watched Mediacorp’s airing of Lee Kuan Yew’s achievements and Singapore’s history, up to the coverage of his funeral and the service held at UCC. Here are some pointers that I picked up, and may we all learn from it:

Keep up with the times. When he gave a speech at the US Congress, he was recognized, not simply because he knew how to talk, but because he knew his country, and he knew other countries. He discussed the current issues of unemployment in the US, and so, he earned the recognition of being a leader who knows, not only one who can talk. As many Singaporeans who grew up with him attest, "he (LKY) never gave empty promises. He delivered.

Build for the future, not just today. LKY looked at Singapore, and as he went around to build bilateral relationships and to attract investors, he realized that to be viable, Singapore has to take up English as the primary language. English became the primary language in trades and in government offices. Even then, for Singapore not to lose its racial culture and tradition, mother was made a requirement in schools. As he put it, he himself rediscovered the treasure of the Chinese language and culture when he learned Hokkien and Mandarin. He only didn’t see today, but he saw 10-, 20-, 30-years into the future.

> I love this one. Being in the software development business, I would often tell myself, and some colleagues, to build for the future, not just today. I practiced the habit of designing and developing applications that can and will stand the test of time.
Choose to be unpopular. Doing what is right will make you an easy target for critics, especially if the change you are making is going to impact so many. And doing what is right means becoming tough and firm, and this could be easily construed as being rigid and uncompassionate. But doing what the people wants, or what your supporters suggest, of what the masses mandate, isn’t always the best way to ‘please’ the people. As it was stated by the speaker, “If you want to be popular, you will misgovern.”

Know what you are dealing with. Perhaps the most significant of the traits of the system that Singapore has is because it ‘borrows’ from the world’s best-in-class practices. As I’ve often heard from fellow management leaders, what LKY did was to study the different system of the world’s governments, and to pick on what is the best practice, and what can be applied to Singapore, and that he did.

Be pragmatic. Even then, when he knew what he was doing, he didn’t immediately executed plans and actions. He had his fellow leaders to consult with, and they slowly built and planned, and planned and built. They had all the data to support their plans, and yet, they moved slowly – but surely.

Be firm. When a plan is put into action, and there are hiccups along the way, or some things don’t work out as planned, be firm. Even when things go along the way they were expected or planned to be, there will always be unsatisfied observers and detractors. If you easily cave in to the pressure, you lose.

Be clean and honest. When you go up the ladder of leadership, and many doors open up to you, don’t be tempted to gorge on your ‘rights and privileges’. Always remember that when you have served your term, or when you have lived your life, the history you leave behind will not only be in your name, but in your family’s, and in your nation’s.

Practice integrity. It was very commendable how he practiced integrity, and fought against corruption. And having lived a life of integrity, it wasn’t difficult for him to tell others of the same high mandate for a leader. If not, detractors will easily find a spot and make it their point of argument against you.

Be tough. Having made integrity his own personal mandate, LKY required it of his nation. He set up CPIB, and anybody who is found to be corrupt, or doing something illegal and is caught and makes a bribe, will have a heavier and harsher punishment.

Surround yourself with equally honest leaders. He didn’t look at the skin color, or the spoken language, but he offered the same chance of becoming a leader to serve the people to potential citizens, who perhaps showed the same qualities as he possessed. I didn’t hear or read of a cabinet member or an MP who was found to be corrupt or debased. A stark contradiction of many leaders past and present.

Include opposition. It was very revealing that while many accused LKY of being close-minded who didn’t entertain others’ views, one fellow leader said that he wouldn’t like you and wouldn’t listen to you anymore if you agreed to everything he said. He wanted somebody who will oppose him and give the other side of the story, and to reason out with you, present the idea and provide the basis for doing so. Indeed, what better way to see the same scenario from somebody else’s eyes! A devil's advocate, anyone?

Listen to others. No matter how smart you are, you will not always see the whole picture on your own. And when you close your ears to others, and gets puffed up in your own proud heart, your downfall is imminent. Be humble, remain humble and always look back from whence you came.

Delegation. Don’t be power hungry. Don’t think you will live forever, and that even all your life, you will stay in power. Train new leaders, and learn to let go. Prepare for your own future by preparing new leaders, and therefore, ensure the continuity of what you have started. That he did, and saw to it that everything is in place, even long before he passed away.

Frugality. It is quite contrary to know that LKY lived his life in frugality, especially that the wealth of Singapore is open to him. He also didn’t abuse his power and privilege. Actually he didn’t need to spend a single dime, only to speak up and request for a new set of clothes, a new set of furniture, the latest TV or computer set, and stores would be on their toes to give him what he asks for – free of charge. Yet he did not. A 60-year old sofa set. A vacuum-tube monitor and an outdated PC. A very simple 2-storey house. And for his contemporaries, borrowed pair of shoes, borrowed coat. Are we missing something here?

Practicality. A chair is a chair, and if it serves its purpose, why seek an elaborate one. And if it still serves its purpose, why replace it and throw it away?

Focus at the task in hand. He always made it a point to be never lingering around issues, but always focused at the task in hand. No wasted time, no wasted opportunity.

Career and family are both equally important. It was with amusement that I watched the open forum where LKY was conversing with a lady, aged 27, who is currently taking up PhD D. She is not married, and she doesn’t have a boyfriend. She would be around 29 by the time she finishes her PhD D, and if she does enter into a relationship after a few more years, and gets married, she’d be around 35 by the time she gets pregnant. LKY stressed that at that age, the dangers of pregnancy, especially for the baby, is increasing. And yet, he didn’t tell her not to pursue the PhD D. He did remark that having a family is more satisfying than a PhD D, but in the end, he jokingly told her, “I hope you catch your PhD D and your boyfriend.”

Keep up with your family. Even when his tasks as a leader was so exacting, he made it a point to have a time together with his family – regularly. Needless to say, he was successful, not only as a leader, but also as a father and as a grandfather.

Fidelity. He married the woman he loves, and he loved the woman he married. No return, no exchange. His wife became the strong support who goes with him anywhere he goes. As it was told, where he is seen, there she was. Yet at the start, they were competitors, she scoring higher than him. But along the way, they became friends, then a couple. Together, they forged the Singapore we all know today is.

Have nothing else to prove. He didn’t show off his status with new gadgets. He didn’t brag about his status with shining cars. He didn’t declare his wealth with huge mansions. He didn’t attend sessions wearing designer clothes. In fact, he had to mend the tear on the jacket that he wore for years and years. Why? Because he had nothing else to prove. Having done what he should, and with an overwhelming mark of excellence, he didn’t need anything else to add on. His work is proven, and he didn’t need to speak about it.

He has passed away, and he is gone. We will miss him. As said in an artist’s epitaph, the same can be said about Lee Kuan Yew:

If you are looking for his work, look around Singapore.

Looking a Culture in the Eye

2015-03-26T08:10:00.002-07:00

INSEAD (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Working with people from all places and races, it is always a challenge. And in my experience, language is the first barrier to be broken down - it is tantamount to knowing the culture by knowing the language. But then again, it may not always be the case.

What your experience?
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ERIN MEYER

I teach cross-cultural management at the international business school Insead, near Paris. For 15 years, I have studied how people in different parts of the world build trust, communicate, make decisions and perceive situations differently, especially in the workplace.

While traveling in Tokyo recently with a Japanese colleague, I gave a short talk to 20 managers. At the end, I asked whether there were any questions or comments. No hands went up. My colleague asked the group again: “Any comments or questions?”

Still, no one raised a hand, but he looked at each person in the audience. Gesturing to one of them, he said, “Do you have something to add?” To my amazement, she responded, “Yes, thank you,” and asked a very interesting question. My colleague repeated this several times.

Afterward, my colleague was unsure how to explain the phenomenon. Then he said, “It has to do with how bright their eyes are.

“In Japan,” he continued, “we don’t make as much direct eye contact as you do in the West. So when you asked if there were any comments, most people were not looking directly at you. But a few people in the group were looking right at you, and their eyes were bright. That indicates that they would be happy to have you call on them.”

That is not something I learned from my upbringing in Minnesota, or during my years spent in living in Europe and Africa.

After the trip I returned to my classroom, where the students are managers from all over the world. I felt both embarrassed and unsettled to see that I had been missing a lot of bright eyes.

In Japan there is an expression, “kuuki yomenai,” which refers to someone who is unable to read the atmosphere. On my trip I was reminded that, with a little curiosity and some help, I could improve my ability to read the Japanese atmosphere.

In today’s economy, an Italian might be negotiating a deal in Nigeria or a German could be managing a team of Brazilians.

In France, I was surprised to hear Americans complain that their French teammates were disorganized and always late. Yet some Indian colleagues were frustrated about those same people being rigid and unadaptable.

I map cultures on eight behavioral dimensions: communicating, evaluating, persuading, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing and scheduling.

For example, the French culture falls between the American and Indian cultures on the scheduling dimension – hence the opposite impressions about chaos versus rigidity.

If you lead a multicultural team, you need to find the flexibility to work up and down these dimensions: watch what makes local managers successful, explain your own style, and perhaps, learn to laugh at yourself. Ultimately, it means learning to lead in different ways.

Focus on understanding behavior in other cultures, and keep finding the bright eyes in the room.

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, September 27, 2014

Termites Work Together as Guardians in the Soil

2015-03-21T08:59:00.004-07:00

English: These termite mounds were most impressive. From the park sign: Cathedral Termite Mound This mound is home to a colony of grass eating termites, Nasutitermes triodiae. It's about 5 meters high and could be over 50 years old. Kingdom:Animalia Phylum:Arthropoda Class:Insecta Subclass:Pterygota Infraclass:Neoptera Superorder:Dictyoptera Order:Isoptera Family: Termitidae Litchfield National Park, Northern Territory, Australia i09_0501 027 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is definitely a science feature, but there is something to learn, especially for leaders. We don't always get to give. It is what we are, how we do, and where we thrive. That will spell our survival for the next milleniums to come...
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By NATALIE ANGIER

The giant termite mounds that rise up from the sands of the African savanna are so distinctive it is tempting to give them names, like “Trumpeting Elephant” or “Flagrantly Obvious Fertility Totem.”

Whatever the metaphor, the megaforms dominate their landscape, and not just visually. As scientists are just beginning to appreciate, termites and their habitats are crucial to the health and robustness of an array of ecosystems: from deserts to rain forests to your local park.

Researchers at Princeton University in New Jersey reported in the journal Science that termite mounds may serve as oases in the desert, allowing the plants that surround them to persist on a fraction of the annual rainfall otherwise required and to bounce back after a withering drought. The mounds could prove potential bulwarks against climate change, preventing fragile dryland from slipping into lifeless wasteland.

“Even when you see desertification start to happen between the mounds, the vegetation on or around the mounds is doing so well it will keep reseeding the environment,” said Corina Tarnita, a professor at Princeton and an author of the report.

While the public may view termites as pale, blind, centimeter-long vermin that can damage homes, only a handful of the 3,000 or so known termite species are pests to people. Many of the rest, you can thank for the ground beneath your feet, which is where the majority live and work. The closer scientists look, the longer grows the list of subterranean tasks that termites take on.

“They’re the ultimate soil engineers,” said David Bignell, an emeritus professor at Queen Mary University of London.

By poking holes as they dig, termites allow rain to soak deep into the soil rather than run off or evaporate. Termites mix sand, stone and clay with organic bits of leaf litter, discarded exoskeletons and the occasional squirrel tail, a blending that helps the soil retain nutrients and resist erosion.

The stickiness of a termite’s feces and other bodily excretions lends structure and coherence to the soil, which also prevents erosion. Bacteria in the termite’s gut can fix nitrogen, extracting it from the air and converting it into a fertilizer, benefiting the termite host and the vast underground economy. “Over all, termites are extremely good for the health of the soil” on which everything else depends, Dr. Bignell said.

Termites also provide a model for understanding the origins of social life, the division of labor, and a sort of altruistic, self-abnegating behavior. In a new study of “panic escape” behavior among termites as they seek to flee from danger, researchers at Louisiana State University Agricultural Center determined that the one thing the termites do not do when disturbed is panic. They don’t start running, pushing and shoving, or clambering over the fallen. They don’t behave like people in a crowded theater when somebody yells fire, or like ants whose nest has been harrowed.

Instead, the researchers found that when they placed 110 termites on round plastic dishes and gave the plates a shake, the termites started running in an orderly fashion, depending on whether they were ordinary workers or soldiers dedicated to nest defense. The workers fell into single-file formation. The ones infront decided whether to turn left or right, and the rest followed at a uniform speed and spacing.

The soldiers migrated to either side of the flow, snapping their mandibles as though preparing to do battle. If one termite stumbled or slowed, those behind would stop and wait for it to right itself.

That organization distinguishes termites from their more famous counterparts among social insects, the ants. “Ants will crowd over each other and get trapped at exits or intersections,” said Gregg Henderson, an entomologists at the agricultural center and an author of the report, which appeared in the journal Insect Science. “But I’ve seen no evidence of selfishness in termites.”

That may be because they have had a lot of practice. Termites, Dr. Henderson said, “were the first animals to form societies,” starting about 200 million years ago, some 50 million years earlier than the ants and their hymenopteran cousins, the bees.

With the help of symbiotic bacteria and protozoa packed into their stomachs at what might be the highest microbial densities in nature, termites thrive by eating what others can’t or won’t: wood, dung, even dirt.

The great termite artists of Africa, the mound builders, cultivate a fungus in tunnels and galleries deep inside vast palaces built of sand, clay and termite excretions. The termites eat a small portion of the fungal spores and use the fungal enzymes to help break down fibrous food sources.

The termites, in turn, offer their fungal partners water, nourishment and a temperate and well-ventilated haven free of competing fungal strains. The mounds also protect their builders against the sun, the seasonal rain and predators.

The largest African mounds can measure nine meters high and house millions of termites. In Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, antelope congregate around termite mounds, and not just for the grazing opportunities.

“The mounds are cooler in the heat of day and warmer at night,” said Robert Pringle, an ecologist at Princeton and an author of the report in Science. “They’re a very pleasant place to hang out.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, March 14, 2015

Liar, Liar? Easier Said Than Seen

2015-02-06T23:21:00.000-08:00

Liar Liar (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Is this technique applied during job interviews? At work?
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BY JOHN TIERNEY

Like most people, airport security screeners like to think they can read body language. In the United States, the Transportation Security Administration has spent some $1 billion training thousands of “behavior detection officers” to look for facial expressions and other nonverbal clues that would identify terrorists.

But critics say there’s no evidence that these efforts have stopped a single terrorist or accomplished much beyond inconveniencing tens of thousands of passengers a year. The T.S.A. seems to have fallen for a classic form of self-deception: the belief that you can read liars’ minds by watching their bodies.

Most people think liars give themselves away by averting their eyes or making nervous gestures, and many law-enforcement officers have been trained to look for specific tics, like gazing upward in a certain manner. But in scientific experiments, people do a lousy job of spotting liars. Law-enforcement officers and other presumed experts are not consistently better at it than ordinary people even though they’re more confident in their abilities.

“There’s an illusion of insight that comes from looking at a person’s body,” says Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago. “Body language speaks to us, but only in whispers.”

The T.S.A. program was reviewed last year by the Government Accountability Office, which recommended cutting funds for it because there was no proof of its effectiveness. That recommendation was based on the meager results of the program as well as a survey of the scientific literature by the psychologists Charles F. Bond Jr. and Bella M. DePaulo, who analyzed more than 200 studies.

In those studies, people correctly identified liars only 47 percent of the time. Their accuracy rate was higher, 61 percent, when it came to spotting truth tellers, but that still left their overall average at 54 percent, only slightly better than chance.

“The common-sense notion that liars betray themselves through body language appears to be little more than a cultural fiction,” says Maria Hartwig, a psychologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Researchers have found that the best clues to deceit are verbal – liars tend to be less forthcoming and tell less compelling stories.

One technique that has been taught to law-enforcement officers is to watch the upward eye movements of people as they talk. This is based on a theory from believers in “neuro-linguistic programming” that people tend to glance upward to their right when lying, and upward to the left when telling the truth.

But this theory didn’t hold up when it was tested by a team of British and North American psychologists. They found no pattern in the upward eye movements of liars and truth tellers.

“There is no Pinocchio’s nose – no one cue that will always accompany deception,” says an author of the eye-movement study, Leanne ten Brinke, of the University of California, Berkeley.

She and others argue that it may nonetheless be possible to detect certain kinds of “high stakes” lies by looking for an array of body cues. Stephen Porter of the University of British Columbia says the poor success rate in studies is caused partly by the limitations of laboratory experiments in which subjects are asked to lie about things that don’t matter to them.

Last year, psychologists at the University of British Columbia trained professionals in forensics to look for facial expressions and other signs of stress or inconsistency in someone telling a story. Then these professionals looked at news footage of people pleading for the return of a missing relative.

Some of the pleaders were sincere, but others were lying (as eventually revealed by evidence that they had murdered the relative). The trained professionals were able to identify the liars with an 80 percent accuracy rate.

That’s an impressive record, but it’s only one experiment, and many researchers question how reliably these techniques can be applied in the real world.

Why do we intuitively believe we can read body language? After writing a book on the topic, Dr.Epley has an explanation.

“When you’re lying or cheating, you know it and feel guilty, and it feels to you as if your emotions must be leaking out through your body language,” he says. “You have an illusion that your emotions are more transparent than they actually are, and so you assume others are more transparent than they actually are, too.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, 05 April 2014

Idea of Work-Life Balance Hits Wall Street

2015-01-31T17:24:00.002-08:00

Goldman Sachs Headquarters, New York City (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This idea of work-life balance is now becoming one important factor in a person's life these days. For what would you do with your tons of money, when nobody is around you anymore to share it with? Or you are no longer healthy to at least enjoy it yourself?

Just what is all the point there is after all the trouble?
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BY RACHEL L.SWARNS

The hard-working investment banker got out of bed at 11 a.m. First a leisurely cup of coffee and some Greek yogurt. Then after a run, he and three friends spent the afternoon watching college basketball on television.

The junior banker, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized by his employer to talk to a reporter, was savoring a rarity: a Saturday off.

“It’s weird waking up, saying, ‘What do I do with my time now?’” he said.

In recent months, some of the biggest banks on Wall Street have upended tradition by urging their junior bankers to take weekend days off.

In January, Bank of America Merrill Lynch told its junior bankers to take four weekend days off every month. Credit Suisse and Citigroup have urged their analysts and associates not to work on Saturdays. Last year, Goldman Sachs recommended that its analysts take weekend off whenever possible, and JPMorgan Chase announced an initiative to ensure that young staff members would have one “protected weekend” every month.

“We want them to be challenged, but also to operate at a pace where they’re going to stay here and learn important skills that are going to stick,” said David Solomon, at Goldman Sachs. “This is a marathon, not a sprint.”

Some may view the schedule change for overworked junior bankers as insignificant. But in an industry in which grueling schedules are embraced as a badge of honor, it reflects a significant shift in corporate culture.

The move to rethink workloads accelerated last summer when a 21-year-old intern at Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s London office died after an epileptic seizure. Reports suggested that he had worked three nights in a row.

The change also reflects the shifting realities: Wall Street is no longer the inevitable first choice finance graduates, some of whom are drawn to technology firms that often offer flexibility at work and big paychecks.

Sonia Marciano, a professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, said her students expected more than big bonuses. “My students, men and women, talk much more openly about an expectation of work-life balance,” said Ms. Marciano, who has been teaching for 20 years. “It’s a shift that seems pretty real and substantial.”

The junior banker who spent the recent Saturday with friends, said that in his first year on Wall Street, he worked all but a few weekend days. His parents stopped hoping that he would answer the phone. He lost touch with friends and struggled to find time to exercise. “The toll that it takes on you as a person, it’s overwhelming,” he said.

He still works through the weekend when a big deal is imminent and responds to calls and emails when he is out of the office.

But on that recent Saturday, he watched college basketball without his BlackBerry beeping. Later, he and his friends went out for burgers and a night of partying. “A chance to recharge,” he said.

He arrived home at 5 a.m., bleary-eyed and ready for a few hours of sleep. But just a few. It was Sunday, and time to get back to work.

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, The New York Times International Weekly, April 5, 2014

Work, a Gender Bias Among Leaders

2015-01-23T21:25:00.001-08:00

English: London Business School logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If brokerage is more apt to be for men, then modelling and product promotion is undoubtedly for women...
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BY PHYLLIS KORKKI

Who really makes the changes in an organization? It’s not always the people with the highest executive titles. A growing body of research has pointed to the importance of informal leaders known to researchers as “brokers,” who have the gift of connecting employees in productive new ways.

New research by Raina A. Brands of the London Business School and Martin Kilduff of University College London has uncovered a bias surrounding brokerage roles.

Professor Brands and Professor Kilduff examined what are known as “friendship networks” within organizations. In this sense, friends are the people you turn to for help, advice and information, whether or not they are in your work group. Simply put, you like and trust them, Professor Brands says. It’s within these friendship networks that much of an organization’s work gets done, Professor Brands says.

In a study of two separate groups – employees of an electronic-components distributor and a cohort of M.B.A. students – she and professor Kilduff identified brokers based on the high level of connectivity they displayed. They also identified the people who were perceived by their colleagues to be brokers. (Perceived brokers are not always actual brokers.)

Researchers asked members to evaluate their colleagues, including the actual and perceived brokers. This is where gender differences emerged. The researchers found that people tended to ignore the activities of female brokers and to exaggerate how much men served as brokers. If women were recognized as brokers, they were perceived more negatively.

“They incurred reputational penalties,” Professor Brands says.

“They were seen as more competent, but less warm.” Other research, she says, has shown that men who take on brokerage roles tend to receive benefits in the form of compensation and promotions, whereas female brokers’ careers are negatively affected.

Professor Brands and Professor Kilduff also analyzed the performance of the brokers’ teams. They found that women who were thought by their teams to be brokers tended to perform well individually, but at the expense of their overall team’s performance.

The professors noted that men are traditionally defined by words like aggressive, forceful, independent and decisive. Women, on the other hand, are stereotypically expected to be kind, helpful, and sympathetic and concerned about others.

Women are thought to excel in the social realm – so you would think that they would be seen as good work brokers, the researchers said. But “despite the widespread notion of women as social specialist, perceptions of the network position of women will be distorted because of the expectation that brokerage is man’s work,” they wrote.

Much of this distortion may be below the level of conscious awareness, Professor Brands says, and simply bringing it to employees’ attention could help minimize the reputational bias that women incur at work.

Taken from The New York Times International Weekly, TODAY Saturday Edition, April 26, 2014

Science Increasingly Makes the Case for God

2015-01-21T06:56:00.001-08:00

Kansai International Airport（ja:関西国際空港）,Osaka,Japan（大阪府）で撮影。 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

     On our way back to Singapore from Osaka, Japan via Kansai International Airport, we took the wrong Express Train, not knowing that there were 2. Since we usually make it a point to leave early, estimating about 2 hours from departure time, that incident caused a delay of 1 hour, still giving us an hour ahead of departure time.
     When we rushed to the check-in row, we were immediately met by the plane's airport personnel, telling us that the flight is delayed, which to them, warranted an endorsement - change of airplane.
     That is how I got this Wall Street Journal paper, where this short article is containted.
     Coincidence? I don't think so. Intelligent scheduling. I believe so.
     This is for all to see, to read, and understand. NOTHING is by chance, be it evolution or big bang. Everything has its time and season - and reason.
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By Eric Metaxas

In 1996 Time magazine ran a cover story asking: Is God Dead? Many have accepted the cultural narrative that he’s obsolete – that as science progresses, there is less need for a “God” to explain the universe. Yet it turns out that the rumors of God’s death were premature. More amazing is that the relatively recent case for his existence comes from a surprising place – science itself.

Here’s the story: The same year Time featured the now-famous headline, the astronomer Carl Sagan announced that there were two important criteria for a planet to support life: The right kind of star, and a planet the right distance from that star. Given the roughly octillion – 1 followed by 24 zeros – planets in the universe, there should have been about septillion – 1 followed by 21 zeros – planets capable of supporting life.

With such spectacular odds, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, a large, expensive collection of private and publicly funded projects launce dint he 1960s, was sure to turn up something soon. Scientists listened with a vast radio telescopic network for signals that resembled coded intelligence and were not merely random. But as years passed, the silence from the rest of the universe was deafening. U.S. Congress defunded SETI in 1993, but the search continues with private funds. As of 2014, researches have discovered precisely bubkis – 0 followed by nothing.

What happened? As our knowledge of the universe increased, it became clear that there were far more factors necessary for life that Sagan supposed. His tow parameters grew to 10 and then 20 and then 50, and so the number of potentially life-supporting planets decreased accordingly. The number dropped to a few thousand planets and kept on plummeting.

Even SETI proponents acknowledged the problem. Peter Schenkel wrote in a 2006 piece for Skeptical Inquirer magazine: “In light of new findings and insights, it seems appropriate to put excessive euphoria to rest… We should quietly admit that the early estimates… many no longer be tenable.”

As factors continued to be discovered, the number of possible planets hit zero, and kept going. In other words, the odds turned against any planet in the universe supporting life, including this one. Probability said that even we shouldn’t be here.

Today there are more than 200 known parameters necessary for a planet to support life – every single one of which must be perfectly met, or the whole thing falls apart. Without a massive planet like Jupiter nearby, whose gravity will draw away asteroids, a thousand times as many would hit Earth’s surface. The odds against life in the universe are simply astonishing.

Yet here we are, not only existing, but talking about existing. What can account for it? Can every one of those many parameters have been perfect by accident? At what pint is it fair to admit that science suggests that we cannot be the result of random forces? Doesn’t assuming that an intelligence created these perfect conditions require far less faith than believing that a life-sustaining Earth just happened to beat the inconceivable odds to come into being?

There’s more. The fine-tuning necessary for life to exit on a planet is nothing compared with the fine-tuning required for the universe to exist at all. For example, astrophysicists now know that the value s of the four fundamental forces – gravity, the electromagnetic force, and the “strong” and “weak” nuclear forces – were determined less than one millionth of a second after the big bang. Alter any one value and the universe could not exist. For instance, if the ratio between the nuclear strong force and the electromagnetic force had been off by the tiniest fraction of the tiniest fraction – by even one part in 100,000,000,000,000,000 – then no stars could have ever formed at all. Feel free to gulp.

Multiply that single parameter by all the other necessary conditions, and the odds against the universe existing are so heart-stoppingly astronomical that the notion that it all “just happened” defies common sense. It would be like tossing a coin and having it come up heads 10 quintillion times in a row. Really?

Fred Hoyle, the astronomer who coined the term “big bang,” said that his atheism was “greatly shaken” at these developments. He later wrote that “a common-sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super-intellect has monkeyed with the physics, as well as with chemistry and biology… The numbers one calculates form the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.”

Theoretical physicist Paul Davies has said that “the appearance of design is overwhelming” and Oxford professor John Lennox has said “the more we get to know about our universe, the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator… gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.”

The greatest miracle of all time, without any close seconds, is the universe. It is the miracle of all miracles, one that ineluctably points with the combined brightness of every star to something – or Someone – beyond itself.

Mr. Metaxas is the author, most recently, of “Miracles: What They Are, Why They Happen, and How They Can Change Your Life” (Dutton Adult, 2014).

Taken from The Wall Street Journal, Wednesday – Thursday, Dec 31, 2014 – Jan 1, 2015

Spiteful? It’s Not Such a Bad Thing

2015-01-07T07:20:00.002-08:00

The Selfish Gene (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The bad eliminating 'more' bad...?
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By Natalie Angier

After decades of focusing on such staples of bad behavior as aggressiveness, selfishness, narcissism and greed, scientists have turned their attention to the subtler theme of spite – the urge to punish, hurt, humiliate or harass another, even when one gains no obvious benefit and may well pay a cost.

Psychologists are exploring spitefulness in its customary role as a negative trait, a lapse that should be embarrassing but is often sublimated as righteousness, as when you take your time pulling out of a parking space because you notice another car is waiting for it.

Evolutionary theorists, by contrast, are studying what might be viewed as the brighter side of spite, and the role it may have played in the origin of admirable traits like a cooperative spirit and a sense of fair play.

The new research transcends older notions that we are savage, selfish brutes at heart, as well as more recent suggestions that humans inherently yearn to love and connect. Instead, it concludes that vice and virtue may be inextricably linked.

“Spitefulness is such an intrinsically interesting subject, and it fits with so many people’s everyday experience, that I was surprised to see how little mention there was of it in the psychology literature,” said David K. Marcus, a psychologist at Washington State University.

Reporting in February in the journal Psychological Assessment, Dr. Marcus and his colleagues described a survey they created to assess individual differences in spitefulness, just as existing personality tests measure traits like agreeableness and extroversion. A total of 946 college students and 297 adults were asked to rate how firmly they agreed with sentiments like, “If my neighbor complained about the appearance of my front yard, I would be tempted to make it look worse just to annoy him or her,” or, “If I opposed the election of an official, I would happily see the person fail even if that failure hurt my community.”

The researchers determined that men were generally more spiteful than women and young adults more spiteful than older ones.

For their part, evolutionary theorists have long been intrigued by the origins and purpose of spite, and a new report suggests that sometimes spite can make right.

Patrick Forber of Tufts University and Rory Smead of Northeastern University, both in Massachusetts, designed a computer model of virtual players challenging each other to single rounds of the ultimatum game.

According to the rules, Player A decided how a pot of money was to be shared with Player B. If B consented to the split, both received the agreed-upon portion; If B rejected the offer, neither player received anything.

The contestants were assigned one of four predetermined strategies, from the easygoing approach of, “When you’re Player A, you share 50-50, but when you’re Player B you accept any offer, no matter how stingy,” to the spiteful, “When you’re A, you make a stingy offer, but when you’re B you spurn a stingy offer.” The researchers then allowed the players to coalesce into mock societies, and they were startled by the results.

Although groups of excessively spiteful or selfish players quickly collapsed, and rigidly fair-minded societies were readily destabilized by influxes of selfish exploiters, the flexible sharers not only proved able to coexist with the spiteful types, but the presence of spiteful had the effect of enhancing the rate of fair exchanges among the genials. Dr. Smead said it seemed that “fairness is acting as a defense against spite.”

The results echo other recent research suggesting that human decency and cooperation require a certain degree of so-called altruistic punishment: the willingness of some individuals to punish rule breakers even when the infraction does not directly affect them.

Omar Tonsi Eldakar of Nova Southeastern University in Florida has studied the link between cooperative behavior and what he calls selfish punishment. “Why is everyone always assuming that it’s the good guys who are doing the punishing?” he asked. “Selfish individuals have more reason than anyone else to want to get rid of other cheaters.”

Using game theory models, Dr.Eldakar has demonstrated that when selfish players intent on maximizing their profits regularly punish other selfish players or exclude them from the group, the net outcome is an overall decline in selfish exchanges to a reasonably stable state.

“It’s like the Mafia,” he said. They end up reducing crime in the areas they inhabit.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, April 12, 2014

The Warning The Water Is Giving Us

2014-12-17T07:24:00.002-08:00

English: Bunker Hill in downtown Los Angeles as seen from Los Angeles City Hall. Photographed and uploaded by user:Geographer Category:Images of Los Angeles (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Los Angeles is the second largest city in the United States (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BY CHARLES FISHMAN

California was wet all over as March began: torrential rain, heavy snow, mudslides. The drought barely noticed.

The water crisis there is now in its third year; some scientists believe 2013 was the driest year in California since 1580. The state, the most populous in America, gets 75 percent of its water from snow, and this year, 70 percent of its usual snowpack is missing.

Britain’s problem has been exactly the opposite: biblical flooding. The Thames has been flowing at its highest level, for the longest period, since 1883. Storms across south western England have left Brits kayaking through their towns. According to Britain’s weather service, the rain across England and Wales is the heaviest in 240 years.

There have always been floods and droughts. But water problems of all kinds seem more common and more urgent because they are.

In 2013, the world had a record number of $1 billion weather disaster – 41, topping the previous high from just three years earlier. Almost all 41 involved water-flooding, drought or damage from cyclones.

There are three reasons we’re seeing more water issues.

The first is population growth. The drought in California is made worse by the fact that the state’s population is one-third bigger than in 1990. Ten million more people live there today. Their added water use drains the equivalent of a 40-hectare lake, 15 meters deep, every day. The challenge of supplying water to growing populations is acute in mega-cities like Beijing, Delhi and Los Angeles.

Living standards have also been rising in developing nations like India, China and Brazil. The more people rise to the middle class, the more water they use- for toilets, for clothes washers, for daily showers. People with modern plumbing often use five or 10 times the water as those without it.

Finally, climate change is likely to make routine cycles of weather more severe and perhaps more frequent. The Thames Barrier, a mechanical dam that protects London from flooding, was used 35 times during the 1990s. This January alone, it was used 17 times. And this year’s flooding comes just two years after another natural disaster in the same part of England: the worst drought in 100 years.

The consequences ripple widely. The American drought has crippled California farmers, who grow 60 percent of the country’s produce, and has left the nation with its smallest cattle herd in 60 years, sending beef prices to record highs. Economists estimate that the flooding in Britain could shave a full point off of its G.D.P.

Often, what we do about the weather is tough it out and hope things go back to “normal.” But what we’ve seen with water over the last decade is a warning. Tumult may be the new normal.

There are two secrets to understanding and addressing water problems. The first is that all water problems are local. Whatever the connections to weather patterns over the Pacific, England’s flooding has to be fixed in England. The drought is California’s problem – conservation in Kansas won’t help. But that’s actually good news. Communities – cities, states, multistate watersheds – have the ability to solve problems right where they are happening.

The second thing to remember is that water doesn’t respond to wishful thinking. It responds to careful, permanent changes in how we live, how we farm, how we build and what we charge for the water itself. The British government has a nine-year-old report about preparing for increased flooding. The title:

“Making Space for Water.” You’re not going to hold back the flood. You have to anticipate it, and adapt.

Most big communities in California have yet to mandate water-use reductions. In part, that’s because water use has already changed there, slowly but dramatically. In 1972, the average resident of Los Angeles used 715 liters a day. Today, the average is 465 liters.

Here’s what the change means: The Los Angeles metro area has 50 percent more people than it did 20 years ago, but it uses the same amount of water. The drought, bad as it is, would have been far worse if people were still using so much water. Thinking ahead matters.

The amount of water on Earth doesn’t change-no “new” water is being created, no water is being destroyed. It simply is used, evaporates and is used again. But we’re being reminded that water doesn’t end up where we want it, when we want it.

In a world of big problems, water problems are among the biggest. But unlike many other big problems – climate change, economic inequality – most water problems are solvable. There’s usually enough water, and even enough money. What we need is time and the realism to tackle the problems.

In that sense, the current water tumult is doing us a favor. If we pay attention, water is giving us fair warning.

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Charles Fishman is the author of “The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, March 8, 2014

A Small Step Toward the Dream of Safe, Boundless Power

2014-12-05T15:45:00.002-08:00

NIF flashlamps (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Laser Bay 2, one of NIF's two laser bays (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Mockup of a gold-plated hohlraum designed for use in the National Ignition Facility (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Upper portion of the NIF's target chamber under construction. The large square beam ports are prominent. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: The Beamlet laser, a scientific prototype of one of the NIF’s 192 beamlines, that has been operating at LLNL since 1994. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Outside view of the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: Layout of the NAtional Ignition Facility. Image taken from a LLNL publication. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is taking years, but nuclear energy research has always taken years. There is the over-arching question of sustainability and safety - and health hazards to top it all.
Not to sound scientist-like, I stop here.
Read on...
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BY KENNETH CHANG

LIVERMORE, California – Fusion, the process that powers the sun, is the dream of many – safe, nonpolluting and almost boundless. Here at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where the primary focus of fusion work involves nuclear weapons, many scientists talk poetically about how it could end the world’s addiction to fossil fuels.

“It’s the dream of the future, solving energy,” said Stephen E.Bodner, who worked on fusion at Livermore in the 1960s and ‘70s, recalling that the military focus then was a ruse to keep government money flowing to the lab for energy research. “Everyone was winking,” he said. “Everyone knew better.”

The basic concept behind fusion is simple: Squeeze hydrogen atoms hard enough and they fuse together in helium. A helium atom weighs slightly less than the original hydrogen atoms, and by Einstein’s equation E=mc2, that liberated bit of mass turns into energy. Hydrogen is so abundant that unlike fossil fuels or fissionable material like uranium, it will never run out.

Scientists have never figured out a way to keep a fusion reaction going long enough to generate usable energy. The running joke is that “fusion is 30 years in the future – and always will be.”

Now, however, scientists here have given the world some progress. In February, a team headed by Omar A. Hurricane said it had used giant lasers to fuse hydrogen atoms and produce flashes of energy, like miniature hydrogen bombs. The amount of energy produced was tiny – the equivalent of what a 60-watt light bulb consumes in five minutes.

The fusion occurred at the National Ignition Facility, which has cost $5.3 billion to build and operate. The key to the facility is ignition. For government purposes, ignition was defined as a fusion reaction producing as much energy as the laser beams that hit it. To achieve that, an initial smidgen of fusion has to cascade to neighboring hydrogen atoms.

The center of NIF is the target chamber, a metal sphere 10 meters wide with gleaming equipment radiating outward. It looks like something from “Star Trek” – in fact it doubled as the engine room of the Enterprise in last year’s “Star Trek Into Darkness” movie.

Each blast starts with a small laser pulse that is split via mirrors into 192, then bounced through laser amplifiers that fill two warehouse-size rooms. The beams are then focused into the chamber, converging on a gold cylinder the size of a pencil eraser. In a brief moment, the imploding atoms fuse together.

The scientists call it bang time.

Each shot is so short that the cost in electricity is just $5.

Livermore officials were confident enough that NIF would achieve ignition soon after it was turned on that they laid out a plan for building a demonstration power plant they said could be ready for electrical grids by the 2030s.

Dr. Bodner, who had left Livermore in 1975 and set up a competing program at the Naval Research Laboratory, was a critic of NIF. In 1995, he predicted that instabilities in the imploding gas would thwart ignition. He championed a different laser fusion concept in which the lasers shine directly on the fuel pellets. That creates other technical difficulties. Dr. Bonder, who retired in 1999, said his team was able to show those could be overcome.

The sun’s immense gravity provides the squeeze that enables fusion. On earth, there are two main possibilities: powerful lasers to jam the hydrogen together, as at NIF, or magnetic fields to contain a hot hydrogen plasma until the atoms collide and fuse.

Most fusion energy research has focused on the magnetic approach, particularly doughnut-shaped machines known as tokamaks.

In 1994, the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at Princeton University in New Jersey generated 10.7 million watts of power for a brief moment. Three years later, the Joint European Torus in England topped that, at 16 million watts.

The next step in the magnetic route is a mammoth international collaboration known as Iter. Construction on Iter has begun in southern France, with the first operations expected to begin in the 2020s – if it comes together. Under a complex management structure, the partners in the project (the European Union, Japan, China, Russia, the United States, India and South Korea) agreed to contribute pieces of the reactor, with the central Iter organization attempting to coordinate.

But the recent progress has come in the laser path to fusion.

Dr. Hurricane adjusted the laser pulse to warm the gold cylinder initially. That reduced the implosion pressure that had been tearing the pellet apart, but calmed some of the instabilities, yielding a higher rate of fusion.

In September, Dr.Hurricane’s team had its first shot that showed signs of the fusion reaction spreading through the fuel.

Jeff Wisoff, NIF’s acting director, said, “Now we at least have a sparking match.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, March 29, 2014

Setting Aside Privacy Issue, Estonia Blazes Digital Path

2014-11-28T05:26:00.002-08:00

Estonian national costumes: 5. Muhu 6. Karja 7. Tõstamaa 8. Pärnu-Jaagupi (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

BY MARK SCOTT

TALLINN, Estonia – The centuries-old city center here looks quaintly antique, with cobbled streets lined by medieval buildings at nearly every turn. But the people have fully embraced the digital world, enthusiastically adopting public and private online services.

Estonians, using national identity card embedded with a microchip, gain access to some 4,000 services, including banking, business registration and even fishing licenses. They review medical records on smartphones. Almost everyone files taxes on the web within minutes, and about a third of voters now cast their ballots online.

While Europe and the United States debate the role of technology in people’s daily lives, Estonia has welcomed it as a fact of life, shooting away concerns about data privacy. In the last 23 years, Estonia, a Baltic country, has transformed from being a member of the Soviet bloc to one of the most connected countries, using technology built primarily within its borders.

The rest of the world has taken notice. The country’s former prime minister, Andrus Ansip, is the new European Commission vice president in charge of Europe’s digital future. “I know from personal experience that paperless government can work,” he said.

With a population of 1.3 million, Estonia faces fewer challenges than bigger countries like Britain and the United States when introducing online services. The transformation has been made on a small budget. The country spends about 50 million euros a year on information technology.

Its decision to go digital also has been driven by the fact that, at independence, it had few financial resources and a small population to jump-start its economy.

Local policy makers soon realized that they could not offer Western-style services without using new technology that could keep costs to a minimum.

Estonia relies on a government-run technology infrastructure, called X-Road that links public and private databases into the country’s digital services. All personal information is kept on separate servers and behind distinct security walls of government agencies, but the system allows the state and businesses like banks to share data when individuals give consent.

Estonians say the online services are more secure and more convenient than traditional methods of dealing with the government.

“Digital services have changed our lives,” said Taavi Roivas, who recently succeeded Mr. Ansip as prime minister.

About 98 percent of Estonians file their income taxes online, taking about five minutes, said Marek Helm, who leads Estonia’s tax and customs authority. That has increased overall tax compliance, cut his agency’s staff in half, and made tax refunds possible within a week.

There were some problems. Estonia’s online medical portal routinely crashed after digital prescriptions were introduced in 2010 because retirees kept signing into the system to renew their medication on the day they all received their pensions. And some local politicians have alleged fraud in online voting.

But the country now wants to take its digital services global by signing up people living outside Europe for so-called “e-residencies “that would give them access to Estonia’s public and private online services.

The upside, Estonians say, is convenience. “I can’t imagine doing things the old-fashioned way,” said Priit Heinla, 27, a project manager for an energy company who uses digital signatures. “You don’t have to sign a mountain of paperwork. It’s just one signature and you’re done.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, November 1, 2014

Religion Upsets Ideas Of European Identity

2014-11-17T06:16:00.000-08:00

20 Slovak korún coin from 1939 - obverse (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

20 Slovak korún coin from 1941 - reverse (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is a year-old article, but its relevance is still in the present age, and in the age to come. Here is my take on matters such as this: In pacifying the godless, God is removed. And He is always a gentleman who doesn't force Himself into people's lives.
Read on...
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BY ANDREW HIGGINS

BRATISLAVA, Slovakia – Late last year, the National Bank of Slovakia announced that the European Commission, the union’s executive arm, had ordered it to remove halos and crosses from its commemorative euro coins due to be minted this summer.

The coins, designed by a local artist, were intended to celebrate the 1,150th anniversary of Christianity’s arrival in Slovak lands but have instead become tokens of the faith’s retreat from contemporary Europe. They featured two evangelizing Byzantine monks, Cyril and Methodius, and violated European diversity rules that ban any tilt toward a single faith.

At a time when Europe needs solidarity and a unified sense of purpose, religion has become yet another source of discord. It divides mostly secular Western Europe from profoundly religious nations in the east and those in between both in geography and in faith, like Slovakia.

The European Commission is under attack from all sides, denounced by atheists for even mild engagement with religion and by nationalist Christian fundamentalists as an agent of Satan.

Asked about such criticism, Katharina von Schnurbein, the commission official who reaches out to both religious and secular groups, smiled and said,” I can assure you that the European Commission is not the Antichrist.”

Europe is suffused with Christianity. Even the European Union’s flag-a circle of 12 yellow stars on a blue background-drew upon from an image of the Virgin Mary wearing a crown with 12 stars.

Throughout its modern history, however, the “European project” has sought to avoid religion and the unruly passions it can stir.

Ms. Von Schnurbein dismissed accusations of an anti-Christian agenda. “We deal with people of faith and also people of no faith,” she said.

The department that ordered Slovakia to redesign its coins said it had no real problem with halos and crosses, but demanded that they be deleted in the interest of “religious diversity” because of complaints from countries like France and Greece.

Several of the union’s most senior figures are Catholic. Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, has told supporters that “we don’t have too much Islam, we have too little Christianity.”

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe slowed the secular tide somewhat as the European Union began to admit new and sometimes deeply religious countries like Poland, Romania, and Croatia, a largely Catholic country of 4.4 million and the latest to be admitted.

The 2007 Treaty of Lisbon, which reformed the original two treaties on which the European Union was founded, skipped any reference to Christianity and instead paid tribute to the “cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe.” It mandated dialogue with religious groups. But it also ordered equal treatment for “philosophical and non-confessional organizations,” which include groups whose principal philosophy is hostility to organized religion.

Stanislav Zvolensky, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Bratislava, said that efforts at European unity are doomed unless the union gives a bigger place to God. “Religion should be the inner strength of the union,” he said.

He does see one encouraging sign: Slovakia’s national bank has decided to stick with its original coin design, and the European Commission has gone along with the plan. The commemorative coins was minted in June – two months later than planned, but with halos and crosses.

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, July 6, 2013

If Gadgets Could Gauge Emotions

2014-11-04T06:48:00.001-08:00

English: Microsoft XBOX 360 Kinect Sensor. Video Kinect: Make live video chats with your Xbox LIVE users under the Standard kinect camera. Video Kinect (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

While this article is a year old, there is still the truth and value in it. That's what things of worth - they stand the test of time. And even more so, because many of the things that were mentioned here are looking into the future - things still to come. A year old, but still not outdated.

Read on...
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JENNA WORTHAM

Artificial intelligence is creeping into our lives at a steady pace. Devices and apps can anticipate what we need, sometimes even before we realize it ourselves.

So why shouldn’t they understand our feelings? If emotional reactions were measured, they could be valuable data points for better design and development. Emotional artificial intelligence, also called affective computing, may be on its way.

But should it be? After all, we’re already struggling to cope with the always-on nature of the devices in our lives. Yes, those gadgets would be more efficient if they could respond when we are frustrated, bored or too busy to be interrupted, yet they would also be intrusive in ways we can’t even fathom today.

Companies like affectiva, a start-up spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are working on software that trains computers to recognize human emotions based on their facial expressions and physiological responses. A company called Beyond Verbal, which has just raised close to $3 million in venture financing, is working on a software tool that can analyze speech and, based on the tone of a person’s voice, determine qualities like arrogance or annoyance, or both.

Microsoft recently revealed the Xbox One, the next generation version of its flagship game console, which includes an update of Kinect, its motion-tracking device that lets people control games by moving their hands and bodies. The new Kinect, which goes on sale later this year, includes a higher-definition camera capable of tracking fine skeletal and muscular changes in the body and face .The machine can already detect the physics behind bodily movements, and calculate the force behind a punch or the height of a jump.

In addition, one of the Kinect’s new sensors uses infrared technology to track a player’s heartbeats. That could eventually help the company detect when a player’s pulse is racing during a fitness contest – and from excitement after winning a game. The possibilities for more immersive, interactive play are mind-boggling.

Albert Penello, a senior director of product planning at Microsoft, says the company intends to use that data to give designers insight into how people feel when playing its games – a kind of feedback loop that can help shape future offerings and experiences. He says Microsoft takes privacy very seriously and will require game developers to receive explicit permission from Xbox One owners before using the data. Microsoft says games could even adapt in real time to players’ physical response, amping up the action if they aren’t stimulated enough, or tamping it down if it’s too scary. “We are trying to open up game designers to the mind of the players,” Penello said. “Are you scared or are you laughing?”

Eventually, he said, the technology embedded in the Kinect camera could be used for a broader range of applications, including tracking reactions while someone is looking at ads or shopping online, in the hope of understanding what is or isn’t capturing the person’s interest. (Some companies have experimented with technologies like eye-tracking software to see what parts of commercials draw the most attention from viewers.)

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Endless sets of data points can be used to track moods.
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Online media companies like Netflix, Spotify and Amazon already have access to real-time consumer sentiment, knowing which chapters, parts of songs, movies and TV shows people love, hate, skip and like to re-watch. Such data were used to engineer the popular online Netflix series “House of Cards,” whose creators had access to data about people’s television viewing habits.

So it is not much of a leap to imagine Kinect-like sensors being used to create new entertainment experiences.

The possibilities go far beyond that. Prerna Gupta, chief product officer at Smule, a development studio that makes mobile games, spoke about the subject at South by Southwest, the conference in Austin, Texas, in March. She called her talk “Apps of the Future: Instagram for Cyborgs,” and gazed far into the future of potential applications.

She says she thinks industries like health care may be revolutionized by emotionally aware technology.

“Tracking how our bodies are responding throughout the day could allow you to tailor your life according to what’s happening to your body throughout the day,” she said. It could allow nutritionist to carefully build meal plans for clients, or for doctors to come up with more efficient medical treatments. Of course, the range of ethical and privacy concerns is enormous.

Clive Thompson, author of a forthcoming book, “Smarter Than You Think: How Technology Is Changing Our Minds for the Better,” says that these exciting possibilities need to be explored very carefully.

He said an insurance company, for example, might want to know its customers’ moods – so it can raise their fees if they show signs of becoming depressed or sick. And employers might want to know when their staff members are bored, so they can give them more work or reprimand them if their attention wanders during an important meeting. He wondered whether we would all become better at masking our emotions if we knew that we were being watched and analyzed.

“We are talking about massive archives of personal data that are really revealing,” Mr. Thompson said. “Not to mention that there is definitely something unsettling about emotion recognition becoming another part of our lives that is archived and scrutinized.”

Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, June 15, 2013

When Facts Interfere With a Good Story

2014-10-30T07:04:00.001-07:00

Free twitter badge (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Twitter (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is indeed the times of technology, but as we find out from this incident, and not only this, but in many other times and forms, before and after this event, we see the abusive tendency that we humans have... we learn from history that we do not learn from history...
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The 24-hour news cycle is rapidly morphing into the 24-second news cycle.

It took less than half time for the Dow Jones Industrial Average to drop 150 points and erase $136 billion in market value after a Twitter hoax on April 23 claimed United States President Obama was injured in an explosion at the White House.

“It was nine, 10, 11 seconds and it was fast and then the question was ‘Why?’” Andrew Frankel, co-president of the brokerage firm Stuart Frankel & Company, told the Times.

He said traders realized the news alert – made after an account at the news cooperative The Associated Press was taken over by Syrian hackers – was false since the television screens showing other business programs had nothing about an explosion.

“You look at how quickly that happened and now everyone wants to release corporate earnings on Twitter,” Mr. Frankel said. “The concerns is ‘How do you know what’s right and what’s not? How do you know what’s hacked and what isn’t?’”

The pitfalls of social media’s news reporting are not just limited to the perceived unreliability of Twitter, with its strict 140-character limit. Reddit, the hugely popular news and entertainment site, found its foray into the chaos surrounding the Boston Marathon bombing to be a humbling experience.

Redditors, as site members are known, turned into amateur sleuths and ended up wrongly identifying several people as possible suspects, The Times reported. Reddit slipped from a reliable place for crowd sourced information to a purveyor of false accusations and found itself at the center of the debate about the responsibilities of digital media, according to the Times.

Erik Martin, the site’s general manager, posted an apology on April 22, saying, “Activity on Reddit fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties. The Reddit staff and the millions of people on Reddit around the world deeply regret that this happened.”

The urge to break news and be first on a big story is an occupational hazard that has long plagued media outlets of every variety.

In the Boston bombing case, Reddit was joined by the venerable television news network CNN in making false reports, most noticeably when a CNN reported declared on the air that an arrest had been made, when in fact the Chechen brothers who were the suspects were still at large. Others outlets, including The New York Post, Fox News, The Boston Globe, and the Associated Press, quickly repeated the claim.

When the surviving brother was in custody after a two-day manhunt, President Obama went on live television to address the nation, and reminded news organizations what their jobs were.

“In this age of instant reporting and tweets and blogs, there’s a temptation to latch on to any bit of information,” the president said. “But when a tragedy like this happens, with public safety at risk and the stakes so high, it’s important that we do this right. That’s why we have investigations. That’s why we relentlessly gather the facts.”

TOM BRADY

Taken from My Paper, Saturday, May 4, 2013

Culture the culprit in the way women are treated

2014-10-30T05:43:00.001-07:00

English: Watercolor Illustrations of different styles of Sari & clothing worn by women in South Asia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is a very sensitive issue, and I am sure that many will not agree with the writer. There will be some who would even hate me for posting this article - but if we only get past the baser side of our humanity and treat women as equally important, and therefore, as equally respected and heard in the society - well, they won't just be objects that would have to be forced into moulds in our culture.

Makes we again think why there are those who'd call themselves liberated women, and while the extreme side of that is one that we also don't desire, perhaps there is a sense to being free, being liberated, if just for the sense of it.

Read on...
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By Divya Nair

A couple of weeks ago, a disturbing incident occurred at one of New Delhi’s busiest metro stations.

Two Nigerian nationals who allegedly misbehaved with women were subjected to Indian ire, mob-style. A shocking video captured on a phone showed the two perpetrators attempting to take shelter in a police booth in the station, but being mercilessly beaten by male commuters to chants of “Bharat Mata Ki Jai!” and “Vande Mataram!”, which roughly translate to “Salutations to Mother India!”

Clearly, the Indian crowd at the station that day believed the Nigerians had no right to tease Indian women – something they perhaps believe is entirely their prerogative.

No more than a few days later, well-known Indian singer K. J. Yesudas went on record to say women should not wear jeans as it goes against Indian culture.

According to news website NDTV, the respected national award-winning singer said: “Women shouldn’t wear jeans and display themselves before people. What is meant to be covered should be covered.

“Wearing jeans and roaming around attracts unnecessary attention. We must respect religious doctrines. Women’s beauty is in their soberness; they should not become like men.”

He was speaking at a function in Thiruvananthapuram early this month on Gandhi Jayanti (a national holiday to mark the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi).

While both incidents have very little in common, they are also bound by something very strong –women. And the crux of the problem seems to be culture itself.

If wearing jeans is against Indian culture, then shaming, humiliating and even attacking people who don’t fit into the Indian mould is also seen as Indian culture, it seems.

Hurting the two Nigerians while chanting Vande Mataram was apparently a show of Indian bravado – a way of keeping the Indian flame of culture burning bright.

The ever-changing notion of what Indian culture is and the unending quest to fit women into predefined roles seem to present a dichotomy that Indian women are struggling to keep up with.

They constantly negotiate with those within their homes and outside to find a place that allows for personal freedom. How do you live in a country that is trying to accommodate a global culture, yet retain traditional values that don’t exactly work in favour of individual liberty?

To outsiders who constantly read news reports on rape in Indian, the solution seems simple: Enforce stronger laws that ensure safety for women and spell out dire consequences to offenders.

Executing this, however, is easier said than done because addressing the issue of safety also means addressing a mindset.

Women are sexually harassed across socio-economic sections of society, and this is perhaps the clearest indication that there is no singular way to remedy the situation.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s bid to bring toilets into millions of homes could be a major step in rural India where, even recently, women were raped when they stepped out to use toilets.

But rapes are rampant even in cities, as women make their way to cinemas, school, colleges or work.

For women in India to feel free, safe and liberated, it requires changing the way they are viewed.

But as long as Indian men – even those like Yesudas, who are in positions of power and influence –believe women need to step into a constructed cultural identity, it will be impossible to eliminate this deep-rooted malaise from the country.

The Business Times

The writer is a BT journalist who previously lived and worked in India.

Taken from My Paper, Thursday, October 23, 2014

Quitting in Anger Is Usually a Bad Idea

2014-08-01T07:58:00.001-07:00

In the doghouse...again (Photo credit: maxymedia)

01-August-2014
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by Phyllis Korkki

"I quit!"

What beleaguered worker hasn't fantasized about saying those words and walking out the door? Wisely, most don't go that far, at least not then and there.

It's fairly common to feel a passing urge to quit your job when you've hit a rough patch, says Nancy S. Molitor, a clinical psychologist in Wilmette, Illinois, and a psychologist and public education coordinator for the American Psychological Association. But she said the idea is surfacing in more employees' minds these days.

Many of the clients have acquiesced at their jobs over last five or six years, just grateful to be employed in an uncertain economy, Dr. Molitor siad. Some were promised raise or bonuses or stock once the recession ended, but now that better times have arrived, companies are hanging onto their cash and withholding those promised rewards, she said.

One result is employee resentment.

Sometimes an employee wants to quit because of an untenable working situation: an overbearing boss, a difficult co-worker, a crushing workload. Often, the reasons for feeling upset and wanting to quit are legitimate, Dr. Molitor said.

But resigning has huge consequences, so you never want to make that decision while in the grip of intense emotion, she said.

Wait at least a week. Discuss your feelings with a friend, family member or therapist. Colleagues are another option -- they may have a much better grasp of office politics -- but amek sure you trust them to keep your confidence, she said.

Anytime you cannot concentrate, or if you find yourself thinking the same thoughts about your job over and over again, "that's a huge red flag," she said. You are reacting to pure adrenaline and emotion. Take some time to calm down, and if necessary seek professional help. If you feel you are in danger of quitting suddenly, take a day off to clear you head, she advised.

Sometimes when we feel unhappy or helpless in our personal lives, we project that onto our jobs -- and onto the boss, who has power over us, Dr. Molitor said.

Once you have cleared your head and separated emotion from reality, you may be able to find a way to change your work situation so that it's no longer intolerable, Dr. Molitor said.

Many employees need to work harder at advocating for themselves, she said. If you felt that you deserved a raise and didn't get one, try asking for one and you might succeed, she said.

When preparing to talk to your boss about your concerns, it's wise to write down your points in advance, she added: "That forces you to be coherent."

After careful consideration, you may determine that your only option is to resign, but do so politely, and with plenty of notice. If you quit suddenly and make a dramatic exit, you can probably forget about your employer as a reference, and word will spread that you left your company in a troubled situation.

Suzanne Lucas, a former human relations professional who writes a blog called the Evil HR Lady, says in a column for CBS News that it's generally a bad idea and "just darn rude" to quit a job on the spot. But she notes exceptions that would justify a quick departure -- for example, if staying in a job would put you in some kind of danger (a violent co-worker, say, or a safety violation), or would make you break the law or violate your ethical or religious standards.

In most cases, though, you can give notice. Just try to be gracious, because "how you end things is incredibly important," said Robert I. Sutton, a professor and an organizational psychologist at Stanford University in California.

According to the "peak end rule," as articulated by the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, the final memory that your co-workers have of you is likely to be much more vivid than most others, Professor Sutton said. If possible, you want that memory to be positive. He said that you, too, would feel better about the experience in retrospect if you quit in a graceful way.

"I'm a big fan of quitting," Professor Sutton said, so long as it's done for the right reasons and in the right way.

-----
Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, April 20, 2013

Where Apps Meet Work, Data Is at Risk

2014-07-19T20:23:00.002-07:00

My iPhone apps as of February 2010 (Photo credit: dougbelshaw)

Do we see this threat in our company?

20-July-2014
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by Quentin Hardy

SAN FRANCISCO - As is the case with many busy people, Delyn Simons's life has become an open phone app of commingled corporate and personal information.

"I've got Dropbox, Box, YouSendIt, Teambox, Google Drive," says Ms. Simons, a 42-year-old executive, naming some of the services on her iPhone that store memos, spreadsheets, customer information and soccer schedules.

She and her colleagues at Mashery, a 170-employee company that helps other companies build more apps, also share corporate data on GroupMe, Evernote, Skype and Google Hangouts. "From the standpoint of corporate I.T.," she says, "my team is a problem."

While the company's most confidentila information is encrypted and available only to authorized, executives, John Oberon. Mashery's information technology chief, who is supposed to keep track of company data, said, "there's only so much you can do to stop people from forwarding an e-mail or storing a document off a phone."

Once the data leaves the corporate network, protecting it becomes much harder. Searching for the name of almost any large company, plus the word "confidential," yields supposedly secret documents that someone has taken from the company network and published.

Netflix, the streaming video service, recently found employees using 496 smartphone apps, primarily for data storage, communications and collaboration. Cisco Systems, which powers much of the Internet with computer networking gear, found several hundred apps, as well as services for shopping and personal scheduling, touching it own network via employees.

"People are going to bring their own devices, their own data, their own software applications, even their own work groups," drawing off friends and contractors at other companies, said Bill Burns, a director at Netflix. "If you try and implant software that limits an employee's capabilities, you're adding a layer of complexity."

Even without proof of compromised accounts, the loss of confidentiality can cost a company both money and reputation.

Some apps onto which employees may move company information, like Facebook, are well known. Others, like Remember the Milk, used for completing tasks, or Cloud Elephant, a data backup service, are news even to some of the experts in I.T. Skyhigh Networks,which recently started monitoring personal use of apps, has counted more than 1,200 services used in corporate networks from personal devices.

Skyhigh signs up for each service, along with 1,000 others that have not yet touched a corporate network, and researches them for security issues, like whether people can share data anonymously, or how easy it is to get inside the system and obtain another customer's data. The company then tunes a customer's corporate network to allow services to have different degrees of access to information.

"We have to be careful how we inspect for security vulnerabilities, since we don't want to get arrested ourselves," says Rajib Gupta, Skyhigh's chief executive.

The problem of data leakage is as old as someone taking a carbon copy home on the weekend. What is different now is how people can take data with a finger swipe, and how little they know about whether a service has malware.

Companies do not want to stand in the way of "life splicing," as the intermingling of home and work tasks is known, because it mostly plays in a company's favor. They just want more security.

-----
Taken from TODAY Saturday Edition, April 06, 2013

US Supreme Court leaves stem cell research alone

2013-03-28T02:21:00.001-07:00

Posted: 08 January 2013

WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court declined Monday to enter the emotionally-charged debate over stem cell research, refusing to hear an appeal centred on the issue of federal government funding.

The top US court did not give a reason for its decision, which ends the long judicial saga over President Barack Obama's 2009 executive order lifting restrictions on financing imposed by his predecessor George W. Bush.

The appeal had come from two researchers working with adult cells rather than embryonic stem cells.

They had asked the Supreme Court to halt financing for stem cell research on the grounds that federal law banned the creation and destruction of embryos for scientific study.

Stem cell research is said to be promising for finding new treatments for a variety of diseases.

A federal judge banned the financing in 2010, but an appeals court in Washington reversed the ruling in 2012. The court said the federal ban does not apply to previously existing embryos that resulted from in vitro fertilization procedures.

Government financing through the National Institutes of Health was authorised for cells from frozen embryos that were left over from fertility treatments.

The NIH, which allowed researchers to use stem cells derived from donated frozen embryos no longer needed for fertility treatments, hailed the ruling.

"This decision allows the ruling to stand, and enables NIH to continue conducting and funding stem cell research, following the strict ethical guidelines put in place in 2009," NIH Director Francis Collins said in a statement.

"Patients and their families who look forward to new therapies to replace cells lost by disease or injury, or who may benefit from new drugs identified by screening using stem cells, should be reassured that NIH will continue supporting this promising research."

- AFP/jc

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Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
US Supreme Court leaves stem cell research alone

Compete with foreigners in terms of skills, not pay

2013-01-12T03:35:00.001-08:00

The Singapore Skyline v3 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Quadrilingual warning sign in Singapore. The text is in the four official languages of Singapore, from top to bottom: English, Chinese, Tamil and Malay. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Foreign construction workers at Little India. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I will post this article as is, and I will post a new one that is purely my own... and I hope that it doesn't get me into trouble - for it is just my opinion, but it would be based on truth - perceived and actual...
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Jan 10, 2013
by Chi Shing Hui

While I agree with the writer, in "Immigration is not long-term solution" (Jan 7), that our heritage and identity are priceless and should be preserved, the future well-being of the whole nation should not be paid as the price.

The Asian and global markets have become increasingly competitive.

When Singapore's annual birth rate has remained at low levels, letting in immigrants is one of the crucial approaches to ensure a healthy growth in the workforce so that Singapore can maintain its competitive edge.

We frequently hear voices about immigrants taking away jobs from locals. We should let the market take its course, though.

All things being equal, I do not believe that most employers would hire a foreigner over a Singaporean.

Yet, when a local and a foreign candidate ask for significantly different pay packages, this may become a major factor in hiring decisions.

This is why Singaporeans should strive to compete with foreigners, not on pay but more in terms of skills and productivity. This is also a message the Government is promulgating.

Reserving jobs for Singaporeans may end up with employers paying more to fill positions. Most, if not all, employers would pass the increased costs onto consumers, leading to inflation and an eventual drop in Singapore's overall competitiveness among its peers.

I recently read news of cleaning work not done in public areas and delays in construction projects owing to insufficient numbers of workers. I suspect the cut in the ratio of foreign workers to local workers may be one of the causes.

Last but not least, regarding the writer's question of what kind of legacy "we wish to pass to our children", I may not know all the answers, but a huge ageing population that cannot be supported by a diminishing workforce is surely not one of them.

-----
Taken from TODAYOnline.com; source article is below:
Compete with foreigners in terms of skills, not pay

Immigration is more than just a game of economic numbers

2013-01-12T03:27:00.001-08:00

English: An aerial view of Parliament House in Singapore. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I would tend to agree with the writer's view...
-----

Jan 10, 2013
by Sathia Varqa

I read with interest Mr Peter Heng's letter, "Immigration is not long-term solution" (Jan 7), and the subsequent online comments.

The immigration debate has many folds, but what often gets most attention in Singapore are the newcomers' lack of integration and lack of appreciation for Singaporean values and norms, even though what are exclusively Singaporean values and norms is subject to debate.

The deliberation over immigration has largely concentrated on the numbers coming into Singapore, the subsequent pressure on infrastructure and the socio-economic tension this has created. These are important, valid considerations.

However, immigration is not only about people coming here, be it construction labourers or expatriates in professional fields, to feed the pursuit of economic growth and then leaving. It must be evaluated from a broader perspective.

Immigration is also about the free movement of values, thoughts and interactions that form our view of people, ourselves and the beliefs we hold in a global city-state like Singapore.

The mobility of ideas and freedom enjoyed by Singaporeans in living and working with non-Singaporeans, whether we are conscious of it or not, has and continues to become an integral part of our society.

The regional states have set this direction to form a more united Association of South-east Asian Nations, with greater freedom of movement by 2015.

We hold Singaporean passports to identify our nationality, but we cannot claim exclusivity to the knowledge, sciences, advances in technology, unity of thought in achieving goals and many others which the multitude across the globe have contributed.

The debate cannot only be on whether we should have more or less immigration.

It should centre on how open we can be in making society a better place by sharing our values and norms as humans and, in this process, developing the capacity to change the bad into good and limiting the bad from worsening.

This would be a more people-centred approach in viewing the issue of immigration here.

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Taken from TODAYOnline.com; source article is below:
Immigration is more than just a game of economic numbers

Immigration is not long-term solution

2013-01-12T03:20:00.001-08:00

1888 cartoon in Puck attacks businessmen for welcoming large numbers of low paid immigrants, leaving the American workingman unemployed. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I am an immigrant to Singapore, and this would be one article that applies to me... or maybe not...
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Jan 07, 2013
by Peter Heng Teck Wee

Most Singaporeans are Xth-generation immigrants. My grandparents originated from China, making me a third-generation Singaporean, and I am grateful for the contribution of immigrants to our fledgling nation.

However, I am not convinced that continuing immigration is a long-term solution for our socio-economic problems. First, we must ask if we can count on new immigrants to commit to Singapore.

Paddler Li Jiawei's return to Beijing, reported in "A grateful Li bids farewell" (Dec 28), serves as an example that immigrants may see Singapore as a place to eke out a living and not as their hinterland.

It is difficult to fault them for this, given that our tiny island cannot offer the security that underpins the concept of a hinterland.

Even if they stay for the long term, it is dangerous to rely on them to plug our demographic holes.

Integrating new immigrants who have not gone through national education or National Service is a trial-and-error process.

They are not immune from growing old, nor are they exempt from having dependents. Unlike Singaporeans, the elderly dependents of new immigrants have no economic safety net in the form of Central Provident Fund savings.

New immigrants may relieve immediate problems such as labour shortages, but it is a form of kicking the can down the road.

We have learnt that such relief comes at the price of productivity stagnation or the gradual displacement of Singaporeans.

If we are not careful, we will create a situation where ever greater numbers of "foreign talent" are needed to offset an ageing, unproductive population. Already, many top jobs at multinational corporations and financial institutions go to new immigrants.

Let us also ask ourselves if building ever more new towns and expressways to absorb a fast rising population is what we stand for.

How many more trees and graves will be given up in the name of development before we realise that what fills this nation's stomach may not be good for its heart? Certain things, such as our heritage and identity, are priceless.

We should think twice before sacrificing these in striving to be a hub for everyone and everything. In the new year, Singaporeans should ask: What is the kind of legacy we wish to pass to our children?

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Taken from TODAYOnline.com; source article is below:
Immigration is not long-term solution

A Pharaoh’s Slit Throat

2013-01-05T04:31:00.001-08:00

English: Mummy of pharaoh Ramesses III. Русский: Мумия фараона Рамсеса III. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Watch out for schemers against your leadership...!
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The New York Times International Weekly
Science & Technology
FINDINGS

A Pharaoh’s Slit Throat

The pharaoh Ramses III, who ruled Egypt in the 12th century B.C., had a scheming wife who was intent on murdering him to bring their son to the throne. The plot is documented in an ancient papyrus, but the exact circumstances of Ramses’ death have been unclear. Now, researchers have used CT scans of the pharaoh’s mummy to reveal that his throat was slit.

“The big cut is in his throat, and it was very deep and large,” said Albert Zink, an anthropologist at the European Academy, who was involved in the research. “It would have killed him immediately.”

Dr. Zink, along with colleagues from Egypt, Italy and Germany, published their findings about Ramses in the British medical journal BMJ. They also discovered an amulet in the king’s wound. Called the Eye of Horus, it was supposed to guard against accidents and restore the wearer’s strength.

“This was most probably done by the ancient embalmers,” Dr. Zink said. “They tried to heal his wound for his afterlife.” The documents that discuss the coup are called the Judicial Papyrus for Turin. They cite the pharaoh’s second wife, Tiye, as the schemer.

SINDYA N. BHANOO

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Article taken from TODAY Paper, Saturday Edition, 05-Jan-2013

Polio breakthrough: India marks disease-free year

2012-02-24T23:28:00.002-08:00

Way to go, India!
-----

Posted: 13 January 2012

NEW DELHI - India marked a year since its last new case of polio on Friday, a major milestone in a country once considered the epicentre of the disease and one that gives hope the scourge can be eradicated worldwide.

There were 150,000 cases of the highly contagious virus in India in 1985, but the country has now gone 12 months since discovering a new case - in an 18-month-old girl in the eastern state of West Bengal.

India, which until recently accounted for half of all the polio cases in the world, is one of four countries - with Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria - where the disease is still officially endemic.

But if all laboratory tests for the wild polio virus return negative in January, India will follow recent success stories Niger and Egypt and be removed from the endemic list by the World Health Organisation by mid-February.

There was cautious optimism in New Delhi as health workers and the government celebrated the milestone while stressing that the virus - which mainly affects young children and can cause paralysis and deformed legs - could resurface at any time.

"We are excited and hopeful, at the same time, vigilant and alert," Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad said in a statement to mark the occasion.

Since the last new case was reported on January 13 last year, another vast effort to immunise children has seen 2.3 million vaccinators travel across India to deliver 900 million doses.

"What India has achieved is reaching a first milestone in a very important process," Lieven Desomer, head of the polio unit at UN children's agency UNICEF in India, told AFP.

"It's not the end of the road, but it's something to be very proud of.

"Achieving this milestone is going to instil confidence in polio eradication efforts globally. If it can be done here, it can be done everywhere."

India will only be judged to have eradicated the disease if it stays polio-free for another two years.

Polio was one of the most feared diseases of the 20th century for children, but it has been successfully controlled through a programme of vaccination in most countries.

UNICEF figures show India, where the crowded and impoverished northern states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have historically been the hotspots, had 150,000 cases of the disease in 1985.

This had fallen to about 6,000 in 1991, to 741 in 2009 and to just 42 in 2010.

The decline worldwide, through a concerted effort by governments, UN agencies and private donors, has raised hopes polio might go the way of smallpox, the only disease successfully eradicated globally.

"If we can achieve that it will be of great benefit to the children of the world," said Desomer. "But the last bit is the toughest."

The precipitous fall in polio cases in India is attributed by UNICEF to a huge campaign by the Indian government, which is often pilloried by critics for its failure to tackle malnutrition and poor sanitation.

It represents a rare public health success story in a country where four in 10 children under five are underweight due to malnutrition and only a third of people have access to toilets.

"India's success (with polio) is arguably its greatest public health achievement," said World Health Organisation Director-General Margaret Chan.

Desomer estimated the Indian government contribution to polio eradication to be about $2 billion over the last 10-15 years.

The other two important factors in combating the virus were a new, more efficient oral vaccine introduced in 2010 and partnership comprising the government, private donors and UN agencies.

He singled out the Rotary International charity for helping kick-start efforts to eradicate polio in the 1980s, as well as more recent donations from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

- AFP/al

Taken from ChannelNewsAsia.com; source article is below:
Polio breakthrough: India marks disease-free year

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