In the quest for some understanding of our twinkling existence, astronomers have built ever larger telescopes capable of catching and pooling the rare light of remote stars and galaxies.Over the decades the torch of awe has been passed from mountaintop to mountaintop, from Mount Wilson, from where the expansion of the universe was discovered, to Palomar, home of the famous 200-inch reflector, which reigned supreme for almost half a century, to the cinder cones of Mauna Kea in Hawaii, where the twin 400-inch-diameter Keck Telescopes lord it over 13 others.
And even to space, where the Hubble Space Telescope is a peerless time machine.
Now the torch may be passed again.
Emboldened by the advances of the last two decades, groups of universities, observatories, nations and other research organizations are pondering plans for radical new telescopes that will dwarf even the giants on Mauna Kea and reach even farther into space and further back in time.
The proposals sport Brobdingnagian names like the California Extremely Large Telescope, or CELT; Giant Magellan; or the Overwhelming Large Telescope, OWL, a 100-meter-diameter behemoth being contemplated by a collaboration of European nations. And their proponents promise appropriately outsized scientific results.
Until last September, Umberto and Maria Falcone lived in what many would consider the height of San Diego living - a 3,000 square foot, four car-garage house with ocean views and enough marble counter tops to handle cookie-making by the dozen."It was our dream home," said Maria.
But last year they traded the Pacific Beach residence they designed and raised two of their five children in for a three-bedroom condo near downtown San Diego's Little Italy district.
What changed? Age and the desire for easier living. Maria's mother, Domenica, now 99, was having a hard time climbing the stairs. Umberto, 64, finally agreed to retire and sell their La Jolla restaurant, Falcone's. Looking for something smaller and easier to maintain, they moved into one of the new multifamily complexes that have sparked a mini-Renaissance in the formerly desolated downtown.
No Condo Lawns To Mow
The Falcones are one reason that condo sales and prices are skyrocketing. As more Americans retire or see their last kids move out, they are trading in the family home for condominiums that often make up for their smaller size with conveniences such as clubhouses and Olympic-sized swimming pools.
The life they lead in these typically more urban areas has changed, too.
With the Internet now entrenched in business, a new wave of opportunity is emerging to extend beyond the network and into the physical environment.Mobile phone technology has become one of the key ways for extending the reach of the network.
Recent figures from research firm Venture Development, predict that by 2007, more than 600 million Java-enabled mobile phones and hand-held devices will ship in a year - more than three times the number of PCs. Meanwhile, wireless standards and solutions, such as 802.11, Bluetooth, WI-FI and RFID (radio frequency identification) are also serving to liberate devices in the physical environment from the constraints of hard-wired connectivity.
Smarter and cheaper devices are being released to take advantage of these technologies. The cost of technology is decreasing while intelligence increases and this is pushing more affordable, smarter devices into consumers' hands, all of which can be wirelessly connected to the still rapidly expanding global internet.
Angus MacDonald, chief technology officer of Sun Microsystems Australia, explains that smart technology is advancing rapidly. "We are moving towards the point where soon we will be able to address your light bulb," he says.
"If you live in an apartment block for instance, and one of your light bulbs blows, we'll be able to know the instant it happens and exactly which bulb."
Becky Pemberton, a nurse, is serving a 35-year sentence at the Mabel Bassett women's prison here for grabbing money out of cash registers in stores in Oklahoma City while she was addicted to heroin.She did not have a weapon. But the way Ms. Pemberton figures it, she was lucky in her sentence. The prosecutor originally offered her a plea agreement of 100 years.
Ms. Pemberton, 48, is representative of a nationwide trend that state officials, law enforcement authorities and criminologists are struggling to understand: a rapid growth in the number of women being arrested, convicted and sent to prison.
Nowhere has there been more attention focused on that trend than in Oklahoma, where the incarceration rate for women is more than double the national average. The Legislature set up a task force this year to learn why.
Nationally, from 1993 through 2002, while overall crime was falling, the number of women arrested rose 14.1 percent, according to the F.B.I.'s Uniform Crime Report. In the same period, the number of men arrested fell 5.9 percent.Some individual crimes show even more striking disparities. While the number of men arrested on charges of aggravated assault fell 12.3 percent in the decade, the number of women arrested on the same charge rose 24.9 percent.
Last year, Curt Dunnam bought a Chevrolet Blazer with one of the most popular new features in high-end cars: the OnStar personal security system.The heavily advertised communications and tracking feature is used nationwide by more than two million drivers, who simply push a button to connect, via a built-in cellphone, to a member of the OnStar staff. A Global Positioning System, or G.P.S., helps the employee give verbal directions to the driver or locate the car after an accident. The company can even send a signal to unlock car doors for locked-out owners, or blink the car's lights and honk the horn to help people find their cars in an endless plain of parking spaces.
...
OnStar is one of a growing number of automated eyes and ears that enhance driving safety and convenience but that also increase the potential for surveillance. Privacy advocates say that the rise of the automotive technologies, including electronic toll areas, location-tracking devices, "black box" data recorders like those found on airplanes and even tiny radio ID tags in tires, are changing the nature of Americans' relationship with their cars.
Toward the end of his 19 years in the National Football League, offensive tackle Lomas Brown noticed something that startled even a hardened veteran. It seemed as if almost every player he knew in the N.F.L. owned a gun. Brown said he saw guns everywhere. On team flights. In locker rooms. In players' cars. In training camp dormitory rooms."I think the vast majority of players in the N.F.L. have guns," said Brown, who retired at the end of last season. "Just about every guy I played with in the N.F.L. had a gun. Almost every player I knew had one. Guns are rampant in football. You have all these players packing guns wherever they go. It's a disaster waiting to happen."
Many people in the N.F.L. share Brown's view, according to interviews with more than 25 players, owners, team executives and agents in recent weeks. Weapons, including military-style assault rifles, can be found in players' homes and cars, and even sometimes in their lockers, the players, executives and owners said.
But at a time when possessing guns has become increasingly common, many players said, they are not searched rigorously when entering stadiums and practice complexes.
The U.S. Agriculture Department says it believes a dairy cow infected with mad cow disease was imported from Canada in 2001.Ron DeHaven, the USDA's chief veterinarian, told reporters on Saturday the cow was one of 74 cattle imported into Idaho from Alberta, Canada, in August 2001. The cow was born in April 1997.
All 74 went to a dairy operation in Mattawa, Washington, DeHaven said. He said it was too early to speculate where the other 73 dairy cows went from there.
The discovery of the deadly, brain-wasting disease in a six-and-a-half-year-old Holstein dairy cow in Washington state has cut off U.S. exports of beef, sent food company stocks tumbling and shaken consumer confidence.The Bush administration said the beef supply is safe for consumers. The USDA said meat linked to the infected cow was sold in four western states -- Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada.
Safeway, Fred Meyer and Albertsons have asked customers to return certain cases of beef patties and other products that originated at Vern's of Moses Lake Meats, which slaughtered the infected cow. Some two dozen nations have halted imports of U.S. beef. The USDA is sending a team of trade experts to Japan and will begin talks on Monday on how to address that nation's concerns and resume beef shipment.
The measure would outlaw the shadiest techniques used by many of the Internet's most prolific e-mailers and include penalties up to five years in prison in rare circumstances. But it also would supplant even tougher anti-spam laws already passed in some states, including a California law scheduled to take effect Jan. 1.
It was a speck of evidence, barely detectable to the human eye, but carefully preserved for 35 years.That stroke of foresight was enough to help San Francisco police solve a horrible crime in which a 14-year-old San Francisco girl was brutally raped, beaten and stabbed to death in 1968 while she was baby-sitting at a neighbor's house.
Suspects in the slaying of Linda Harmon were questioned at the time, but no one was arrested, and the case was left unsolved. Until last week.
San Francisco Police Chief Alex Fagan announced Tuesday that an arrest warrant had been issued Friday for William Speer, 61, a sexually violent predator who was in a mental hospital in Phoenix after serving prison time for rape.DNA tests of a swab of semen taken during an autopsy of the girl's body at the time of the killing matched Speer's genetic fingerprint. Speer, who police say has prior convictions in California for sex offenses, is currently in the custody of sheriffs in Maricopa County, Ariz., awaiting extradition to San Francisco. His bail has been set at $10 million. "Advances in technology have allowed us to come to this point where we can give closure to a family,'' Fagan said.
The apparent discovery of mad cow disease in a lone cow from Washington state poses no immediate health concerns, but it could deliver a body blow to the entire nation's beef industry.It remains to be seen whether American consumers will cut back on beef, despite reassurances that the meat is safe. But America's $2.6 billion beef export industry is already in jeopardy. As if to confirm cattlemen's worst fears, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan and Australia imposed bans today on U.S. beef imports.
The incidence of diabetes has been rising in recent years, in children as well as in adults. Considering only diagnosed cases in adults, the prevalence rose 40 percent in the 1990's, from 4.9 percent to 6.9 percent of adults. By 2050, unless current trends are reversed, experts predict a further increase of 165 percent.Even more disturbing is a new estimate of the lifetime risk of developing diabetes among boys and girls born in the year 2000. An analysis published in October in The Journal of the American Medical Association by scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention predicts the following for those born in 2000:
- 32.8 percent of boys and 36.5 percent of girls will develop diabetes during their lifetimes.
- Among non-Hispanic blacks, 40.2 percent of boys and 49 percent of girls, and among Hispanics, 45.4 percent of boys and 52.5 percent of girls face the same fate.
- Among all those in whom diabetes is diagnosed at age 40, men will lose 11.6 years of life and 18.6 years of quality life and women will lose 14.3 years of life and 22 years of quality life as a result of the disease.
HENZHEN, China, Dec. 22; China's national legislature moved to amend the Constitution on Monday to protect private property rights, the first time the Communist Party has formally protected private wealth since taking power 55 years ago.The change, expected to be enacted early next year, is a milestone in China's 25-year economic reform effort. It marks a victory for advocates of China's emerging class of entrepreneurs, who have argued for years that the Marxist Constitution discriminates against them and gives leeway to the police and the courts to seize their property according to party dictates.
The amendment, subjected to a prolonged debate behind closed doors during the past six months, says that "private property obtained legally shall not be violated," at least nominally putting it on the same footing as public property, which the Constitution now deems "sacred and inviolable."
But the wording of the amendment made public on Monday differs in crucial ways from a simpler version put forward by supporters of more fundamental changes to the Constitution. By including the phrase "obtained legally," the amendment still makes the legal system, controlled by the Communist Party, the arbiter of property rights.
Digital Camera Makers Changing The Landscape Of Photography
Consumers have been stuffing Christmas stockings with digital cameras this year. To get attention, the makers of those must-have gadgets have been stuffing newspapers, magazines and prime-time TV with ads.As consumers begin to switch en masse from film to digital photography, makers of digital cameras and photo printers see an opportunity to become the Kodak of the digital age.
Sony, Canon, Hewlett-Packard and, of course, Eastman Kodak are among the companies spending millions of dollars this Christmas on print and TV ads to get top-of-mind status among consumers.
For years, Kodak, with its ubiquitous yellow boxes of film, has been associated with photography. But the digital firms are jockeying to get in the picture.
Digital camera ads are everywhere these days. HP is running a trendy TV spot featuring the song "Pictures of You" by the Cure, a British band. It's also running multipage magazine spreads. Canon has its "85 Second Photo Lab" TV campaign and glossy inserts in Sunday newspapers.As digital cameras start to dominate the picture, the companies that people associate with photography are changing.
Shirky.com:
... We are all so used to bell curve distributions that power law distributions can seem odd. The shape of Figure #1, several hundred blogs ranked by number of inbound links, is roughly a power law distribution. Of the 433 listed blogs, the top two sites accounted for fully 5% of the inbound links between them. (They were InstaPundit and Andrew Sullivan, unsurprisingly.) The top dozen (less than 3% of the total) accounted for 20% of the inbound links, and the top 50 blogs (not quite 12%) accounted for 50% of such links.
The inbound link data is just an example: power law distributions are ubiquitous. Yahoo Groups mailing lists ranked by subscribers is a power law distribution. (Figure #2) LiveJournal users ranked by friends is a power law. (Figure #3) Jason Kottke has graphed the power law distribution of Technorati link data. The traffic to this article will be a power law, with a tiny percentage of the sites sending most of the traffic. If you run a website with more than a couple dozen pages, pick any time period where the traffic amounted to at least 1000 page views, and you will find that both the page views themselves and the traffic from the referring sites will follow power laws.
The basic shape is simple - in any system sorted by rank, the value for the Nth position will be 1/N. For whatever is being ranked -- income, links, traffic -- the value of second place will be half that of first place, and tenth place will be one-tenth of first place. (There are other, more complex formulae that make the slope more or less extreme, but they all relate to this curve.) We've seen this shape in many systems. What've we've been lacking, until recently, is a theory to go with these observed patterns.
Now, thanks to a series of breakthroughs in network theory by researchers like Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, Duncan Watts, and Bernardo Huberman among others, breakthroughs being described in books like Linked, Six Degrees, and The Laws of the Web, we know that power law distributions tend to arise in social systems where many people express their preferences among many options. We also know that as the number of options rise, the curve becomes more extreme. This is a counter-intuitive finding - most of us would expect a rising number of choices to flatten the curve, but in fact, increasing the size of the system increases the gap between the #1 spot and the median spot.
A second counter-intuitive aspect of power laws is that most elements in a power law system are below average, because the curve is so heavily weighted towards the top performers. In Figure #1, the average number of inbound links (cumulative links divided by the number of blogs) is 31. The first blog below 31 links is 142nd on the list, meaning two-thirds of the listed blogs have a below average number of inbound links. We are so used to the evenness of the bell curve, where the median position has the average value, that the idea of two-thirds of a population being below average sounds strange. (The actual median, 217th of 433, has only 15 inbound links.)
Nanotechnology draws its name from the nanometer, which is a billionth of a meter, or 100,000 times as thin as a human hair. Individual molecules, tiny organisms like viruses and the smallest features of products like microchips operate in a nanoscale landscape.Many industries used nanoscale products and processes decades before the term nanotechnolgy became a recognized concept on Wall Street. In the 1930's, for example, Kodak figured out how to insert a layer of nanoscale silver particles in its film to filter light. But nanotechnology did not catch the fancy of investors until the 1990's, when ingenious new software and computer-controlled tools expanded the possibilities for manipulating small-scale processes, designing new materials and accurately measuring their performance.
The new generation of nanomaterials is already taking commercial root. Nanoscale clay particles strengthen car bodies. Coatings made with aluminum-titanium nanoparticles add to the durability of boiler components and submarine periscopes for the Navy. Carbon nanotubes add stiffness to Babolat tennis rackets. And pants are being made with techniques that alter the structure of cotton to create nanoscale whiskers that make the fabric more stain resistant.
Analysts say that such developments are simply a hint of what is to come in nanotech.
Pfizer, the maker of Lipitor, the leading drug to reduce harmful blood cholesterol, announced yesterday that it would pay $1.3 billion for Esperion Therapeutics, a small company that has pioneered a new series of drugs that mimic or enhance so-called good cholesterol.Pfizer already held the first bidding rights to market one of the drugs, but in the end decided to buy the company, executives of both companies said yesterday in interviews.
In November, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a study reporting that one of the Esperion drugs developed to mimic high-density lipoprotein cholesterol, or H.D.L., significantly reduced the levels in arteries of cholesterol-rich fatty acids called plaque.
"The study reported the drug decreased the plaque significantly," said Dr. H. Bryan Brewer Jr., the chief for the molecular disease branch at the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. "The interesting fact is that it takes years and years to develop hardening of the arteries - and within six weeks of using this drug, you see a significant change."
In the trial, seriously ill heart patients who were given five weekly injections of the drug showed an average reduction in plaque of 4.2 percent. Patients given a salt solution showed a slight increase in plaque.
Silicon.com:
The entertainment industry has in the last few days suffered two set backs in its efforts to stop illegal copying of music and films.
First we heard that on Friday the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) had a series of decisions allowing it to track down US file-swappers through their ISPs reversed in a DC federal appeals court .
Then today the Norwegian known as 'DVD Jon' was put in the clear after, as a teenager, cracking and distributing the keys to a program that keeps films on DVD being copied. The movie industry claims piracy costs it about $3bn a year in lost sales.
There are several factors at work here, in what has become one of the major stories of the past year.
First, we shouldn't assume the RIAA's case is lost. Friday's ruling was all about the privacy of ISPs' customers, not whether they are allowed to copy copywrite-protected work.
However, while Hollywood and the entertainment industry in general will continue to hire top lawyers - a major theme of the software industry this year - it is looking increasingly like they are getting bogged down while the number of consumers bypassing traditional channels goes up.
It may well just be that the move to new, internet-oriented business models occurs before the RIAA or a film studio takes every teenager in the world to court. Witness the success of iTunes and other, legal services, even from unlikely candidates such as Coke. Someone here is being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century and for once it isn't the kids.
For More People in 20's and 30's, Home Is Where the Parents Are
By TAMAR LEWIN
On the job, James Navarro seems to be a model of mature adulthood. At 30, he is an appellate court lawyer in Brooklyn, working 50 hours a week on research to help judges decide cases. But look at the rest of his life, and the picture becomes murkier.
Mr. Navarro lives with his parents in Queens. His mother packs lunch for him a few times a week. His bedroom still has his high school baseball trophies and a giant stuffed bunny that was a present from a former girlfriend. On weekends, he plays touch football and goes drinking and clubbing with his two best friends — both about his age, fully employed and living with their parents, too.
"When I was in college, I thought I'd be married by 24 and have a house and kids by 30," Mr. Navarro said. "Now I think the idea of being an emotionally developed male by 24 is ridiculous. I want to get married and have kids someday. But I don't feel any pressure that it has to be soon."
Mr. Navarro is no loser: he is funny, good-looking, charming; and typical of his generation's slowed-down approach to adulthood. To some extent, the data tells the story.
Has there ever been a cultural sea change as stealthy as the one represented by the rise of interactive entertainment? To anyone who came of age after, say, the introduction of the first Sony Playstation in 1995, video gaming is every bit as central to the pop-entertainment universe as movies or music, while to anyone older than that, it seems like one of those strange customs indigenous to the country of the young, in which the revenge fantasies of lonely teenage geeks are harmlessly siphoned off in some vaguely Dungeons-and-Dragons-like fantasy setting. No one would think of denying that video games are big, but few grown-ups outside the business have an understanding of just how big they've become.Globally, the industry earned $28 billion in 2002, and in the United States, it's growing at around 20 percent a year. According to Fortune magazine, Americans will spend more time playing video games this year -- about 75 hours on average -- than watching rented videos and DVD's. A nationwide survey found that the percentage of last year's college students who had ever played video games was 100. Two games from the industry leader Electronic Arts, Madden NFL Football and FIFA Soccer, have each earned in excess of a billion dollars. (This year's Madden edition made more than $200 million alone.) For new and established musicians alike, games are the new radio; landing a spot on a video-game soundtrack is arguably more prestigious than landing a similar spot in a movie, a function not just of sales figures but also of the fact that the average Madden NFL 2004 buyer, for instance, will spend 100 hours in front of the game. Each statistic is more mind-boggling than the last, and together they certainly pose a challenge to conventional wisdom about which of these media is the tail and which is the dog.
The latest New York Times/CBS News poll has found widespread support for an amendment to the United States Constitution to ban gay marriage. It also found unease about homosexual relations in general, making the issue a potentially divisive one for the Democrats and an opportunity for the Republicans in the 2004 election.Support for a constitutional amendment extends across a wide swath of the public and includes a majority of people traditionally viewed as supportive of gay rights, including Democrats, women and people who live on the East Coast.
Attitudes on the subject seem to be inextricably linked to how people view marriage itself. For a majority of Americans -- 53 percent -- marriage is largely a religious matter. Seventy-one percent of those people oppose gay marriage. Similarly, 33 percent of Americans say marriage is largely a legal matter and a majority of those people -- 55 percent -- say they support gay marriage.The most positive feelings toward gay people were registered among respondents under 30, and among those who knew gay people.
The nationwide poll found that 55 percent of Americans favored an amendment to the constitution that would allow marriage only between a man and a woman, while 40 percent opposed the idea.
The U.S. population grew by 2.8 million in the past year and is edging toward 300 million, a threshold that should be reached within four years.
The South and West added the most people in the year that ended July 1, and Nevada was the fastest-growing state for the 17th consecutive year, according to Census Bureau estimates Thursday.
The overall population grew 1 percent, to nearly 291 million people. Immigration and a high birth rate among Hispanics -- now the nation's largest minority group -- helped fuel the increase.
The 1920 census was the first to record 100 million Americans, a figure that took nearly 150 years for the country to attain. The 200-million mark was surpassed 50 years later.
At the current rate, the nation will be home to 300 million people within four years, said John Haaga, director of domestic programs at the Population Reference Bureau, a nonprofit demographic research group.
Americans continue flocking to the South and West, with those regions accounting for about three-quarters of the growth in the last year. Nevada was the fastest-growing state, adding nearly 74,000 people, or 3.4 percent, to its population.
William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, said climate and affordability are t
China's 2nd busiest port is expected to maintain 40% growth this year
(SINGAPORE) Stronger than anticipated growth at China's second busiest container port, Shenzhen, will see it trail mainland front runner Shanghai only slightly and overtake South Korea's Busan Port in full year throughput, the latest official figures reveal.
Strong performer: Shenzhen port is expected to overtake Busan in the global volumes league table this year, though it will still trail Shanghai as well as leaders Singapore and HK Shenzhen has already handled 9.68 million TEUs in the year through November, maintaining a 40 per cent growth rate year on year, which should give it 10.6 million TEUs by the end of December.
Shanghai is expected to handle 10.9 million TEUs by year's end.
Busan, which held onto third place in the global league tables last year, had already effectively conceded that position to mainland China's biggest port, Shanghai. However Shenzhen's performance means it is on track to also pass Busan, which is likely to handle around 10.1 million TEUs by year's end.
The result will be a dramatic change in the world's top six container ports ranking, but won't shake the positions of the two leaders - Hong Kong and Singapore - at least this
Egg prices are up, way up. In fact, the price of eggs jumped up another nickle a dozen this week, even though as Americans, we are eating more eggs than ever before.According to the United Egg Producers, we will eat nearly 255 eggs per person this year and that's 7 more eggs than five years ago. U.E.P. predicts we'll eat more than 70 billion eggs in 2003.
The egg producers are blaming this year's lust for the yolk on the low carb, all protein, Atkins Diet.
Diageo, the maker of Smirnoff, has announced a string of national cable ads with a simple message - zero carbs. As the fight for the Atkins dollar gets fiercer, spirit and beer marketers alike have begun to position their products as low-carb and diet-friendly.With an estimated 32 million carb-conscious Americans spending $2.5 billion a year on low-carb foods, alcohol promoters are being prompted to incorporate the now mainstream diet into their marketing campaigns. Requests by the National Consumers League for more information on spirits labels, including calories and ingredients, also indicates the increasing nutrition consciousness of consumers.
Diageo is jumping on the Atkins bandwagon - a string of national cable ads, starting just in time for the holiday season, position Smirnoff as a no-carb alternative. The ads, prompted by a consumer survey that found 63% incorrectly thought spirits like vodka and whisky had more carbs than beer or wine, show Smirnoff being poured into a shot glass while words on the screen proclaim "zero carbs". Smirnoff has also launched a website, lowcarbparties.com and hired Ted Allen, wine and food expert from the hit show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, to promote the low-carb content of spirits.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi has admitted trying to develop weapons of mass destruction but now plans to dismantle all such programs, President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Friday.Bush said Libya's decision - which would open the country to international weapons inspectors - would be ``of great importance'' in stopping weapons of mass destruction in a global fight against terrorism.
Britain and the United States have been talking about the issue with Libya for nine months, Blair said. "Libya came to us in March following successful negotiations on Lockerbie to see if it could resolve its weapons of mass destruction issue in a similarly cooperative manner,'' Blair said in England.
At the White House, Bush said the war in Iraq and efforts to stop North Korea's nuclear program had sent a clear message to countries such as Libya that they must abandon weapons programs.
More than 20 million customers have chosen to use the Delta Air Lines self-service kiosks to check-in for their flights during 2003, almost tripling the kiosks' usage from 2002's total of 7.4 million kiosk check-ins.According to Delta, two million customers a month are now using the airline's 850 kiosks to check-in, check baggage, change flights, and perform other self-service activities. "I'm delighted - but not surprised - that so many of our customers are choosing self-service kiosks as their preferred check-in method," said Rich Cordell, senior vice president of airport customer service for Delta.
Amazon.com Review:
Frances Berg, MS, LN, has spent years researching and writing about weight and eating. Now, in response to the growing crisis affecting America's youth, she brings her lifetime of knowledge to bear on the problem of obesity in children and teens in the groundbreaking book Underage and Overweight: America's Childhood Obesity Epidemic.Underage and Overweight is more than a diet and exercise plan. Studies and statistics prove that diets and exercise regimens don't work on children and teens; instead, they can lead to eating disorders, malnutrition, and increased weight gain in the long run. Underage and Overweight encourages families to promote a more active lifestyle and provide healthier food choices, rather then prescribing aerobics and limiting portions. By changing the way our families think about food and physical activity, we encourage children and teens to learn healthy habits that should drastically reduce the rates of overweight and obesity in American youth.
A helpful and insightful guide to healthy living for the whole family, Underage and Overweight provides solutions for parents who are concerned about overweight or obesity in their children—or who simply want to learn how to help their children lead healthier, more active lives.
Malalai Joya pushed her black head scarf forward to cover her hair fully, then opened her mouth.Out poured a torrent of words, in a voice rising with emotion. Why, she asked the delegates assembled here on Wednesday to ratify a new constitution for Afghanistan, were her countrymen and women tolerating the presence of the "criminals" who had destroyed the country?
"They should be brought to national and international justice," she said. "If our people forgive them, history will not."
It took a moment for the 502 delegates to absorb the import of her words. When they did, the result was bedlam: shouts of "Death to Communism!" and a rush by some toward the stage, and toward the diminutive Ms. Joya as well.
All of 25, Ms. Joya, a social worker from Farah Province, in the southwest, had crossed several lines at once. She had spoken her mind as few Afghan women dare to do.More important, as many interpreted her words, she had spoken against the mujahedeen, or holy warriors, who fought and humbled the Soviet Union. They are a sacrosanct constituency in this country, and a powerful political force in this assembly, a traditional meeting called a loya jirga.
DetroitFP:
For years Asian brands have ruled American living rooms. From TV sets and stereos to video games and DVD players, chances are if they are in your house, names such as Sony, Samsung and Panasonic are on them.
But advances in technology -- like the transmission and storage of music, movies and television in the computer code of ones and zeros -- have opened the way for American companies to get back in the game.
Long known for their computer prowess, U.S.-based Gateway, Dell, Hewlett-Packard and Apple now are rolling out everything from DVD players and digital cameras to MP3 players and TV sets this Christmas season.
The last time a U.S.-based company manufactured a TV set was in 1995, before Zenith Electronics Corp. was acquired by a Korean company.
Even Delphi Corp., the Troy-based automotive supplier, has launched its first line of products for the home with its SKYFi satellite radio receivers and boombox.
"You go down the consumer electronics list and the companies are either Japanese, Chinese or Korean," said Tom Edwards, senior industry analyst for the NDP Group, a New York-based sales and marketing consulting firm. "It's nice to have America back in there competing again."
The new guys are not just entering the market, they are changing it.
Using the Internet ordering systems they've established to sell their personal computers directly to consumers, these companies are now able to sell their TVs, DVDs and MP3 players for a lot less.
As a result, consumers are cashing in on lower prices -- such as a Gateway plasma television that undercuts its Japanese competitor by $2,000.
"I never have thought about it before, but I don't think I have ever even watched television on an American-made TV," said Justin Smith, 33, who was at the Gateway store in Troy buying a plasma set. "I think it's cool, but I also like Gateway, so I know it's going to be good."
SeattlePI:
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which opens Jan. 8, Intel is expected to disclose the development of a class of advanced semiconductors that technologists and analysts say will improve the quality of large-format digital televisions and substantially bring down their cost, according to industry executives close to the company.
Intel's prodigious manufacturing capacity and its ability to integrate display, television receiver and computer electronics all on a single piece of silicon are likely to open up new markets for a class of products that have generally sold for $3,000 to $10,000 until now.
By doing so, Intel and other companies should be able to take greater advantage of Moore's Law, named for Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel who accurately predicted decades ago that computer chips would double in capacity about every 18 months.
"I think this brings Moore's Law to digital television," said Richard Doherty, a consumer electronics industry analyst who is president of Envisioneering Inc., a consulting firm based on Long Island. He predicted that the low-cost display technology, which can be incorporated into "rear-projection" television sets, could lead to lightweight 50-inch displays only 7 inches thick for about $1,000, perhaps as early as the 2004 holiday season.
Intel's expected decision to enter the television market is another powerful indicator of the accelerating computer industry assault on the consumer electronics industry. Gateway and Dell are already selling large-format digital televisions made for them in Asia, and Hewlett-Packard has indicated it will also enter the .Such a powerful marketing and technology combination could blend easily with Microsoft's media center software, which is aimed at using personal computing technology as the heart of home entertainment centers.
Intel wants to get inside your television. The world's largest microchip maker will soon unveil plans to make chips for digital televisions, opening a fast-growing market to a company that dominates the computer chip business, an industry executive familiar with the plans said on Wednesday.The entry of Santa Clara, California-based Intel Corp. would pose a serious threat to established consumer electronics companies in Europe and Japan, such as Philips and Sony Corp, as well as emerging players like Texas Instruments Inc.. analysts said.
Chris Chinnock, senior researcher at Insight Media, which publishes an electronics display newsletter, said Intel's arrival would underline the contrast in the television market between consumer electronics companies -- which have enjoyed relatively high margins and slower product turnover cycles -- and computer companies, which operate on razor-thin margins and regular product updates.
PC makers Gateway Inc. and Dell Inc. have already shaken up television sales with lower-cost liquid crystal-based sets, he said.
Betsy Holden, under fire for months as Kraft Foods Inc. struggled through a down period, lost her job as co-chief executive when the food and beverage giant abandoned its dual CEO structure and left Roger Deromedi in charge....
American consumers' increased health concerns have put packaged food companies under pressure recently. Worries about the artery clogger "trans fat," rising obesity and the trend toward low-carbohydrate, high-protein diets have hurt sales of cookies and some other packaged foods.
Hardee's and Carl's Jr. fast-food chains consider it thinking outside the bun -- capitalizing on America's low-carbohydrate craze, they're launching a bunless, lettuce-wrapped burger with just a handful of carbs.CKE Restaurants Inc., the chains' parent, has unveiled the new menu item as Americans look to lop off carbs, in everything from beer to ketchup. Not coincidentally, the rollout precedes Americans' traditional New Year effort to lose weight.
But dietitians are weighing in, warning that whether it's the Hardee's low-carb Thickburger, with a third of a pound of beef, or its Carl's Jr. low-carb, half-pound Six Dollar Burger cousin, consumers should chew on this: it's still high in fat and calories.
...
For the record, the low-carb Thickburger has about 420 calories, 32 grams of fat and 5 grams of carbs, compared with its original's 850 calories and 57 fat grams. The low-carb Six Dollar Burger has 490 calories, 37 grams of fat and 6 grams of carbs. The regular? About 960 calories, 62 fat grams and 61 carbohydrate grams.
Low-carb, high-protein diets have enjoyed a resurgence, with books such as "Atkins for Life" reversing decades of dietary advice and saying the way to lose weight is to cut out carbs in favor of high-protein diets.
The Intel Corporation is planning to do to digital television what it has already done to computing.
At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, which opens on Jan. 8, Intel is expected to disclose the development of a class of advanced semiconductors that technologists and analysts say will improve the quality of large-screen digital televisions and substantially lower their price, according to industry executives close to the company.Intel's ability to integrate display, television receiver and computer electronics on a single piece of silicon is likely to open new markets for a class of products - including plasma, projection and L.C.D. TV's - that now sell for $3,000 to $10,000.
Intel, as well as other large chip manufacturers, should be able to expand the benefits of Moore's Law, named for Gordon Moore, a founder of Intel, which accurately predicted decades ago that computer chips would continue to double in capacity roughly every 18 months, while their price would continue to fall.
"I think this brings Moore's Law to digital television," said Richard Doherty, a consumer electronics industry analyst who is president of Envisioneering, a consulting firm based on Long Island. He predicted that the low-cost display technolog
"Moving to India is not a luxury. It is a necessity"
American workers won't like what venture capitalist Ravi Chiruvolu says about why his tech start-ups are built using Indian workers. But they'd better listen.
Xalted Networks, a router technology start-up in Plano, Texas, launched in 1999 and soon grew to 200 employees. Four years later, that same company has just two employees in the U.S.: a founder who does sales and marketing, and a single design engineer. The remaining 220 employees work in India.
Venture capitalist Ravi Chruvolu told Salon why outsourcing might be harder than it looks on paper, but is becoming essential for new companies that aim to compete in a global marketplace.
CreativeCommons:
I had an oppportunity to attend the Creative Commons bash in SF this past Sunday. Some of the coolest, hippest people in SF and at Stanford are creating a new set of legal tools to enable open source content sharing as well as the co-development and commercialization of content.
Their efforts are leading to an explosive growth of open source music, pictures, films, illustrations and even science. The set of legal tools Creative Commons is pioneering is truly remarkable in its ease of enabling content creators to share and collaborate on the net.
Their new move ReticulamRex does an incredible job of explaining what CC is and how their tools work.
CreativeCommons:
The Public Library of Science is a nonprofit organization dedicated to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. PLoS emerged in October 2000 through the effort of three dynamic and highly respected scientists: Nobel Laureate and former head of the National Institutes of Health Harold Varmus, molecular biologist Pat Brown of Stanford University, and biologist Michael Eisen of Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and UC Berkeley. This trio's dream, as the L.A. Times put it, is to build "a world in which the many thousands of scientific journals . . . are placed in an electronic library open to the public."
This week, PLoS moved closer to realizing this dream with the release of its first open access publication: PLoS Biology, a world-class, peer-reviewed scientific journal.
CSM:
...So it does not come as a surprise that Berklee, among the country's most prestigious music institutions, is at the front of a small but influential pack of schools moving unprecedented amounts of content online.
After the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed almost 400 lawsuits against music file-sharers in America this past fall, the music school launched Berklee Shares, a program that places more than 100 music lessons on the Internet free of charge and encourages those who download the video, audio, and text files to share the minilessons with as many people as possible.
The goal is threefold: spread the Berklee name around the world as quickly and cheaply as possible; further the Berklee goal to educate and develop students to excel in music as a career; and encourage a healthy discussion about file- sharing, which the school considers to be a legitimate distribution model for the music industry and beyond.
"Berklee is in a unique position in the music business," says Dave Kusek, associate vice president of the school.
The school's job, he explains, includes training not only musicians and songwriters, but also the industry's business leaders, managers, publishers, and record-label executives.
"We're very aware that there are problems with the recording business at the moment, but we're also aware that the number of people appreciating music and the number of artists creating music is at an all-time high," Mr. Kusek says. "And it's our mission to train them to excel in careers in music across those 360 degrees."
To many Americans today, file-sharing signals little more than pirated music and lawsuits. To academic institutions, however, it could be the best educational and marketing tool ever invented.
Berklee is not the only academic institution dabbling in the world of file-sharing. Rice University's Connexions Project and Massachusetts Institute of Technology's OpenCourseware also encourage the file-sharing of certain academic material online.
Along with Berklee, they use copyright licenses covered by San Francisco-based Creative Commons, licenses that protect the university-originated material without preventing viewers from downloading and sharing their own versions. Creative Commons calls it "some rights reserved."
"The stigma that's been attached to file sharing is really unfair," says Glenn Otis Brown, executive director of Creative Commons.
File-sharing itself isn't illegal, he says; sharing material when all rights are reserved is. Through the Creative Commons license, Berklee grants everyone the rights to "copy, distribute, display, and perform the work" as long as the material is used for noncommercial uses, attribution to the Berklee Shares program is given, and no derivatives are made from the work.
Marketing communications agency Euro RSCG Worldwide today released forecasts for the coming year, focusing on increases in "people power," self-indulgence, and counter-reactions to globalization. Insights are drawn from ongoing research of the agency's S.T.A.R. (Strategic Trendspotting and Research) team and from a global panel of colleagues in 75 countries who report in regularly on local trends and information.
"So much of what we're seeing in trends right now is part of what we're calling the 'New Normal,'" said Marian Salzman, Chief Strategy Officer at Euro RSCG Worldwide. "From demographic changes that have developed over the past few decades, including the rise of singletons, to shifts in priorities that are the result of a rapidly changing and uncertain world, we're finding that people's lives and objectives are significantly different today compared with even ten years ago."
The following is a sample of trendsightings contained within Euro RSCG's latest white paper: "Year in Prospect: 2004":
- Going Local
- Us vs. Them
- Rise of the Singletons
- Self-Gifting
- Catering to Metrosexuals
- Anti-Globesity Campaign
- Blogging
- Google Bombing and Further Politicization of the Internet
- Hot Spots and E-Wear
- Executive Coaches
For the full text of the press release go to: PR Newswire.
The Food and Drug Administration effectively approved the use of an obesity drug, Xenical, for adolescents yesterday. This is the first time that a weight-loss drug has been permitted to treat overweight children. A spokeswoman for the drug agency said it had decided to allow the manufacturer to add to the Xenical labels two studies that involved children to help doctors prescribe the correct doses for 12- to 16-year-olds.Terence Hurley, a spokesman for Hoffman-La Roche, the manufacturer, said it had no plans to market the drug for teenagers, but added that it was good news for children who battle obesity. "We're thrilled with the approval," Mr. Hurley said.
Xenical, one of three prescription weight-loss drugs on the market, works by blocking the body's ability to digest fat. Like the other two, Meridia and Phentermine, Xenical is described by most obesity experts as just moderately useful.
It has several unpleasant side effects, including problems with bowel control, and it works best when combined with a low-calorie diet that limits foods high in fat.
The F.D.A. acted as studies show that 15 percent of American children are overweight, and doctors and parents are struggling to deal with increasing childhood obesity.
(HealthDayNews) -- A chewable birth control pill that tastes like spearmint?
That's exactly what Ovcon 35 is -- an oral contraceptive tablet that can be chewed and swallowed. This new version of Ovcon 35, which received U.S. Food and Drug Administration approval on Friday, provides one more alternative to the many types of oral contraceptives currently on the market, the agency says.
Ovcon 35 contains a progestin and an estrogen found in contraceptives that are already marketed.
The pill can be swallowed whole or chewed and swallowed. If the pill is chewed and then swallowed, the woman should drink a full glass -- 8 ounces -- of liquid immediately afterward so the full dose reaches the stomach and no residue is left in the mouth, according to the product's directions.
The FDA says Ovcon 35 is available only in a 28-day regimen. Each package contains 21 round, white, active tablets, to be followed by seven reminder, green inactive tablets to complete a four-week cycle.
The product is manufactured by Bristol Myers Squibb Company of Princeton, N.J., and will be marketed by Warner Chilcott, Inc., of Rockaway, N.J., the FDA says.
The Australian:
...Joining a number of jurisdictions worldwide — including several Brazilian cities — Australia's capital passed Democrats-sponsored legislation designed to give open source software a leg up.
With the Democrats warning the ACT is just the beginning, opponents of open source and Linux, such as Microsoft, are starting to sweat.
Next year the proprietary software makers will face similar legislation in the federal and NSW parliaments.
It's possible the ACT Bill — the Government Procurement (Principles) Guideline Amendment Bill — may have slipped under the radar of the groups that have steadfastly opposed such legislation.
Perhaps they were focusing on South Australian Democrats MP Ian Gilfilian's Bill, which was defeated a week previously. Or perhaps they didn't realise how easy it is to get private members' business through the small ACT Parliament.
Either way, the reaction to the legislation — which modestly calls on government to "consider" open source software in purchasing — has been vehement.
Microsoft labelled the legislation "anti-competitive", and warned that it could damage the Australian software industry.
The legislation — introduced by ACT Democrats MP Roslyn Dundas — was amended by the 17-member Legislative Assembly, and passed with the support of the Greens and Independents.
Ms Dundas' Bill calls for government to "consider" the purchase of open source software in procurement plans. The original version of the Bill would have required the ACT to "prefer" open source software.
A spokeswoman for Microsoft said the company was unhappy with the decision.
"The ACT decision is of concern because it affects all software companies," she said.