MEXICO CITY (AP) - Money sent back to Mexico by workers living in the United States hit a record $13.3 billion last year, surpassing foreign investment inflows for the first time.Statistics from the Bank of Mexico issued this week show remittances 35 percent higher than in 2002. The average transfer was $321.
In its fourth-quarter inflation report, the central bank said the 2003 transfers beat foreign direct investment, which hit a seven-year low of $11 billion. Analysts say the economy is expected to have expanded only 1.2 percent in 2003.
"The important growth in transfers reflects, on one hand, improved monitoring of inflows, and on the other, a larger number of immigrants,'' the central bank said.
More than 20 million people of Mexican origin live in the United States, although only half of them are estimated to have a bank account. About 5 million Mexicans are thought to be working in the United States without legal status, which discourages them from approaching financial institutions.
Competition in the money-transfer market has intensified in the past two years as top U.S. banks looked for expansion alternatives in a fast-growing sector that was largely ignored in the past.
BEIJING - China announced Friday that its scientists had cloned a Siberian ibex, a threatened mammal that dwells in the crags of central Asia, in a feat sure to heighten debate over whether cloning can help reconstitute endangered species.The week-old Siberian ibex is ``full of pep'' and ``exhibiting a strong will to survive,'' a state television newscast reported.
The mountain-goat-like Siberian ibex, which state television described as ``one of the most endangered animals in China,'' was born after cloned cells were placed in a common goat in western China.
China is seeking to rescue endangered and threatened species -- such as the giant panda and the rare freshwater white-flag dolphin -- through cloning, forestalling the threat of extinction, despite arguments from some experts that the high costs of cloning would be better spent on protecting animals in their native habitats.
State media said the Siberian ibex was born through "cross-species cloning technology,'' meaning scientists inserted a cell nucleus with intact DNA from the Siberian ibex into egg cells of normal goats, then implanted them in a surrogate goat mother.
"The result was an ibex embryo, now the baby ibex in the spotlight in northwest China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region,'' state television said.
Then they realized the light could be put to good use. Now dozens of synchrotron machines have been built around the world for the sole purpose of generating light, including X-rays 10 billion times brighter than those from a conventional X-ray machine.Even before the upgrade, the machine was being used by 1,800 scientists from around the world, more than 100 universities and companies such as IBM, Genentech, Chiron and Roche Pharmaceuticals, said SLAC Director Jonathan Dorfan. Now it will be expanded and automated so scientists can run their experiments from their home laboratories.
One of the main goals is determining the structures of proteins -- the workhorse molecules that carry out most of the functions of living cells. Once this structure is understood, researchers can sometimes develop drugs that interact with a protein in a way that prevents or limits disease.
This is an expanding area of science, said John Norvell of the National Institute of General Medical Sciences. In 1972, he said, the structures of only 16 proteins were known; today there are more than 20,000, and about two-thirds of them are mapped out using synchrotrons.
Though business is booming at the software company he founded here, Bit by Bit Computer Services, expenses for his traditional Indian wedding, planned for the end of February, are slowly spiraling beyond his budget.First, he has to entertain his guests lavishly at a riverside resort two hours' drive from the city. He has booked it for three days of celebrations. Among the guests will be a handful of his overseas clients, mostly from Britain. The hotel stay for them and some other guests, along with the wedding feast expenses, will add to the bill, which is nearing $25,000. And that does not include the outlay for the honeymoon in New Zealand with his bride, Usha Kempegowda.
"The upbeat Indian economy is not helping me," Mr. Shenoy lamented half seriously. "I find people's expectations have shot up and I'm spending 10 times more than I would have spent some years ago."The economy is indeed buoyant. Gross domestic product grew 5.7 percent in the country's first quarter, which ended in June, then jumped 8.4 percent in the next quarter, compared with levels the previous year. And the bounce is being felt across nearly all business sectors.
New research suggests even 3-year-olds aren't getting enough exercise, raising concerns over their weight, future disease risk, psychological well-being, behavior and learning ability.In the first study to rigorously track the movements of preschoolers, scientists found that the average 3-year-old is physically active for just 20 minutes a day, well short of the recommended hour a day for that age.
In The Lancet study published this month, scientists from the University of Glasgow in Scotland recruited 78 children. Each 3-year-old wore an "accelerometer," a matchbox-sized monitor clipped to the waistband, for a week.
A 3-year-old 25 years ago was eating 25 percent more than a 3-year-old today," he said. "But physical activity levels have dropped quite dramatically over the last 15 or 20 years."
An antivirus company Wednesday declared Mydoom, the latest global computer virus, as the biggest ever, spreading at a pace likely to make it larger than the Sobig virus of last year.Mydoom clogged the Internet with 100 million infected e-mails in its first 36 hours and is being investigated by U.S. law enforcement officials. In Europe, about 33 percent of e-mails being sent Wednesday afternoon were infected with the virus, according to Mikko Hypponen, director of the anti-virus division of F-Secure, a Finnish company.
Hypponen also reported that Internet security experts have found a new version of the Mydoom computer virus, dubbed Mydoom.B, that evades detection measures for the original virus. The second strain is programmed to attack the Web site of Microsoft, F-Secure said.
Hypponen said the Sobig virus, which struck in August, infected millions of computers and caused more than 300 million infected e-mail messages to be sent during its first week.
NEW YORK and SAN FRANCISCO, Jan. 28 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, a record company, radio station, recording group and online music store teamed up to achieve a new level of speed to market in the digital realm.The exclusive digital EP "From KFOG to iPod" by critically-acclaimed Virgin Recording Group "The Thrills" was released early this morning on Apple's iTunes Music Store, less than 48 hours after the band recorded the tracks at a KFOG-FM Emerging Artist Concert in San Francisco on Sunday, January 25. Five songs from the show, including the single "One Horse Town" are available for purchase, allowing consumers to download the live recording from iTunes to their Macs or Windows-based PCs and iPods. The entire EP can be downloaded for $4.95 or single tracks are available until February 24th for 99 cents each.
Apple's iTunes Music Store (iTunes) and KFOG 104.5\97.7 FM, which is heard throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and streamed worldwide on www.kfog.com, will promote "The Thrills" release with on-air and special website mentions.
"Pairing the promotional power of radio with the instant gratification of digital distribution is the logical next step in the music revolution," said Rob Schoeben Apple's Vice President of Applications Marketing. "We're excited to offer this exclusive live collection from 'The Thrills' on the iTunes Music Store."
The promotion furthers KFOG's reputation as a station on the cutting edge, with an upscale, technically savvy audience.
"KFOG is dedicated to connecting our listeners to the best World Class Rock we can find," said KFOG Program Director Dave Benson. "We see making a KFOG Emerging Artist Concert available via iTunes as a vital move into the digital future."
The Thrills' current tour, in support of their debut, So Much For the City has left a wake of admiring reviews, a string of national TV appearances, and increasing sales. So Much For the City was named The New York Times #2 record of 2003 and was one of the Los Angeles Times' 2003 Top 10.
"Digital distribution is allowing us to get live shows out into the market quickly and respond to emerging events," according to Lars Murray, Virgin Records Director of New Media Marketing. "'From KFOG to iPod' captures the sound of an extraordinary point in the band's development, and we're pleased to be working with forward-thinking partners like KFOG and Apple."
From KFOG to iPod" will be available exclusively through iTunes for only four weeks beginning on the January 27 release date.
A new blood transfusion is suspected in a new mad cow case in Britain.A Food and Drug Administration policy announced on Monday banning the feeding of cattle blood to calves was partly based on a new case of mad cow disease in which a Briton may have been infected through a blood transfusion, a Food and Drug Administration official said on Tuesday.
At a Senate hearing, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, questioned why the food agency had instituted the ban when, he said, scientific evidence indicated that infectious particles that are believed to cause mad cow disease, misfolded proteins called prions, had never been found in blood.
The agency official, Dr. Lester Crawford, told the committee that a new case of the human form of the disease, called variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, came to light in late December in Britain. The ill person had received a blood transfusion from an infected donor, prompting concern among the authorities who are trying to determine whether the disease was transmitted through the blood, said Dr. Crawford, a deputy commissioner with the agency.
"The new case in England has caused shock waves around the globe," Dr. Crawford said. There have been no proven cases of transmission of mad cow in humans through blood transfusions.
"We are about to embark on what is arguably going to be the coolest geologic field trip in human history," Dr. Squyres said. At first glance, the outcrop looks huge, like the rock formations of Yosemite National Park."It's actually really tiny," Dr. Squyres said.
The semicircle of rock, part of the rim of the small, shallow crater where the Opportunity landed, is about 30 yards long, but only a foot and a half high at most. The rover, when it gets there, will tower over the rocks.
"The rover drivers, when they first saw this, they went `yikes!' " Dr. Squyres said. "But when they realized the scale of those things, it was not quite the imposing obstacle it appeared to be."
The scientists also realized how small the layers are, each perhaps half an inch thick. "So that really places some constraints on what it could be," Dr. Squyres said. "These aren't lava flows."
The light-colored bedrock is believed to underlie the whole region where the Opportunity landed, known as Meridiani Planum and spanning tens of thousands of square miles. Dr. Knoll said the vast expanse of rock led him to discount the possibility that the rocks formed out of sediment blown in by wind.
Washington's quiet, persistent diplomacy and a clear assurance from Islamabad on ending terrorism eventually helped to change New Delhi's perception of Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf as a troublemaker and the villain of Kargil and Agra...
The two attempts to kill Musharraf -- on December 14 and December 25 -- played a "critical role" in creating a sea change in the attitudes of both India and Pakistan, the official said.
While sections of the Indian establishment doubted the authenticity of the first incident, the second one, in which 14 people were killed, convinced them that Musharraf was indeed in trouble.
The attacks "helped him [Musharraf] see our side of the argument," a diplomat said. "We have for long been arguing that terrorism against us will one day destabilise Pakistan and that there are no compartments in the terror complex. What is dangerous for India is dangerous for the US and dangerous for a moderate Pakistan state also."
The secretary of transportation called Tuesday for tripling the air traffic capacity of the United States in the next 15 to 20 years to make room for more jet taxis, private jets, airliner traffic and the use of unmanned aerial vehicles.The secretary, Norman Y. Mineta, said that air travel was recovering from the terrorist attacks of 2001 because of improved security and a rebounding economy and that new runways, control towers, air traffic computers and other improvements were being added. But, Mr. Mineta said, "the changes that are coming are too big, too fundamental for incremental adaptations of the infrastructure."
If the United States wants to retain global leadership in aviation, he said, "we need to modernize and transform our global transportation system, starting right now."
The Pentagon is gearing up for a sweeping round of base closures that could shutter as many as one-fourth of the country's 425 military installations over the next few years.Defense officials and analysts say the move next year would save billions of dollars that the armed services are spending every year to maintain obsolete and unneeded facilities - money they say could be better spent on modernizing military hardware and improving the quality of life for America's 1.4 million active-duty servicemen and women.
Even though the $401 billion defense budget is at an all-time high, the push comes as U.S. troops are already stretched thin fighting a guerrilla insurgency in Iraq, tracking down al-Qaida and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and keeping a lid on potential hot spots such as the Korean peninsula.
While some lawmakers want to increase the size of the Army by as many as 40,000 troops, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld instead is plowing ahead with plans to transform the armed services into a leaner and more lethal force outfitted with a new generation of advanced weapons, communications gear and other equipment.With so many competing priorities, defense officials and many analysts say, the stakes involved in a new round of base closures couldn't be higher.
Home-schooling advocate Karl Bunday used to get a lot of blank looks when he visited college fairs in his native Minnesota and pitched the virtues of students educated around the kitchen table.Nearly a decade later, things have changed. "It seems like this time, everybody has heard of home schooling," said Bunday, who operates the Web site learninfreedom.org about "taking responsibility for your own learning."
Until recently, educators say, home-schooled students mostly gravitated to small, primarily religious colleges. Now, as the movement keeps gaining in popularity, they can be found on many -- even most -- campuses nationwide.
"As the numbers (of home schooled) have increased, and there have also been more admitted to college, they've actually performed quite well," said Barmak Nassirian, a policy analyst with the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.
While exact figures are not available, the number of middle and high school students educated at home is now estimated at between 1 million and 2 million.
A 6-year-old Thai boy became Asia's seventh confirmed bird flu fatality, and the government said Monday it was awaiting lab results to determine whether the disease killed four other people in a northern province.The World Health Organization said the search for a vaccine had been set back because the virus had mutated. A previous strain detected in Hong Kong in 1997 can no longer be used as the key to producing a vaccine, so an international effort has become necessary, WHO said.
Scientists believe people get the disease through contact with sick birds. Although there has been no evidence yet of human-to-human transmission, health officials are concerned the disease might mutate further and link with regular influenza to create a form that could trigger the next human flu pandemic.
"This is now spreading too quickly for anybody to ignore it," said WHO spokesman Peter Cordingley in Manila, Philippines.
Officials in Bangkok said they were investigating whether the virus might be carried by migratory birds.
PARK CITY, Utah -- Sundance is the Super Bowl of film festivals, at least in terms of advertising. During the 11 days of the Sundance Film Festival, held each January, this tiny ski town grows thick with corporate logos -- on banners, tote bags, vans, ski hats and, of course, on movie screens.This year, tech companies are among the most prominent, with HP, Sony, Microsoft and LG Electronics each paying an undisclosed amount to sponsor the festival. Overall, about one-fourth of Sundance's official sponsors come from the tech industry.
HP set up Wi-Fi hot spots in six sites around town, so computer users can lounge and check their e-mail. Sony, no newcomer to Sundance, sneaked its name into the festival catalog about 80 times -- once for each film that was shown in digital form. And LG, an electronics company, placed plasma screens in every festival venue, and some unofficial ones, too, hanging about 50 of the super-thin monitors around town.
For Doug Cole, HP's director of entertainment marketing, Sundance is a chance to listen to independent filmmakers -- he said the company receives productive feedback from those who use HP technologies. And he described HP's marketing push at Sundance as "an incredible value," costing about the same as it does to produce a 30-second TV spot.
"We were attracted to the essence of what Sundance stands for -- empowering the creative thought process," Cole said. "That's a universal, whether it is helping your kids with homework or creating an independent film. The thought process should be supported and celebrated, and HP provides technology to make it simpler."
With luck, the world will escape the latest outbreak of bird flu with no more than the six human deaths already blamed on it and the loss of millions of chickens. But public health experts worry of a much greater disaster: A catastrophe they say is among the worst imaginable, a global outbreak of an entirely new form of human flu.There is no clear sign that will happen. Nevertheless, avian influenza's sudden sweep through Asia, along with its tendency for wholesale mutation, leave many wondering about the bug's potential for rampant spread among humans. It is a possibility the medical journal The Lancet calls "massively frightening."
"The question everybody is asking is, 'Is this the progenitor to a pandemic?'" says Dr. Gregory Poland, chief of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic.
Influenza pandemics typically strike three or four times a century. The worst in the past 100 years, the 1918-19 Spanish flu, caused an estimated 40 million to 50 million deaths. Another is considered inevitable and perhaps overdue, but when it will happen and how bad it will be are almost totally unpredictable.
The nightmare this time would be a flu virus leaping from birds to people and spreading, introducing a disease for which humans have no natural defense.
Google tip-toed into the hot market of online social networks with the quiet launch of Orkut.com on Thursday.The search company, which is expected to go public this year, is flexing its power with its Internet fans by constantly offering new services, including comparison shopping and news search. Orkut could be the clearest signal that Google's aspirations don't end with search.
"Orkut is an online trusted community Web site designed for friends. The main goal of our service is to make the social life of yourself and your friends more active and stimulating," according to the Web site, which states that the service is "in affiliation with Google."
A Google representative said that the site is the independent project of one of its engineers, Orkut Buyukkokten, who works on user interface design for Google. Buyukkokten, a computer science doctoral candidate at Stanford University before joining Google, created Orkut.com in the past several months by working on it about one day a week--an amount that Google asks all of its engineers to devote to personal projects. Buyukkokten, with the help of a few other engineers, developed Orkut out of his passion for social networking services.Google spokeswoman Eileen Rodriquez said that despite Orkut's affiliation, the service is not part of Google's product portfolio at this time. "We're always looking at opportunities to expand our search products, but we currently have no plans in the social networking market."
Still, Google owns the technology developed by its employees, Rodriquez said.
Austria-based Swarovski, known for its crystal accessories and gifts, is drastically changing how it sells in America. The company is significantly reducing U.S. production of its crystal jewelry and will stop selling it through major department stores.Over the past five years, the company's crystal jewelry business globally has tripled, while its North American jewelry business has increased by just 25 percent, said Cohen. Swarovski has attributed the difference in sales to its retail model in the US.
In America, the company sells its jewelry, as well as its home decor and gift items, through department stores. But those stores pushed Swarovski to introduce new products more often than the company releases products in other ares of the world, said Cohen. The department stores were counting on new products to drive consumer traffic, he said. Sales at U.S. department stores open at least a year dropped by 3.87 percent from February 2003 to June 2003, compared with the same period the year before, according to the Bloomberg Same-Store Index.
"In the U.S., we got ourselves into a situation where we had too many new items," said Cohen.
Time was - say, two months ago - when typing the phrase "miserable failure" into the Google search box produced an unexpected result: the White House's official biography of President George W. Bush.But now the president has a fight on his hands for the top ranking - from former President Jimmy Carter, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and the author-filmmaker Michael Moore.
The unlikely electoral battle is being waged through "Google bombing," or manipulating the Web's search engines to produce, in this case, political commentary. Unlike Web politicking by other means, like hacking into sites to deface or alter their message, Google bombing is a group sport, taking advantage of the Web-indexing innovation that led Google to search-engine supremacy.
The perpetrators succeed by recruiting a small group of accomplices to link from their Web sites to a target site using specific anchor text (the clickable words in a link). The more high-traffic sites that link a Web page to a particular phrase, the more Google tends to associate that page with the phrase - even if, as in the case of the president's official biography, the term does not occur on the destination site.
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Google plays down the significance of Google bombing, saying the search results merely reflect what is actually happening on the Web.
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But some in the industry say Google may be more worried than it lets on. The company's success, to a large extent, has been built on its search algorithm's ability to return relevant Web pages and weed out irrelevant or outright bogus results. The growing popularity of Google bombing can't be a welcome development for a company that is expected to begin selling stock to the public in a few months.
...RedEnvelope gravely underestimated demand. It has always promoted itself as a purveyor of last-minute gifts and has won customers with its unusual items and its signature red boxes and white bows.During the heart of the shopping season in early December, orders were coming in at 10 times RedEnvelope's normal daily volume. Orders swelled for several of the company's custom-designed items, like a jewelry armoire, for which there was no alternate supply source.
Broadband wireless technologies will help bring the next five billion users to the Internet, an Intel Corporation executive explained today at the Wireless Communications Association (WCA) annual symposium.Sean Maloney, Intel executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Communications Group, outlined the company's plan to work with the industry to dramatically drive down the cost and increase the availability of broadband wireless technologies, including 802.11 wireless local area networking (WLAN) and 802.16 wireless metropolitan area networking (WMAN). This effort will help attract the next wave of Internet users, particularly those in emerging markets such as China, India and Latin America.
Specifically, 802.16 technology, often referred to as WiMAX, complements WLAN by connecting 802.11 hot spots to the Internet and provides a wireless alternative for last-mile broadband connectivity to businesses and homes.
"The wireless service provider and telecommunication equipment industries are rallying around WiMAX technology because of its tremendous cost advantages to provide last-mile connectivity to large parts of the world that are too expensive to serve with wired technologies," said Maloney.
A buck gets you more than a song on the Internet these days. Time Warner's America Online is offering broadband users downloaded movies for 99 cents each.AOL is partnering with MovieLink, a movie download rental service and a joint venture of the five major movie studios, to bring this promotional offering to its 2.6 million broadband members. These members have high-speed connections through other vendors and pay $14.95 per month to get AOL.
The move is part of AOL's effort to sweeten its high-speed offering, as more people get hooked on broadband. It's also a MovieLink effort to introduce legitimate movie downloads on the Internet as an alternative to file swapping.
Internet piracy has already beset the music industry, and, as broadband becomes ubiquitous, the movie industry is hoping to avoid the same challenges and losses. See Net Sense: Digital loopholes still exist.
The promotion begins Wednesday and runs for five weeks. AOL broadband members will be able to begin watching a movie as soon as they've downloaded it, which can take 30 to 45 minutes, said Steven Yee, vice president of AOL Movies. Movies now available range from "Finding Nemo" to "The Matrix."
China's fast-growing economy has overtaken Japan to become the world's second largest consumer of crude oil after the US, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) and the Chinese government.
Latest IEA estimates say China consumed 5.46m barrels a day last year, compared with Japan's 5.43m b/d. In the last quarter of 2003, the IEA says, China was the "main driver of global oil demand growth".
The US remains by far the biggest oil user, consuming more than 20m b/d. The growth in Chinese demand is expected to continue this year, at a time when Opec has little room to boost oil output and US commercial oil inventories are at their lowest levels since 1975, creating tight conditions in the global market.
Benchmark US crude futures hit $35.95 a barrel yesterday, their highest level since US-led forces invaded Iraq last March.
The latest figures underline China's thirst for natural resources to fuel its industrial revolution. Yesterday, China reported economic growth of 9.9 per cent for the fourth quarter of 2003, taking full year growth to 9.1 per cent.
They also confirm that the economy - to the dismay of the ruling Communist party - is becoming ever more dependent on energy imports, mainly from the Middle East.
Japanese telecom carriers, pioneers of internet-capable and picture-snapping handsets, have now come up with the world's first mobile phone that enables users to listen to calls inside their heads - by conducting sound through bone.The TS41 handset, manufactured by electronics firm Sanyo, was put on sale by the Tu-Ka mobile phone group this month, drawing healthy demand from customers who want to hear calls better in busy streets and other noisy places.
The new phone is equipped with a "Sonic Speaker" which transmits sounds through vibrations that move from the skull to the cochlea in the inner ear, instead of relying on the usual method of sound hitting the outer eardrum.
With the new handset, the key to better hearing in a noisy situation is to plug your ears to prevent outside noise from drowning out bone-conducted sounds.
If the user holds the handset to the top of the head, the back of the head, cheekbone or jaw and plugs his or her left ear, the call will be heard internally on the left side.It is the first time that the bone conduction has been used in mobile phones although the technology has been available for fixed-line phones in Japan, mostly for elderly people, for the past two years.
That's where things get sticky, in terms of museum ethics. Ordinarily, not-for-profit museums make their money from private donations, box-office receipts, gift-shop sales and government support. But times are tough, with a huge falloff in funding and declines in cultural tourism.The traditional cashless quid pro quo for lending art to other museums -- we'll lend you our Picasso if we can borrow your Matiss -- has been augmented by lending fees. But these money deals are still between nonprofits.
Boston's hiring out Monets to help Glimcher make money in Las Vegas (not to mention jacking up the demand for the other Monets that Pace Wildenstein has for sale) seems to break new ground.
Some say the Bellagio Gallery is a "for-profit museum" and destined to fail. "There is not one for-profit art museum in this country," says Ed Able, head of the American Association of Museums. "If it were possible to run an art museum as a for-profit entity, why do we not have any?" (In truth, what makes a museum a museum is a permanent collection. The Bellagio doesn't have one.)
Others, like L.A. Times art critic Christopher Knight, say that the MFA "ought to be ashamed of itself" for selling out to private interests. Responds MFA director Malcolm Rogers: "We are always exploring new ways of bringing in revenue.
In the course of her Internet research, she stumbled upon a Web site for the Fertility Institutes in Los Angeles, headed by Dr. Jeffrey Steinberg, where she learned about an in vitro fertilization technique called preimplantation genetic diagnosis.By creating embryos outside the womb, then testing them for gender, PGD could guarantee -- with almost 100 percent certainty -- the sex of her baby. Price tag: $18,480, plus travel.
Last November Sharla's eggs and Shane's sperm were mixed in a lab dish, producing 14 healthy embryos, seven male and seven female. Steinberg transferred three of the females into Sharla's uterus, where two implanted successfully. If all goes well, the run of Miller boys will end in July with the arrival of twin baby girls. "I have three wonderful boys," says Sharla, "but since there was a chance I could have a daughter, why not?"
advertisementThe brave new world is definitely here. After 25 years of staggering advances in reproductive medicine -- first test-tube babies, then donor eggs and surrogate mothers -- technology is changing baby-making in a whole new way. No longer can science simply help couples have babies, it can help them have the kind of babies they want. Choosing gender may obliterate one of the fundamental mysteries of procreation, but for people who have grown accustomed to taking 3-D ultrasounds of fetuses, learning a baby's sex within weeks of conception and scheduling convenient delivery dates, it's simply the next logical step.
Around the world and around the block, Nintendo has taken a leadership position in the video game industry. Hardware and software sales in 2003 made significant leaps over 2002, and Nintendo's success bumped Microsoft's Xbox to the No. 3 position in the 2003 console wars.Global holiday sales for Nintendo GameCube(TM) in 2003 outpaced 2002 by a whopping 70 percent, and Nintendo does not plan to change its global sales target of 6 million Nintendo GameCube systems this fiscal year.
Nintendo estimates for 2003, Nintendo GameCube U.S. hardware sales increased by more than 35 percent over 2002; Sony's PlayStation 2 dropped by about 25 percent and Xbox showed no relevant market growth. In December alone, Nintendo GameCube hardware sales soared 69 percent over December 2002, compared to a drop of about 30 percent for PlayStation 2. Again, Xbox showed little change.
The venerable VMS operating system just doesn't want to fade away, and one longtime observer thinks he knows why--it's stable."It doesn't break," said Terry Shannon, publisher of Shannon Knows HPC newsletter. "It doesn't get viruses. It's unhackable. It's bulletproof." While Shannon said VMS's 400,000-plus licenses are dwindling every year, one of the interesting aspects of the software is that some users in "mission critical and clustering applications" in particular are moving to VMS for its stability. In fact, he said, some users that had strayed from VMS are returning. He cited the Veterans Administration as an example of a user with heavy stability and security demands that moved to VMS recently.
And that's why Hewlett-Packard--the current proprietor of the operating system--is evaluating HP OpenVMS Version 8.2 as the first OS production release for the Itanium family.
A headlong rush is taking place in cyberspace to grab a slice of the potentially lucrative market for legal music downloads. Coca-Cola is the latest to join the fray, launching its own branded online music service with more than 250,000 tracks costing from 80 pence each. It seems that everyone from record labels to software companies is trying to cash in on the success of Apple's iTunes music store which has sold 25 million songs in just nine months.To those in the music business, it reflects a shift in how the industry sees the internet.
"The tenor of our discussions has entirely changed," said David Ring, Vice President of Universal Music technology arm, eLabs.
"We went from zero revenue as an industry to $30m by the end of last year for legitimate digital downloads."
'Absolute sea change'
Over the past 12 months, the big record labels have realised there is an untapped demand for online music. Everyone has accepted that you can compete with free, offering something that is better than free.
But VoIP is not just a way of transmitting phone calls on the cheap, says De Beer."It is, and will be, a component of a range of broadband applications that will combine voice, data and other communications media to provide users with new, innovative and compelling communications choices," De Beer told NewsFactor. "As the technology grows, it will grow not as a cheaper telephone service," but rather because it "will integrate other non-voice applications as part of a richer set of communications vehicles."
VoIP will fundamentally change the economics of providing voice services to the consumer, De Beer believes, as well as alter the fundamental economics upon which telephone companies are based. The technology will "increase competition in the consumer voice-services market via third-party access to provide voice services in addition to cable and other entry media into the home," he predicts.
Expanding Wireless Options
Another realization that is taking form is that VoIP and IP telephony are not restricted to networking in the wired world. When VoIP is paired with Wi-Fi, the combination can provide 802.11-ready PDA and notebook users the option of placing their phone calls wirelessly.
It's the kind of thing that only happens in films... The hero, desperately searching for a terrorist or kidnap victim, taps their name into a computer.A map comes up on the screen, pinpointing the precise location of their target. The good guys move in, the hunt is over.
Great for movie spooks, but only a scriptwriter's dream? In fact, the technology has arrived that allows anyone to track someone down without them having a clue they are under surveillance.
It has crept in almost unnoticed - and at the centre of this new Big Brother technology-for-all is nothing more sophisticated than our own mobile phones.
A clutch of brand new and perfectly legal internet-based services have just been launched that cost as little as 30p to use, and take less than five seconds to zero in to within 50 metres of where a person is.A simple text message or phone call to an operator from a suspicious spouse or boss can send one of the new DIY spying services off to track a person down. Another call or a visit to a special website will then tell you where they are.
The technology is improving, too. A new, satellite-assisted system that will be able to narrow down the search to just five metres is expected within a year.
The Wi-Fi gear market continued to pick up pace last year, with shipments and revenue rising more than twofold as prices fell and customers adopted new technology, according to a new report.Shipments of wireless networking cards and access points jumped to 22.7 million units, an increase of more than 200 percent compared with 2002, when 7.2 million units were shipped, In-Stat/MDR said in a report released Wednesday.
The approval of the 802.11g standard and the availability of products using it picked up on the impetus set by the 802.11b standard, according to the research firm. At the same time, products based on the 802.11b standard dipped in price, spurring sales and so adding to revenue gains for manufacturers. Hardware revenue increased 140 percent to $1.7 billion in 2003, up from the $700 million the previous year, the report found.
"It's TV, without the television," said John Vail, director for digital media and marketing for Pepsi-Cola North America, a unit of PepsiCo.
Video advertisements from major marketers have dotted the online landscape sporadically in recent years, but the new ads differ from their precursors in one critical respect: until now, none have run at 30 frames a second, the speed of TV video. As a result, most multimedia ads are less sharp than TV images, even for people with fast connections.
The new ad technology, from Unicast, an advertising company based in New York, invisibly loads the commercial while unwitting users read a Web page, then displays the ad across the entire browser area when users click to a new page. The resulting ad is identical to TV, whether the user has a high- or low-speed connection. The company says the technology evades pop-up blockers, but the person can skip the ad by clicking a box.
[John] Doerr, [Silicon Valley's] best-known VC, scored the first solid green by predicting 2004 will mark the arrival of "personalized medicine'' -- genetic testing to show whether a specific drug will or won't benefit an individual patient. Genomic Health in Redwood City, funded in part by Kleiner Perkins, is one example. Doerr said the company is completing a test to identify which women will benefit from chemotherapy after a diagnosis of breast cancer.
But even by Chinese standards, things have been moving at a blistering pace of late. Official statistics, which the government tends to smooth so as not to indicate big booms or busts, show that the economy expanded 8.5 percent last year, despite the fact that growth came to a virtual halt during the second quarter because of an outbreak of SARS. According to independent economists, however, the Chinese economy actually expanded at an annual pace of 11 percent to 13 percent through the second half of last year.Strains are already showing. Blackouts have become a problem in a majority of China's provinces, as families with new air-conditioners and refrigerators compete with new factories for electricity. Auto sales soared 75 percent last year, as prices in a market protected from imports until 2001 drifted down toward global levels. Still, automakers are planning huge factory expansions in the hope that such growth will continue. Most economists specializing in China now predict that sometime this year, growth will have to slow, at least for the investment side of the economy - the building of new factories, for example. That could prove painful. The United States economy suffered severe weakness on the investment side in 2001 and 2002, when the market for telecommunications equipment became glutted.
Dr Panos Zavos has provided no evidence to back up his claims A controversial US fertility specialist who says he has implanted a cloned embryo into a woman's womb has been condemned as "irresponsible" by scientists.Dr Panos Zavos gave few details and no evidence, and said it was still too early to tell if the procedure had resulted in pregnancy.
But UK Health Secretary John Reid condemned the attempt to create a cloned human baby as a "gross misuse of genetic science".
Fertility experts said if true, it was an "incredibly risky" step to take, and said Dr Zavos was giving false hope to people desperate to have children.
To embark on human cloning at this stage... just seems to me quite astoundingly irresponsibleDr Zavos made his announcement at a news conference in a central London hotel on Saturday.
He said the embryo came from the immature egg of the infertile 35-year-old woman, and a skin cell from her husband.
He said it was a "very recent event" that did not happen in the US, the UK or anywhere else in Europe.
Yet, just like the positive earnings reports, anecdotal evidence is pointing positive. Las Vegas drew more than 129,000 people to the Consumer Electronics Show last week. This week in San Jose, the Dutch government held a conference attended by 600 executives seeking to improve trade ties with the Netherlands.``We have great reason to be optimistic,'' said Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Carly Fiorina in a speech to the group. Jeff Henley, chairman and chief financial officer of Oracle, told the audience, ``Tech spending will continue to improve this year.''
He said retailers like Wal-Mart have begun testing radio-frequency identification tags, which can replace bar codes with radios that can trace a product anywhere it goes, from warehouses to the checkout counter. Once they deploy the tags, they will have to buy a raft of new hardware and database software to deal with the flood of data, benefiting everyone in the electronics food chain.
Said Jeff Benck, vice president of IBM's eServer division: ``Customers that were paring back in the last three years are now coming back.''
Guo Liang, a scholar with the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who studies the role of the Internet in Chinese society, said the case was the latest example of the Net's growing influence. He said Internet protests of a beating death last year that involved police officers helped prompt a change in national detention laws. The Net also became a primary source of information during the initial SARS outbreak.Mr. Guo noted that while most Internet users are China's urban elite, he recently finished a study showing that poorer, more rural residents are increasingly online, renting time at Internet cafes for as little as 12 cents an hour.
"This platform has really changed the situation in China, because everybody can write something," he said. "They just log on to Sina.com and read all kinds of newspapers. And the fascinating thing for them is, they get to leave their comments."
Consumers think of themselves as logical creatures, but of course that is not always true. Emotional and irrational factors come into play when we buy things to impress our friends or to make us feel better about ourselves -- even if we don't ever quite admit it. Still, there are limits, right? A particular make of car or a designer suit might function as a source of fulfillment or personal identity, but not, for instance, a washing machine. Actually, there are no limits. Even a washing machine can be a source of consumer meaning. Whirlpool, the appliance maker, was betting that this was the case when it introduced a washer-and-dryer line (or ''fabric care system'') called the Duet. And this has turned out well, as the washer is now the fastest-selling machine of its kind, capturing almost 20 percent of sales in its category in less than three years....
This sounds silly. But even in focus groups, the company got a clue that it had hit on something, as participants started throwing around phrases like ''the Ferrari of washing machines.''
Accordingly, the Duet washer alone was priced not in the typical $400 to $500 range but rather at a Ferrari-like level of $1,300 or so. The dryer runs you another $800. The machine is a standout example of a ''new American luxury'' described in the recent book ''Trading Up,'' by retail experts associated with the Boston Consulting Group. The authors, Michael J. Silverstein and Neil Fiske, did their own interviews with Duet buyers, who ''revealed multiple layers of their emotional connection with their appliances.'' One such owner of the washer and dryer told them: ''They are our little mechanical buddies. They have personality. . . . When they are running efficiently, our lives are running efficiently. They are part of my family.''
In another shift away from its film business and toward the future of digital technologies, Eastman Kodak said Tuesday it will stop selling traditional film cameras in the USA, Canada and Western Europe.Kodak will continue to market 35mm cameras in "emerging" markets like China, India and Eastern Europe.
It will also discontinue worldwide Advanced Photo System (APS) cameras. They were launched with great fanfare in 1996, but only 1.6 million units sold last year in the USA vs. 12.8 million digital cameras.
Digital cameras -- which don't use film -- now outsell film cameras in the USA. The gap is expected to widen even more this year.
Today, the principal international standard-setting organizations have representation from many countries, including China, but American interests often carry the greatest influence."We are accustomed to the United States being the biggest market and the technology leader, so the standards have largely been American standards," said Clyde V. Prestowitz, president of the Economic Strategy Institute in Washington and a former trade negotiator. "But China is going to be the biggest in the world for a lot of things. If the Chinese have the biggest market for cellphones, DVD players, computers and other things, they will have a lot of power to set technology standards."
China's effort to develop its own technical standards for the next generation of DVD's appears to be an effort to avoid hefty royalty payments to patent-holding corporations in Japan, the United States and Europe. About half of the world's DVD players are now made in China.
The new discs will hold four to five times the digital video and audio data of those currently on the market. The next-generation discs and their players will not be widely available until at least 2005, but the world's largest electronics, computer and entertainment companies are already battling over whose technology will become part of an industry standard.
Nobody questions Michelle Wie's talent, or her potential as a golfer. Wie is 6 feet tall with a lean athletic build, drives the ball close to 300 yards and already has a top-10 finish in an L.P.G.A. major championship. Last year, at age 13, she became the youngest golfer to win an adult United States Golf Association title, capturing the Women's Amateur Public Links Championship.Professionals who have seen her play marvel at her ability.
"She has probably one of the best golf swings I've ever seen, period," said Davis Love III, one of the world's best players.
But at age 14, is Wie taking on too much, too soon? That is a question being posed to Wie, and her parents, as she prepares to compete in the PGA Tour's Sony Open in Hawaii on Thursday.
Though the Tour does not keep official age records of competitors, Wie is believed to be the youngest player to compete in a Tour event, and the youngest girl. Wie is following in the footsteps of Annika Sorenstam, who became the first woman in 58 years to play a PGA Tour event last year, when she captured the country's attention while missing the cut at the Colonial in May. Suzy Whaley also played on the PGA Tour last year, when she missed the cut at the Greater Hartford Open.
The Walt Disney Co. is shuttering its Orlando-based animation studio, cutting 258 jobs, as the company shifts from hand-drawn animated films to computer-generated features and videos. Some of the employees will be offered jobs in Burbank, Calif., Disney said Monday in announcing the move.The company has been steadily trimming its animation department for the past few years, from a peak of 2,200 employees in 1999 to 600, all based in Burbank after Monday's announcement.
The closing of the Orlando studio comes after Disney has closed animation outposts in Paris and Tokyo, which were opened during a boom in hand-drawn animation.
Over the past few years as computer-generated 3-D films proved far more successful at the box office than traditional 2-D films, Disney shifted from having a large number of animators on staff to hiring on a per-film basis.
The move resulted in layoffs and major salary cuts and an emphasis on producing less costly 2-D films. The 2002 success Lilo & Stitch, for instance, was produced for about $80 million compared with $140 million for the box-office flop Treasure Planet, released the same year.
The bursting of the dot.com bubble was greeted with much cynicism. However, as with the bursting of the great railway boom in the 19th century, consumers have woken up to the fact that not all the money invested was wasted. We got a rail network that transformed daily life. Now, through the internet, consumers have instant access to bargains on a scale never dreamt of.Suddenly, you can buy or bid for items - from CDs to cars - anywhere in the world. In particular, ultra-cheap consumer products are available from America, where the dollar has slid by 30 per cent. The average consumer can only benefit from this development (though we pity the poor souls who recently ordered what they thought was genuine Viagra over the internet, only to find it lacked the appropriate uplifting qualities). The only people unhappy with this new international supermarket are, understandably, Her Majesty's Customs and Excise, which is determined that these new imports should not escape its clutches.
The Iraq invasion was "an unnecessary preventive war of choice" that has robbed resources and attention from the more critical fight against al Qaeda in a hopeless U.S. quest for absolute security, according to a study recently published by the U.S. Army War College.The 56-page document (download report in PDF format) written by