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.
...
Google plays down the significance of Google bombing, saying the search results merely reflect what is actually happening on the Web.
...
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 Jeffrey Record, a veteran defense expert who serves as a visiting research professor at the Strategic Studies Institute of the Army War College, represents a blistering assessment of what President Bush calls the U.S. global war on terrorism.
Pentagon officials on Monday said Record was entitled to his opinion, but reiterated Bush's view that Iraq is the "central front" in the war on terrorism.
Record urged U.S. leaders to refocus Bush's broad war to target Osama bin Laden al Qaeda network, blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America, and its allies. Record said the Iraq war was a detour from real anti-terrorism efforts.
...
Record faulted the administration for fusing disparate enemies such as rogue states, terrorist groups and weapons of mass destruction proliferators into a monolithic threat.
In doing so, he said, the administration "may have set the United States on a course of open-ended and gratuitous conflict with states and non-state entities that pose no serious threat to the United States."
The FBI and the Justice Department have renewed their efforts to wiretap voice conversations carried across the Internet.The agencies have asked the Federal Communications Commission to order companies offering voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service to rewire their networks to guarantee police the ability to eavesdrop on subscribers' conversations.
Without such mandatory rules, the two agencies predicted in a letter to the FCC last month that "criminals, terrorists, and spies (could) use VoIP services to avoid lawfully authorized surveillance." The letter also was signed by the Drug Enforcement Administration.
This is not the first time the Bush administration has expressed concern about terrorists and other lawbreakers using VoIP to evade wiretaps. As previously reported by CNET News.com, a proposal presented quietly to the FCC in July sought guaranteed surveillance access to broadband providers. But the latest submission, which follows a recent FCC forum on Internet telephony, is more detailed than before and specifically targets VoIP providers as a regulatory focus.
The National Football League will roll out a Chinese-language version of its Web site this month in yet another move by American entertainment and media organizations to capitalize on overseas Internet audiences.The new N.F.L. site, which the league plans to announce this week, will offer all the usual NFL.com fare, but with the text translated to Mandarin Chinese. The Web site will feature commentary from Chad Lewis, a Philadelphia Eagles tight end who speaks Mandarin as a result of a two-year stint as a Mormon missionary in Taiwan in his early 20's.
The N.F.L.'s move is in the vanguard as Web publishers respond to an expanding audience overseas. As Internet use grows rapidly abroad, people in other countries who can read English have been gravitating to the bigger American Web sites for news, games and entertainment. For example, Washingtonpost.com, which is almost exclusively in English and makes no extensive effort to attract overseas readers, has nonetheless built a significant foreign readership - about 1.5 million of its 8.5 million monthly visitors. Some of the site's advertisers now aim specifically at the international audience.
More than four million surveillance cameras monitor our every move, making Britain the most-watched nation in the world, research has revealed.The number of closed circuit television (CCTV) cameras has quadrupled in the past three years, and there is now one for every 14 people in the UK. The increase is happening at twice the predicted rate, and it is believed that Britain accounts for one-fifth of all CCTV cameras worldwide. Estimates suggest that residents of a city such as London can each expect to be captured on CCTV cameras up to 300 times a day, and much of the filming breaches existing data guidelines.
Civil liberties groups complain that the rules governing the use of the cameras in Britain are the most lax in the world. They say that, in contrast to other countries, members of the public are often unaware they are being filmed, and are usually ignorant of the relevant regulations. They also argue that there is little evidence to support the contention that CCTV cameras lead to a reduction in crime rates.
By the reductive logic that rules our food system, cannibalism should be as legitimate a way of eating as any other: it's all just protein, right? Yet the great unlearned lesson of B.S.E. and other similar brain-wasting diseases is that, at the level of species or ecosystems, it isn't quite true that protein is protein. Eating the protein of your own species, for example, carries special risks....
One of the most off-putting things about factory farms is how cavalierly they flout these evolutionary rules, forcing animals to overcome deeply ingrained aversions. For their instincts we substitute antibiotics.
For tens of thousands of years, we have been eating the flesh of ruminants that live on grass. The rightness of that picture -- a bovine grazing on grassland -- goes way back, maybe all the way to the savanna. And while that picture has recently been eclipsed by nauseating images of modern meat production, the grass-fed ruminant and the vegetarian herbivore are not extinct yet.
For several years now, an alternative, postindustrial food chain has been taking shape, its growth fueled by one ''food scare'' after another: Alar, G.M.O.'s, rBGH, E. coli 0157:H7; now B.S.E. Whatever science told us about the risks of these novel industrial entrees and sides, something else told us we might want to order something more appetizing: organic, hormone-free, grass-finished. It might cost more, but it's possible again to eat meat from a short, legible food chain consisting of little more than sunlight, grass and ruminants. Back to the future: a 21st-century savanna. If, as seems probable, this landscape should now expand at the expense of the feedlot, then something good -- even beautiful -- will have come of this poor mad cow.
But with those days long gone, the new alliance underscores the feverish deal making going on as computer makers, consumer electronics companies, and content providers all jostle for position in the uncharted territory converging around digital entertainment."It's frenetic out there," said Gary Johnson, the chief executive of PortalPlayer, a hardware design company in Santa Clara, Calif., that contributed to the design of the first iPod. "The world of the PC and consumer electronics industry are combining and digital music is becoming a key service."
The advent of legal online digital music sales and subscriptions has touched off a gold rush of companies racing to stake a claim with consumers, whose interest in digital entertainment while at home and on the move has re-energized an industry that still is struggling to revive spending on information technology.
The growing importance of digital media is fracturing the monolithic world long dominated by Microsoft's software and spurring the creation of an array of alternatives.
"These new software platforms are a brand new opportunity," said Mark Anderson, president of Technology Alliance Partners, a Seattle-area consulting firm. "It's a completely different game."
Microsoft has said that it plans to offer its own MSN music store later this year.
With Americans fattening up and fast food on the defensive, McDonald's this week began telling dieters in the New York area how much fat and carbs are in some of its meals.New posters and brochures, prominently displayed in restaurants in New York, New Jersey and parts of Connecticut, tell customers how to modify McDonald's existing menu -- by leaving out the bun or cheese, for example --- to reduce their intake of fat, carbohydrates and calories.
"We are trying to educate our customers that the foods they love at McDonald's can fit into the diet they're on," said Cristina Vilella, marketing director for the fast food company's New York metro region office in Roseland, N.J.
"If they're watching fat, carbs or counting calories, they can take the menu and fit it into the lifestyle that they're leading."
President Bush offered a plan today that he said would help millions of illegal immigrants working in the United States while also making the country more secure and prosperous and living up to its finest ideals."By tradition and conviction, our country is a welcoming society," Mr. Bush said at a special ceremony in the White House. "We welcome the talent, the character and the patriotism of immigrant families."
While Mr. Bush said again that he opposed amnesty, which he said would only encourage lawbreaking and perpetuate illegal immigration, his proposals would nonetheless effectively grant a measure of amnesty to illegal immigrants with jobs.
What Mr. Bush called "a temporary worker program" would allow foreign workers to come to United States for specific jobs with specific employers, provided that no American workers could be found to fill the jobs. It would also require the return of these temporary workers to their home countries after their work period was over.
The legal status granted by the program would last three years, and would be renewable -- but it would not be permanent, Mr. Bush said.
A hormone called vasopressin is clearly better at saving the lives of patients whose hearts have stopped than the drug doctors have been using for the past 100 years, according to a study that could transform the treatment of sudden cardiac arrest.For a century, cardiac arrest victims have been given epinephrine, a synthetic adrenaline that constricts blood vessels and boosts blood pressure. It is often administered when shocking the heart with a defibrillator fails to revive the patient.
Using vasopressin instead improved the chances of reaching a hospital alive by about 40 percent, and tripled the chances of going home from the hospital, in patients with the most deadly type of cardiac arrest, asystole, where all heart activity has stopped. Still, only 5 percent who got vasopressin made it home. The large European study was reported in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.
Astronomers have found an immense structure of galaxies that formed much earlier in the history of the universe than most theorists had believed possible.A team led by Povilas Palunas of the University of Texas said the objects, including 37 galaxies and one quasar, are aligned in a structure that is at least 300 million light years long and 50 million light years wide.
Palunas and his team presented a report on the discovery Wednesday at the national meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
The astronomers said the structure is 10.8 billion light years away, which means it formed when the universe was only 20 percent of its present age. No such structure has been found before this far away and so early in the history of the universe.
Palunas said the astronomers could detect only the brightest of the galaxies in the structure, but if the grouping follows the pattern of other large collections, it may include many thousands of dim, unseen galaxies.
Well-accepted theories of the early universe, supported by supercomputer simulations, have held that 10.8 billion years ago was too early after the Big Bang for the formation of stellar structures of this size. The Big Bang, which scientists theorize began the universe, is thought to have occurred about 13.7 billion years ago.
In a cheery elementary school classroom with red window panes and crayon drawings tacked on the walls, a class of 3-year-olds are doing their "yoga," transforming themselves into lions and butterflies."Let's be froggies!" instructor Anne Jeffries says, spurring the children to happily hop up and down from a squatting position. They're having fun, but they're also tackling a serious problem that is drawing the attention of doctors, educators and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The JumpStart program, a pilot program that teaches nutrition as part of the Head Start curriculum at P.S. 5 in Manhattan's Washington Heights neighborhood, is the youngest nutrition program in the nation. JumpStart organizers believe early education could be the key to fighting a trend that has seen the number of overweight and obese children double in the past 20 years.
Desmond Supple, an economist at Barclays Capital, wrote in a research report on Tuesday that the banks would be able to write off loans as uncollectible and make corresponding accounting entries against their equity without converting the dollars into yuan.The State Administration of Foreign Exchange said the transfer to the banks was actually accomplished at the end of last year, which will allow the banks to show the extra capital in their year-end accounts. Several bankers said this might make it easier for the banks to pursue stock offerings by the end of this year. The foreign exchange agency said that even after deducting $45 billion, China's foreign reserves leaped $116.84 billion last year, to $403.25 billion.
For Intel Capital, the digital home represents the next major market opportunity. The fund has already invested in Bridgeco, a start-up designer of low-cost chips for linking home devices, and Entropic, which designs chips for home networking systems over standard coaxial cable. Another investment, Musicmatch, sells software for recording, organizing and playing music on digital devices.Mr. Miner compared the state of the digital home electronics market today to that of the computer industry two decades ago, when the makers of monolithic mainframe computers began to give way to the upstart personal computer makers. Within a few years, an entire industry of new players had emerged.
Likewise, in digital consumer electronics, the industry is only now realizing that the necessary innovation may well come from nimble entrepreneurs rather than established corporations. "People are just now waking up to the realities," Mr. Miner said. "There have been entrenched players in consumer electronics so that people have been hesitant to jump in."
Mr. Baker of Gartner said that the problems of digital networking are likely to be solved by new companies that do not have a vested interest in one technology or another.
It won't be a capital offense in this capital city, but motorists caught driving while juggling their cell phones could end up with a ticket and a $100 fine starting in July.The District of Columbia City Council gave final approval Tuesday to a bill banning drivers from talking on hand-held cell phones while behind the wheel. They would have to use a handsfree device, although exemptions would be made for emergency situations.
"We've all seen a lot of near misses as people are chatting away on their phones," said Councilwoman Carol Schwartz, one of the bill's co-sponsors. "We're a very densely populated city and we need to protect our pedestrians, whether they be our residents or our visitors.
Jeffrey Behling, a dairy farmer in Washington State, used to burn the carcasses of his hobbled "downer" cattle until he found there was a market for their meat. Even so, selling damaged cows for human consumption never sat well with Mr. Behling, who in 2001 briefly had in his feedlot the Holstein cow identified last month as the downer with mad cow disease."It's an absurd practice," Mr. Behling, 44, said in an interview. "Foolishness caused by maybe a certain amount of greed."
The financial motive that drove the industry to defend practices like selling downers has been turned on its head by the discovery of mad cow disease. Now, in an attempt to rescue the market for American beef, the industry is being forced to accept regulation it has long fought.
Male sperm counts have fallen by almost a third since 1989, with factors such as drinking and obesity possibly to blame, according to a British study.A survey of 7,500 men who attended the Aberdeen Fertility Centre in northern Scotland between 1989 and 2002 brought alarming findings, researchers said Monday.
Analysis of sperm samples showed that in men with what is considered a "normal" concentration of sperm -- defined as over 20 million sperm per millilitre of semen -- the average sperm count fell by 29 percent.
This "must cause some concern and needs to be explained", said Dr Siladitya Bhattacharya, who led the research project.
"There could be a number of lifestyle factors which could play a role in this," he said.
"It just highlights the need for research to discover what these reasons might be, as well as the need for further studies elsewhere in the country to see if they support our results."
Drug use, alcohol, smoking and obesity have all been linked to a decline in sperm counts, as well as pesticides and other chemicals in the environment.
United States immigration officers began fingerprinting and photographing tens of thousands of foreign visitors required to have visas on Monday, in what federal authorities described as a sophisticated new security measure to monitor who enters the country and how long they stay.
America Online will give its customers built-in software to detect and remove "spyware," hidden tools that can monitor Web surfers' online habits for marketing purposes, company executives said yesterday.The AOL move, which is to be announced today, steps up a battle between consumers and makers of so-called adware and spyware, which have become increasingly popular marketing tools for advertisers seeking to reach Internet users in a variety of ways that many consider unduly intrusive.
The spyware-removal program that AOL will use is made by another company, Aluria Software. It will be bundled with the next version of AOL's software, which will be released soon. AOL customers using older software will be able to download the program separately, executives said.
The AOL software will work automatically on the customer's computer, scanning it once a week and identifying the adware and spyware packages it finds, the company said. Users will then decide whether they want to remove the products.
"We're trying to inform and empower the consumer," said Jeff Kimball, vice president for new products at AOL, which is a unit of Time Warner. "If you want it, that's your choice. If you don't, here's a simple and easy way to get it out of your life."
Pakistan and India say they will start talks next month to resolve their differences, which include the bitterly divisive issue of Kashmir.The countries' leaders are "confident" the talks will bring peace - "History has been made," Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf told journalists.
The news was announced at the end of a South Asian regional summit in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.A BBC correspondent in Islamabad says the move is a major breakthrough.
Recent months have seen a gradual thaw in relations between the two nuclear rivals after a period of prolonged military confrontation."To carry the process of normalisation forward, the president of Pakistan and the prime minister of India agreed to commence the process of a composite dialogue in February 2004," Indian Foreign Minister Yashwant Sinha told journalists in Islamabad, reading from a joint statement.
China will create one or two global brands among the world's top ten in the coming decade, thanks to the country's rapid development and its soaring production and marketing capabilities," Jennifer Gordon, chief executive of Australia-based Capital Group, said at a forum on China's branding promotion held recentlyin Beijing."Haier and Lenovo, as well as electronics maker TCL, are all very promising competitors," Gordon, also head of branding and marketing for the Sydney Olympic Organizing Committee, told Xinhua.
According to Gordon, China's hosting of the 2008 Olympics couldbe a big boost for its top companies and products, and they shouldmake full use of this platform to gain brand name recognition worldwide.
"The perception is that the Chinese are never going to get anywhere because they don't have their own brands. That was true ten years ago, but it's changed dramatically," said Nicholas Lardy,a scholar on China research at the Brookings Institution, one of the major think tanks of America.
The Washington-based Center for Health Workforce Studies sees a shortage of 85,000 physicians by 2020.Because of the growing concern over physician shortages, the American Medical Association in December changed its long-standing policy on physician supply, which, for decades, warned of a physician oversupply.
Predictions of a surplus in physician supply were shortsighted for many reasons, according to Richard Cooper, director of the Health Policy Institute at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where he is a professor and former dean.
Cooper said managed care's ability to restrict doctor visits had worn off and patients with insurance have gotten used to visiting their doctors whenever they want.And the aging population has led to an increase in the demand for physician services.
Americans will be particularly outraged when they cannot have immediate access to the health care they feel they are entitled to, Cooper said, and that day is dawning as people age.
Health care has improved to the point, he said, where people are living longer and demanding the latest, most technologically advanced care.
If the issue were limited to the 100,000 or so customers currently using Internet-based telephones, the debate might remain largely theoretical. But the service seems on the verge of a takeoff.The field's current leader is the Vonage Holdings Corporation, an Edison, N.J., company with about 80 percent of the market so far. Mr. Davidson is among its customers. Vonage estimates that it will have 250,000 customers by the end of 2004 and one million by 2006. Time Warner Cable, a unit of Time Warner Inc., and the AT&T Corporation have both announced major initiatives to roll out Internet-based phone service.
The regional Bell company Qwest Communications International Inc. plans to offer Internet telephone service in its 14-state Rocky Mountain region as an alternative to conventional phone service. And every other major telecommunications provider has plans to introduce Internet-based service to take advantage of the technology's lower costs and the lack of regulation.
The F.C.C. has embarked on a series of public hearings around the country on whether and how to regulate Internet telephony. The agency's chairman, Mr. Powell, has said that his instinct is to subject telephone calls made using Internet technology to only minimal regulation in order to avoid costs and bureaucracy that he says would slow innovation and competition.
San Francisco and Oakland international airports will be among 115 airports and 14 seaports implementing a new system that is designed to confirm the identity of arriving foreign visitors, and to better track their whereabouts while they are in the United States, according to officials at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.Monday marks the official start of the US-VISIT program, which stands for United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology.
The program processes visa-holders as they enter the U.S., and is a cornerstone of the DHS' goal to improve security at the nation's borders, officials said.
Mineta San Jose International Airport is one of 30 airports implementing just the exit portion of the program, according to airport officials. Entrance and exit procedures will be phased in at all air, sea and land border entrances by the end of 2005, DHS officials said.
Officials said many of the current entry procedures remain the same, with a couple of additional measures that in most cases will take just a few seconds. US-VISIT will use scanning equipment to collect "biometric identifiers,'' including electronic fingerprints and digital photos, according to the DHS.
Data collected from foreign travelers will be securely stored as part of the visitor's travel record.
When exiting the U.S., visitors will check out at kiosks by scanning their passport or visa and repeating the fingerprint scan, according to DHS officials. The information will be available to authorized officials and law enforcement agencies, and will help verify compliance with visa and immigration policies, officials said.
Fingerscans and other data will be checked against a database of known and suspected terrorists, according to the DHS, making the system more effective than a simple names database, and protecting the identities of those whose travel documents have been stolen.
The US-VISIT program received $380 million in 2003, and is slated to receive another $330 million in 2004, according to the DHS.
Both economies are hungry for raw materials, especially energy - Japan because it has almost none of its own, China because its economic boom has fast outstripped what once were adequate domestic supplies. Both want to limit their dependence on oil from distant, politically volatile regions like the Middle East. And both see an attractive alternative in the little-tapped energy riches of the vast, vacant Russian Far East. Getting oil to market from the remote East Siberian fields that Russia is ready to develop means spending billions on a pipeline. Japan and China are fighting hard over where that pipeline will go: either to China's northeastern industrial heartland, or to this stretch of Russian shoreline, where a new deep-water oil terminal will be just one day's tanker cruise from Japan.With the choice Russia faces, the political and economic dynamics of Northeast Asia stand to be profoundly shaped for years to come.
"The Chinese will be furious if the Russians do not give them the pipeline," said Graham Hutchings, an Asian specialist with the British consulting group Oxford Analytica. And no one expects it to be the last time Japan and China collide over the resources they both need.
China has been talking to Russia about Siberian oil for a decade, and its need has grown acute.
Instant messaging, long a part of teenagers' lives, is working its way into the broader fabric of the American family. The technology "has really grown up in the last 18 months," said Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director at Jupiter Research. "It's certainly not just for kids anymore."Almost three-quarters of all teenagers with online access use instant messaging and about half of all adults have tried the services, surveys show. Adults, who generally began using the services from AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo to stay in touch with co-workers during the day, Mr. Gartenberg said, are saying "this stuff I'm using for work is actually useful in my personal life as well."
Use among adults has grown to include friends and far-flung family members, particularly children away at college. AOL, which provides the most popular service, reports that more than one billion instant messages each day flow through its networks.
And now, as families own more than one computer, the machines spread beyond the den and home networks relying on wireless connections become increasingly popular, instant messaging is taking root within the home itself.
Although it might seem lazy or silly to send electronic messages instead of getting out of a chair and walking into the next room, some psychologists say that the role of the technology within families can be remarkably positive. In many cases, they say, the messages are helping to break down the interpersonal barriers that often prevent open communication.
"Conversation between parents and teenagers could be highly emotional and not necessarily productive," said Elisheva F. Gross, a psychology researcher at the Children's Digital Media Center at the University of California at Los Angeles. When young people are online, however, "it's their turf," she said. "It may be a way for parents to communicate in a language and in a space that their children are more comfortable with."
Cruise-missile technology has joined the battle against cancer.
CyberKnife is a device that delivers highly concentrated doses of radiation, beamed from the end of a flexible robotic arm, to precisely target tumors.
It lets physicians painlessly treat cancers of the brain, neck and spine — even some that have been deemed inoperable — without making a single incision.
The tool's pinpoint accuracy — within a millimeter — allows the maximum amount of radiation to target tumors, while minimizing exposure to healthy tissue, doctors familiar with CyberKnife say.
Dr. Mark J. Brenner uses CyberKnife at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, where he is chief of radiation oncology.
"What this enables us to do is key in on the tumor with very, very precise margins. This is what radiation oncology has been aiming for all along," Brenner says. "This is the ultimate local therapy — surgery without the scalpel."
Chinese consumers are buying cars at an breakneck speed, spurred on by new government policies that allow banks to lend on vehicles and, for some of them, by a desire to impress the neighbours. More than 3.91 million of the 4 million motor vehicles manufactured between January and November 2003 were sold."China's auto demand is expected to rise to 10 million by 2010, second only to North America," said Zhang Xiaoqiang, vice-minister in charge of the State Development and Reform Commission in mid-December.
Rising income accounts for only part of the buying frenzy. A car, like a laptop computer and a house, has long been regarded as a coveted emblem of a middle-class life.
The Chinese Government's policy to encourage individuals to buy cars or houses in installments through bank credits has boosted consumption of luxury items.
The concept of credit is relatively new in China.
Trends come and go.
Bell-bottoms and leg warmers. Chat rooms and sushi bars. Apartments done art deco and sports gear gone retro.
And with trends -- much like the mantra in the hipster remake of "Ocean's 11" -- you're either in or you're out.
Here's a glimpse at what's shaping up to be 2004's hot trends:
1) Compact Concert
Instant Live is a revolutionary service that allows concertgoers to purchase a high-quality recording of a performance and take it home just minutes after the show.
2) Friendly Connection
Friendster.com, one of the Internet's fastest-growing Web sites, bills itself as an online community that connects people through networks of friends.
After only eight months, the online cocktail party now has more than 2 million users and a growth rate of 20 percent a week.
3) Going to the Dogs
Four-star restaurants in several major cities have started serving up high-end hot dogs.
The trend started after Hot Doug's restaurant in Chicago was mentioned a few months ago in Gourmet magazine, sparking an unofficial national competition for the country's best hot dog.
4) Driving force
Fuel-sipping gas-electric hybrid vehicles, such as the Toyota Prius, are about to take over America's roadways.
5) Ringing endorsement
The smart phone, soon to become as common as the basic cell phone, is nothing short of a small computer with an antenna.
6) Reel Moms
Thanks to Reel Moms, parents can take in a big-screen showing of "Seabiscuit" instead of "Brother Bear."
Reel Moms, launched a year ago in New York City, has spread to many major U.S. markets, including Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, earning rave reviews.
The project is designed for parents who feel unwelcome at movies when their crying infants earn snide comments and rude looks.
Reel Mom movies usually begin at 11 a.m., parents are charged matinee price, and all you need to get in is a child younger than 2.
7) Dress up or down
Hot fashion trends include fabrics with spots, strappy sandals and the return of an old favorite: paisley.
8) Home is where the trend is
The remodeling industry is booming.
But the emphasis on home improvements has switched from adding value to your home (i.e. investment) to making your home a comfortable place to live (a.k.a. cocooning).
9) The big picture
A media revolution is coming — and its name is HDTV.
HDTVs also have dropped in price, down from several thousand dollars apiece to a more affordable $800 to $900