This is a recent quote from Nicholas Negroponte in Spain at the IaaC Lecture Series:
"Design school is the future, business school is dead."
The point may be stated in the extreme, but the point to consider is the importance of design in the future of business.
I have heard Nicholas talk about design several times but my thinking on design began with some posts from Frog Design after reading Helmust Esslinger's "A Fine Line" (Esslinger founded Frog Design.) Frog helped me to see the parallels to entrepreneurship in design. I then found the Stanford Design School, which is heavily influenced by the thinking of the design firm IDEO, and began reading about their design processes. Lately I have been reading Karl Ulrich's writings on design. Ulrich is another alumni of MIT (Negroponte) who teaches a Coursera offering on design. He also advocates that design should be part of a general requirements university curriculum, like writing, calculus, etc.
All of this reading lead me to realize that design process is an excellent model for the first part of a two-part process approach to entrepreneurship, which I described in this post a few days ago. I think both Nicholas and Ulrich would agree with this concept that a formal design process is the foundation of entrepreneurship, or at least the foundation to develop the hypothesis to be tested in the market. (For the sake of completeness, let us assume that the design process is used for addressing documented large market opportunities.)
In this post, "How to Survive the End of the Industrial Age", I basically argued that the individual must control their economic destiny in the 21st century and that entrepreneurship is the best solution. Therefore, I believe that business schools, as one means to teach entrepreneurship, must change as follows:
(All of my posts on design are here.)
Image credit: Systemtek
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Normally, when a company releases two laptops in different sizes (the MacBook Air, anyone?) we review just one: we assume you'll get the gist about the design and trackpad the first time, ya know? So it's funny, then, that we're taking a look at the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11 after we've already tested the Yoga 13 and named it one of our favorite Windows 8 convertibles. They look alike, with an inventive hinge allowing you to fold the screen back like a book cover. The keyboards are the same too, though the 11-incher's is understandably a tad more crowded. They even have the same oddly shaped power port.
Except, of course, they're totally different products. Whereas the Yoga 13 is a proper laptop, with a Core i5 processor and full Windows 8, the Yoga 11 runs Windows RT, and is powered by a Tegra 3 chip (yes, the same one you're used to seeing in Android tablets). That means a big dip in performance, but exponentially longer battery life. Legacy x86 apps are off-limits too, given that this is Windows RT and all. Now that we've set up that equation for you (weaker performance plus longer battery life minus standard Windows apps equals what?) let's meet up after the break to see if this is just as good a deal as its big brother.
Filed under: Laptops, Tablets, Lenovo
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/LOZWwcx5Ph8/
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Apr. 29, 2013 ? Researchers at the University of Arizona's Tumamoc Hill have digitized 106 years of growth data on individual plants, making the information available for study by people all over the world.
Knowing how plants respond to changing conditions over many decades provides new insights into how ecosystems behave.
The permanent research plots on Tumamoc Hill represent the world's longest-running study that monitors individual plants, said co-author Larry Venable, director of research at Tumamoc Hill.
Some of the plots date from 1906 -- and the birth, growth and death of the individual plants on those plots have been periodically recorded ever since.
The century-long searchable archive is unique and invaluable, said Venable, a UA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology who has been studying plants on Tumamoc since 1982.
"You can see the ebb and flow of climate, and you can see the ebb and flow of vegetation," he said.
Lead author Susana Rodriguez-Buritica said, "Long-term data sets have a special place in ecology."
The records have allowed scientists to estimate life spans for desert perennials, some of which are very long-lived, Venable said.
In addition, data from the plots on Tumamoc Hill reveal changes in the Sonoran Desert and have been important to key advances in the science of ecology.
For example, the Tumamoc plant censuses helped overturn the long-standing idea that plant communities progress through a series of steps to a stable collection of species known as a climax community.
"The desert wasn't progressing toward a climax community," he said. Instead of being in synch, each species and plot was changing to its own rhythm.
Rodriguez-Buritica, a postdoctoral research associate in the UA department of ecology and evolutionary biology, Venable and their co-authors Helen Raichle and Robert H. Webb of the U.S. Geological Survey and Raymond M. Turner, formerly of USGS, have published a description of their data in the Ecological Society of America's journal Ecology and archived the data set with the society at http://www.esapubs.org/archive/ecol/E094/083/.
The title of their paper is, "One hundred and six years of population and community dynamics of Sonoran Desert Laboratory perennials." The National Science Foundation, the USGS and the U.S. National Park Service funded the archiving.
Landmark research on the physiology and ecology of desert plants has been conducted on Tumamoc Hill ever since the Carnegie Institution of Washington established the Desert Laboratory there in 1903 to study how plants cope with living in the desert.
The first permanent plots, generally 33 feet by 33 feet (10 meters by 10 meters), were established in 1906 by Volney Spalding; nine of his original plots remain to this day. Additional plots were established by Forrest Shreve in the 1910s and 1920s. Two more plots were added in 2010. Currently, there are 21 plots.
For every perennial plant within each plot, the ecologists recorded the species, the area the plant covered and its location. Even seedlings were identified and mapped.
In addition to the written records, repeated photographs of the plots have been taken since 1906. Those photographs are in the Desert Laboratory Collection of Repeat Photography at the USGS in Tucson, Ariz.
Over the years, botanists and ecologists have helped census and re-census the plots. Co-author Turner took over the work when he came to the UA as a botany professor in 1957, continued while a botanist for USGS and continues to do in retirement. In 1993, co-author Webb took up the project and is keeping the censuses going.
Sorting through data recorded from 2012 back to 1906 was a huge challenge, said Rodriguez-Buritica. She had something to build on: Janice Bowers of USGS had begun to archive the records but retired before finishing. Initially, Rodriguez-Buritica and Venable thought a year would do it -- but the task ended up taking much longer.
The records were in several places -- some at the library or in storage at Tumamoc and some in the UA library's Special Collections.
One of the challenges Rodriguez-Buritica faced is that methods of collecting and recording information about plants have changed over time.
Spalding, who established the very first plots in 1906, worked long before the age of computers -- he recorded his observations in a small notebook. Ecologists continued to record their field observations in paper notebooks and created maps on graph paper well into the latter part of the 20th century.
All those paper records had to be digitized.
Only in the last 20 years have scientists been pinpointing plant locations and other observations directly onto a map within their computers by using GPS and GIS technology.
Upon reviewing and checking the data, Rodriguez-Buritica realized that she needed to standardize the information collected over a century so that other scientists could analyze it. Her expertise in applied statistics and spatial ecology was perfect for the job.
She also computerized the series of maps created over time so new investigators could see all the plant location maps created since 1906.
By putting all the information into a standardized digital format and making it easily accessible on the Web, Rodriguez-Buritica, Venable and their colleagues have ensured that other researchers can build on and expand this unique data set.
Tumamoc Hill is one of the birthplaces of plant ecology, Venable said.
"In the first half of the 20th century, all the great plant ecologists either worked here or came though here," he said. "Plant ecologists from the Desert Lab were key in founding the Ecological Society of America and its flagship journal, Ecology. It is satisfying to see the project come full circle and be permanently archived 100 years later by the journal that these researchers started."
The Desert Lab and Tumamoc Hill have been designated as a National Environmental Study Site, a National Historic Landmark, an Arizona State Scientific and Educational Natural Area and are on the National Register of Historic Places.
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/top_science/~3/gB0eib4XVUM/130429154218.htm
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On the diamond jubilee of the double helix, we should admit that we don't fully understand how evolution works at the molecular level, suggests Philip Ball
Image: Wikimedia Commons/Yikrazuul
This week's diamond jubilee of the discovery of DNA's molecular structure rightly celebrates how Francis Crick, James Watson and their collaborators launched the 'genomic age' by revealing how hereditary information is encoded in the double helix. Yet the conventional narrative ? in which their 1953 Nature paper led inexorably to the Human Genome Project and the dawn of personalized medicine ? is as misleading as the popular narrative of gene function itself, in which the DNA sequence is translated into proteins and ultimately into an organism's observable characteristics, or phenotype.
Sixty years on, the very definition of 'gene' is hotly debated. We do not know what most of our DNA does, nor how, or to what extent it governs traits. In other words, we do not fully understand how evolution works at the molecular level.
That sounds to me like an extraordinarily exciting state of affairs, comparable perhaps to the disruptive discovery in cosmology in 1998 that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating rather than decelerating, as astronomers had believed since the late 1920s. Yet, while specialists debate what the latest findings mean, the rhetoric of popular discussions of DNA, genomics and evolution remains largely unchanged, and the public continues to be fed assurances that DNA is as solipsistic a blueprint as ever.
The more complex picture now emerging raises difficult questions that this outsider knows he can barely discern. But I can tell that the usual tidy tale of how 'DNA makes RNA makes protein' is sanitized to the point of distortion. Instead of occasional, muted confessions from genomics boosters and popularizers of evolution that the story has turned out to be a little more complex, there should be a bolder admission ? indeed a celebration ? of the known unknowns.
DNA dispute
A student referring to textbook discussions of genetics and evolution could be forgiven for thinking that the 'central dogma' devised by Crick and others in the 1960s ? in which information flows in a linear, traceable fashion from DNA sequence to messenger RNA to protein, to manifest finally as phenotype ? remains the solid foundation of the genomic revolution. In fact, it is beginning to look more like a casualty of it.
Although it remains beyond serious doubt that Darwinian natural selection drives much, perhaps most, evolutionary change, it is often unclear at which phenotypic level selection operates, and particularly how it plays out at the molecular level.
Take the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project, a public research consortium launched by the US National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland. Starting in 2003, ENCODE researchers set out to map which parts of human chromosomes are transcribed, how transcription is regulated and how the process is affected by the way the DNA is packaged in the cell nucleus. Last year, the group revealed that there is much more to genome function than is encompassed in the roughly 1% of our DNA that contains some 20,000 protein-coding genes ? challenging the old idea that much of the genome is junk. At least 80% of the genome is transcribed into RNA.
Some geneticists and evolutionary biologists say that all this extra transcription may simply be noise, irrelevant to function and evolution. But, drawing on the fact that regulatory roles have been pinned to some of the non-coding RNA transcripts discovered in pilot projects, the ENCODE team argues that at least some of this transcription could provide a reservoir of molecules with regulatory functions ? in other words, a pool of potentially 'useful' variation. ENCODE researchers even propose, to the consternation of some, that the transcript should be considered the basic unit of inheritance, with 'gene' denoting not a piece of DNA but a higher-order concept pertaining to all the transcripts that contribute to a given phenotypic trait.
Source: http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=33f5adfe772bfdaa60803b0ad5f25773
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Must try harder.
Update: Bonus points if you press the space bar as you play!
Via: Joystiq
Source: Drop, @Notch (Twitter)
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/VWXHPRn62fY/
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By John Nyaradi
A sea change is underway for Apple Computer and the tech sector and major dangers and opportunities will unfold as this tidal wave rolls ashore. Long before Apple Computer (AAPL) became the most watched stock in the world, a book called The Personal Computer Book by Peter McWilliams was published back in 1982.
Apple still makes headlines today but many of the exciting companies, which were introduced to us in The Personal Computer Book, have either died or they have been consumed by other corporations (in the manner that Compaq was cannibalized by Hewlett Packard (HPQ)). Kaypro Computer, the manufacturer of a metal-encased unit which was as portable as a sewing machine, filed for bankruptcy in 1992. Digital Equipment Corporation (or DEC) was consumed by Compaq in 1998 before Compaq was eaten by HP in 2002. Commodore International, which brought you the Commodore 64 and the Amiga, was laid to rest in 1994.
The central character of The Personal Computer Book was a little company in Seattle named Microsoft (MSFT), which developed a "disk operating system" called MS-DOS at the request of IBM. IBM (IBM) wanted to start manufacturing a product line called personal computers. Their entire PC line was built around computer chips called "central processing units" or CPUs which were manufactured by a company named Intel (INTC).
By 2013, Microsoft, IBM and Intel appear to be heading to the same - or similar - fate as the other companies mentioned in The Personal Computer Book. Worse yet, a company named Dell Computer, (DELL) which developed a massive customer base by direct sales of PCs to customers through ads in such magazines as Computer Shopper and PC, now faces an uncertain fate after founder, Michael Dell first announced plans to take the company private, with the assistance of a private equity firm named Silver Lake Partners. As it turns out, the large-stake shareholders are not happy with the $13.65-per-share buyout price. On August 22, 2008 - just before the collapse of Lehman Brothers - Dell was trading at $25.50 per share. Dell hasn't been traded for $18 per share since February 21, 2012.
The fate of the personal computer extends beyond the good - or bad - fortunes of any particular company. At this point in American history, the personal computer is headed for the same fate as the Leisure Suit. It is rapidly becoming antiquated technology.
Smartphones and pads are replacing the clunky units with their spinning metal-disk hard drives, as consumers are increasingly entrusting their most private, personal information, photos and videos (yes - that kind, as well) to complete strangers who operate mainframe computers known as the cloud.
This sea change in digital technology is changing the entire tech sector from the investment standpoint. Microsoft, which just found its way back to $32 per share after spending most of the post-Lehman years in the $25 range (with the exception of last year's spring fever) is increasingly becoming a target for ridicule.
In fact, an online dispute arose at a popular news website after one commentator characterized Apple as "the new Microsoft". (Oh, snap!) As die-hard Apple investors stubbornly clung to their positions while the share price plunged from $702 on September 19 to $390 on April 19, it is easy to understand why.
The fate of Intel Corporation is inexorably linked to the well-being of its biggest customers in the PC manufacturing industry. At this time last year, Intel was clawing its way back to $29 per share. These days, you are lucky if you can unload those shares at $22.
A good number of investors who survived the dot-com bubble, which came to grief in March of 2000, are nervously fretting about what to do with their technology sector shares. Because the entire tech sector rises and falls with the prices of those four relics of the PC era, many see the entire sector as radioactive.
Which brings the discussion to Apple Computer, the tech industry darling which is now locked in a significant bear market as it struggles to maintain its dominance.
The company's recent earnings report was lackluster, at best, as iPhone sales decline and margins shrink. Apple stock has taken a sharp decline from the lofty peaks in the $700/share range to close on Friday at $417.
Numerous brokers have cut their price targets for Apple and now there's a wide range of targets between $400-$800 per share.
The company reported revenues that were better than expected and good sales for the iPad. However, Apple reported declining profits for the year over year period and declining gross margins. Slowing growth is bad news for an innovation leader like Apple and the rest of the world seems to be catching up with Samsung (SSNLF.PK) pressing them in the phone market and Amazon (AMZN) in the tablet world.
Apple is losing market share as its iPhone sales grew just 7% year over year while Samsung shipped more than 60 million smartphones in the first quarter, giving it 30% of the global smartphone pie compared to Apple's 37 million phone sales and 17% of the market.
Apple also issued lower guidance for the upcoming quarter and that it has no new products to release until autumn, another bad news omen for a company that depends on innovation and invention.
Apple's big announcement during the earnings call was that it's going to give shareholders $100 billion in buybacks and dividends, which is a departure from previous practice and obviously an attempt to offset the pain of a a 40% decline in the value of Apple stock.
The sea change in tech from personal computers to mobile and tablets is accelerating minute by minute and which companies will be winners and which will be losers remains very much in doubt. Key players include Apple, Amazon and Google (GOOG) and, of course, the old line names like Microsoft, IBM, Dell and Hewlett Packard, who will struggle to stay relevant and not become dinosaurs in this new age.
For investors, stock picking in this new age could become treacherous, at best, as the battle for survival and supremacy plays out. Here is a list of some ETFs you may want to consider as alternatives to investments in individual tech sector companies:
For tech bulls:
PowerShares QQQ Trust ETF (QQQ): This ETF, formerly known as the "Nasdaq 100 Tracking Stock", invests in all of the stocks in the Nasdaq 100 Index, which includes 100 of the largest domestic and international non-financial companies listed on the Nasdaq Stock Market based on market capitalization.
Technology Select Sector SPDR ETF (XLK): This ETF invests in all of the equity securities of the Technology Select Sector Index in the same proportion as the investments in those companies made by the index itself.
For tech bears:
ProShares Short QQQ ETF (PSQ): This ETF seeks daily investment results which correspond to the inverse (-1x) of the daily performance of the NASDAQ 100 Index. QQQ invests in derivatives which ProShares Advisors believes, in combination, should have similar daily return characteristics as the inverse (-1x) of the daily return of the index.
ProShares UltraShort QQQ ETF (QID): This ETF seeks daily investment results which correspond to two times the inverse (-2x) of the daily performance of the NASDAQ 100 Index. QID invests in derivatives which ProShares Advisors believes, in combination, should have similar daily return characteristics as two times the inverse (-2x) of the daily return of the index.
A quick look at a chart of QQQ offers insight into the current condition of the tech sector:
In this chart of QQQ we can see how the index (candlesticks) has been in an uptrend and the blue line of Amazon closely tracks the direction of the QQQ index.
However, we can see how the black line of Apple stock prices has wildly diverged from the overall sector.
Apple makes up a significant percentage of the weighting in QQQ and so it's unlikely that this divergence can continue. It's very likely that either Apple will have to rally or that QQQ will decline to a point where the two are again in synch with each other.
Bottom line: In today's world, the rate of change will only continue to accelerate as mobile and tablets and the cloud crowd out PCs, mainframes and semi-conductor based computing products. Picking individual winners and losers will be a gamble, at best. However, tech index ETFs like QQQ and PSQ will offer investors opportunity to profit from both the rise and fall of the tech sector tide.
Disclosure: Wall Street Sector Selector actively trades a wide range of exchange traded funds and positions can change at any time.
Disclaimer: The content included herein is for educational and informational purposes only
Source: http://seekingalpha.com/article/1379441-the-rise-and-fall-of-apple-and-the-tech-sector?source=feed
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By Yereth Rosen
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (Reuters) - Digging a large mine in southwest Alaska would inflict widespread ecological damage, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said in a report on Friday that could hurt the chances of a proposed project in that region winning regulatory approval.
A large scale open-pit mine in Alaska's unspoiled Bristol Bay region would destroy up to 90 miles of salmon and trout spawning streams, harm thousands of acres of wetlands that support fish and subject local waters to chemical spills and releases of untreated wastewater, the EPA report said.
The report did not specifically analyze the plan for Pebble Mine, the project proposed for the area, because developers have not officially made permit applications. But it studied the implications of a hypothetical project similar to Pebble. (EPA report: http://r.reuters.com/dew67t)
Pebble Mine, located 200 miles southwest of Anchorage, would be one of the world's largest open-pit copper mines. Developers have described it as a potential economic boon that would target both known and anticipated reserves of 80 billion lbs (36.3 billion kg) of copper, over 100 million ounces (2.8 million kg) of gold and 5.5 billion pounds (2.5 billion kg) of molybdenum.
But the latest EPA report predicted a wider scope of environmental damage than outlined in a draft report the agency released last year.
The EPA's conclusion drew a pointed reaction from the mine's developer, Pebble Limited Partnership President John Shively, who called the latest version of the assessment "flawed" and a waste of public money.
Shively in a statement blasted EPA for what he said was a decision to heed mine opponents' demands for a "pre-emptive veto" before development plans are final.
Even "the threat of a ?pre-emptive veto' will introduce uncertainty into the process that threatens to hurt the entire U.S. economy, not just a proposed mine in Alaska," Shively said.
The new EPA assessment backs up the previous draft report's conclusions about stream and wetlands damages, but gives more details about expected damages from roads, culverts, traffic accidents and other industrialization that would likely accompany mine development.
The EPA has made no decision about whether to invoke its legal powers to block the Pebble Mine, said Dennis McLarren, Pacific Northwest regional director for the agency.
The new report will be used to make any decisions about Bristol Bay protections, McLarren said in a conference call.
"We want to better understand the delicate ecological balance the produces the extraordinary fish and wildlife resources in Bristol Bay and assess the risk that mining could pose to that balance," he said.
Developers have already spent $680 million on the Pebble Mine project and plan to spend another $80 million this year, co-owner Northern Dynasty Minerals Ltd said this week. The other owner and Pebble partner is mining giant Anglo American.
The Pebble Mine plan has drawn fury from commercial and sport fishermen, Alaska Natives and environmentalists.
It is upstream from waters that hold the world's largest sockeye salmon runs and other rich marine life, including endangered whales and other vulnerable marine mammals. On land, national wildlife refuges and parks are nearby.
(Editing by Alex Dobuzinskis and Lisa Shumaker)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/alaska-mine-damage-streams-wetlands-epa-report-031217221.html
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By Lamine Chikhi
ALGIERS (Reuters) - Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika was transferred to France for medical tests on Saturday night after suffering a minor stroke, Algeria's official news agency said.
Bouteflika, who has ruled over the North African oil and gas producer for more than a decade, had an "transient ischemic attack" or mini-stroke on Saturday but his condition was not serious, the APS agency said, quoting the prime minister.
The 76-year-old is part of an older generation of leaders who have dominated politics in a country that supplies a fifth of Europe's gas imports and cooperates with the West in combating Islamist militancy.
He has rarely appeared in public in recent months, prompting speculation about his health.
"The president felt unwell and he has been hospitalised but his condition is not serious at all," Prime Minister Abdelmalek Sellal was quoted as saying by APS.
The president was then moved to France, on the recommendation of his doctors.
Bouteflika and other members of Algeria's elite have controlled Algeria since it won independence from France in a 1954-62 war.
In the early 1990s, the military-backed politicians overturned an election which Islamists were poised to win and then fought a conflict with them in which about 200,000 people were killed.
They also saw off the challenge of Arab Spring protests two years ago, with Bouteflika's government defusing unrest through pay rises and free loans for young people.
Bouteflika has served three terms as president of the OPEC member and is thought unlikely to seek a fourth at an election due in 2014.
U.S. diplomatic cables leaked in 2011 said Bouteflika had been suffering from cancer but it was in remission.
More than 70 percent of Algerians are under 30. About 21 percent of young people are unemployed, the International Monetary Fund says, and many are impatient with the gerontocracy ruling a country where jobs, wages and housing are urgent concerns.
A transient ischemic attack is a temporary blockage in a blood vessel to the brain. it typically lasts for less than five minutes and "usually causes no permanent injury to the brain", the American Stroke Association said on its website.
The attacks should be seen as a warning as a third of people who experience them go on to have a full stroke within a year, the organisation added. (Reporting by Lamine Chikhi; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/algeria-president-france-tests-minor-stroke-082652028.html
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The round-up of Good Reads this week includes how the Internet could erode China's authoritarianism, the status of the UN millennium development goals, how parents introduce technology to children, and space-diver Felix Baumgartner's superhero suit.
Felix Baumgartner jumped out of a space capsule 130,000 feet above Earth.
Red Bull Stratos/AP/File
EnlargeFreedom is the ethos of the Internet, allowing people to express opinions and organize in the digital sphere. That is, unless you live in a country that manipulates users? online experiences with a ?cyber cage.?
Skip to next paragraph Allison TerryCorrespondent
Allison Terry works on national news desk for the Christian Science Monitor. She also contributes to the culture section and Global News blog.
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China, at the top of this list, has allowed its citizens to benefit from the Internet?s economic mobility while still controlling its political and social impact. As some dissidents have said, ?freedom is knowing how big your cage is,? reports The Economist.
It?s a method of governing the Internet that is antithetical to the Western model of free speech. Further, China?s ?adaptive authoritarianism? is serving as a model for other countries (such as Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and Ethiopia) looking to profit from the Internet even as they control it. But even with this paternalistic approach, The Economist argues that the Internet may still have a destabilizing impact on the foundation of China?s authoritarianism. As online access spreads ? especially via mobile phones ? the democratic nature of the Internet may eventually bring political change to China.
?When, many years from now, history books about this period come to be written, the internet may well turn out to have been an agent not of political upheaval in China but of authoritarian adaptation before the upheaval, building up expectations for better government while delaying the kind of political transformation needed to deliver it,? states the report. ?That may seem paradoxical, but it makes sense for a party intent on staying in power for as long as it can.?
The number of people living in extreme poverty (less than $1.25 a day) dropped from 43 percent in 1990 to about 21 percent in 2010, one indicator that the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have had some measure of success. Reducing extreme poverty by half was achieved five years before its 2015 deadline.
Before governments, multilateral institutions, and nongovernmental organizations set new international development agendas, the accomplishments and shortcomings of MDGs need to be closely examined, writes John W. McArthur in Foreign Affairs.
?The MDGs have helped mobilize and guide development efforts by emphasizing outcomes. They have encouraged world leaders to tackle multiple dimensions of poverty at the same time and have provided a standard that advocates on the ground can hold their governments to,? writes Mr. McArthur. ?Even in countries where politicians might not directly credit the MDGs, the global effort has informed local perspectives and priorities. The goals have improved the lives of hundreds of millions of people. They have shown how much can be achieved when ambitious and specific targets are matched with rigorous thinking, serious resources, and a collaborative global spirit.?
Looking forward to the next generation of development, McArthur said that low-income countries must have a greater voice in outlining the goals, and government accountability must be a priority.
To some parents these days, it may seem as if their toddlers ? or in some cases, infants ? are increasingly tech savvy, especially when it comes to tablets. With more than 40,000 kids? games and applications in iTunes and Google Play, it?s no surprise that such young children have mastered technology, writes Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic.
?It did not seem beyond the range of possibility that if Norman Rockwell were alive, he would paint the two curly-haired boys bent over the screen, one small finger guiding a smaller one across, down, and across again to make, in their triumphant finale, the small z,? Ms. Rosin writes.
On the downside, however, is the extra worry that parents have about what impact technology is having on their children?s development.
?Parents end up treating tablets like precision surgical instruments, gadgets that might perform miracles for their child?s IQ and help him win some nifty robotics competition ? but only if they are used just so,? she writes. ?Otherwise, their child could end up one of those sad, pale creatures who can?t make eye contact and has an avatar for a girlfriend.?
What does it take to jump out of a space capsule 130,000 feet above Earth? Lots of coaching, according to Felix Baumgartner, the man who set the record for highest human free-fall last October, while also breaking the speed of sound.
In a Vanity Fair profile, William Langewiesche describes how Mr. Baumgartner spent five years preparing for the feat with a team of veteran aerospace engineers, test pilots, and a sports psychologist. Baumgartner struggled with the idea of wearing his spacesuit, so his psychologist told him to think of it as a superhero outfit.
?If you put it on and look in a mirror, you look like a hero, you know? There aren?t many people in the world who have their own suit,? Baumgartner said. ?Even astronauts, they don?t have custom-made suits.... It protects me. It gives me the right to be there at 130,000 feet.?
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By Randall Palmer and Alastair Sharp
MONTREAL/TORONTO (Reuters) - Chiheb Esseghaier, a Tunisian doctoral student in Quebec, ran afoul of his research institute's administration two years ago when he tore down posters for the charity United Way showing naked men and women with the slogan "Underneath, we are all equal."
"We met with him to discuss with him and to try to understand why he did that. We explained that we don't do that here," said Julie Martineau, a spokeswoman at the INRS research center at Varennes, south of Montreal.
The incident may have been a simple misunderstanding over cultural norms. But now Esseghaier is one of two men facing charges including conspiracy to commit murder in what prosecutors say was an al Qaeda-backed plot.
They allegedly hoped to derail a passenger train.
An observant Muslim and a Canadian resident, Esseghaier was described by the Tunisian embassy in Ottawa as "a Tunisian citizen and a brilliant PhD student" in a statement issued this week.
He started his four-year research program at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique in 2010, investigating the use of nanotechnology to detect cancer and other diseases.
Esseghaier, aged 30, is the younger of the two men accused of the conspiracy. He faces an additional charge that he instructed one or more people to carry out terrorist activity. He has said the allegations against him are based on laws that are unreliable because they are not the work of God.
In Tunisia, Esseghaier's parents told Reuters that their son was innocent.
"My son is a human being and could not kill an ant. He is the victim of a security crackdown carried out by Canada against religious people to convince people that the Boston incident will not be repeated in Canada," his father Mohamed Rashad Esseghaier said.
"My son is a genius. He has accomplished excellent medical research. He attended seminars in New York. I am proud of him."
His friends in Tunisia said he was easily swayed. "It was easy to influence him; he has a weak personality," one friend, Meriam Sassi, told Reuters. "He could not differentiate between the truth and a joke.
NANOTECHNOLOGY
Esseghaier has been in Canada since 2008, most recently at the prestigious INRS, where he was writing his PhD thesis.
Esseghaier's profile on the networking site LinkedIn is in keeping with the professional focus of the site.
It lists him as the co-author of six academic papers and an attendee at conferences across North America, noting that he obtained a Tunisian master's degree in industrial biotechnology and studied at Quebec's Universite de Sherbrooke before INRS.
Until earlier this week, the profile had one unusual feature. It displayed the black and white flag of al Qaeda's wing in Iraq instead of a profile picture.
By Tuesday, LinkedIn had removed the flag, the emblem of the Islamic State of Iraq, an umbrella group of al Qaeda-linked insurgents. A LinkedIn spokesman said the rules of the site say profile pictures must be of the person.
Attempts by Reuters in the Middle East to reach the Islamic State of Iraq were not successful.
A co-author of one of Esseghaier's academic papers had little insight into the Tunisian.
"It appears that we shared co-authorship in a journal article dealing with biosensors for diagnostics," Carlos Suarez, from Washington State University, told Reuters by email.
"I was quite shocked to find out that I was somehow associated with this person. However, despite sharing co-authorship I've never met this guy before and I don't know who he is."
MONTREAL MOSQUES
Esseghaier, listed as homeless in court papers after his arrest, was known both at a neighborhood mosque in Montreal, and at a larger place of worship that the Pentagon once identified as a place where Islamic extremists were recruited.
"I knew him as a normal Muslim, but I don't know what happened after," one man said as he exited midday prayers at the unassuming Cote-des-Neiges mosque, behind a simple storefront in a multicultural Montreal neighborhood.
A second worshipper said he had seen Esseghaier on Saturday as he looked at accommodation ads at the Assuna Annabawiyah Mosque. The mosque is the only one in North America on a classified Pentagon list of nine mosques where al Qaeda members had recruited, helped or trained.
The New York Times published the Pentagon document, called "Matrix of Threat Indicators for Enemy Combatants," in April 2011, and said the document helped U.S. military analysts assess what risk detainees at its Guantanamo Bay prison might pose.
The Pentagon declined to discuss classified assessments.
Abdel Salam Elmenyawi, president of the Assuna Annabawiyah Mosque, said he had never heard of Esseghaier before he was arrested.
Asked to comment on the Pentagon threat matrix report, he said: "This is such total nonsense."
U.S. law enforcement and national security officials said on Thursday they believed Esseghaier traveled to Iran within the past two years on a trip directly relevant to the investigation of the alleged plot. Canadian police have said the two men received "direction and guidance" from "al Qaeda elements in Iran," though they say there is no sign of Iranian government involvement with the suspects.
CO-ACCUSED
Esseghaier's co-accused is Raed Jaser, 35, a Palestinian whose family came to Canada as refugees in 1993 from the United Arab Emirates. Most of the family are now Canadian citizens.
Like Esseghaier, Jaser held increasingly strong Islamist views, to the extent that his father Mohammed reached out for help to Muhammad Robert Heft, a Canadian convert to Islam and an outreach worker with disaffected Muslim youth.
Heft said the father had expressed concern to him about Jaser's extremist positions starting in 2010.
"He knows something is wrong with that, but not obviously to the degree that his son is going to go off or essentially get arrested for terrorism," Heft said. "When a guy prays to God the manifestations should be that he becomes more merciful and more compassionate, not more angry and aggressive."
An immigration document posted online by the National Post newspaper shows the government tried to deport Raed Jaser in 2004 because of several convictions he racked up after he came to Canada.
The transcript showed Jaser had five convictions for fraud and two for "failure to comply with a recognizance."
But Jaser, who was born in the UAE, was stateless and the Canadians were not sure where to deport him to.
Jaser eventually obtained the status of a permanent resident, Canada's equivalent to a U.S. Green Card.
The family attended his preliminary court hearing on Tuesday in a show of support. They declined to speak to the media after the hearing, and Reuters has been unable to contact them.
Jaser's lawyer John Norris, won an immediate publication ban on court proceedings - barring media from publishing details.
Company records kept by Industry Canada list Jaser as a director of a now defunct limousine service, a firm incorporated in 2008 and dissolved three years later for failing to file annual documents.
Canadian media say he worked more recently at his brother-in-law's moving and storage company, and also as a dispatcher and bus driver.
Members of the Masjid al-Faisal mosque, a short walk from Jaser's semi-detached rented home in Toronto, described Jaser as a quiet, religious man who attended prayers as often as five times a day, at the scheduled prayer times for devout Muslims, and often brought his wife.
"As a person he was very quiet, peaceful. He used to interact in terms of socializing ... but he didn't socialize too much because he came here most of the time with his wife, so he didn't stick around too long," said a senior member of the congregation who asked not to be named.
"But other than that, a very nice fellow."
(Additional reporting by Leila Lemghalef in Montreal and Susan Taylor and Allison Martell in Toronto, Mark Hosenball in Washington, Tarek Amara in Tunis; Editing by Frances Kerry and Claudia Parsons)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/canadian-train-plot-suspects-caused-unease-extreme-views-221636253.html
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Most of us are familiar with the "winter blues," the depression-like symptoms known as "seasonal affective disorder," or SAD, that occurs when the shorter days of winter limit our exposure to natural light and make us more lethargic, irritable and anxious. But for rats it's just the opposite.
Biologists at UC San Diego have found that rats experience more anxiety and depression when the days grow longer. More importantly, they discovered that the rat's brain cells adopt a new chemical code when subjected to large changes in the day and night cycle, flipping a switch to allow an entirely different neurotransmitter to stimulate the same part of the brain.
Their surprising discovery, detailed in the April 26 issue of Science, demonstrates that the adult mammalian brain is much more malleable than was once thought by neurobiologists. Because rat brains are very similar to human brains, their finding also provides a greater insight into the behavioral changes in our brain linked to light reception. And it opens the door for new ways to treat brain disorders such as Parkinson's, caused by the death of dopamine-generating cells in the brain.
The neuroscientists discovered that rats exposed for one week to 19 hours of darkness and five hours of light every day had more nerve cells making dopamine, which made them less stressed and anxious when measured using standardized behavioral tests. Meanwhile, rats exposed for a week with the reverse?19 hours of light and five hours of darkness?had more neurons synthesizing the neurotransmitter somatostatin, making them more stressed and anxious.
"We're diurnal and rats are nocturnal," said Nicholas Spitzer, a professor of biology at UC San Diego and director of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind. "So for a rat, it's the longer days that produce stress, while for us it's the longer nights that create stress."
Because rats explore and search for food at night, while humans evolved as creatures who hunt and forage during the daylight hours, such differences in brain chemistry and behavior make sense. Evolutionary changes presumably favored humans who were more active gatherers of food during the longer days of summer and saved their energy during the shorter days of winter.
"Light is what wakes us up and if we feel depressed we go for a walk outside," said Davide Dulcis, a research scientist in Spitzer's laboratory and the first author of the study. "When it's spring, I feel more motivation to do the things I like to do because the days are longer. But for the rat, it's just the opposite. Because rats are nocturnal, they're less stressed at night, which is good because that's when they can spend more time foraging or eating."
But how did our brains change when humans evolved millions of years ago from small nocturnal rodents to diurnal creatures to accommodate those behavioral changes?
"We think that somewhere in the brain there's been a change," said Spitzer. "Sometime in the evolution from rat to human there's been an evolutionary adjustment of circuitry to allow switching of neurotransmitters in the opposite direction in response to the same exposure to a balance of light and dark."
A study published earlier this month in the American Journal of Preventive Medicinefound some correlation to the light-dark cycle in rats and stress in humans, at least when it comes to people searching on the internet for information in the winter versus the summer about mental illness. Using Google's search data from 2006 to 2010, a team of researchers led by John Ayers of San Diego State University found that mental health searches on Google were, in general, 14 percent higher in the winter in the United States and 11 percent higher in the Australian winter.
"Now that we know that day length can switch transmitters and change behavior, there may be a connection," said Spitzer.
In their rat experiments, the UC San Diego neuroscientists found that the switch in transmitter synthesis in the rat's brain cells from dopamine to somatostatin or back again was not due to the growth of new neurons, but to the ability of the same neurons there to produce different neurotransmitters.
Rats exposed to 19 hours of darkness every 24 hours during the week showed higher numbers of dopamine neurons within their brains and were more likely, the researchers found, to explore the open end of an elevated maze, a behavioral test showing they were less anxious. These rats were also more willing to swim, another laboratory test that showed they were less stressed.
"Because rats are nocturnal animals, they like to explore during the night and dopamine is a key part of our and their reward system," said Spitzer. "It's part of what allows them to be confident and reduce anxiety."
The researchers said they don't know precisely how this neurotransmitter switch works. Nor do they know what proportion of light and darkness or stress triggers this switch in brain chemistry. "Is it 50-50? Or 80 percent light versus dark and 20 percent stress? We don't know," added Spitzer. "If we just stressed the animal and didn't change their photoperiod, would that lead to changes in transmitter identity? We don't know, but those are all doable experiments."
But as they learn more about this trigger mechanism, they said one promising avenue for human application might be to use this neurotransmitter switch to deliver dopamine effectively to parts of the brain that no longer receive dopamine in Parkinson's patients.
"We could switch to a parallel pathway to put dopamine where it's needed with fewer side effects than pharmacological agents," said Dulcis.
Spitzer, Dulcis and the other researchers involved in the study are now working with biomedical scientists at the UC San Diego medical school to track the brains of individual rats with positron emission tomography after long and short days of light to determine how stable the neurotransmitter switches are and how quickly the rat brains change after being exposed to different periods of light.
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University of California - San Diego: http://www.ucsd.edu
Thanks to University of California - San Diego for this article.
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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/127946/Longer_days_bring__winter_blues_____for_rats__not_humans
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A majority says it should be reduced.
The poll was taken right after the capture of the Boston bomber?legal immigrant, and US citizen of less than a year?s duration. The first anniversary of his becoming a citizen will occur on September 11, 2013.
The results represent a spike:
A just-released Fox News poll finds 55 percent of voters think fewer legal immigrants should be accepted into the U.S. That?s up from 43 percent in 2010.
Quite a jump, isn?t it? My hunch is that the figure will go down again, at least somewhat, as the recency of the Boston bombing fades. And even if it doesn?t, don?t look to see legal immigration reduced, especially under this administration. The idea of fewer legal immigrants may be popular with the people, but it doesn?t seem to be all that popular with politicians of either party.
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 25th, 2013 at 9:49 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.Source: http://neoneocon.com/2013/04/25/public-on-legal-immigration-too-much/
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Public release date: 26-Apr-2013
Share ] Contact: Carl Blesch
cblesch@ur.rutgers.edu
732-932-7084 x616
Rutgers University
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. Rutgers University physicist Karin Rabe has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies and a leading center for independent policy research.
Rabe is a professor II in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the School of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on theoretical analysis and prediction of the structure and properties of materials, and applying these methods to the design of new materials that could be used in future electronic devices for energy conversion and information storage and processing. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society, from which she received the David Adler Lectureship Award in Materials Physics in 2008. Earlier in her career, she received a Presidential Young Investigator Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.
Rabe is among 198 scholars, scientists, writers, artists, civic, corporate and philanthropic leaders selected to join the academy this year. Members contribute to academy studies of science and technology policy, energy and global security, social policy and American institutions, and the humanities, arts and education.
"Election to the Academy honors individual accomplishment and calls upon members to serve the public good," said Academy President Leslie C. Berlowitz. "We look forward to drawing on the knowledge and expertise of these distinguished men and women to advance solutions to the pressing policy challenges of the day."
With this new appointment, 22 Rutgers faculty have been elected members of the academy. The new class will be inducted at a ceremony on Oct. 12 at the academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.
Since its founding in 1780, the Academy has elected leading "thinkers and doers" from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Public release date: 26-Apr-2013 Share ] Contact: Carl Blesch
cblesch@ur.rutgers.edu
732-932-7084 x616
Rutgers University
NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. Rutgers University physicist Karin Rabe has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, one of the nation's most prestigious honorary societies and a leading center for independent policy research.
Rabe is a professor II in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the School of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on theoretical analysis and prediction of the structure and properties of materials, and applying these methods to the design of new materials that could be used in future electronic devices for energy conversion and information storage and processing. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Physical Society, from which she received the David Adler Lectureship Award in Materials Physics in 2008. Earlier in her career, she received a Presidential Young Investigator Award and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.
Rabe is among 198 scholars, scientists, writers, artists, civic, corporate and philanthropic leaders selected to join the academy this year. Members contribute to academy studies of science and technology policy, energy and global security, social policy and American institutions, and the humanities, arts and education.
"Election to the Academy honors individual accomplishment and calls upon members to serve the public good," said Academy President Leslie C. Berlowitz. "We look forward to drawing on the knowledge and expertise of these distinguished men and women to advance solutions to the pressing policy challenges of the day."
With this new appointment, 22 Rutgers faculty have been elected members of the academy. The new class will be inducted at a ceremony on Oct. 12 at the academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Mass.
Since its founding in 1780, the Academy has elected leading "thinkers and doers" from each generation, including George Washington and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-04/ru-rpe042513.php
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