Nation Finally Shitty Enough To Make Social Progress

NOVEMBER 5, 2008 | ISSUE 44•45 ; Source: www.theonion.com

WASHINGTON—After emerging victorious from one of the most pivotal elections in history, president-elect Barack Obama will assume the role of commander in chief on Jan. 20, shattering a racial barrier the United States is, at long last, shitty enough to overcome.

Although polls going into the final weeks of October showed Sen. Obama in the lead, it remained unclear whether the failing economy, dilapidated housing market, crumbling national infrastructure, health care crisis, energy crisis, and five-year-long disastrous war in Iraq had made the nation crappy enough to rise above 300 years of racial prejudice and make lasting change.

"Today the American people have made their voices heard, and they have said, 'Things are finally as terrible as we're willing to tolerate," said Obama, addressing a crowd of unemployed, uninsured, and debt-ridden supporters. "To elect a black man, in this country, and at this time—these last eight years must have really broken you."

Added Obama, "It's a great day for our nation."

Carrying a majority of the popular vote, Obama did especially well among women and young voters, who polls showed were particularly sensitive to the current climate of everything being fucked. Another contributing factor to Obama's victory, political experts said, may have been the growing number of Americans who, faced with the complete collapse of their country, were at last able to abandon their preconceptions and cast their vote for a progressive African-American.

Citizens with eyes, ears, and the ability to wake up and realize what truly matters in the end are also believed to have played a crucial role in Tuesday's election.

According to a CNN exit poll, 42 percent of voters said that the nation's financial woes had finally become frightening enough to eclipse such concerns as gay marriage, while 30 percent said that the relentless body count in Iraq was at last harrowing enough to outweigh long ideological debates over abortion. In addition, 28 percent of voters were reportedly too busy paying off medial bills, desperately trying not to lose their homes, or watching their futures disappear to dismiss Obama any longer.

"The election of our first African-American president truly shows how far we've come as a nation," said NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams. "Just eight years ago, this moment would have been unthinkable. But finally we, as a country, have joined together, realized we've reached rock bottom, and for the first time voted for a candidate based on his policies rather than the color of his skin."

"Today Americans have grudgingly taken a giant leap forward," Williams continued. "And all it took was severe economic downturn, a bloody and unjust war in Iraq, terrorist attacks on lower Manhattan, nearly 2,000 deaths in New Orleans, and more than three centuries of frequently violent racial turmoil."

Said Williams, "The American people should be commended for their long-overdue courage."

Obama's victory is being called the most significant change in politics since the 1992 election, when a full-scale economic recession led voters to momentarily ignore the fact that candidate Bill Clinton had once smoked marijuana. While many believed things had once again reached an all-time low in 2004, the successful reelection of President George W. Bush—despite historically low approval ratings nationwide—proved that things were not quite shitty enough to challenge the already pretty shitty status quo.

"If Obama learned one thing from his predecessors, it's that timing means everything," said Dr. James Pung, a professor of political science at Princeton University. "Less than a decade ago, Al Gore made the crucial mistake of suggesting we should care about preserving the environment before it became unavoidably clear that global warming would kill us all, and in 2004, John Kerry cost himself the presidency by criticizing Bush's disastrous Iraq policy before everyone realized our invasion had become a complete and total quagmire."

"Obama had the foresight to run for president at a time when being an African-American was not as important to Americans as, say, the ability to clothe and feed their children," Pung continued. "An election like this only comes once, maybe twice, in a lifetime."

As we enter a new era of equality for all people, the election of Barack Obama will decidedly be a milestone in U.S. history, undeniable proof that Americans, when pushed to the very brink, are willing to look past outward appearances and judge a person by the quality of his character and strength of his record. So as long as that person is not a woman.

James Carroll: Making sense of $700 billion

How much is 700 billion? The mind registers the number with such imprecision as to make it meaningless. One blogger proposed this way of grasping the figure: As a stack of $100 bills, it would reach 54 miles high. But who can imagine that? On the other hand, someone at the Smithsonian once calculated that counting to one billion, at the rate of one digit per second, would take 30 years. By that scale, counting to 700 billion would take 21,000 years.

Come again? That stretch of time takes us back to the cave painters of Lascaux, the glacial age, the last Neanderthals. The mind is not helped.

By a nice coincidence, though, the U.S. financial rescue package of $700 billion duplicates a number that was also in the news last week - the Pentagon budget. In the fiscal year just beginning, the U.S. Defense Department will spend $607 billion on normal military costs, and an additional $100 billion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. (As of June 30, 2008, Congress had appropriated $859 billion for the wars; Congressional Budget Office projections assume further costs of $400 billion to $500 billion as the wars wind down). But for the coming year, $700 billion is the Pentagon's nice round number (this includes neither Homeland Security nor intelligence costs).

Step back. All of last week's hand-wringing hoopla over the emergency bailout stands in stark contrast to the utter indifference with which politicians approved an equivalent layout for the military - an approval so routine that it was ignored in the press and by the public.

Barack Obama has no issue with current Defense expenditures. The annual American military budget is at least 10 times larger than the military budgets of Russia and China; it is 20 times larger than the entire budget of the U.S. State Department. But last week's demonstration of anguish over the historic financial rescue figure throws an entirely new light on the nearly identical number that will fund the Pentagon for one measly year.

This is not a matter merely of comparison. Here is the question that no one is asking about America's grave financial crisis: By fueling corporate profits, jobs, and private-sector growth for two generations with massive over-investment in the military, has the United States gutted the real worth of its economy?

One needn't be an economist to know that spending money on war planes, missiles and exotic weapons systems, not to mention combat operations, creates far less social capital than spending on education, bridges, mass transit, new forms of energy - even the arts.

The genius of America's most brilliant minds has been yoked for more than half a century to the invention of ways to kill and destroy. ("I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness." - Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," 1956) What if those minds had been put to work imagining alternative futures - the rescue of the environment, the ending of disease and poverty, the artistic fulfillment of new media, the teaching of children? It's a question as old as Eisenhower ("The cost of one modern heavy bomber," he said in 1953, "is this: A modern brick school in more than 30 cities." Leaving office, he said, "We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage." That's us.)

The $700 billion bailout aims to rescue the world's economy, but that, too, raises questions about the Pentagon's prior effect there. Because America has put military invention at the heart of its enterprise, the exporting of weapons to countries that do not need them and cannot afford them has become a main mode of America's being in the world. (The Arms Control Association reports that in 2007 the Pentagon sent $40 billion worth of arms to two dozen nations; that is double the 2007 appropriation for US foreign aid.) Unneeded weapons spark unnecessary wars.

That the majority of humans are in dire straits and that the planet itself is groaning are issues treated like givens of nature, yet they are results of the ways creativity is channeled and resources are shared. $700 billion for rescue. $700 billion for war. Something is wrong with this picture, and last week that coincidence of numbers told us what.

Source: International Herald Tribune, Published: October 6, 2008

Syria and Lebanon agree on border

Syria and Lebanon have agreed to resume the work of a committee to demarcate their common border, a joint statement by the two countries says.

The neighbours also agreed to examine another disputed issue, the fate of hundreds of people who have been missing "in the two countries" since the 1975-1990 civil war in Lebanon.

The statement was read at a news conference by each country's foreign minister, as Michel Sleiman, the Lebanese president, ended a landmark two-day visit.

Sleiman and Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, agreed on Wednesday to start the first ever full diplomatic relations since independence 60 years ago.

The borders between the two countries are poorly delimited in certain places, particularly the Shebaa Farms, a mountainous sliver of land rich in water resources located at the junction of southeast Lebanon, southwest Syria and northern Israel.

The 25-square km tract of farming land was seized by Israel from Syria in the 1967 Middle East war and is now claimed by Beirut, with the backing of Damascus. Israel says they are part of Syria.

Asked whether Thursday's agreement would include a redrawing of the Shebaa Farms, Walid al-Moualem, the Syrian foreign minister, said: "The definition of the Shebaa Farms cannot happen under occupation."

Lebanese and Syrian territories have also been in dispute over several areas of Bekaa and northern Lebanon since the creation in 1920 of greater Lebanon, an administrative district within the French mandate for Syria.

Human rights groups claim that around 650 people who went missing during the Lebanese civil war are being held in Syria, which dominated Lebanon politically and militarily for almost 30 years until April 2005.

Sleiman is the first Lebanese president to visit Damascus since Syria withdrew its troops from Lebanon in April 2005, two months after the assassination in a massive Beirut bomb blast of Rafiq al-Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister.

Damascus has denied any responsibility despite accusations by Lebanese anti-Syrian groups.
Saad Hariri, Rafik al-Hariri's son and political heir, welcomed the establishment of diplomatic ties, describing it as an accomplishment for the Lebanese people.

Ocean 'dead zones' expanding worldwide: study

Oceanic "dead zones" where marine life cannot survive have been steadily increasing over the past five decades and now encompass 400 coastal areas of the world, a US-Swedish study.

"The formation of dead zones has been exacerbated by the increase in (pollution) ... fueled by riverine runoff of fertilizers and the burning of fossil fuels," the study said.

The phenomenon, called eutrophication, is caused by industrial pollution as well as runoff of water containing phosphates and nitrates into the oceans.

Oceans react to the boost in pollution by growing more algae and vegetation in coastal areas.

When the algae dies and sinks to the bottom, it decreases the amount of oxygen available in the bottom waters, a process called hypoxia, eventually wiping out fish and crustaceans that live there, as well as the foods they eat.

Dead zones tend to creep up in calm waters that see lower water exchange, but have more recently been affecting major fishery areas in the Baltic, Kattegat, and Black Seas as well as the Gulf of Mexico and East China Sea, the study said.

The researchers said the expansion of dead zones in these areas threatens commercial fishing and shrimping near the coastlines.

The phenomenon was first noted along the Adriatic Coast in the 1950s.

Seasonal dead zones affect the Gulf of Mexico, Chesapeake Bay and Scandinavian waters.

It can take years to treat severe hypoxia in a coastal region, and only four percent of treated areas have shown any signs of improvement, though the trend is reversible, the study said.

"From 1970 to 1990, the hypoxic zone on the northwestern continental shelf of the Black Sea has expanded to 40,000 square kilometers (15,500 square miles)," the study noted.

"However, since 1989, the loss of fertilizer subsidies from the former Soviet Union reduced nutrient loading by a factor of two to four, with the result that by 1995 the hypoxic zone had gone.

"The study authors said the global warming trend alone was likely to increase oceanic dead zones by increasing temperature, causing changes in rainfall patterns and changing discharges of fresh water and agricultural nutrients into the oceans.

"Climate change also has the potential to expand naturally occurring OMZs (oxygen minimum zones) into shallower coastal waters, damaging fisheries and affecting energy flows in the same way that eutrophication-driven hypoxia does," the authors wrote.

The researchers noted that any return to preindustrial levels of nutrient input into global waters would be "unrealistic".

However, they said "an appropriate management goal would be to reduce nutrient inputs to levels that occurred in the middle of the past century, before eutrophication began to spread dead zones globally."

Source: New Straits Times, 16th August 2008

Bisexuality passed on by 'hyper-heterosexuals'

Bisexual men might have their "hyper-heterosexual" female relatives to thank for their orientation.

Previous work has suggested that genes influencing sexual orientation in men also make women more likely to reproduce. Andrea Camperio Ciani and colleagues at the University of Padua, Italy, showed that the female relatives of homosexual men tend to have more children, suggesting that genes on the X chromosome are responsible. Now the team have shown that the same is true for bisexuality.

"It helps to answer a perplexing question - how can there be 'gay genes' given that gay sex doesn't lead to procreation?" says Dean Hamer of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who was not involved in the work. "The answer is remarkably simple: the same gene that causes men to like men also causes women to like men, and as a result to have more children."

Sexual attraction
The researchers asked 239 men to fill out questionnaires about their families and their past sexual experiences. On the basis of their answers, the men were classified as heterosexual, bisexual or homosexual. The results showed that the maternal aunts, grandmothers and mothers of both bisexual men and homosexuals had more children than those of heterosexual men.

Camperio Ciani emphasises that, rather than being a "gay gene", this unidentified genetic factor is likely to promote sexual attraction to men in both men and women. This would influence a woman's attitude rather than actually increasing her fertility, making her likely to have more children.

Simon LeVay, a neuroscientist and writer based in West Hollywood, California, describes this as a sort of "hyper-heterosexuality" and explains how it would help to ensure that homosexual behaviour was passed on through the generations. "The positive effect of an X-linked gene on female fecundity tends to outweigh the negative effect of the gene on male fecundity."

According to Camperio Ciani and colleagues, the same genetic factor appearing to be present in both bisexual and homosexual men provides further support for the idea that sexuality is determined by a complex mix of genes and experience.

"We understand that the genetic component has to interact with something to produce different phenotypes," says Camperio Ciani.

"Genetics is not determining the sexual orientation, it's only influencing it."

Source: NewScientist
15:45 15 August 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Tamsin Osborne

Mobile wallet, or maybe more!

Would you like it if one day, you forget to bring your wallet, yet you can still pay for your bus ride or buy a drink from a vending machine? Or you forgot to bring your staff pass, yet you can still enter your office building. When you finally got home, you can open your house doors despite having left the keys home too.

All these and more are enabled by a new technology called mobile wallet. Mobile wallet is mobile phone that has functionality to supplant a conventional wallet and more. Unlike mobile commerce, mobile wallet is a much more versatile application that includes elements of mobile transactions, as well as other items one may find in a wallet, such as membership cards, loyalty cards and travel cards. It also stores personal and sensitive information like passport, credit card information, PIN codes, online shopping accounts, booking details and insurance policies that can be encrypted or password-protected. The technology aims to reduce the number items people will need to carry around.

With mobile wallet, the user can use their mobile phone to pay transactions at merchants that accept mobile payments. To do this, the user just needs to upload digital cash from a credit card to their mobile phone and swipe their mobile phone at payment counters. They can also swipe their mobile phone at ticketing machines. Mobile wallet can be used as a virtual train ticket where customers just wave their mobile phone across the checkout stations instead of using separate swipe cards. Another use is as an identifier to log on to a computer at Internet kiosks. The data is exchanged by mere proximity, without the need for physical contact. Users who use the same mobile wallet applications can also exchange data with one another, example bank account numbers when they need to perform bank transfers among one another. There are several technologies that could enable mobile wallet operations of handsets, including Near Field Communications (NFC), Radio Frequency (RFID), bar codes, and visual recognition.

According to InStat, a high-tech market research firm, as many as 25 million wireless phone subscribers in North America could be using their mobile phones as mobile wallets by 2011. One of the first carriers to launch mobile wallet is NTT Docomo that uses its Felica system to allow those who carry compatible 3G handsets like Fujitsu’s F900iC and other models by NEC, Panasonic, Sharp, Mitsubishi and Sony Ericsson to make payments using their handsets. A credit card-sized Sony smart card powers the system. It holds a chip which can be loaded with personal data.

With a subscription, the wallet phones work by sending data at high speeds and securely over the DoCoMo network. Special readers can also be built into cash machines and cash registers to recognise the transactions. The handsets have built-in security to stop others using the service by using password protection or fingerprint scanning.

In South Korea, SK Telecom has started a mobile wallet service called Moneta. Even in the Philipines, a service known as G-Cash allows the transfer of money via text messages (SMS). This service enables users to send money from mobile to mobile, buy goods and services and pay for business permits and micro loans and won an award at the GSM Association Awards 2005 in Cannes.

Innovations in mobile payment could also benefit people developing content for internet websites. It would be possible to charge small payments on the website using your mobile phone. Even PayPal has joined in the foray by introducing the ability to make payments or to send money to others by sending SMS. All you need is to activate your account using your phone number and you can text a message when you see something you are interested in. Every order will be followed by a Mobile PIN as an added layer of security. Hey, you can even donate money using PayPal’s mobile wallet.

While there is widespread enthusiasm about mobile wallet technology, there are fears of security breaches and identity theft. Having all your personal and sensitive information stored on a phone poses a big risk. Incidents of people having their mobile phone stolen will lead to more loss in personal information like bank accounts and passport numbers. However, it would be great if the day will come when we can leave home without our wallet, credit card, passport, membership cards and keys. There would be a lot of empty space in wallets and handbags.

Source: http://www.mobileworld.com.my

Making no waves

This article makes me smile =)
Have a good day!

Cher Linn

ATHLETES in the ancient Olympics competed in the buff, on the grounds (among other things) that clothes were a hindrance to performance. Modern technology, however, has changed that. In some sports, notably swimming, the right costume can be an enormous boon. Take Speedo's LZR swimsuit, which was introduced in February. Fully 38 of the 42 world swimming records that have been broken since then have fallen to swimmers wearing LZRs. Indeed, some of those records have been claimed by less-than-notable racers, suggesting that the difference lies in the apparel, not the athlete.

To make the LZR four innovations had to come together. The first is the fabric. The new suit is cut from a densely woven nylon-elastane material that compresses the wearer's body into a hydrodynamic shape but is extremely light. Moreover, there are no sewn seams. Instead, the suit is bonded together using ultrasonic welding. Seams act as speed bumps in the water. Ultrasonic welding removes 6% of the drag that would otherwise occur, according to Jason Rance, the head of Aqualab, Speedo's research-and-development centre in Nottingham in Britain. Compared with Speedo's previous suit, which was used by numerous gold medallists in the 2004 Olympic Games, the new material has half the weight yet triple the power to compress the body.

Second, the suit has what Speedo calls an “internal core stabiliser”—like a corset that holds the swimmer's form. As a swimmer tires, his hips hang lower in the water, creating drag. By compressing his torso, the LZR not only lets him go faster, because it maintains a tubular shape, but also allows him to swim longer with less effort. In tests, swimmers wearing the LZR consumed 5% less oxygen for a given level of performance than those wearing normal swimsuits did.

Third, as a further drag-reduction measure, polyurethane panels have been placed in spots on the suit. This reduces drag by another 24% compared with the previous Speedo model. Fourth, the LZR was designed using a three-dimensional pattern rather than a two-dimensional one. It thus hugs a swimmer's body like a second skin; indeed, when it is not being worn, it does not lie flat but has a shape to it.

The results are a suit that costs $600 and takes 20 minutes to squeeze into, and a widespread belief among swimmers competing in the Beijing Olympics this summer that they will have to wear one or fail. The director of the American team, Mark Schubert, for example, thinks the LZR improves performance by as much as 2%—a huge leap considering that tenths of a second may mark the difference between first and fourth place. Arena, a rival swimsuit-maker, called the situation “unprecedented” and, initially, lobbied for a review of the garment rules in an open letter to the sport's governing body, FINA (the Fédération Internationale de Natation). Another maker, Tyr, has launched another type of suit altogether. It is suing Speedo's parent company, Warnaco Swimwear, Mr Schubert (for more or less insisting that members of his team wear the LZR) and others on antitrust grounds. The LZR is thus being referred to by some people as high-tech doping on a hanger.

Speedo's success is partly due to a subtle rule “clarification” made by FINA in April which confirms that polyurethane areas can be incorporated into racing swimsuits. Other manufacturers complain it is unfair that a revision with sweeping implications took place only a few months before the Olympics. Still, they are rushing to bring forward rival products. On June 4th FINA approved new suits by Arena, Adidas and Mizuno, so Speedo's technological lead may not last. In technology as in sport, records are simply there to be broken.

Source: The Economist 11th June 2008