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A few years before "Super Size Me" hit theaters in 2004, Dr. Paresh Dandona, a diabetes specialist in Buffalo, New York, set out to measure the body's response to McDonald's — specifically breakfast. Over several mornings, he fed nine normal-weight volunteers an egg sandwich with cheese and ham, a sausage muffin sandwich, and two hash brown patties.
Dandona is a professor at the State University of New York-Buffalo who also heads the Diabetes-Endocrinology Center of Western New York, and what he observed has informed his research ever since. Levels of a C-reactive protein, an indicator of systemic inflammation, shot up "within literally minutes." "I was shocked," he recalls, that "a simple McDonald's meal that seems harmless enough" — the sort of high-fat, high-carbohydrate meal that one in four Americans eats regularly — would have such a dramatic effect. And it lasted for hours.
Inflammation comes in many forms. The swelling of a sprained ankle indicates repairing torn muscle and tendon. The redness and pain around an infected cut signifies the body's repulsion of microbes. The fever, aches, and pains that accompany the flu represent a body-wide seek-and-destroy mission directed against an invading virus. They're all essential to survival, the body's response to a perceived threat or injury. But inflammation can also cause collateral damage, especially when the response is overwhelming — like in septic shock — or when it goes on too long.
Chronic, low-grade inflammation has long been recognized as a feature of metabolic syndrome, a cluster of dysfunctions that tends to precede full-blown diabetes and that also increases the risk of heart disease, stroke, certain cancers, and even dementia — the top killers of the developed world. The syndrome includes a combination of elevated blood sugar and high blood pressure, low "good" cholesterol, and an abdominal cavity filled with fat, often indicated by a "beer belly." But recently, doctors have begun to question whether chronic inflammation is more than just a symptom of metabolic syndrome: Could it, in fact, be a major cause?
For Dandona, who's given to waxing grandiloquent about the joys of a beer on the porch in his native Delhi, or the superb ice wines from the Buffalo region, the results presented a quandary. Food was a great pleasure in life. Why would Nature be so cruel, he wondered, and punish us just for eating?
Over the next decade he tested the effects of various foods on the immune system. A fast-food breakfast inflamed, he found, but a high-fiber breakfast with lots of fruit did not. A breakthrough came in 2007 when he discovered that while sugar water, a stand-in for soda, caused inflammation, orange juice — even though it contains plenty of sugar — didn't.
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The city announced Thursday that the California Energy Commission approved the city’s locally adopted energy standards, making Lancaster the first city in the nation to make residential solar mandatory.
Given authority by the CEC to enforce the ordinance, Lancaster now requires single family residential units – built after Jan. 1, 2014 – to provide an average of 1 kilowatt (kW) of solar-generated electricity per housing unit.
“We continue to aggressively pursue net-zero status, and this approval by the CEC proves we are indeed on the right path,” Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris said in a city news release. “Requiring solar power assets for new residential construction in the coming years will bring Lancaster one huge step closer to becoming the Alternative Energy Capital of the World, while providing new homeowners with earth-friendly and cost-effective benefits.”
Lancaster’s Residential Zoning Ordinance was comprehensively revised to require new home builders to meet the aggregate energy generation requirement within a production subdivision, though solar energy systems do not have to be on every home [* SEE DEC. 30-2013 ENDNOTE], according to the news release.
Approved on Dec. 11 by the CEC, the new ordinance was adopted by the Lancaster City Council in March 2013, which approved the implemention of solar energy systems into new residential construction.
At its Oct. 22 meeting, the City Council unanimously adopted another ordinance that amended the 2013 edition of the California Building Standards Code, placing those standards within the Lancaster Municipal Code.
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Since mid-2013, KPN is rolling over standard Gigabit Fiber (GoF) technology in new FTTH areas, making the speed WBA 500/500 Mbps can offer customers.
KPN also started in 2014 with the deployment of WBA 500/500 Mbps FTTH in existing areas. The planning of this deployment can be found on the website of KPN Wholesale .
In existing FTTH areas KPN now offers a maximum speed of internet WBA 100/100 Mbps Ethernet technology over Fiber (EoF). In 2012, KPN piloted in three existing FTTH areas (IJburg, Nunspeet and Wells) with the offer of the speed 500/500 Mbps.
Gigabit over Fiber (GoF) technology KPN makes these speeds. In the pilot, KPN has also looked at the evolution of the migrations between the different technologies.
When Kanye West [cq] wrote the lyric, "I'm chilling, trying to stack these millions," he probably did not mean digital currency. But a new technology might give him pause, or at least have him scratching his head.
In a sign that the frenzy over Bitcoin may have reached a new level of ridiculousness, there is now another phenomenon inspired by it: Coinye West, named after the American hip hop artist Kanye West.
Bitcoin is a new online technology designed as a currency to enable anonymous transactions over the Internet with little or no fees. Bitcoin mining involves pooling together the resources of computers over a network to solve mathematical problems that, theoretically, generate bitcoins as a reward. The software supporting the system is open source, so it has already spawned a number of alternative forms of the technology, such as Ripple, Litecoin and Colored Coins.
Coinye West, however, might be the first to be modeled after, and take its name from, a celebrity. "We chose Kanye because of his trendsetting abilities and his originality," the developers of the currency said via email. They declined to identify themselves due to the collaborative and "decentralized" nature of the currency. West himself was not involved in developing the currency, and he was notified of its existence only via Twitter. But who knows how the artist might respond, given his previous claim that "I am Steve Jobs."
The currency will officially launch on Jan. 11, underpinned by a common-sense goal: To make digital currencies more accessible to a less technical audience. The Coinye West system, its developers said, will use a different algorithm from Bitcoin's that will let people use their home computers to acquire Coinye West coins instead of having to go out and buy expensive, specialized hardware.
The name of this mining software will be "Gold Digger," the developers said, presumably after the title of a popular song by West. "We want to bring cryptocurrency to the masses," they said, "so that anybody can get into mining with a couple of clicks."
The currency is also intended to support hip-hop-related e-commerce transactions. Some online merchants have already contacted the currency's founders asking how they can accept it as money, the founders said.
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ISPs exist to provide us with unfettered access to the Internet, not the version they or their technology partners feels is appropriate for us. Their ‘parental controls’ do not achieve their stated aim of “protecting children” and are already causing collateral damage by blocking totally innocent sites such as the one you are reading now. It’s hard not to get angry when you realize your website’s accessibility is becoming disabled by default.
Someone once told me never to go food shopping when hungry, never to argue when drunk, and more recently never to write when angry. Take a deep breath, go for a run, get the aggression out anyway you can first, I was advised.
I’ve done all of that this morning and none of it has worked. In fact, I might be even more fired up than before. This website blocking nonsense that is beginning to pollute the Internet has gone way too far and is becoming my sworn enemy.
Here at TF we’ve long been opponents of website blocking. It’s a blunt instrument that is prone to causing collateral damage and known for failing to achieve its stated aims. We recently discovered that thanks to Sky’s Broadband Shield filtering system, TorrentFreak is now blocked on one of the UK’s largest ISPs by users who think they are protecting their kids.
Our crimes are the topics we cover. As readers know we write about file-sharing, copyright and closely linked issues including privacy and web censorship. We write about the positives and the negatives of those topics and we solicit comments from not only the swarthiest of pirates, but also the most hated anti-piracy people on the planet.
If the MPAA, RIAA, FACT, BPI, RightsAlliance, BREIN and every DMCA takedown company on earth want to have their say they can do that, alongside the folks at The Pirate Bay. We won’t deny anyone their voice, whether it’s someone being raided by the police or the people who instigated the raid. Getting the news out is paramount.
We are not scared to let anyone have their say and we embrace free speech. But apparently the people at Sky and their technology masters at Symantec believe that we should be denied our right to communicate on the basis that we REPORT NEWS about file-sharing issues.
That’s just utter nonsense.
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Today, a lot of transactions concerning the Petroleum industry are carried out via the internet. This is why a majority of the Petroleum dealers in Melbourne and the outlying agencies have invested in high-end solutions. Anahata offers customized solutions that are designed and developed to meet the specific needs and requirements of each and every dealer in the industry.
Anahata was established by Pablo Rodriguez Pina and Robert Nagajek in 2010. Since then it has grown to become the leading ICT solutions provider in Melbourne and the greater Victoria area.
The firms brand is bolstered by being an Oracle Certified Partner and certified MYOB developer partner developing solutions using Java, Java Enterprise Edition, Oracle Database and MySQL as well as MYOB AccountRight (cloud) and MYOB AccountRight desktop.
Conversely, Anahata has embarked in partnership with other major industry players to deliver turnkey solutions that are seamlessly integrated to the existing systems and infrastructure like hosting, infrastructure, barcode printing, RFID Scanning, mobility and other similar technologies.
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Week after week, newspapers issue a stream of hopeful headlines: Microsoft, PayPal, Fujitsu and scores of other companies are expanding their investments in Ireland, creating thousands of jobs as unemployment hovers near record highs.
There is just one hitch: Not enough people are qualified to fill all the jobs. In some cases, the companies have had to look outside Ireland to recruit candidates with the right skills.
After a five-year economic crisis, the mismatch represents one of the thorniest problems facing Ireland and many other European countries. Hundreds of thousands of people who lost work, and many young people entering the work force, are finding that their skills are ill suited to a huge crop of innovation-based jobs springing up across the Continent.
"In all countries, there is an expectation that many of the new jobs created will be in the knowledge-intensive economy," said Glenda Quintini, a senior labor economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. "But we are seeing a worrisome skills mismatch that means a large number of unemployed people are not well prepared for the pool of jobs opening up."
Employers have long complained that graduates do not have the skills they need. But in a recent report, the International Labor Organization warned that "skills mismatches and occupational shifts have worsened" in Europe in the wake of the crisis. People laid off in hard-hit sectors, from construction to finance, face lengthy retraining, while too few graduates entering the job market have chosen engineering, science or technology degrees for the growing innovation-based jobs market.
The gap in Europe has important consequences for the recovery as the euro zone grapples with unemployment rates stuck stubbornly above 12 percent: It may hold back a return to meaningful growth and generate "significant economic and social costs," according to the European Commission, the policy-making arm of the European Union.
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Last December, the FDN Federation attended the 30th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg.
It was a very fruitful event, which allowed us to meet many DIY ISP initiatives or community networks from all around the world. We discussed and exchanged about our goals, our difficulties, and possible solutions. It was also an opportunity for every project to present their tools.
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According to the statistics from China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the number of fixed-line subscribers in China reached 185 million as of the third quarter of 2013, up only by 9% compared to the same quarter a year ago.
Neither did the country's Optical Network City project achieve its goal, with the penetration rate of FTTH/O reaching only 18%. Although China has the most FTTH/O subscribers in the world, the number of subscribers increased by only 13 million during the first three quarter of 2013 - a number which is only 10% of the increase in 3G service subscribers during the same period.
The development of fixed-line broadband networks has been slow mainly because of a number of reasons, Digitimes Research believes.
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Fears within the Obama administration and Congress are mounting about Chinese telecom giant Huawei’s plan to build a wireless network in South Korea. The Obama administration and Congress are turning up the pressure on South Korea to turn back from a pending deal with Huawei Technologies, a Chinese firm that the U.S. intelligence community believes is linked to the Chinese military.
Top administration officials have begun quietly talking to Seoul about U.S. national-security concerns over the pending deal, which would see Huawei help build South Korea’s new broadband network. A growing list of influential lawmakers are also raising red flags about a deal that would make some 28,500 U.S. military forces in South Korea dependent on a communications network that might leave them vulnerable to Chinese eavesdropping.
Vice President Joe Biden raised the issue with Prime Minister Jung Hong-won during his trip to South Korea in early December, according to two sources briefed on the meeting. Also, the White House’s National Security staff has tasked the U.S. intelligence community to study the effects of the Huawei-South Korea deal on American security interests.
On Thursday in a statement to The Daily Beast, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) joined the growing bipartisan chorus opposing the deal and pledged that Congress would act if South Korea went through with the arrangement.
“The Republic of Korea is not just a close U.S. ally; it is a country in which 28,500 Americans in uniform are serving on the front lines and ready to fight in Korea’s defense. The national-security interests of the United States are thus directly affected by the integrity of Korea’s information networks,” McCain said. “Given the serious concerns that our government has with Huawei and its alleged ties to the Chinese government, a Korean decision to give Huawei a major stake in building out the country’s telecommunications infrastructure would go over very badly in the United States and the Congress.”
McCain’s concerns echoed those of two top Democrats, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-NJ), who asked senior Obama administration officials to review the deal in a letter reported by The Daily Beast last month.
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Would you enjoy the cosiness and warmth of Christmas with your children or grandchildren just that little bit less if you knew that other people's children were dying because of it? More than four million children under five years old are now at risk of acute malnutrition in the Sahel, an area of the world that is one of the clearest victims of the rich world's addiction to fossil fuels.
About 18 million people in the Sahel – the vulnerable pan-African strip of land that runs from Senegal to Sudan along the southern edge of the Sahara – faced famine last year. Life has never been easy there. Its land is poor. Its people are often semi-nomadic, moving their animals between the grasslands. But science is increasingly pointing a hard finger at those to blame for the persistence of Sahelian drought – and it is us.
This is an ineluctable consequence of improving the computer models of climate change. Of course, there are still large uncertainties. But what has long persuaded me of the strength of the scientific case for human-induced climate change is that climate-sceptic scientists have not managed to build a model that explains global warming without human-induced effects. The human hand is indispensable in understanding what has happened.
There are legitimate doubts about the scale of the impact, and about other offsetting factors that may reduce human-induced global warming. But what should be a wake-up call is science's growing ability to highlight the blame for particular extreme events, and not just in the Sahel.
For instance, a recent paper by Fraser C Lott and colleagues examined the increased probability that the 2011 East African drought in Somalia and Kenya can be attributed to human-induced climate change. Pardeep Pal and others investigated the impact of climate change on the £1.3bn insured losses from the flooding in the UK in 2000. Peter A Stott and others looked at the hot European summer of 2003, and its heatwave-related deaths.
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Development Bank of Japan Inc. will buy half of the stake in a 172-megawatt offshore wind project in the U.K. owned by Marubeni Corp., which purchased its original holding for 200 million ($329 million) pounds in 2011.
The bank and Marubeni will now each own 24.95 percent of the Gunfleet Sands facility off Essex, DBJ said in a statement today.
Denmark-based Dong Energy A/S will retain its majority ownership and will continue to operate the project, according to the statement, which didn’t disclose financial terms.
“By partnering up with Marubeni and Dong Energy, who is the market leader in offshore wind, DBJ will be able to support domestic and international renewable energy projects,” DBJ said in the statement.
Tokyo-based Marubeni confirmed the deal in a separate statement today.
The Edward Snowden and NSA dragnet surveillance story that dominated headlines last week was framed in terms of a tension between national security and civil rights: Judge Richard Leon's ruling that the extent of surveillance may be unconstitutional; new revelations about the extent of the agency's spying on foreign governments and businesses; and the list of reform recommendations submitted by a blue-ribbon panel to President Barack Obama.
The other angle that's been a thread throughout is one of technological determinism: the technology is there, says the government, so the NSA has in some ways been "on autopilot," as Secretary of State John Kerry put it in November. The technology should be limited, goes the other side of the argument, if indeed it can be now.
Both these perspectives are plainly legitimate, but also insufficient. While the NSA collects data against foreign intelligence threats generally, the type of data that effectively requires massive collection and storage of individual communications has been presented, for example by Gen. Keith Alexander, in terms of the need to connect the dots to stop another 9/11.
So the extent of NSA surveillance corresponds logically to the extent of the ill-defined successor to the war on terror: When the enemy can be anywhere, the state looks everywhere.
The boundary of the U.S. response to terrorism is the critical frame through which to view the vast impressionistic canvas upon which the NSA attempts to connect the dots: The root issue is not the balance between national security and civil liberties but defining the boundaries of the U.S. response to terrorism.
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The foodstuffs of the Western diet, primarily grown by industrial agriculture, are increasingly being produced using a two-part system of engineered plant seeds and toxic chemical application.
Novel bacterial genes are incorporated through genetic engineering, and toxic chemical residues are readily taken up by the engineered plants. Research indicates that the new bacterial RNA and DNA present in genetically engineered plants, providing chemical herbicide resistance and other traits, have not yet fully understood biological effects. This paper however, will only examine the effects of the chemical glyphosate, the most popular herbicide on the planet.
Glyphosate (N-phosphonomethylglycine), the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup®, is the main herbicide in use today in the United States, and increasingly throughout the World, in agriculture and in lawn maintenance, especially now that the patent has expired. 80% of genetically modified crops, particularly corn, soy, canola, cotton, sugar beets and most recently alfalfa, are specifically targeted towards the introduction of genes resistant to glyphosate, the so-called “Roundup Ready® feature” In humans, only small amounts (~2%) of ingested glyphosate are metabolized to aminomethylphosphonic acid (AMPA), and the rest enters the blood stream and is eventually eliminated through the urine [1].
Studies have shown sharp increases in glyphosate contamination in streams in the Midwestern United States following the mid 1990s, pointing to its increasing role as the herbicide of choice in agriculture [2]. A now common practice of crop desiccation through herbicide administration shortly before the harvest assures an increased glyphosate presence in food sources as well [3–5]. The industry asserts that glyphosate is nearly nontoxic to mammals [6,7], and therefore it is not a problem if glyphosate is ingested in food sources. Acutely, it is claimed to be less toxic than aspirin [1,6]. As a consequence, measurement of its presence in food is practically nonexistent. A vocal minority of experts believes that glyphosate may instead be much more toxic than is claimed, although the effects are only apparent after a considerable time lapse.
Thus, while short-term studies in rodents have shown no apparent toxicity [8], studies involving life-long exposure in rodents have demonstrated liver and kidney dysfunction and a greatly increased risk of cancer, with shortened lifespan [9].
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It’s official – Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology says 2013 ranked as the country’s warmest year since records began more than a century ago, with the annual national mean temperature 1.2°C above the average.
Along the way, several new temperature records were set: the summer was the warmest on record as was Australia’s spring, while winter was ranked third in the historical warming stakes.
“The past year was characterized by persistent and widespread warmth”, says the Bureau.
“Mean temperatures across Australia have generally been well above average since September 2012. Long periods of warmer than average days have been common, with a distinct lack of cold weather.”
January 7th last year ranks as the hottest single day on record across the country, when the national daily average maximum temperature reached 40.3°C.
Later that month Sydney — usually relatively cool compared with inland areas and cities such as Darwin in the Northern Territory – smashed its own temperature record with the mercury climbing to 45.8°C. Meanwhile 31 August was the warmest winter day on record across the country.
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Hjelmeland Municipality in Ryfylke, Norway will be offered Altibox´s next generation high speed broadband. Municipal administration, public organizations, enterprises, households and cottage owners are offered a fiber network at a rate of 1 Gbit/s. The goal is that everyone in the community will be able to get fiber network connected 2016, with the first customers being connected during the first half of 2014.
"Altibox will work with the municipality, looking at user behavior, deployment of municipal services, contributions to business and utilization of new learning channels for citizens. Hjelmeland will be a "laboratory" for high-speed broadband in Norway" , says CEO Stian Røisland in Fiber AS, responsible for building out the fiber Altibox to deliver their services.
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It is one if the greater ironies of computer history that the vision of the hippies had to be married to the technology funded and fostered by the Pentagon, before the world of integrated information and communication became possible. [Stephen Segaller, NERDS2.0 p 134]
J.C.R. Licklider's vision of man-computer symbiosis drove the work of the Information Processing Techniques Office of ARPA in the early 1960s. In memos addressed to The Members of the Intergalactic Computer Network, Licklider presented a futuristic vision where computers could be tied together in a common network using standard languages, enabling the computer scientists to share and build on each other’s work. In 1964, Robert Taylor took over for Licklider, and brought on Larry Roberts to build the network.
Unlike Baran, who was attempting to solve the communications problems of the entire Department of Defense, Roberts had a more modest goal: network together a few ARPA funded computer centers. Roberts was not so much building a network, as he was networking computer researchers. That is an important difference, as the important stuff was the ends of the network, not the network itself. The job of the network was to provide connectivity (and interconnection), support the work of the research and innovation at the ends, and otherwise get out of the way. In 1967, Roberts released a blueprint for the ARPANET entitled Multiple Computer Networks and Intercomputer Communications. ARPANET would be packet switched using shared telecommunication paths; distributed (resilient to failure); decentralized (no central gatekeeper); able to freely scale (assets could be easily added without permission); and operated with a sub-network of computers whose sole job was to route traffic (not process data).
The ARPANET was launched in 1969, and by 1972 the "experiment" was causing a stir. Other networks quickly followed. ARPA recognized the need to interconnect incompatible computer networks. Therefore, Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn developed the Internet Protocol, a "simple" protocol that created “a network of networks,” providing interconnection between otherwise incompatible computer resources, and facilitating research at the ends of the network. On January 1, 1983, ARPANET migrated to the Internet Protocol.
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To Africa’s many challenges, add one more: unemployment. Unemployment, independent of any other factor, threatens to derail the economic promise that Africa deserves. It’s a time bomb with no geographical boundaries: Economists expect Africa to create 54 million new jobs by 2020, but 122 million Africans will enter the labour force during that time frame. Adding to this shortfall are tens of millions currently unemployed or underemployed, making the human and economic consequences nearly too large to imagine. Thus, even with the strong economic growth we have seen over the past decade, job creation in Africa remains much too slow. Africa needs a comprehensive, coordinated approach akin to America’s “Marshall Plan” in Europe after World War Two.
That effort focused on building infrastructure, modernising the business sector, and improving trade. By the end of the four-year programme, Europe surpassed its pre-war economic output. We can, and must, do the same for Africa. Entrepreneurs, politicians, philanthropic foundations, and development organisations — such as the World Bank, International Finance Corporation and USAID — must all work together to solve the unemployment crisis and make Africa an engine of growth. If we are outrun by the employment challenge, Africa will be a drag on global growth and resources for generations to come. Africa’s Marshall Plan should prioritise three interdependent “pillars” of development, which all work together to form a virtuous cycle of growth: policy reform and a commitment to the rule of law; investment in infrastructure, and a commitment to developing Africa’s manufacturing and processing industries.
This virtuous cycle forms the heart of Africapitalism: the public, private, and development sectors all coming together, united in a single objective of generating jobs and social wealth. First, we need enlightened government policies that help reduce administrative and operating costs for investors and businesses. We must streamline licensing and permitting processes, reduce import duties and tariffs and ease visa restrictions, among other reforms. Such policies would do much to attract investment, increase entrepreneurship and ultimately generate jobs. Enlightened government policy in Kenya and Nigeria has already helped to advance the information technology and financial services sectors. Microsoft’s pilot project to expand broadband access in Africa depends on government policy that frees up unused “white space” in the TV and radio broadcast spectrum.
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Situated about 40 kilometers south of Kuwait City, the Greater Burgan field is thought to hold nearly a tenth of the world’s proven oil reserves and second only to Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar field (about 500 km to the south). Greater Burgan produces around 1.6 million barrels of oil per day (1 barrel = 42 gallons).
In the false-color image, you can still remnants of the oil well fires during the Persian Gulf War:
"Vegetation appears red; buildings are white and gray; water is light blue; roads are gray; and the desert is tan. In the top image, a network of interlocking roads connects individual wellheads. The parts of the desert that appear to be stained a darker brown are most likely the remnants of oil lakes and tar mats that formed after oil well fires were ignited during the Persian Gulf War. In the wider view (bottom), Ahmadi, a wealthy suburb of Kuwait City and home to the Kuwait Oil Company headquarters, appears red due to trees and lawns."
You can also see gas flares in the image (showing up as bright orange). Gas flaring is a controversial practice, especially in the U.S. in light of the shale gas boom, but rather limited in Kuwait: only 1 percent of gas is flared off by the state-run oil company, compared to 17 percent in 2005. North Dakota, for reference, was flaring off as much as 30 percent of its gas in recent years (although that is expected to decline as regulations and technology are implemented).
For more on the history of Kuwait’s oil development Geo Expro has a deeper dive on the wars, occupations, and politics of developing Kuwait’s oil resources, like this:
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Towards the end of last year, a six-year-old aspiring astronaut from Colorado offered up the contents of his piggy bank to help support the chronically underfunded NASA. After learning that the US government body that once put a man on the moon was now cutting funding for its planetary science division, Connor Johnson pledged $US10.41 to help keep the NASA department in business.
Barely a month later, China sent the Chang'e-3 mission, carrying the unmanned Jade Rabbit lander to the moon, raising the prospect that it will be China's taikonauts rather than US astronauts exploring space in the future. The mission put China in the select club of only two other nations – the US and Russia – to have landed moon rovers successfully.
At the time, China's space agency crowed that the successful mission showed "the new glory of China to scale the peaks in world science and technology areas".
But China is not just funding an unmanned moon lander and an eventual manned mission. It plans to have the Tiangong-3 or Heavenly Palace space station orbiting Earth by 2023 – just about the time funding for the US-backed International Space Station is scheduled to run out. And China is by no means alone in its aspirations. In November India launched its Mangalyaan Mars orbiter which will explore the red planet's surface, mineralogy and atmosphere while testing deep space communication.
South Korean President Park Geun-hye recently announced plans to boost the share of government funding for science research and development. She pulled forward a deadline for a moon rover launch from 2025 to 2020 and flagged plans to create a new satellite launcher.
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Now in its fifth year, here are the new lists of the ‘Top Ten’ most influential people in the corporate e-learningsector, in the World, Europe, the UK and Asia-Pacific.
These lists are compiled from a corporate online learning perspective, on the basis of a person’s perceived current influence on the online learning industry – as a practitioner, commentator, facilitator and/or thought leader. In such a subjective area, opinions will always differ – and there is no guarantee that the judges’ decisions will meet with universal acclaim - but these lists represent what a number of people think about the personalities who lead the corporate online learning world.
This year, as the worldwide corporate online learning technologies market continues to develop, there is a new list – relating specifically to the USA/ Canada market. However, the World list continues to reflect the dominance on the USA and Canada on the worldwide market.
Of the 42 different names on the five lists, 26 are men and 16 are women.
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China is preparing to surpass the United States as the world’s largest economy, in purchasing power parity terms. Already its economy is 80% the size of ours, and if current growth rate differentials persist, it will take China only about four more years to surpass us. At market exchange rates, China’s GDP is smaller, and is expected to remain less than ours until 2028. This is hardly surprising. After all, China has four times as many people as the US; if every Chinese worker were to earn the US minimum wage, its GDP would be larger than ours. That is not a very high bar. With that economic size comes military power and global cultural clout. China’s awe-inspiring rise is often framed as the return to a historical norm. A common belief is that for most of the last 5,000 years, China was the world’s center of wealth, culture, technology, and power. The 19th and 20th centuries, we are told, were a brief aberration, and China is now simply retaking its rightful place as the world’s preeminent nation. This trope gives China a certain air of inevitability. The problem is, it’s not really accurate. The truth is that for most of its history, China has struggled to overcome a number of chronic difficulties that have usually kept it from global preeminence.
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The National Security Agency is reportedly building a ‘quantum computer’ capable of breaking encryption used to protect the most vital records around the world.
The US spy agency is seeking an advanced-speed, “cryptologically useful quantum computer” that can bypass encryption that currently shields global banking, business, medical and government records.
The quantum computer is part of a $79.7 million research project called “Penetrating Hard Targets,” according to documents supplied by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and reported by The Washington Post. Much of the program is hosted in a College Park, Maryland laboratory under classified contracts.
Past Snowden-fueled revelations have shown the NSA has worked to deliberately weaken common encryption standards.
Yet the NSA’s own technology capable of shattering all forms of public key encryption - including that which protects state secrets - is no closer to success than any other attempts in the scientific community, according to the leaked documents.
“The application of quantum technologies to encryption algorithms threatens to dramatically impact the US government’s ability to both protect its communications and eavesdrop on the communications of foreign governments,” according to one Snowden-leaked document.
The NSA appears to consider its efforts running at the same pace as competitors sponsored by the European Union and the Swiss government, with incremental progress yet little hope of much of a breakthrough.
“The geographic scope has narrowed from a global effort to a discrete focus on the European Union and Switzerland,” one NSA document says.
The NSA did not respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment.
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Is clean energy a victim of its own success, or is the transition from fossil fuels to alternative energy just going through some natural growing pains? However you spin it, in places like Hawaii and Germany, rooftop solar panels are popping up like weeds – but at a rate that might be too fast for utility companies to handle.
Solar panel setups can often supply enough juice to power a home, and more – with any excess electricity fed back into the grid. But this makes managing the flow of power a bit more difficult for the utility, compounded by the fact that solar power generation can fluctuate with changes in cloud cover. The result can be either a sudden draw on the grid on cloudy days, or a potentially overloading power surge on unexpectedly sunny days. Not every grid is able to cope.
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For two months in a row, the top-selling car in Norway has been an electric car. (Yes, the #1 best-selling car of any kind was an electric car in both September and October.) Interestingly, it wasn’t the same car. In September, it was the Tesla Model S that led Norwegian auto sales. In October, it was the Nissan Leaf.
Now, there’s a lot of speculation about why Norway is kicking serious ass in electric car sales. Some people think it’s “this,” some think it’s “that,” etc, etc. But can anyone say what it really is?
Well, at EVS 27 in Barcelona last week*, the best presentation that I saw at the whole symposium was one on exactly this topic, which was given by Francisco Carranza, Manager of Corporate Planning at Nissan Europe. Clearly, Nissan is interested in knowing why its Leaf has sold so well in Norway. And it’s also interested in having that level of per capita sales in many more markets. So, it has a good incentive to communicate its best research findings on this matter to as many influential people as possible. I think Francisco really nailed it, and I’ll do my best to share what I learned from that presentation and others (there were a lot of presentations on Norway’s EV success) below and in follow-up posts. Click headline to read more--
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