Disorderly Genius: How Chaos Drives The Brain

HAVE you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time? You may think that such fleeting thoughts, however random they seem, must be the product of predictable and rational processes. After all, the brain cannot be random, can it? Surely it processes information using ordered, logical operations, like a powerful computer?

Actually, no. In reality, your brain operates on the edge of chaos. Though much of the time it runs in an orderly and stable way, every now and again it suddenly and unpredictably lurches into a blizzard of noise.

Neuroscientists have long suspected as much. Only recently, however, have they come up with proof that brains work this way. Now they are trying to work out why. Some believe that near-chaotic states may be crucial to memory, and could explain why some people are smarter than others.

In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of "self-organised criticality". These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour - such as a swinging pendulum - and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence.

The quintessential example of self-organised criticality is a growing sand pile. As grains build up, the pile grows in a predictable way until, suddenly and without warning, it hits a critical point and collapses. These "sand avalanches" occur spontaneously and are almost impossible to predict, so the system is said to be both critical and self-organising. Earthquakes, avalanches and wildfires are also thought to behave like this, with periods of stability followed by catastrophic periods of instability that rearrange the system into a new, temporarily stable state.

Self-organised criticality has another defining feature: even though individual sand avalanches are impossible to predict, their overall distribution is regular. The avalanches are "scale invariant", which means that avalanches of all possible sizes occur. They also follow a "power law" distribution, which means bigger avalanches happen less often than smaller avalanches, according to a strict mathematical ratio. Earthquakes offer the best real-world example. Quakes of magnitude 5.0 on the Richter scale happen 10 times as often as quakes of magnitude 6.0, and 100 times as often as quakes of magnitude 7.0.

These are purely physical systems, but the brain has much in common with them. Networks of brain cells alternate between periods of calm and periods of instability - "avalanches" of electrical activity that cascade through the neurons. Like real avalanches, exactly how these cascades occur and the resulting state of the brain are unpredictable.

It might seem precarious to have a brain that plunges randomly into periods of instability, but the disorder is actually essential to the brain's ability to transmit information and solve problems. "Lying at the critical point allows the brain to rapidly adapt to new circumstances," says Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg from the Central Institute of Mental Health in Mannheim, Germany.

Disorder is essential to the brain's ability to transmit information and solve problems

The idea that the brain might be fundamentally disordered in some way first emerged in the late 1980s, when physicists working on chaos theory - then a relatively new branch of science - suggested it might help explain how the brain works.

The focus at that time was something called deterministic chaos, in which a small perturbation can lead to a huge change in the system - the famous "butterfly effect". That would make the brain unpredictable but not actually random, because the butterfly effect is a phenomenon of physical laws that do not depend on chance. Researchers built elaborate computational models to test the idea, but unfortunately they did not behave like real brains. "Although the results were beautiful and elegant, models based on deterministic chaos just didn't seem applicable when looking at the human brain," says Karl Friston, a neuroscientist at University College London. In the 1990s, it emerged that the brain generates random noise, and hence cannot be described by deterministic chaos. When neuroscientists incorporated this randomness into their models, they found that it created systems on the border between order and disorder - self-organised criticality.

More recently, experiments have confirmed that these models accurately describe what real brain tissue does. They build on the observation that when a single neuron fires, it can trigger its neighbours to fire too, causing a cascade or avalanche of activity that can propagate across small networks of brain cells. This results in alternating periods of quiescence and activity - remarkably like the build-up and collapse of a sand pile.

Neural avalanches

In 2003, John Beggs of Indiana University in Bloomington began investigating spontaneous electrical activity in thin slices of rat brain tissue. He found that these neural avalanches are scale invariant and that their size obeys a power law. Importantly, the ratio of large to small avalanches fit the predictions of the computational models that had first suggested that the brain might be in a state of self-organised criticality (The Journal of Neuroscience, vol 23, p 11167).

To investigate further, Beggs's team measured how many other neurons a single cell in a slice of rat brain activates, on average, when it fires. They followed this line of enquiry because another property of self-organised criticality is that each event, on average, triggers only one other. In forest fires, for example, each burning tree sets alight one other tree on average - that's why fires keep going, but also why whole forests don't catch fire all at once.

Sure enough, the team found that each neuron triggered on average only one other. A value much greater than one would lead to a chaotic system, because any small perturbations in the electrical activity would soon be amplified, as in the butterfly effect. "It would be the equivalent of an epileptic seizure," says Beggs. If the value was much lower than one, on the other hand, the avalanche would soon die out.

Beggs's work provides good evidence that self-organised criticality is important on the level of small networks of neurons. But what about on a larger scale? More recently, it has become clear that brain activity also shows signs of self-organised criticality on a larger scale.

As it processes information, the brain often synchronises large groups of neurons to fire at the same frequency, a process called "phase-locking". Like broadcasting different radio stations at different frequencies, this allows different "task forces" of neurons to communicate among themselves without interference from others.

The brain also constantly reorganises its task forces, so the stable periods of phase-locking are interspersed with unstable periods in which the neurons fire out of sync in a blizzard of activity. This, again, is reminiscent of a sand pile. Could it be another example of self-organised criticality in the brain?

In 2006, Meyer-Lindenberg and his team made the first stab at answering that question. They used brain scans to map the connections between regions of the human brain and discovered that they form a "small-world network" - exactly the right architecture to support self-organised criticality.

Small-world networks lie somewhere between regular networks, where each node is connected to its nearest neighbours, and random networks, which have no regular structure but many long-distance connections between nodes at opposite sides of the network (see diagram). Small-world networks take the most useful aspects of both systems. In places, the nodes have many connections with their neighbours, but the network also contains random and often long links between nodes that are very far away from one another.

For the brain, it's the perfect compromise. One of the characteristics of small-world networks is that you can communicate to any other part of the network through just a few nodes - the "six degrees of separation" reputed to link any two people in the world. In the brain, the number is 13.

Meyer-Lindenberg created a computer simulation of a small-world network with 13 degrees of separation. Each node was represented by an electrical oscillator that approximated a neuron's activity. The results confirmed that the brain has just the right architecture for its activity to sit on the tipping point between order and disorder, although the team didn't measure neural activity itself (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 103, p 19518).

That clinching evidence arrived earlier this year, when Ed Bullmore of the University of Cambridge and his team used brain scanners to record neural activity in 19 human volunteers. They looked at the entire range of brainwave frequencies, from 0.05 hertz all the way up to 125 hertz, across 200 different regions of the brain.

Power laws again

The team found that the duration both of phase-locking and unstable resynchronisation periods followed a power-law distribution. Crucially, this was true at all frequencies, which means the phenomenon is scale invariant - the other key criterion for self-organised criticality.

What's more, when the team tried to reproduce the activity they saw in the volunteers' brains in computer models, they found that they could only do so if the models were in a state of self-organised criticality (PLoS Computational Biology, vol 5, p e1000314). "The models only showed similar patterns of synchronisation to the brain when they were in the critical state," says Bullmore.

The work of Bullmore's team is compelling evidence that self-organised criticality is an essential property of brain activity, says neuroscientist David Liley at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, who has worked on computational models of chaos in the brain. But why should that be? Perhaps because self-organised criticality is the perfect starting point for many of the brain's functions.

The neuronal avalanches that Beggs investigated, for example, are perfect for transmitting information across the brain. If the brain was in a more stable state, these avalanches would die out before the message had been transmitted. If it was chaotic, each avalanche could swamp the brain.

At the critical point, however, you get maximum transmission with minimum risk of descending into chaos. "One of the advantages of self-organised criticality is that the avalanches can propagate over many links," says Beggs. "You can have very long chains that won't blow up on you."

Self-organised criticality also appears to allow the brain to adapt to new situations, by quickly rearranging which neurons are synchronised to a particular frequency. "The closer we get to the boundary of instability, the more quickly a particular stimulus will send the brain into a new state," says Liley.

It may also play a role in memory. Beggs's team noticed that certain chains of neurons would fire repeatedly in avalanches, sometimes over several hours (The Journal of Neuroscience, vol 24, p 5216). Because an entire chain can be triggered by the firing of one neuron, these chains could be the stuff of memory, argues Beggs: memories may come to mind unexpectedly because a neuron fires randomly or could be triggered unpredictably by a neuronal avalanche.

The balance between phase-locking and instability within the brain has also been linked to intelligence - at least, to IQ. Last year, Robert Thatcher from the University of South Florida in Tampa made EEG measurements of 17 children, aged between 5 and 17 years, who also performed an IQ test.

The balance between stability and instability in the brain has been linked with intelligence, at least as measured by scores on an IQ test

He found that the length of time the children's brains spent in both the stable phase-locked states and the unstable phase-shifting states correlated with their IQ scores. For example, phase shifts typically last 55 milliseconds, but an additional 1 millisecond seemed to add as many as 20 points to the child's IQ. A shorter time in the stable phase-locked state also corresponded with greater intelligence - with a difference of 1 millisecond adding 4.6 IQ points to a child's score (NeuroImage, vol 42, p 1639).

Thatcher says this is because a longer phase shift allows the brain to recruit many more neurons for the problem at hand. "It's like casting a net and capturing as many neurons as possible at any one time," he says. The result is a greater overall processing power that contributes to higher intelligence.

Hovering on the edge of chaos provides brains with their amazing capacity to process information and rapidly adapt to our ever-changing environment, but what happens if we stray either side of the boundary? The most obvious assumption would be that all of us are a short step away from mental illness. Meyer-Lindenberg suggests that schizophrenia may be caused by parts of the brain straying away from the critical point. However, for now that is purely speculative.

Thatcher, meanwhile, has found that certain regions in the brains of people with autism spend less time than average in the unstable, phase-shifting states. These abnormalities reduce the capacity to process information and, suggestively, are found only in the regions associated with social behaviour. "These regions have shifted from chaos to more stable activity," he says. The work might also help us understand epilepsy better: in an epileptic fit, the brain has a tendency to suddenly fire synchronously, and deviation from the critical point could explain this.

"They say it's a fine line between genius and madness," says Liley. "Maybe we're finally beginning to understand the wisdom of this statement."

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Tags:

phase-shifting, social behaviour, IQ, EEG measurements, Meyer-Lindenberg, Power laws, self-organised criticality, "power law" distribution, epilepsy, "phase-locking", Global Development News,

Source:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227141.200-disorderly-genius-how-chaos-drives-the-brain.html?full=true

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Abu Dhabi Firm Buys Stake in Tesla Motors

Tesla Motors has yet to turn a profit, but that isn't stopping an Abu Dhabi investment firm from buying a stake in the electric car maker from Daimler, the latest sign of interest in the San Carlos startup.

Daimler sold part of its 10 percent stake in the electric-car manufacturer to Aabar Investments, bringing its largest shareholder into a venture to develop alternative powering systems.

Aabar, which will own almost 4 percent Tesla, bought the stake under an agreement to increase cooperation with Daimler after the investment company acquired stock in the German carmaker in March, the companies said today in a joint statement. They didn't disclose a price.

Daimler, the world's second-largest maker of luxury cars, bought just under 10 percent of Tesla for a "double-digit million-euro" sum in May. The Stuttgart, Germany,-based manufacturer reiterated today that it plans to install Tesla's lithium-ion battery packs and charging equipment in 1,000 electric-powered versions of its Smart car.

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Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/businessupdate/ci_12827600?source=email&nclick_check=1

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China Launches Arabic TV Channel

China has launched a 24-hour Arabic-language television channel aimed at addressing "distorted" views of China in the Middle East and North Africa.

The satellite channel, launched on Saturday, is expected to reach about 300 million people in 22 countries. China Central Television (CCT already broadcasts foreign language channels in English, Spanish and French. Zhang Changming, deputy president of CCTV, said that through the Arabic channel "the world can know China and China can know the rest of the world even better". "Our principle is to be real, to be objective, to be accurate and transparent. CCTV will present the world with the real China," he said at the launch. The channel will mainly broadcast news, but Zhang promised it would also feature entertainment and educational programmes.

'Good journalism'

Ying Chan, the director of Hong Kong University's journalism and media studies centre, told Al Jazeera that China saw the channel as a way to counter "unfair" portrayls of China in the international media. "There's no question that the Middle East is a very strategic area and China wants its voice heard there," she said.

"They want to announce their policies more to the world, and they also felt that the international media, led by the Western media, has not been fair to China." China exerts a great deal of control over its media and often censors the reporting of sensitive topics. "It [CCTV] will face challenges in how much it will allow its own reporters to report news as it is, as it happened," Ying said. "I think CCTV, in order to gain influence, has to deliver good journalism."

Investment plans

CCTV has also said it plans to open more foreign bureaus. The Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post newspaper reported that Beijing was prepared to put 45 billion yuan ($6.6bn) into the development of its media, an amount which could not be confirmed by Chinese sources. China's Arabic language channel joins other foreign government media networks broadcasting in Arabic. The UK's BBC launched its Arabic channel last year and the US set up al-Hurra, an Arabic-language channel based in Virginia, in 2004.

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Source:

http://english.aljazeera.net/news/asia-pacific/2009/07/200972563026919452.html

Tags:

Chinese State, CCTV, China's Arabic language channel, BBC launched its Arabic channel, US set up al-Hurra, Global Development News, South China Morning Post , Hong Kong University, journalism and media studies centre, Al Jazeera,

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IKEA is as Bad as Wal-Mart

My mother still owns, and uses, the same vacuum cleaner she bought early in her marriage, just after World War II. She still lives in the house my father -- not a carpenter by trade, but an electrician -- built in the early 1950s with the help of his brothers, a small but sturdy Cape Cod-style dwelling with hardwood floors and solid wood doors that close with a hearty, satisfying clunk (as opposed to the echoey click of hollow-core doors).

Today the idea of anything -- a household appliance, a piece of furniture, a house -- being built to last is almost laughable. When your vacuum cleaner stops sucking, you most likely haul it out to the curb and trek to Target or a big-box home-goods store to replace it. Even if you could readily find someone to repair it, the trouble and the cost would be prohibitive. If you need a bookcase, there's always IKEA: Sure, you'd prefer to buy a sturdily built hardwood version that doesn't buckle under the weight of actual books, but who has extra dough to spend on stuff like that? The IKEA bookcase is good enough, for now if not forever.

That cycle of consumption seems harmless enough, particularly since we live in a country where there are plenty of cheap goods to go around. But in her lively and terrifying book "Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture," Ellen Ruppel Shell pulls back the shimmery, seductive curtain of low-priced goods to reveal their insidious hidden costs. Those all-you-can-eat Red Lobster shrimps may very well have come from massive shrimp-farming spreads in Thailand, where they've been plumped up with antibiotics and possibly tended by maltreated migrant workers from Burma, Cambodia and Vietnam. The made-in-China toy train you bought your kid a few Christmases ago may have been sprayed with lead paint -- and the spraying itself may have been done by a child laborer, without the benefit of a protective mask.

"Cheap" is hardly a finger-waggling book. This isn't a screed designed to make us feel guilty for unknowingly benefiting from the hardships of workers in other parts of the world. And Shell -- who writes regularly for the Atlantic -- isn't talking about the shallowness of consumerism here; she makes it clear that she, like most of us, enjoys the hunt for a good deal. "Cheap" really is about us, meaning not just Americans, but citizens of the world, and about what we stand to lose in a global economic environment that threatens the very nature of meaningful work, work we can take pride in and build a career on -- or even at which we can just make a living.

Discount chains pretend to be the most democratic of enterprises, willing and able to fill our every need at a price we can afford: Ingenious slogans like "Design for All" (Target) and "Save money. Live Better" (Wal-Mart) make that point pretty well. Shell asserts that an excess of cheap goods -- and the drive to make and sell them ever more cheaply -- is putting a deadly squeeze on workers worldwide. Most liberal-leaning citizens are aware of the profit-making schemes of Wal-Mart and, even if we actually shop there, find them distasteful (although Shell notes that among economists, the chain has its defenders).

But Shell asserts that even outlet malls and seemingly benign, friendly, progressive stores like IKEA are part of the problem; along with more obvious bad guys like Wal-Mart, they perpetuate a cycle that, far from nurturing creativity and innovation in the marketplace, ultimately benefits a relative few at the very top of the economic chain. Shell notes that before retiring in February 2009, "Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott Jr. took home in his biweekly paycheck what his average employee earned in a lifetime." You might say that, for Scott, the good news is that everybody can afford to shop at Wal-Mart; the better news is that he himself doesn't have to.

Shell begins by outlining the history of mass production in America (perhaps not surprisingly, firearms were among the first items to be mass-produced) and the rise of the discount chain. In the late 1800s a sickly farmer's son named Frank W. Woolworth opened the first "five-and-dime"; later, foreshadowing a future that workers around the world now seem doomed to live out, he quipped, "We must have cheap labor or we cannot sell cheap goods. When a clerk gets so good she can earn better wages elsewhere, let her go."

The understanding is that she'll have somewhere else to go, where her skills and talents are wanted or needed, considered something worth paying for. But increasingly in our current work climate, more skills only make a worker more expensive and possibly more demanding, not more desirable. With meticulousness and daring, Shell approaches this problem and the myriad thorny issues twined around it, incorporating the research and views of an assortment of economists, political scientists and law professors to build her case. At the core of her argument is the idea that the wealth of cheap goods available to us doesn't make our lives better; instead, it fosters an environment that endangers not just the jobs of American workers but the idea of human labor, period.

It's impossible to grapple with the global economy without addressing the tricky subject of China, and Shell does so with the right amount of clear-eyed empathy. She notes that China as a nation has grown wealthier while its poor have become poorer. According to figures released by the World Bank, between 2001 and 2003 the income of the poorest 10 percent of China's 1.3 billion people had fallen by 2.4 percent, to less than $83 per year. In that same period, the country's economy grew by 10 percent, and its richest people became 16 percent richer.

Many of China's poor work in factories, earning ever-shrinking pay under inhospitable or dangerous conditions, as the American conglomerates who do business there press the Chinese government to revise or reverse regulations that might make these laborers' work lives more tolerable. The government, understandably eager for China to take its place at the global-commerce table, is all too eager to comply. A Shanghai journalist makes a piercing comment to Shell: "We do not yet have the luxury to concern ourselves too much with things like human rights."

But Shell is careful to point out that China isn't the source of the "cheap goods" problem. She quotes Mark Barenberg, a professor of law at Columbia University and an expert on international labor law: "The severe exploitation of China's factory workers and the contraction of the American middle class are two sides of the same coin." The idea is that when global corporations squeeze labor in China and other developing nations, they're able to use the threat of low-wage competition to, as Shell puts it, "roll back decades of hard-won gains in wages, benefits, and dignified treatment for workers in the United States." In other words, employers in the United States can easily use the threat of downsizing and outsourcing to gain more power over, and squeeze more juice out of, their employees -- who, in turn, enjoy increasingly less protection from unions.

While the Chinese are hardly the villains of Shell's story, certain Swedes have plenty to answer for: Shell's chapter on IKEA is the most gently damning in the book. Shell is quick to admit that IKEA products -- from bookshelves to tables to lamps -- are very nicely designed. And the ingenuity of designing furniture so that it can be shipped efficiently, compactly and cheaply, with an eye toward environmental concerns, is admirable. But Shell also points out the hypocrisy inherent in IKEA's philosophy.

As a clever IKEA commercial, directed by Spike Jonze, points out, an old lamp (or bookcase or table) doesn't have feelings; any piece of furniture can and should be replaced at any time. The ad, and the whole IKEA approach, suggests that objects have no lasting meaning or value. They're disposable; when we tire of them, we should just throw them out. Then why, Shell asks, does IKEA personify its products by naming them, à la the Lack coffee table or the Kura loft bed? "If IKEA thinks it's crazy to care deeply about objects, why," she asks, "does it sell a wok named after a girl?"

IKEA makes money, and lots of it, by passing on to the consumer the cost of assembling its products, thus turning the consumer into part of its workforce: Depending on how you look at it, we either save money by putting IKEA furniture together ourselves, or we pay for the privilege of putting IKEA furniture together ourselves.

Regardless, these tables and bookcases aren't, and aren't intended to be, heirloom pieces. But Shell wonders if our expectations are too low. We no longer expect craftsmanship in everyday objects; maybe we don't feel we even deserve it. "Objects can be designed to low price," she writes, "but they cannot be crafted to low price." But if we stop valuing -- and buying -- craftsmanship, the very idea of making something with care and expertise is destined to die, and something of us as human beings will die along with it: "A bricklayer or carpenter or teacher, a musician or salesperson, a writer of computer code -- any and all can be craftsmen.

Craftsmanship cements a relationship between buyer and seller, worker and employer, and expects something of both. It is about caring about the work and its application. It is what distinguishes the work of humans from the work of machines, and it is everything that IKEA and other discounters are not."

What's more, IKEA is the third-largest consumer of wood in the world and uses timber that comes mostly from Eastern Europe and the Russian Far East, where, Shell points out, "wages are low, large wooded regions remote, and according to the World Bank, half of all logging is illegal." IKEA president and CEO Anders Dahlvig asserts that the timber his company uses is harvested legally, and the company does employ forestry experts to monitor the company's suppliers. But Shell points out that IKEA has only 11 forestry monitors, not nearly enough to keep a watchful eye on all those suppliers worldwide, and five of those specialists are devoted to China and Russia, a vast spread of territory by itself. Dahlvig says that hiring more inspectors would cost too much; he'd have to pass the cost on to the consumer.

Would enlightened consumers pay a little more, maybe, to buy products made from wood that had been, unquestionably, legally harvested? Maybe -- but it's not the consumer's choice to make, at least not right now. And if there's one thing that makes reading this eye-opening book an ultimately frustrating experience, it's that Shell can't offer many helpful solutions to this tangle of economic and moral problems, aside from urging us to be more aware as consumers.

Still, she does cite one example of an organization that at least tries to get it right: Wegmans, a chain of supermarkets with stores located mostly in the suburbs of New York state, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Virginia and Maryland, offers its employees job-training programs, health insurance and retirement benefits. The company operates on the supposition that if it treats its employees respectfully, they'll be better prepared (and more willing) to serve the needs of customers. The approach seems to work: Wegmans profits financially by fostering and retaining customer loyalty, and its employee turnover rate is low -- roughly 6 percent, measured against an industry-wide rate of more than 30 percent. The company also buys a large percentage of its produce from small, local farmers, and has been doing so for 20 years.

If "Cheap" is a harrowing document of the pursuit of profit at the expense of our basic humanity, the example set by Wegmans -- Shell saves it for the end of the book -- sounds almost too good to be true, the kind of crazy business idea that, according to the logic of outfits like Wal-Mart, shouldn't work. In reality, it's one of the foundations of good business: Treat your employees well, and they'll serve you well in return. The cost may be higher, but the price is right.

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Source: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/07/12/cheap/index.html?source=rss

Tags: IKEA, Walmart, China, Cheap labor, low-cost producer, Outsourced manufacturing, World Bank, Columbia University, Russian forests and timber, Global Economic News, Global Development News, Salon,

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Google Unveils SMS Service For Africa

WASHINGTON (AFP) - - Google on Monday unveiled a new service designed to provide information via SMS text message to mobile phone users in Africa, where cell phones are prevalent but Internet penetration is low.

"At Google we seek to serve a broad base of people -- not only those who can afford to access the Internet from the convenience of their workplace or with a computer at home," the Mountain View, California, company said in a blog post.

"It's important to reach users wherever they are, with the information they need, in areas with the greatest information poverty," Google said. The Internet search and advertising giant noted that Africa has the world's highest mobile phone growth rate and that mobile use on the continent is six times higher than Internet penetration.

"Most mobile devices in Africa only have voice and SMS capabilities, and so we are focusing our technological efforts in that continent on SMS," it said.

Google said Google SMS, which will be available first in Uganda, would provide information, via SMS, on a number of topics including health and agriculture tips, news, local weather and sports. Google also said that it is also launching a service called Google Trader, an SMS-based application that helps bring together buyers and sellers of product or services, from used cars to livestock to jobs.

Google said another service, Google SMS Tips, enables a mobile phone user to have a Web search-like experience. A user enters a text query and Google returns relevant answers after searching a database. Google said Google SMS Tips and Google Trader were developed in partnership with several organizations, including the Grameen Foundation, an offshoot of the pioneering Grameen bank founded by Nobel peace laureate Muhammad Yunus.

Source: http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20090630/ttc-us-uganda-africa-it-telecom-internet-0de2eff.html

Tags: Grameen bank, Mohammed Yunus, Grameen foundation, Google SMS Tips, Google Trader, Uganda, Goolge SMS, Africa, Global IT News, Global Development News, Livestock, Nobel peace prize, IT, tech, technology, web,

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Obama Triumphs With Energy Bill

WASHINGTON – In a triumph for President Barack Obama, the Democratic-controlled House narrowly passed sweeping legislation Friday that calls for the nation's first limits on pollution linked to global warming and aims to usher in a new era of cleaner, yet more costly energy.

The vote was 219-212, capping months of negotiations and days of intense bargaining among Democrats. Republicans were overwhelmingly against the measure, arguing it would destroy jobs in the midst of a recession while burdening consumers with a new tax in the form of higher energy costs.

At the White House, Obama said the bill would create jobs, and added that with its vote, the House had put America on a path toward leading the way toward "creating a 21st century global economy." The House's action fulfilled Speaker Nancy Pelosi's vow to clear major energy legislation before July 4. It also sent the measure to a highly uncertain fate in the Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid said he was "hopeful that the Senate will be able to debate and pass bipartisan and comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation this fall."

Obama lobbied recalcitrant Democrats by phone from the White Houseas the House debate unfolded across several hours, and Al Gore posted a statement on his Web site saying the measure represents "an essential first step towards solving the climate crisis." The former vice president won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work drawing attention to the destructive potential of global warming.

On the House floor, Democrats hailed the legislation as historic, while Republicans said it would damage the economy without solving the nation's energy woes. It is "the most important energy and environmental legislation in the history of our country," said Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts. "It sets a new course for our country, one that steers us away from foreign oil and towards a path of clean American energy."

But Rep. John Boehner, the House Republican leader, used an extraordinary one-hour speech shortly before the final vote to warn of unintended consequences in what he said was a "defining bill." He called it a "bureaucratic nightmare" that would cost jobs, depress real estate prices and put the government into parts of the economy where it now has no role.

The legislation would require the U.S. to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 and by about 80 percent by mid-century. That was slightly more aggressive than Obama originally wanted, 14 percent by 2020 and the same 80 percent by mid-century.

U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels are rising at about 1 percent a year and are predicted to continue increasing without mandatory limits. Under the bill, the government would limit heat-trapping pollution from factories, refineries and power plants and issue allowances for polluters. Most of the allowances would be given away, but about 15 percent would be auctioned by bid and the proceeds used to defray higher energy costs for lower-income individuals and families.

"Some would like to do more. Some would like to do less," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said in advance of the final vote. "But we have reached a compromise ... and it is a compromise that can pass this House, pass that Senate, be signed by the president and become law and make progress."

That seemed unlikely, judging from Reid's cautiously worded statement. "The bill is not perfect," it said, but rather "a good product" for the Senate to begin working on. And there was plenty to work on in a House-passed measure that pointed toward higher electricity bills for the middle class, particularly in the Midwest and South, as well as steps to ease the way for construction of newnuclear reactors, the first to be built since the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979.

The bill's controversy was on display in the House, where only eight Republicans joined 211 Democrats in favor, while 44 Democrats joined 168 Republicans in opposition. And within an hour of the vote, both party campaign committees had begun attacking lawmakers for their votes.

One of the biggest compromises involved the near total elimination of an administration plan to sell pollution permits and raise more than $600 billion over a decade — money to finance continuation of a middle class taxcut. About 85 percent of the permits are to be given away rather than sold, a concession to energy companies and their allies in the House — and even that is uncertain to survive in the Senate.

The final bill also contained concessions to satisfy farm-state lawmakers, ethanol producers, hydroelectric advocates, the nuclear industry and others, some of them so late that they were not made public until 3 a.m. on Friday.

Supporters and opponents agreed the bill's result would be higher energy costs but disagreed vigorously on the impact on consumers. Democrats pointed to two reports — one from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the other from the Environmental Protection Agency — that suggested average increases would be limited after tax credits and rebates were taken into account. The CBO estimated the bill would cost an average household $175 a year, the EPA $80 to $110 a year.

Republicans questioned the validity of the CBO study and noted that even that analysis showed actual energy production costs increasing $770 per household. Industry groups have cited other studies showing much higher costs to the economy and to individuals.

The White House and congressional Democrats argued the bill would create millions of "green jobs" as the nation shifts to greater reliance on renewable energy sources such as wind and solar and development of more fuel-efficient vehicles — and away from use of fossil fuels such as oil, gas and coal.

It will "make our nation the world leader on clean energy jobs and technology,"declared Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., who negotiated deals with dozens of lawmakers in recent weeks to broaden the bill's support.

Pelosi, D-Calif., took an intense personal interest in the measure, sitting through hours of meetings with members of the rank and file and nurturing fragile compromises. At its heart, the bill was a trade-off, less than the White House initially sought though it was more than Republicans said was acceptable. Some of the dealmaking had a distinct political feel. Rep. Alan Grayson, a first-term Democrat, won a pledge of support that $50 million from the proceeds of pollution permit sales in the bill would go to a proposed new hurricane research facility in his district in Orlando, Fla.

In the run-up to the vote, Democrats left little to chance. Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., confirmed by the Senate on Thursday to an administration post, put off her resignation from Congress until after the final vote on the climate change bill. And Rep. Patrick Kennedy, D-R.I., who has been undergoing treatment at an undisclosed facility, returned to the Capitol to support the legislation. He has said he struggles with depression, alcoholism and addiction, but has not specified the cause for his most recent absence.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090627/ap_on_go_co/us_climate_bill

Tags: Obama passes energy bill in congress, Carbon emissions, Carbon reduction, energy costs, Global Development News, Nancy Pelosi, Henry Waxman, Ellen Tauscher, Alan Grayson, CBO study, EPA, Patrick Kennedy,

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US Draws Line With China On Climate Technology

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Access to green technology is becoming a growing stumbling block in global efforts to fight climate change, with US lawmakers bristling at what they see as China's attempt to "steal" US know-how.

China and India have led calls for developed nations to share technology to help them battle global warming as the clock ticks to a December meeting in Copenhagen meant to seal a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. The US House of Representatives this month unanimously voted to make it US policy to prevent the Copenhagen treaty from "weakening" US intellectual property rights on a wind, solar and other eco-friendly technologies.

Congressman Rick Larsen, a member of President Barack Obama's Democratic Party who authored the measure, said the United States was caught between concern both over the climate and its soaring trade deficit with China. "The US can be part of China's solution for the problems that they admittedly have with energy efficiency and emissions. And I think legitimately we want to be part of that solution -- we're the two largest emitters of C02 in the world," Larsen said.

"But we need to couple being part of that solution with making it part of the solution on the trade deficit as well," he said ahead of the measure's approval. Representative Mark Kirk, a Republican who joined Larsen on a recent trip to China, said that climate change was the most contentious issue during talks with Chinese leaders.

Kirk said the Chinese essentially were seeking "the stealing of all intellectual property" related to energy efficiency and climate change. Kirk warned that China's position could change the political dynamics in Washington, where promoters of a bill to force emission cuts say the United States stands to create millions of jobs in a new green economy. "Right now a number of green industries like the climate change bill coming out. But if an international treaty sanctions the theft of their intellectual property, then there will be hardly any green jobs built in the United States," Kirk said.

The United States is the only major industrialized nation to reject the Kyoto Protocol, with former president George W. Bush saying it was unfair by making no demands of fast-growing developing nations such as China and India. Despite a recession, President Barack Obama has vowed to work to halt the planet's warming, which UN scientists warn will threaten severe weather and the extinction of plant and animal species later this century if unchecked.

More than 180 countries promised at a December 2007 meeting in Bali, Indonesia to take part in the next global treaty with a "common but differentiated responsibility" for developed and developing economies. But 12 days of talks this month in Bonn came up with no visible progress, with top Chinese negotiator Li Gao accusing rich nations of reneging on sharing technology and watering down commitments to cut emissions.

"There is an attempt to obliterate the principle of 'common but differentiated responsibility' and to split up the developing countries," Li told China's state Xinhua news agency.

Shyam Saran, India's envoy on climate change, also criticized rich nations, which he said bore the historic responsibility for climate change. India has proposed setting up global "innovation centers" to work on green technology.

A report last month by experts for the UN climate body called for a "balanced" approach, stressing the importance of intellectual property rights but saying all nations needed to accept the terms.

Technology transfer "is certainly a big and important question that might be a roadblock" in global negotiations, said Daniel Kessler of Greenpeace.

The environmental group has called for public and private funds on climate change to be pooled into an independent global body, funded to the tune of at least 140 billion dollars a year. But such funding may prove hard to come by. The European Union, champion of the Kyoto Protocol, has come under fire from environmentalists for declining to put a figure on climate aid, saying it is waiting to see other nations' proposals.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090623/bs_afp/uschinaclimatewarmingtechnology_20090623022226

Tags: China, USA, Obama, Kyoto Protocol, EU, Greenpeace, Xinhua, Li Gao, Daniel Kessler, Shyam Saran, Global Development News, US House of Representatives, Copenhagen, Bali, Mark Kirk, Rick Larsen, Intellectual Property, Global Best Practice,

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China's Solar Drive

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Beijing's bid to boost the solar energy sector could draw more than $10 billion in private funding for projects and put China on track to become a leading market for solar equipment in the next three years.

Shares of U.S.-listed Chinese solar firms such as Suntech Power Holdings, the world's biggest crystalline solar panel-maker, have risen strongly on expectations China will soon unveil more cash incentives to develop solar energy. China, the world's top greenhouse gas polluter, is trying to catch up in a global race to find alternatives to fossil fuels, blamed for carbon emissions affecting the planet's climate.

Any cash perks for the sector will help drive demand for solar energy systems and create bigger businesses for companies involved in the entire solar supply chain, says Julia Wu, an analyst with research firm New Energy Finance. Top panel-makers including Trina Solar, Yingli Green Energy Holding Co and JA Solar are expected to benefit, while solar wafer-makers such as LDK Solar could gain from related business opportunities.

"China could potentially be the top market for solar. Companies up and down the supply chain should benefit," said Wu. Beijing is considering enhancing cash incentives at a time when European states including Germany, one of the largest solar markets, are pulling back on spending to slow industry growth.

Nearly 10 years of subsidized prices have made Germany among the largest markets for photovoltaic panels, which transform sunlight into electricity, producing solar giants including Q-Cells AG and Conergy. "The photovoltaic industry has very good opportunities in the medium and long term now that a lot of countries have decided to develop new energy as an important measure to combat the economic crisis," Shawn Qu, president and chief executive officer of Canadian Solar Inc, told Reuters.

INCENTIVES

Although China supplies half the world's solar panels, it contributes very little to demand as the cost of tapping solar energy to generate electricity remains steep and investors find little economic sense in pursuing solar projects in China where incentives are few. But that's about to change.

China's government said in March it will offer to pay 20 yuan ($2.90) per watt of solar systems fixed to roofs and which have a capacity of more than 50 kilowatt peak (kwp). The subsidy, which could cover half the cost of installing the system, was popular among developers, attracting applications equivalent to the building of 1 gigawatt of solar power.

One GW, or 1 billion watts, is enough electricity to power a million homes. China is expected to raise its 2020 solar power generation target more than fivefold to at least 10 GW. With incentives, analysts expect over 2 GW in new solar capacity will be installed as early as 2011, up from just over 100 MW in 2008.

To further attract investors, Beijing may align its solar energy policy with an incentive scheme used in Europe and the United States called "feed-in tariff," which guarantees above-market prices for generating solar power. China is widely expected to announce a subsidized price for solar power of 1.09 yuan per kW-hour (kwh), or 16 cents, which is over three times the rate paid for coal-fed electricity in China, but far below the established solar tariffs of about 45 cents in Europe and 30 cents in the United States.

"It would be too low considering the current manufacturing technology," said Fang Zheng, general manager of China Huadian Corporation New Energy Resources Development Co, the renewable energy unit of state-owned Huadian Group. "Such a price would not help the development of the solar power generation industry."

Several Chinese power producers say a fair price for solar power would be 1.5 yuan per Kwh. Without a guaranteed high price, solar firms may find it hard to compete. "In itself (the tariff), it's not enough encouragement for the market," said CLSA analyst Charles Yonts. "Even in the sunniest areas, you're still looking at a negative return or below your cost of capital based on current prices." Yonts estimates a developer would have to bring down costs by 30 percent to $3 a watt for a project to yield a return of as little as 8 percent.

THE WHOLE PACKAGE

Nevertheless, analysts say that taken together, Beijing's proposed tariff and other perks should help generate decent returns given that local labor and equipment costs are cheap."(The tariff) sounds a little light relative to European feed-in tariffs," Steven Chadima, Suntech vice president of external affairs, told a recent conference in the United States.

"But the costs are substantially lower in China and there are also other incentive programs available to package together to be able to create a reasonable electricity price coming off these projects." Moreover, prices of polysilicon are expected to fall further below the current $60 a kilogram amid a glut of the solar panel material, further cushioning costs. Certainly a view that the overall impact of the China incentives will be beneficial to the solar sector appears to be reflected in company share prices -- Suntech shares hit a 7-month high last week.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-GreenBusiness/idUSTRE55I18S20090619

Tags: Solar Power, Photovoltaic, Polysilicon, Solar Subsidies, China, Huadian Group, CLSA analyst Charles Yonts, Global Development News, Canadian Solar Inc, Suntech Power Holdings, Beijing,

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Mideast Hanging On Every Text and Tweet From Iran

Though Tehran has largely shut down communication outlets, protesters are getting out snippets of text and stealthily uploaded photos in a guerrilla-style Internet revolt.

Reporting from Cairo -- Footage of burning cars, masked boys and bloodied protesters in Iran is playing across the Middle East, captivating Arab countries where repressive regimes have for years been arresting political bloggers and cyberspace dissidents.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia and other Sunni nations have tense relations with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Shiite-led theocracy ruling Iran. But they don't want protests in Tehran to inspire similar democratic fervor in their countries -- especially the merging of Facebook and Twitter with a potent opposition leader like Iran's presidential challenger, Mir-Hossein Mousavi.

So far, that has yet to happen. Egyptian activists, for example, have called for rallies and strikes on Internet social networks over the last year, but they have no galvanizing personality and are too disorganized to pose a threat to the police state controlled by President Hosni Mubarak.

"I don't think similar events could even take place in Egypt or other Arab countries," said Ibrahim Issa, editor of the Cairo independent newspaper Al Dustour, who has been arrested a number of times for criticizing the Mubarak government. "We hope and we always keep faith that what's happening in Iran could push Arabs to try and do the same against their oppressive regimes. But reality tells us that this is not applicable. We are comparing 30 years of what I can call Iranian democracy to 30 years of Egyptian tyranny."

The Middle East is witnessing Iran slip into a guerrilla-style Internet and Twitter game of strategies and slogans pecked out by protesters attempting to outflank a government that has largely shut down communication outlets, leaving the nation breathless on snippets of text and stealthily uploaded pictures.

It is a battle on the streets and across the airways, a realm where technology is both churning out and smothering polarizing messages and images. Iranian authorities have blocked opposition websites, jammed satellite TV channels and cut off text messaging. But still, word is trickling beyond the censors, linking, however sparsely, protesters from Tehran to those elsewhere in the country.

Tweets by StopAhmadi are both philosophical and terse: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. Over n' out." "Girl shot in Tehran." Persiankiwi's tweets list updates of police movements and arrests: "Our street is quiet now -- we cannot move tonight but must move asap when dawn starts."

Iran is offering an intriguing glimpse into how years of disillusionment can suddenly leap from cafes and university campuses to a national revolt, where dueling political voices and agendas square off with banners, rhetoric and allegations of election fraud.

The Iranian elections have "imposed themselves on everything. The masses of young men, the noticeable presence of young women -- especially female university students -- and the slogans of change, the intense competition that raged," Mohammad Hussein al-Yusifi wrote in the Kuwait daily Awan. "All these factors left us no possibility but to observe closely what is happening on the Iranian scene."

The characters in that tumult, appearing amid videos of tear gas and baton-swinging police, have provided alluring narratives: presidential challenger Mousavi, whose Facebook fan group has about 50,000 members, standing amid throngs of his supporters; Ahmadinejad proclaiming victory and calling for calm; and the hovering visage of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Each is mentioned on Twitter missives bristling with rumors about what might happen next.

But sometimes things go blank. On Tuesday, Persiankiwi's Twitter feed, which has nearly 19,000 followers, posted this: "I must log off now -- will log on when I have more info -- need phone line -- no mobile cover, no sms, no satellite, no radio." Similar difficulties are encountered by international media. Teymoor Nabili, a reporter for Al Jazeera, wrote on the network's website: "Day-by-day our ability to access any information has been slowly whittled away. . . . I am no longer allowed to take a camera out into the streets. I'm not even sure I can walk out into the streets with a mobile phone without getting into trouble."

Activists and bloggers watching developments in Iran from afar say the protests show the promise and limits of technology in orchestrating the kind of social unrest seen in Tehran. There is also the sentiment that Iranian activists rising up against an anti-Western regime enjoy more international support than their counterparts in Arab countries where anti-democratic governments are close U.S. allies.

"A cyber war and its bloggers [can't] carry out a revolution or overthrow a certain regime on its own," said Wael Abbas, a blogger and human rights activist in Egypt. "Full revolution has to come from the masses in the streets." The huge rallies and placards in Tehran make Issa, the Cairo editor, envious: "The current Egyptian system was built on fraud while the Iranian revolution was built by the people, and that is why they are fighting for such a system," he said. "The bottom line is that unlike Iran, we are politically dead."

Iran's revolutionary spirit, evident 30 years ago in the Islamic Revolution, has been unbottled again. And for the Arab world it is a lesson in resistance and a maturing democracy that may be controlled by clerics but is expressing its will in the streets and in blips of texts and tweets.

Source: http://www.latimes.com/news/la-fg-iran-image17-2009jun17,0,5597.story?track=rss

Tags: Iran, Twitter, Iranian elections, Iranian protests, Cairo, Egypt, Facebook, Bloggers, activists, persiankiwi, Tehran, Global Development News, Al Dustour, Mubarak,

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