In The Lifeguard, Kristen Bell plays a 29-year-old woman who abandons her life in New York City to move back in with her parents ? and work at a pool. The film premiered at Sundance, but is it destined to be an indie hit? Watch our review!
View Transcript TranscriptSource: http://www.popsugar.com/Lifeguard-Movie-Review-Sundance-Video-26988336
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'I thought it would be unexpected,' Fif tells MTV News, avoiding rumors that it came from the BET Hip Hop Awards scuffle between G-Unit, Maybach.
By Rob Markman
A scene from 50 Cent's "Major Distribution" video
Photo: Shady/Aftermath Records
Source: http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1700833/50-cent-major-distribution-mmg-chain.jhtml
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Crystal Symphony
Crystal Cruises is eyeing affluent travelers by offering exclusive Mediterranean excursions on its spring itineraries that cannot be accessed through other travel brands.
The cruise line?s new collection of experiences called ?Boutique Adventures? will be available this spring for groups ranging from one to 15 travelers on Crystal Symphony and Crystal Serenity ships sailing to the Mediterranean. Guests will have exclusive access to estates, art studios, museums, castles and businesses.
?Our guests are looking for different ways to experience destinations and they relish insider access,? said Mimi Weisband, vice president of public relations at?Crystal Cruises, Los Angeles. ?We are continually challenging our tour operators to seek out the unusual, experiential, intimate, cultural adventures.
?Our guests do not want a mass-market excursion ? they will pay more for something if it is unique and authentic,? she said.
Cruising the Mediterranean
There are seven Boutique Adventures that guests can choose. The cost ranges from $223 to more than $1,000 per guest.
Travelers can book the excursions online up to six months before their cruise.
The Florence excursion comprises a viewing of the Uffizi Gallery?s private Contini Bonacossi Collection, which is not accessible to the public.
In Funchal, Portugal, guests will have lunch with a local celebrity at Reid?s Palace or visit a family-run Madeiran winery where they will dine with the owners.
During the Rome experience, guests will make their own jewelry with instruction from a former Valentino model who now designs jewelry.
The Corfu, Greece, excursion consists of a painting lesson from the president of the Corfu Painters Society.
In Italy?s Vetriano, guests will attend the opera at Teatro Concordia, the?smallest public theater in the world.
Teatro Concordia
Excursions in Sorrento and Taormina, Italy, comprise?cooking lessons and meals with local, Michelin-star chefs.
In Taormina in Italy?s Sicily region, travelers will be served a meal while watching a classical concert at a Sicilian castle.
Crystal Cruises will promote the Boutique Adventures via its Web site, quarterly magazine and the on-board Shore Excursion team, per Ms. Weisband.
In addition, travel agents will also inform their clients about the experiences.
?The cruise industry has been becoming more aware of the large portion of the affluent travelers who shy away from cruises due to many misconceptions and overall lack of desire to be on-board the mega-ships,? said D.M. Banks, director at?DMB Public Relations, New York.
?Crystal Cruises is always looking at ways to provide the luxuries of cruises, while providing a boutique experience for their guests,? he said. ?This is another example of them thinking outside of the box to truly connect with their guests.
?Affluent travelers are more than happy to pay a premium for superior services and, more importantly, unique and personalized experiences. These intimate and semi-private excursions are great ways for guest to feel more immersed into the culture and destinations while at port.?
Story time
The new Boutique Adventures are meant to align with Crystal Cruises? ?Begin a New Story? ad campaign that launched last year, per Ms. Weisband.
The cruise line rebranded itself during the second quarter of 2012 through an all-encompassing campaign that centers on the notion of the travel journal and encourages consumers to share memories from past cruises.
The marketing efforts focus on cruise destinations and once-in-a-lifetime experiences, rather than the amenities of the ship.
Begin a New Story uses multiple channels including print ads with digital watermark technology, brochures, online banner ads, email, video and a smartphone app.
For instance, print ads appear in Cond? Nast Traveler, National Geographic Traveler, Town & Country, Travel & Leisure, Coastal Living, Elle D?cor, Food & Wine and Forbes Life.
Consumers can scan the ads with their smartphones to reveal a 60-second video that shows three travelers? experiences in select Crystal Cruises? destinations through watercolor animation.
The brand asked eight watercolor artists to create images that are used in all aspects of the campaign (see story).
?The trend for affluent consumers is more intimate and incredibly special ? both of which are key to these excursions,? Ms. Weisband said.
?Entering someone?s home, sharing a meal with them and just a few other guests, and being able to hear in-depth stories of living and working in that area from your host ? these are experiences that can be deeply personal, bonding and memorable, really expanding one?s understanding of a culture far beyond any info gleaned from merely sight-seeing,? she said.
?Affluent consumers crave such experiences that go beyond the norm, as so many of them travel at a level well above the basics.?
Final Take
Tricia Carr, editorial assistant on Luxury Daily, New York
Tricia Carr is an editorial assistant on Luxury Daily. Her beats are apparel and accessories, arts and entertainment, education, food and beverage, fragrance and personal care, government, healthcare, home furnishings, jewelry, legal/privacy and nonprofits. Reach her at tricia@napean.com.
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Tags: Begin a New Story, Boutique Adventures, Crystal Cruises, Crystal Serenity, Crystal Symphony, In-store, luxury, luxury marketing, luxury travel, Mediterranean travel, Mimi Weisband, travel and hospitality, travel marketing
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LONDON (AP) ? If you're making a movie about WikiLeaks, this is the kind of thing you probably see coming.
Julian Assange says he has obtained a leaked copy of the script for "The Fifth Estate," a DreamWorks film about the maverick computer expert and his famed secret-busting site. In a speech before the Oxford Union debating society earlier this week, Assange said his unauthorized sneak peek has left him convinced the film is a hit piece.
"It is a mass propaganda attack against WikiLeaks, the organization (and) the character of my staff," he said, adding that the movie ? the opening scenes of which Assange described as taking place in Tehran and Cairo ? also hyped Western fears over the Islamic Republic's disputed atomic energy program.
"It is not just an attack against us, it is an attack against Iran. It fans the flames of an attack against Iran," he said.
A DreamWorks spokeswoman declined to comment on Assange's claims.
In a telephone interview late Friday, Assange said that the film's plot revolves around a fictional mole in Iran's nuclear program who discovers that the country has nearly finished building an atom bomb and will soon be in a position to load it onto ballistic missiles. The film has the informant fleeing to Iraq when WikiLeaks publishes his name among its massive trove of classified material.
Assange says the whole story is "a lie built on a lie," claiming that the U.S. intelligence community generally believes that Iran stopped comprehensive secret work on developing nuclear arms in 2003, and that, in any case, the world had yet to see evidence of a case in which WikiLeaks had exposed a CIA informant.
"They tried to frame Iran as having an active nuclear weapons program. Then they try to frame WikiLeaks as the reason why that's not known to the public now," Assange said, comparing the movie to Kathryn Bigelow's "Zero Dark Thirty," another film whose artistic liberties with recent history have drawn allegations of political bias.
Assange declined to say where he got the script, although he hinted that he had been supplied with several copies of it over time. He also declined to say whether the script would be posted to the WikiLeaks website, saying only that "we are examining options closely."
"The Fifth Estate" stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Assange and Daniel Bruhl as Daniel Domscheit-Berg, an early Assange ally who eventually fell out with WikiLeaks.
The film is due for release in November, and in a statement earlier this week director Bill Condon was quoted as saying that those behind the movie want "to explore the complexities and challenges of transparency in the information age" and "enliven and enrich the conversations WikiLeaks has already provoked."
Assange made his comments to the Oxford Union on Wednesday via videolink from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has been holed up for more than six months in a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden as part of a long-running sex crimes case.
___
Online:
Assange's speech before the Oxford Union: http://bit.ly/Vcokdo
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FILE - In this Oct. 19, 2009 file photo, the Apple logo is seen on an Apple store in San Francisco. AP Apple shares plunged Thursday, Jan. 24, 2013, after the company reported quarterly results that point to growth slowing after five blowout years. (AP Photo/Russel A. Daniels, File)
FILE - In this Oct. 19, 2009 file photo, the Apple logo is seen on an Apple store in San Francisco. AP Apple shares plunged Thursday, Jan. 24, 2013, after the company reported quarterly results that point to growth slowing after five blowout years. (AP Photo/Russel A. Daniels, File)
NEW YORK (AP) ? Apple needs to start making nice with Wall Street, analysts said Thursday as investors hammered the company's stock.
The sell-off put Apple a hair's-breadth away from losing its status as the world's most valuable company. At Thursday's close, it was worth $423 billion, just 1.6 percent more than No. 2 Exxon Mobil Corp.
The plunge was set off by Apple's quarterly earnings report late Wednesday, which suggested the company's nearly decade-long growth spurt is slowing drastically.
The stock ended down $63.51 or 12 percent, at $450.50. It last traded that low a year ago. It was the biggest one-day percentage drop in the stock since Sept. 29, 2008, when two Wall Street brokerages downgraded the stock because of the recession. In dollar terms, it was the largest ever single-day change in the stock.
Should Apple try to win back the investors who are fleeing? No, analysts say. Investors who bought the stock on the way up will be chasing the next hot stock. The company needs to make itself appealing to a new crop of people who've never considered the stock, analysts say, by doing what Wall Street wants and doling out more of its massive cash pile in the form of more generous dividends and stock buybacks.
Apple's profits for the October-December quarter were flat compared with the year before. It still managed to grow revenue 18 percent from the year before, but the cost of starting up production lines for multiple new products like the iPhone 5 and iPad Mini meant that less revenue flowed to the bottom line. The company's gross profit margin in the recent quarter was 38.6 percent compared with 44.7 percent a year earlier.
Of even more concern to investors: Apple's forecast sales growth for the current quarter is around 7 percent compared with a year ago ?far from the 50-percent-plus rate it's often hit in recent years.
Apple usually lowballs its forecasts, but Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer indicated the company will provide more realistic figures from now on.
To be sure, Apple products haven't lost their appeal. Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company couldn't make enough iPhones, iPads and iMacs in the holiday quarter to satisfy demand. The problem is rather that Apple hasn't launched a revolutionary new product since the iPad in 2010.
It's a lot to ask that a company reinvent consumer electronics every few years, but Apple did it three times in a decade with the launch of the iPod, iPhone and iPad. In doing so, the company left investors with the expectation of perpetually zooming growth.
Now, Apple looks quite different. It's still massively profitable, but its growth is moderate, making it similar to companies like IBM Corp. and Microsoft Corp.
"The company is at a bit of a crossroads," said Nomura Securities analyst Stuart Jeffrey. "It's gone from launching big hit products where they didn't have to look at the competitive landscape ? they just did their own thing ? and the growth meant they didn't have to focus on the whims of Wall Street."
The problem, Jeffrey said, is that Apple hasn't adjusted to this reality and worked to find new constituencies among investors. Those who invest in fast-growing companies or chase rising stocks have abandoned the company. Apple doesn't do enough to attract other investor types: value investors who seek out the stocks of undervalued companies with steady, predictable profits, and income investors who look for stocks with generous dividends and low risk.
Analyst Brian White at Topeka Capital Markets said the lack of interest from value-oriented investors means Apple lacks a safety net when there's disappointing news, like Wednesday's earnings report. When other companies' stocks fall, value investors tend to swoop in, putting a floor under the stock and dampening volatility.
"No one wants to pay anything for (Apple) because you can't get the value investor to back it up," White said.
Apple sits on a cash pile of $137 billion, which currently earns about 1 percent annual interest. It's a hoard that frustrates many company-watchers, and analysts are virtually unanimous in their opinion that Apple should be putting it to better use.
Apple has taken steps in the right direction, as far as Wall Street is concerned. Last year, it instituted a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share, a generous sum compared with most technology companies. But it's paltry when measured against companies with similar cash reserves. It has also started using cash to buy back shares ? another way to reward investors.
But analysts say the company should be doing more. Jeffrey calculates that Apple will generate about another $103 billion over three years, but has only committed to returning $45 billion of this $240 billion in cash to shareholders.
"The company needs to change strategically in a number of ways... including in looking after shareholders," Jeffrey said.
A higher dividend would appeal to value and income investors, and buybacks would reduce the number of shares outstanding, which in turn would get the company's earnings per share growing again.
White has been one of the biggest Apple cheerleaders on Wall Street. He drew attention in April for setting a $1,111 price target for Apple's stock when the shares were trading around $600.
White backed away from his old price target on Thursday. He said he still believes the company is worth that much, but he has realized he's too far in front of the pack. Investors aren't going to give the company the credit it deserves, in his opinion.
"It's tough for people to get their head around. I can't be a visionary forever," White said.
His new price target: $888. Eight is a lucky number in China, and three eights are extra lucky.
"Look, Apple needs a little luck here," White said.
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8 hrs.
Microsoft Research is embarking on a highly ambitious project: A computational model of an entire ecosystem, from the soil itself to the creatures that live on it.
Such a comprehensive model would be useful not just to biologists, but to city planners and legislators, who could see concrete?predictions regarding things like deforestation and dams.
To model anything from nature properly is a monumental task, regardless of scale. A single atom, a single cell, or a single organism contains so much information and so many variables that it is effectively impossible to model them perfectly.
Modeling?an entire ecosystem with any accuracy, then, is a task of mind-boggling complexity. But not too long ago, so was sequencing the human genome, or simulating the way proteins form and fold in the molecular soup of our bodies. Drew Purves at Microsoft Research in Cambridge thinks the time has come for what the company describes as a General Ecosystem Model?(also known as GEM)?? capable of simulating just about any ecosystem in the world.
Purves wrote an article for the journal Nature announcing the?team's intentions, and calling for others to help out ? because it's not a small project. They've already created a prototype, called the Madingley Model, which is already more ambitious than anything out there.
"There are a huge number of ecological and environmental models, but in our opinion, nothing that is yet as comprehensive as a GEM would be," Purves told NBC News in an emailed statement. Models for certain areas of the ocean, or specific types of forests, already exist, but can't be adapted easily. He wants to make one that's powerful enough to be applied anywhere, from the deep ocean to the high desert; you'd just need to put in the correct parameters.
It wouldn't be perfect, but you?don't need a perfect model of something to make useful predictions: Tomorrow's weather, the effects of a drug, and the existence of subatomic particles like the Higgs Boson were all theorized from imperfect models. And Purves cautions that while the researchers' work has a broader range than anything out there, it's still missing a lot.
Even without simulating bacteria or the effects of certain features like streams, researchers can reach predictions that match up to the real world. A rise in temperature, for example, would kill off certain plants and cause others to thrive, which would affect the soil they live in, the herbivores that feed on them, and the carnivores that feed on them. It could all be simulated within the model.
But they still need data. Lots more data. Purves elaborates:?"What we are really missing is good data on the state of whole ecosystems... how much herbivore biomass there is in total, or, how many individuals of each size class?" After all, a thousand, big wildebeest may consume more grass than small ones, and seek out higher territories. And since every creature ends up recycled into the ecosystem again, every statistic is important to keep track of.
Purves hopes that the model will enable not just advances in science, but in policy as well. With a true model of a state or region's ecosystem, the effects of dams, runoff, climate change, and other things can be calculated objectively and included as part of the lawmaking discussion. On that front, the researchers are collaborating with the United Nations Environment Programme to help?hone?their work for political relevance.
It's a work in progress, but in a few years it could be a powerful resource for anyone looking into the effects of just about anything on the environment and its denizens. New updates to the project will be logged at the Computational Ecology and Environmental Science section of Microsoft Research.
Devin Coldewey is a contributing writer for NBCNews Digital. His personal website is?coldewey.cc.
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Written by Bane Rossi on 24 January 2013
WESTERVILLE, Ohio ? Otterbein University sophomore Kristen Norris (Westerville/Central) has been named the Ohio Athletic Conference (OAC) ?Field Athlete of the Week,? the league office announced Monday afternoon.
Norris won a pair of jumping events Saturday afternoon as the women?s track and field team rolled to victory in the Otterbein Invitational, held inside the Clements Recreation and Fitness Center.
Kristen Norris
Norris leapt 35-1 in the triple jump, good enough to best the second-place finisher by nearly four feet. She also won the long jump with a mark of 16-9 ? and came in fourth in the 60-meter dash.
The track and field teams resume action Saturday, traveling to crosstown Capital University for the OAC Split Meet.
?
PRESS RELEASE & PHOTO COURTESY OF OTTERBEIN ATHLETICS
Source: http://megasportsnews.com/?p=43962
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NEW YORK ? Five years after the start of the Great Recession, the toll is terrifyingly clear: Millions of middle-class jobs have been lost in developed countries the world over.
And the situation is even worse than it appears.
Most of the jobs will never return, and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market. What?s more, these jobs aren?t just being lost to China and other developing countries, and they aren?t just factory work. Increasingly, jobs are disappearing in the service sector, home to two-thirds of all workers.
They?re being obliterated by technology.
Year after year, the software that runs computers and an array of other machines and devices becomes more sophisticated and powerful and capable of doing tasks more efficiently that humans have always done. For decades, science fiction warned of a future when we would be architects of our own obsolescence, replaced by our machines; an Associated Press analysis finds that the future has arrived.
?The jobs that are going away aren?t coming back,? says Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of ?Race Against the Machine.? ??I have never seen a period where computers demonstrated as many skills and abilities as they have over the past seven years.?
The global economy is being reshaped by machines that generate and analyze vast amounts of data; by devices such as smartphones and tablet computers that let people work just about anywhere, even when they?re on the move; by smarter, nimbler robots; and by services that let businesses rent computing power when they need it, instead of installing expensive equipment and hiring IT staffs to run it. Whole employment categories, from secretaries to travel agents, are starting to disappear.
?There?s no sector of the economy that?s going to get a pass,? says Martin Ford, who runs a software company and wrote ?The Lights in the Tunnel,? a book predicting widespread job losses. ?It?s everywhere.?
The numbers startle even labor economists. In the United States, half of the 7.5 million jobs lost during the Great Recession paid middle-class wages, ranging from $38,000 to $68,000. But only 2 percent of the 3.5 million jobs gained since the recession ended in June 2009 are midpay. Nearly 70 percent are low-paying jobs; 29 percent pay well.
In the 17 European countries that use the euro as their currency, the numbers are even worse. Almost 4.3 million low-pay jobs have been gained since mid-2009, but the loss of midpay jobs has never stopped. A total of 7.6 million disappeared from January 2008 through June.
Experts warn that this ?hollowing out? of the middle-class workforce is far from over. They predict the loss of millions more jobs as technology becomes even more sophisticated and reaches deeper into our lives. Maarten Goos, an economist at the University of Leuven in Belgium, says Europe could double its middle-class job losses.
Some occupations are beneficiaries of the march of technology, such as software engineers and app designers for smartphones and tablet computers. Overall, though, technology is eliminating far more jobs than it is creating.
To understand the impact technology is having on middle-class jobs in developed countries, the AP analyzed employment data from 20 countries; tracked changes in hiring by industry, pay and task; compared job losses and gains during recessions and expansions over the past four decades; and interviewed economists, technology experts, robot manufacturers, software developers, entrepreneurs and people in the labor force who ranged from CEOs to the unemployed.
The AP?s key findings:
?For more than three decades, technology has drastically reduced the number of jobs in manufacturing. Robots and other machines controlled by computer programs work faster and make fewer mistakes than humans. Now, that same efficiency is being unleashed in the service economy, which employs more than two-thirds of the workforce in developed countries. Technology is eliminating jobs in office buildings, retail establishments and other businesses consumers deal with every day.
?Technology is being adopted by every kind of organization that employs people. It?s replacing workers in large corporations and small businesses, established companies and start-ups. It?s being used by schools, colleges and universities; hospitals and other medical facilities; nonprofit organizations and the military.
?The most vulnerable workers are doing repetitive tasks that programmers can write software for ? an accountant checking a list of numbers, an office manager filing forms, a paralegal reviewing documents for key words to help in a case. As software becomes even more sophisticated, victims are expected to include those who juggle tasks, such as supervisors and managers ? workers who thought they were protected by a college degree.
?Thanks to technology, companies in the Standard & Poor?s 500 stock index reported one-third more profit the past year than they earned the year before the Great Recession. They?ve also expanded their businesses, but total employment, at 21.1 million, has declined by a half-million.
?Start-ups account for much of the job growth in developed economies, but software is allowing entrepreneurs to launch businesses with a third fewer employees than in the 1990s. There is less need for administrative support and back-office jobs that handle accounting, payroll and benefits.
?It?s becoming a self-serve world. Instead of relying on someone else in the workplace or our personal lives, we use technology to do tasks ourselves. Some find this frustrating; others like the feeling of control. Either way, this trend will only grow as software permeates our lives.
?Technology is replacing workers in developed countries regardless of their politics, policies and laws. Union rules and labor laws may slow the dismissal of employees, but no country is attempting to prohibit organizations from using technology that allows them to operate more efficiently ? and with fewer employees.
Some analysts reject the idea that technology has been a big job killer. They note that the collapse of the housing market in the U.S., Ireland, Spain and other countries and the ensuing global recession wiped out millions of middle-class construction and factory jobs. In their view, governments could bring many of the jobs back if they would put aside worries about their heavy debts and spend more. Others note that jobs continue to be lost to China, India and other countries in the developing world.
But to the extent technology has played a role, it raises the specter of high unemployment even after economic growth accelerates. Some economists say millions of middle-class workers must be retrained to do other jobs if they hope to get work again. Others are more hopeful. They note that technological change over the centuries eventually has created more jobs than it destroyed, though the wait can be long and painful.
A common refrain: The developed world may face years of high middle-class unemployment, social discord, divisive politics, falling living standards and dashed hopes.
In the U.S., the economic recovery that started in June 2009 has been called the third straight ?jobless recovery.?
But that?s a misnomer. The jobs came back after the first two.
Most recessions since World War II were followed by a surge in new jobs as consumers started spending again and companies hired to meet the new demand. In the months after recessions ended in 1991 and 2001, there was no familiar snap-back, but all the jobs had returned in less than three years.
But 42 months after the Great Recession ended, the U.S. has gained only 3.5 million, or 47 percent, of the 7.5 million jobs that were lost. The 17 countries that use the euro had 3.5 million fewer jobs last June than in December 2007.
This has truly been a jobless recovery, and the lack of midpay jobs is almost entirely to blame.
Fifty percent of the U.S. jobs lost were in midpay industries, but Moody?s Analytics, a research firm, says just 2 percent of the 3.5 million jobs gained are in that category. After the four previous recessions, at least 30 percent of jobs created ? and as many as 46 percent ? were in midpay industries.
Other studies that group jobs differently show a similar drop in middle-class work.
Some of the most startling studies have focused on midskill, midpay jobs that require tasks that follow well-defined procedures and are repeated throughout the day. Think travel agents, salespeople in stores, office assistants and back-office workers like benefits managers and payroll clerks, as well as machine operators and other factory jobs. An August 2012 paper by economists Henry Siu of the University of British Columbia and Nir Jaimovich of Duke University found these kinds of jobs comprise fewer than half of all jobs, yet accounted for nine of 10 of all losses in the Great Recession. And they have kept disappearing in the economic recovery.
Webb Wheel Products makes parts for truck brakes, which involves plenty of repetitive work. Its newest employee is the Doosan V550M, and it?s a marvel. It can spin a 130-pound brake drum like a child?s top, smooth its metal surface, then drill holes ? all without missing a beat. And it doesn?t take vacations or ?complain about anything,? says Dwayne Ricketts, president of the Cullman, Ala., company.
Thanks to computerized machines, Webb Wheel hasn?t added a factory worker in three years, though it?s making 300,000 more drums annually, a 25 percent increase.
?Everyone is waiting for the unemployment rate to drop, but I don?t know if it will much,? Ricketts says. ?Companies in the recession learned to be more efficient, and they?re not going to go back.?
In Europe, companies couldn?t go back even if they wanted to. The 17 countries that use the euro slipped into another recession 14 months ago, in November 2011. The current unemployment rate is a record 11.8 percent.
European companies had been using technology to replace midpay workers for years, and now that has accelerated.
?The recessions have amplified the trend,? says Goos, the Belgian economist. ?New jobs are being created, but not the middle-pay ones.?
In Canada, a 2011 study by economists at the University of British Columbia and York University in Toronto found a similar pattern of middle-class losses, though they were working with older data. In the 15 years through 2006, the share of total jobs held by many midpay, midskill occupations shrank. The share held by foremen fell 37 percent, workers in administrative and senior clerical roles fell 18 percent and those in sales and service fell 12 percent.
In Japan, a 2009 report from Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo documented a ?substantial? drop in midpay, midskill jobs in the five years through 2005, and linked it to technology.
Developing economies have been spared the technological onslaught ? for now. Countries like Brazil and China are still growing middle-class jobs because they?re shifting from export-driven to consumer-based economies. But even they are beginning to use more machines in manufacturing. The cheap labor they relied on to make goods from apparel to electronics is no longer so cheap as their living standards rise.
One example is Sunbird Engineering, a Hong Kong firm that makes mirror frames for heavy trucks at a factory in southern China. Salaries at its plant in Dongguan have nearly tripled from $80 a month in 2005 to $225 today. ?Automation is the obvious next step,? CEO Bill Pike says.
Sunbird is installing robotic arms that drill screws into a mirror assembly, work now done by hand. The machinery will allow the company to eliminate two positions on a 13-person assembly line. Pike hopes that additional automation will allow the company to reduce another five or six jobs from the line.
?By automating, we can outlive the labor cost increases inevitable in China,? Pike says. ?Those who automate in China will win the battle of increased costs.?
Foxconn Technology Group, which assembles iPhones at factories in China, unveiled plans in 2011 to install one million robots over three years.
A recent headline in the China Daily newspaper: ?Chinese robot wars set to erupt.?
Candidates for U.S. president last year never tired of telling Americans how jobs were being shipped overseas. China, with its vast army of cheaper labor and low-value currency, was easy to blame.
But most jobs cut in the U.S. and Europe weren?t moved. No one got them. They vanished. And the villain in this story ? a clever software engineer working in Silicon Valley or the high-tech hub around Heidelberg, Germany ? isn?t so easy to hate.
?It doesn?t have political appeal to say the reason we have a problem is we?re so successful in technology,? says Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at Columbia University. ?There?s no enemy there.?
Unless you count family and friends and the person staring at you in the mirror. The uncomfortable truth is technology is killing jobs with the help of ordinary consumers by enabling them to quickly do tasks that workers used to do full time, for salaries.
Check out your groceries or drugstore purchases using a kiosk? A worker behind a cash register used to do that.
Buy clothes without visiting a store? You?ve taken work from a salesman.
Click ?accept? in an email invitation to attend a meeting? You?ve pushed an office assistant closer to unemployment.
Book your vacation using an online program? You?ve helped lay off a travel agent. Perhaps at American Express Co., which announced this month that it plans to cut 5,400 jobs, mainly in its travel business, as more of its customers shift to online portals to plan trips.
Software is picking out worrisome blots in medical scans, running trains without conductors, driving cars without drivers, spotting profits in stocks trades in milliseconds, analyzing Twitter traffic to tell where to sell certain snacks, sifting through documents for evidence in court cases, recording power usage beamed from digital utility meters at millions of homes, and sorting returned library books.
Technology gives rise to ?cheaper products and cool services,? says David Autor, an economist at MIT, one of the first to document tech?s role in cutting jobs. ?But if you lose your job, that is slim compensation.?
Even the most commonplace technologies ? take, say, email ? are making it tough for workers to get jobs, including ones with MBAs, like Roshanne Redmond, a former project manager at a commercial real estate developer.
?I used to get on the phone, talk to a secretary and coordinate calendars,? Redmond says. ?Now, things are done by computer.?
Technology is used by companies to run leaner and smarter in good times and bad, but never more than in bad. In a recession, sales fall and companies cut jobs to save money. Then they turn to technology to do tasks people used to do. And that?s when it hits them: They realize they don?t have to re-hire the humans when business improves, or at least not as many.
The Hackett Group, a consultant on back-office jobs, estimates 2 million of them in finance, human resources, information technology and procurement have disappeared in the U.S. and Europe since the Great Recession. It pins the blame for more than half of the losses on technology. These are jobs that used to fill cubicles at almost every company ? clerks paying bills and ordering supplies, benefits managers filing health-care forms and IT experts helping with computer crashes.
?The effect of (technology) on white-collar jobs is huge, but it?s not obvious,? says MIT?s McAfee. Companies ?don?t put out a press release saying we?re not hiring again because of machines.?
___
What hope is there for the future?
Historically, new companies and new industries have been the incubator of new jobs. Start-up companies no more than five years old are big sources of new jobs in developed economies. In the U.S., they accounted for 99 percent of new private sector jobs in 2005, according to a study by the University of Maryland?s John Haltiwanger and two other economists.
But even these companies are hiring fewer people. The average new business employed 4.7 workers when it opened its doors in 2011, down from 7.6 in the 1990s, according to a Labor Department study released last March.
Technology is probably to blame, wrote the report?s authors, Eleanor Choi and James Spletzer. Entrepreneurs no longer need people to do clerical and administrative tasks to help them get their businesses off the ground.
In the old days ? say, 10 years ago ? ?you?d need an assistant pretty early to coordinate everything ? or you?d pay a huge opportunity cost for the entrepreneur or the president to set up a meeting,? says Jeff Connally, CEO of CMIT Solutions, a technology consultancy to small businesses.
Now technology means ?you can look at your calendar and everybody else?s calendar and ? bing! ? you?ve set up a meeting.? So no assistant gets hired.
Entrepreneur Andrew Schrage started the financial advice website Money Crashers in 2009 with a partner and one freelance writer. The bare-bones start-up was only possible, Schrage says, because of technology that allowed the company to get online help with accounting and payroll and other support functions without hiring staff.
?Had I not had access to cloud computing and outsourcing, I estimate that I would have needed 5-10 employees to begin this venture,? Schrage says. ?I doubt I would have been able to launch my business.?
Technological innovations have been throwing people out of jobs for centuries. But they eventually created more work, and greater wealth, than they destroyed. Ford, the author and software engineer, thinks there is reason to believe that this time will be different. He sees virtually no end to the inroads of computers into the workplace. Eventually, he says, software will threaten the livelihoods of doctors, lawyers and other highly skilled professionals.
Many economists are encouraged by history and think the gains eventually will outweigh the losses. But even they have doubts.
?What?s different this time is that digital technologies show up in every corner of the economy,? says McAfee, a self-described ?digital optimist.? ??Your tablet (computer) is just two or three years ago, and it?s already taken over our lives.?
Peter Lindert, an economist at the University of California, Davis, says the computer is more destructive than innovations in the Industrial Revolution because the pace at which it is upending industries makes it hard for people to adapt.
Occupations that provided middle-class lifestyles for generations can disappear in a few years. Utility meter readers are just one example. As power companies began installing so-called smart readers outside homes, the number of meter readers in the U.S. plunged from 56,000 in 2001 to 36,000 in 2010, according to the Labor Department.
In 10 years? That number is expected to be zero.
NEXT: Practically human: Can smart machines do your job?
There are 22 hours, 6 minutes remaining to comment on this story.
Source: http://www.daily-chronicle.com/2013/01/22/recession-technology-flail-middle-class-jobs/a2eizbq/
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Google's Native Client endowed x86 machines with the ability to run apps compiled from C and C++ right inside Chrome in 2011, and now ARM devices are finally getting their time to shine. Mountain View's latest Native Client SDK adds support for ARM hardware, and tweaking existing Native Client apps to run on the architecture sounds pretty painless. According to Page and Co., developers just have to add a new file extension to their app, tweak a manifest file and get ahold of the fresh SDK. ARM support is reason enough for developers to celebrate, but Google says it's working on a next-gen Portable Native Client that'll let apps work regardless of architecture and without having to recompile, to boot. If you're ready to start coding, hit the source link for more details.
Filed under: Desktops, Laptops, Tablets, Internet, Google
Source: Google Chromium Blog
Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/VdhsWJ3nOXs/
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Public release date: 23-Jan-2013
Share ] Contact: Craig Macaulay
craig.macaulay@csiro.au
61-362-325-219
CSIRO Australia
Ice cores drilled in the Greenland ice sheet, recounting the history of the last great warming period more than 120,000 years ago, are giving scientists their clearest insight to a world that was warmer than today.
In a paper published today in the journal Nature, scientists have used a 2,540 metre long Greenland ice core to reach back to the Eemian period 115-130 thousand years ago and reconstruct the Greenland temperature and ice sheet extent back through the last interglacial. This period is likely to be comparable in several ways to climatic conditions in the future, especially the mean global surface temperature, but without anthropogenic or human influence on the atmospheric composition.
The Eemian period is referred to as the last interglacial, when warm temperatures continued for several thousand years due mainly to the earth's orbit allowing more energy to be received from the sun. The world today is considered to be in an interglacial period and that has lasted 11,000 years, and called the Holocene.
"The ice is an archive of past climate and analysis of the core is giving us pointers to the future when the world is likely to be warmer," says CSIRO's Dr Mauro Rubino, the Australian scientist working with the North Greenland Eemian ice core research project.
Dr Rubino says the Greenland ice sheet is presently losing mass more quickly than the Antarctic ice sheet. Of particular interest is the extent of the Greenland continental ice sheet at the time of the last interglacial and its contribution to global sea level.
Deciphering the ice core archive proved especially difficult for ice layers formed during the last interglacial because, being close to bedrock, the pressure and friction due to ice movement impacted and re-arranged the ice layering. These deep layers were "re-assembled" in their original formation using careful analysis, particularly of concentrations of trace gases that tie the dating to the more reliable Antarctic ice core records.
Using dating techniques and analysing the water stable isotopes, the scientists estimated the warmest Greenland surface temperatures during the interglacial period about 130,000 years ago were 84oC degrees warmer than the average of the last 1,000 years.
At the same time, the thickness of the Greenland ice sheet decreased by 400250 metres.
"The findings show a modest response of the Greenland ice sheet to the significant warming in the early Eemian and lead to the deduction that Antarctica must have contributed significantly to the 6 metre higher Eemian sea levels".
Additionally, ice core data at the drilling site reveal frequent melt of the ice sheet surface during the Eemian period. "During the exceptional heat over Greenland in July 2012 melt layers formed at the site. With additional warming, surface melt might become more common in the future," the authors said.
The paper is the culmination of several years work by organisations across more than 14 nations.
Dr Rubino said the research results provide new benchmarks for climate and ice sheet scenarios used by scientists in projecting future climate influences.
###
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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Public release date: 23-Jan-2013 Share ] Contact: Craig Macaulay
craig.macaulay@csiro.au
61-362-325-219
CSIRO Australia
Ice cores drilled in the Greenland ice sheet, recounting the history of the last great warming period more than 120,000 years ago, are giving scientists their clearest insight to a world that was warmer than today.
In a paper published today in the journal Nature, scientists have used a 2,540 metre long Greenland ice core to reach back to the Eemian period 115-130 thousand years ago and reconstruct the Greenland temperature and ice sheet extent back through the last interglacial. This period is likely to be comparable in several ways to climatic conditions in the future, especially the mean global surface temperature, but without anthropogenic or human influence on the atmospheric composition.
The Eemian period is referred to as the last interglacial, when warm temperatures continued for several thousand years due mainly to the earth's orbit allowing more energy to be received from the sun. The world today is considered to be in an interglacial period and that has lasted 11,000 years, and called the Holocene.
"The ice is an archive of past climate and analysis of the core is giving us pointers to the future when the world is likely to be warmer," says CSIRO's Dr Mauro Rubino, the Australian scientist working with the North Greenland Eemian ice core research project.
Dr Rubino says the Greenland ice sheet is presently losing mass more quickly than the Antarctic ice sheet. Of particular interest is the extent of the Greenland continental ice sheet at the time of the last interglacial and its contribution to global sea level.
Deciphering the ice core archive proved especially difficult for ice layers formed during the last interglacial because, being close to bedrock, the pressure and friction due to ice movement impacted and re-arranged the ice layering. These deep layers were "re-assembled" in their original formation using careful analysis, particularly of concentrations of trace gases that tie the dating to the more reliable Antarctic ice core records.
Using dating techniques and analysing the water stable isotopes, the scientists estimated the warmest Greenland surface temperatures during the interglacial period about 130,000 years ago were 84oC degrees warmer than the average of the last 1,000 years.
At the same time, the thickness of the Greenland ice sheet decreased by 400250 metres.
"The findings show a modest response of the Greenland ice sheet to the significant warming in the early Eemian and lead to the deduction that Antarctica must have contributed significantly to the 6 metre higher Eemian sea levels".
Additionally, ice core data at the drilling site reveal frequent melt of the ice sheet surface during the Eemian period. "During the exceptional heat over Greenland in July 2012 melt layers formed at the site. With additional warming, surface melt might become more common in the future," the authors said.
The paper is the culmination of several years work by organisations across more than 14 nations.
Dr Rubino said the research results provide new benchmarks for climate and ice sheet scenarios used by scientists in projecting future climate influences.
###
[ | E-mail | Share ] ?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-01/ca-gic012213.php
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This was the result of coordinated takedown effort, Spamhaus, an firm dedicated to fighting spam, announced on Saturday.
The Virut malware spreads by inserting malicious code into clean executable files and by copying itself to fixed, attached and shared network drives. Some variants also infect HTML, ASP and PHP files with rogue code that distributes the threat.
Once installed on a computer, the Virut malware connects to an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server using an encrypted connection and awaits instructions. This allows attackers to control Virut infected computers as a botnet.
Virut is primarily used as a malware distribution platform ? other cybercriminals pay the Virut botmasters to deploy their own malware on the already compromised computers.
In the past, Virut has been used to distribute the ZeuS banking malware and the Kehlios spambot. However, last week, security researchers from Symantec warned that Virut?started distributing the Waledac malware, potentially leading to the resurrection of the Waledac botnet that was originally shut down by Microsoft in 2010.
The Virut botnet masters are using several dozen domain names in the .pl (Poland), .ru (Russia) and .at (Austria) top-level domains as part of their command and control (C&C) infrastructure, Spamhaus team member Thomas Morrison said on Saturday in?an announcement?on the organisation?s website.
Spamhaus collaborated with the Polish Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT.pl) and the home.pl domain registrar to ensure that no traffic was received by the .pl domains used by the Virut botnet, a process known as sinkholing, Morrison said.
?A number of domains in .pl, most notably zief.pl and ircgalaxy.pl, have been used to host Virut, its command and control IRC servers, as well as to host other malware, including Palevo and Zeus,? CERT Poland?said on Friday. ?NASK, the operator of the Polish domain registry, took over 23 of these domains yesterday in an effort to protect Internet users from Virut-related threats. Name servers for those domains were changed to sinkhole.cert.pl, controlled by CERT Polska [CERT Poland] ? an incident response team operated by NASK.?
Spamhaus also worked with Group-IB, a Russian information security and computer forensics company, which was able to get the .ru domains used by Virut shut down in a matter of hours.
Although currently crippled, the Virut C&C infrastructure is not completely out of the hands of attackers. Their last remaining strongholds are the remaining .at domain names, Morrison said.
Spamhaus alerted the .at domain registry and the Austrian CERT multiple times about this issue and hopes that they will follow the example of their Polish and Russian counterparts in suspending the C&C domain names.
?The Virut takedown effort clearly illustrates the important and meaningful role [domain] registries and registrars can play in the fight against cybercrime in general,? Morrison said. Such organisations should be proactive and add clauses in their contracts that will allow them to quickly take action against domain names used for malicious purposes, he said.
Based on information gathered during a recent sinkholing operation, Symantec?estimates the size of the Virut botnet?at over 300,000 infected computers.
Tags: ASP, Austria, botnet, C&C, CERT, CNME, command and control, computer news middle east, crippled, Cybercriminal, gang, Group-IB, highlightedpost, HTML, infected, infection, Internet relay chat, IRC, Kehlios, malware, Microsoft, online, php, Poland, Polish Computer Emergency Response Team, Russia, security, server, spam, Spamhaus, Symantec, takedown, Thomas Morrison, threat, virut, Waledac, ZeusSource: http://www.cnmeonline.com/news/virut-botnet-crippled-by-researchers/
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Jan. 23, 2013 ? The metabolic process which fuels the growth of many cancers has its origins in normal brain growth finds a new study published in BioMed Central's open access journal Cancer & Metabolism. Using knock-out mice the study shows that interfering with Hexokinase-2 (Hk2), an enzyme integral to glucose metabolism, reduces the aggressiveness of medulloblastoma, the most common malignant brain tumor in children, and allows long term survival of mice.
Most cells only convert glucose to lactate in the absence of oxygen, for example, during a short burst of intensive exercise (anaerobic glycolysis). However rapidly dividing cells, including many cancer cells, convert glucose to lactate even in the presence of oxygen (aerobic glycolysis).
Researchers from the University of North Carolina have found that Hk2 switches on aerobic glycolysis in progenitor cells of the brain and in medulloblastoma. In the absence of Hk2, brain development was disordered. Additionally they found that deleting the Hk2 gene in mice genetically prone to develop medulloblastoma reduced the aggressiveness of the tumors, allowing long-term survival of the mice.
Dr. Timothy Gershon, who led this study, explained, "As long ago as 1924 Otto Warburg hypothesized that cancers use glycolysis to provide energy for growth even in the presence of oxygen. We found that glycolysis in the presence of oxygen is a developmental process that is co-opted in cancer to support malignant growth. We can now think about targeting this process in patients."
Open access publisher BioMed Central is proud to announce the launch of the Cancer & Metabolism . Professor Chi van Dang, co-Editor-in-Chief, commented that "It has become self-evident that metabolism and bioenergetics are regulated by cancer genes. Cancer & Metabolism is launched uniquely to fulfil the needs of a burgeoning field." Professor Michael Pollak, co-Editor-in-Chief, added that "The scope of Cancer & Metabolism will allow for an interdisciplinary readership including cancer biologists, endocrinologists, oncologists, clinical trialists and population scientists."
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Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/most_popular/~3/hIl6MRsTrv8/130122231353.htm
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WASHINGTON ? The Internal Revenue Service today announced a simplified option that many owners of home-based businesses and some home-based workers may use to figure their deductions for the business use of their homes.
In tax year 2010, the most recent year for which figures are available, nearly 3.4 million taxpayers claimed deductions for business use of a home (commonly referred to as the home office deduction).
The new optional deduction, capped at $1,500 per year based on $5 a square foot for up to 300 square feet, will reduce the paperwork and recordkeeping burden on small businesses by an estimated 1.6 million hours annually.
?This is a common-sense rule to provide taxpayers an easier way to calculate and claim the home office deduction,? said Acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller. ?The IRS continues to look for similar ways to combat complexity and encourages people to look at this option as they consider tax planning in 2013.?
The new option provides eligible taxpayers an easier path to claiming the home office deduction. Currently, they are generally required to fill out a 43-line form (Form 8829) often with complex calculations of allocated expenses, depreciation and carryovers of unused deductions.? Taxpayers claiming the optional deduction will complete a significantly simplified form.
Though homeowners using the new option cannot depreciate the portion of their home used in a trade or business, they can claim allowable mortgage interest, real estate taxes and casualty losses on the home as itemized deductions on Schedule A. These deductions need not be allocated between personal and business use, as is required under the regular method.
Business expenses unrelated to the home, such as advertising, supplies and wages paid to employees are still fully deductible.
Current restrictions on the home office deduction, such as the requirement that a home office must be used regularly and exclusively for business and the limit tied to the income derived from the particular business, still apply under the new option.
The new simplified option is available starting with the 2013 return most taxpayers file early in 2014.
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