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April 22 Question from Colleague最多人问的问题： 你有多高？（其实我一直都不认为我很高，但来到这里后暂时还没有找到比我更高的）
最郁闷的问题： 你薪酬有多少？ （当住一大班同事面前你会点答？）
最温馨的问题（候）： 你还习惯这吧？ （令人好感动的regrad哦~~）
最没趣的问题： 你打篮球厉害吧？ （无语…幸好说有游泳，再说游得好坏他们暂时（或者永远）都不会知道吧！）
最不知所措的问题： 有女朋友没有？ （有人居然还直接问，女朋友肯定很漂亮吧？ 汗ing...）
最常见的问题： 在哪个部门工作啊？ （Q部门呢！鼻子高高的.）
最难答的问题： 这里有没有问题？ （有啊，周讲师，但是我都不知道怎样提问啊，呼！）
April 02 涨价版《月亮之上》我在遥望, 市场之上, 有多少的东西正在自由的上涨, 昨天已经, 掏干了钱囊, 和你重逢在借钱的路上, 手头越来越紧,只能回想, 有钱的日子象在天堂,呕也,呕也,呕也 谁在控制,物价狂涨, 昂贵的猪肉象白云在飘荡, 东边借钱,西边还帐,再紧紧腰带,来碗面汤 March 31 About Daily刚才打开空间，刷了很久才刷进去，然后又对“添加日记”的按钮按了许久才进入编辑页面；这种看似即将会发生但不知道还要等多少分钟发生，或者不知道会不会发生的感觉十分令人无奈。老实说，并不是第二次进来写日记才意识到这种感觉，即便是之前“功课式”地保存浏览过的文章和打开别人的主页窥探人家的日记时，这种感觉充满了期待和疑惑…… 不如…… 都是些无厘头的假想。生活像天平，希望通过在虚拟的国度里多写些无厘头的东西能让现实变得更加充实。 March 26 很闷很无聊昨天整整睡了13个钟。在早上7点的时候醒过，但是找不到要自己起床的理由；下午回去又睡过，想不睡但是找不到不睡的理由，于是一天就这样耗费掉。 今天只睡了8个钟。早上8点的时候醒了，但由于今天不是工作日，本来可以继续睡却起了床——仿佛为了迎接我们李大爷的光临。 中午饭气攻心，本来可以打盹却上了网忽悠——仿佛为了去图书馆看看时事周刊。 到底这网络日记想表达些什么呢？当我在思考这个问题时往往打消自己发布的冲动，为什么像我这样一个思想高度活跃，乃至晚上大说梦话的人，面对日记的写作会显得那么乏力呢？（记得初中的那滔滔不绝的日记和高中轻狂的周记……） 还是没有回答自己的提问～希望那天再番起这篇My first blog能想起答案吧！ September 06 Amnesia Destroys Imagination as Well as Memory, Study FindsAmnesia Destroys Imagination as Well as Memory, Study Finds
Brian Handwerk From National Geographic News January 17, 2007
Amnesia may rob people of their imaginations as well as their memories, new research suggests. "What we've shown is that people with amnesia really are stuck in the present," said lead study author Eleanor Maguire of the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging at University College London.
"They can't recall the past, and now it seems that they can't even imagine the future or indeed richly imagine even fictitious experiences."
Amnesia, which is sometimes temporary, describes several conditions that involve partial or complete memory loss.
Brain damage, tumors, strokes, or even psychological issues that cause the brain to black out disturbing memories can cause the effect. (Related: "Beyond the Brain" in National Geographic magazine.)
Incomplete Picture
Reporting this week in the online edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Maguire and colleagues examined patients who were "profoundly amnesic."
These patients were unable to acquire any new memories.
Several of the amnesiacs did have some past memories, but only of events that occurred 10 or even 20 years before the onset of their illness. Many had no detailed memories of anything that had ever happened in their lives.
The researchers asked the amnesiacs to imagine scenarios such as lying on a sandy beach and then to describe what the experience would be like—what they would see, hear, and smell.
But the patients could describe only fragmented scenes.
"They described many of the elements that would characterize the experience," Maguire said. "But they couldn't put them into a spatial context—they couldn't organize them into the location of that scenario."
"They would know there should be a sea, that there would be sand, but in the way they described it, they'd say, I just can't visualize the whole scene as you'd like," she added.
Without an environment or location to house a scene, amnesiacs may be unable to recreate or imagine normal experiences.
"If you think about memories, they are always somewhere, because things happen somewhere," Maguire explained. "So spatial context is very important for our experiences."
Placing a Memory
Scientists believe that the brain recalls past events by meticulously reconstructing the individual cues of an experience—the people, objects, and other aspects that composed the scene.
This process is thought to occur in a region of the brain known as the hippocampus, which was damaged in the amnesiac patients studied. (Related: "First Ever Brain 'Atlas' Completed" [September 26, 2006].)
The new study implies that similar processes in the hippocampus are also used to imagine future events, suggesting that memory and imagination are two sides of the same coin.
The hippocampus may provide the spatial context that binds and blends the people, objects, and other aspects of a memory—or an imagined event.
"Maybe the hippocampus," Maguire said, "is the basic scaffold around which memories are hung."
Can This Football Helmet Save Lives?Can This Football Helmet Save Lives?
More professional football players are turning up with irreversible brain disorders. Are concussions to blame? By Brett Zarda | August 2007 From Popular Science
Andre Waters, 44, shot himself in the head after bouts with depression. Terry Long drank a bottle of antifreeze at 45. Thirty-six-year-old Justin Strzelczyk heard voices and died in a crash while fleeing police. All ex–NFL players, all dead before their 46th birthday, and according to autopsies performed by physician Bennet Omalu, all with signs of brain damage.
Omalu, a former neuropathologist at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, believes he's the first to pinpoint forensic evidence of a condition he has dubbed football-induced chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), a variation of "boxer's dementia." Symptoms include confusion, mood disorders, slurred speech and memory loss. On the eve of football season, Omalu, along with a growing number of clinicians, argues that other players are at risk.
Now chief medical examiner for San Joaquin County in California, Omalu discovered abnormal proteins in each player's brain similar to those found in 90-year-old dementia patients. He believes that scores of players have analogous damage, but proving it requires postmortem brain sectioning. "These are not the first football players to develop dementia, become destitute, and suffer from depression," he says. "The novelty is that for the first time, we have direct, indisputable tissue evidence."
The NFL, however, isn't convinced. "No one is dismissing the work, but there are numerous inconsistencies and inaccuracies," says physician Ira Casson, co-chairman of the NFL's Mild Traumatic Brain Injury (MTBI) committee. "We refuse to jump on the bandwagon with the first report."
Casson disagrees that the pathology is consistent with boxer's dementia. Omalu concedes that components of boxer's CTE are not evident, but notes that different impacts will yield different pathologies.
Kevin Guskiewicz, the research director at the Center for the Study of Retired Athletes, a frequent critic of the MTBI committee, says the NFL should consider evidence beyond brain slices. Surveying retired players, Guskiewicz found a three-fold increase in clinical-depression rates after three or more concussions. In June he presented his findings at the first-ever "concussion summit" in Chicago, a gathering of more than 250 clinicians, player representatives, and team doctors and trainers convened by NFL commissioner Roger Goodell to discuss traumatic head injuries. Casson dismissed Guskiewicz's results as well, saying the study relied too heavily on anecdotal information. "The data is there," Guskiewicz counters. "Now, hopefully, physicians and trainers will put it to good use."
The NFL has come under mounting pressure to step up the care of its players. Most recently, a congressional subcommittee threatened to enact legislation that would force the league to improve its player-disability plan. Slowly, the NFL is beginning to make changes. As of this season, all players must undergo neuropsychological testing, and the MTBI committee is initiating a study to monitor brain function in retired players. The league has also implemented a new medical plan to cover players diagnosed with dementia. (It has accepted 50 of 104 applications to date.)
Meanwhile, the New Hampshire–based company Simbex is developing technology that could help prevent CTE altogether. It makes sensor-embedded telemetry helmets that can gauge in real time a concussive-level impact and notify personnel on the sidelines. In addition to helping staff decide when to bench a player, the technology is enabling researchers to better understand the biomechanical causes of head trauma, which in turn could lead to better headgear. Seven universities and five high schools now require players to wear the helmets. The NFL is considering the technology but has no firm plans to adopt it.
Guskiewicz, for one, insists that the NFL needs to do more. "Is it smarter to assume the risk is there, until proven otherwise, and treat the players more cautiously," he asks, "or should we assume it's not there and risk the chance?"
September 05 A World of Eloquence in an Upturned PalmA World of Eloquence in an Upturned Palm
 By JOHN TIERNEY From International Herald Tribune
Published: August 28, 2007 ATLANTA — The chimpanzees, after spotting the humans at the corner of their compound, came over to us with their arms outstretched and their palms turned upward. This was the chimps’ way of asking for a banana — and a lot more, as researchers here at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center have discovered. That simple gesture, the upturned palm, is one of the oldest and most widely understood signals in the world. It’s activated by neural circuits inherited from ancient reptiles that abased themselves before larger animals. Chimps and other apes, notably humans, adapted it to ask not just for food, but also for more abstract forms of help, creating a new kind of signal that some researchers believe was the origin of human language.
If that’s true, if human eloquence can be traced from a primal message signifying “Gimme,” I’m not sure what conclusion to draw about our species. Maybe that we are inherently social creatures who survived and prevailed against mightier animals by learning to enlist the cooperation of others. Or maybe just that, in our heart of hearts, we are all slackers.
The meaning of the gesture is clear whether it’s with one upturned palm, the “Brother, can you spare a dime” stance of beggars around the world, or with the two-palm version favored by preachers who reach out to beseech divine assistance. Or by exasperated Hollywood directors who rise from their chairs with upturned palms to implore their actors, “Work with me, people!”
The upraised palm is the automatic accompaniment to an apology or an alibi. As you try blaming the computer for eating your homework, you shrug your shoulders and expose your palms as a show of helplessness. What could I do? How could I know?
The palm-up gesture is what the anthropologist David Givens, director of the Center for Nonverbal Studies in Spokane, Wash., calls a “gestural byproduct” of the circuits in the brain and spinal cord that protected vertebrates hundreds of millions of years ago.
Confronted with a threat, ancient lizards would instinctively bend their spine and limbs to press their bodies closer to the ground, protecting the neck and head and signaling submission to a larger animal. This crouch display is the opposite of the high-stand display, the aggressive posture of a stallion or a gorilla raising its chest and head to appear larger.
The human remnant of the crouch display is a shrug of the shoulders, which lowers the head and rotates the forearms outwards so that the palms face up. Conversely, the high-stand display persists in humans as a rotation of the forearms and palms in the opposite direction, producing the domineering palm-down gesture used by a boss slapping the conference table or an orator commanding quiet from his audience.
Most of these gestures are performed unconsciously, but the palm-up was adapted long ago for conscious gestures by humans and other apes. Chimps and bonobos have been observed using it in the wild and in captivity. In a recent study, Amy Pollick and Frans de Waal, of Emory University, found that chimps here at Yerkes and bonobos in California used gestures in different ways depending on the situation and the group.
A chimp would use the palm-up gesture to ask other chimps to share food, for help in a fight, for sex or, most frequently, to request a grooming session. Bonobos used it most often as an invitation to play. The chimps and bonobos also sent signals through vocalizations and facial expressions, but these didn’t vary much. They seemed to be more closely tied to emotions and weren’t used as flexibly.
“These observations,” Dr. Pollick said, “led Frans and me to speculate that gestures may have served as the steppingstone for early hominid communication and, possibly, language.”
The primatologists at Emory note that gestures are controlled by the same part of the brain that controls speech. But it is also possible, they said, that gestures and speech evolved jointly to create language, as suggested by David McNeill, a psychologist at the University of Chicago.
Synchronizing gestures and speech was essential, Dr. McNeill believes, because what we see humans do today could not have arisen from a system of gesture-first pantomime.
As language evolved, humans used the palm-up for more complex ideas. They could signal, “I don’t know,” by holding both palms face up — or cradling one upturned palm inside the other, a gesture North Africans use to mean, “I don’t understand.”
They could use the open palm metaphorically, as if it were holding an idea, to accompany an announcement like, “Here’s my plan.”
Chimps are not so subtle, but they can understand “Gimme” even when it’s coming from nonchimps. Dr. Pollick found that that she could get a chimp to give her something by pointing to the object and making the palm-up gesture.
Even when the desired object wasn’t visible, the chimps sometimes responded. When Dr. de Waal made the palm-up gesture to a chimp that had stashed some uncracked macadamia nuts inside her mouth, she knew exactly what he meant. She obliged him by gently spitting the nuts into his hand.
Watching the chimps at Yerkes, I began thinking of the palm-up as a sort of linguistic missing link, and it was comforting to think we still had some way to talk with our relatives. But this gesture has its limits for interspecies communication, as I realized when I tried making the palm-up gesture from the corner of the compound.
None of the chimps responded in any way. That wasn’t surprising, if only because they don’t normally respond to strangers. But even if they had wanted to, they would have been hard pressed to continue the conversation. They didn’t have anything to give me, and they lacked a vital human skill: the ability to counter one palm-up with another.
They didn’t know how to helplessly shrug their shoulders and hold out their empty upturned palms to send a sympathetic reply: I’d love to help you, buddy, but I’m all tapped out. Hominids learned to ask for favors early in their evolution. It took longer to figure out how to say a polite no.
September 04 The resilience of freedomThe resilience of freedom
Jun 28th 2007 From The Economist print edition After ten years of Chinese sovereignty, Hong Kong's economy is thriving. But politics, says Simon Long (interviewed here), remains a one-horse race
THE torrential rain that fell on Britain's end-of-empire parade on the night of June 30th 1997 conjured up apocalyptic visions of the future of Hong Kong. Prince Charles bequeathed a sodden city to Jiang Zemin, China's president, and left on board his yacht with Chris (now Lord) Patten, the last British governor. That very night the city's new masters swore in a new “provisional” legislature appointed to replace one elected under British rule. Television cameramen flocked to the territory's borders with China to film the arrival of the People's Liberation Army. It proved to be almost the last chance to see those soldiers in Hong Kong: they disappeared into their barracks. There were no round-ups of degenerates, dissidents or democrats, and no newspaper closures.
It is tempting to argue that Hong Kong has changed China more than the other way round, as this newspaper and others forecast in 1997. Certainly China has changed the more, though Hong Kong's role in this—compared with, for example, the dynamic momentum of China's internal reforms, and the country's accession to the World Trade Organisation—is debatable. Yet as Hong Kong and China celebrate the tenth anniversary of their reunion, their self-congratulation seems justified. An experiment without historic precedent, the transfer of Hong Kong's sovereignty while keeping its unique way of life, has come off—so far.
What has not changed in the “Hong Kong Special Administrative Region” (SAR) of China is more obvious than what has. The city streets still hum to the rhythm of commerce. The skyline remains one of the glories of urban ambition. Even the grumbles are unchanged. The harbour—the reason this “barren rock” became a metropolis—continues to shrink as Hong Kong island reverts to the mainland through reclamation.
The red flag of China flutters over Government House, Lord Patten's former home, and government offices are adorned with China's state insignia. But the street names still celebrate former colonial governors—Des Voeux, Robinson, Nathan, Bonham (though, for the foreseeable future, a Patten Boulevard seems unlikely). And servants of the colonial regime still play important roles under the new dispensation. Donald Tsang, Hong Kong's chief executive, the successor to the governor, was formerly a senior member of Lord Patten's administration.
Drastic changes, however, were never likely. The 1997 handover was part of a process rather than a life-changing event. The largest part of Hong Kong's land area, the New Territories, had been Britain's under a 99-year lease granted in 1898. China never recognised that agreement, nor indeed the treaties ceding Hong Kong island and Kowloon in perpetuity. But the expiry of the lease presented practical difficulties, such as over land tenure, so China agreed to negotiations with Britain that led to the two countries' 1984 “Joint Declaration”, confirming Hong Kong's reversion to China at the end of the lease.
 Unusually, then, the change of sovereignty was preceded by a long planning period. Unprecedentedly, China also agreed that the transfer would happen on the basis of “one country, two systems”. Until 2047 Hong Kong would keep its own economic and political system and enjoy autonomy in everything except foreign affairs, defence and national security. This was an extraordinary concession for a proud, resurgent nation. It reflected the vision of Deng Xiaoping, who was in the process of opening China up from the autarkic blind alley of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. No Chinese leader since has enjoyed the popularity of Deng in those early years. Many in Hong Kong say that the anniversary the island should be celebrating is not this year's but the one coming up in December next year: the 30th anniversary of the Communist Party plenum that marked the Deng restoration. Even so, there were reasonable doubts about whether “one country, two systems” could work. The whole point of Hong Kong, both for the people living there and the foreigners doing business with it, was that it was not quite China. It was a place of refugees, “a Chinese colony that happen[ed] to be run by Britain”, according to its historian, Frank Welsh. By 1997 it had become a prosperous, service-oriented economy and a sophisticated, cosmopolitan society. China was a poor agricultural nation in the throes of the world's fastest industrial revolution.
Hong Kong had been a colony with only limited self-rule. But Lord Patten and others like to point to the observation of the late Samuel Finer, a famous historian of government, that Hong Kong's was a unique political system: undemocratic but free. China was, and remains, undemocratic and unfree. Optimism in the late 1980s that its opening-up might include political liberalisation was crushed by the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing on June 3rd-4th 1989. For a generation in Hong Kong, that was a defining moment. But 18 years have passed, and for today's bright, otherwise well-informed and sophisticated 17-year-olds mention of it rings only distant bells.
That is not surprising. The biggest challenges Hong Kong has faced in those 17-year-olds' lifetime have stemmed not from Chinese repression but from Asia's 1997 financial crisis, the bursting of the dotcom bubble, and epidemics of bird flu and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). Hong Kong weathered those storms. The economy has just enjoyed its best three years for two decades. As open and free as any in the world, it has proved its flexibility and resilience.
 This report will argue that, with some important lapses, China has kept its promises, and “one country, two systems” is working better than many expected. But its continued success is jeopardised by the failure to tackle the big unresolved issue left at the handover: the establishment of an accountable government checked and balanced by a representative legislature. Hong Kong will never sit comfortably in China as long as its politics is a battle between two camps, one labelled “pro-Beijing” and the other “pro-democracy”. To the relief of Britain and China, Hong Kong has been largely absent from world headlines in the past turbulent decade. But it has not been without its drama. Besides the unforeseen financial and health crises, there was, in effect, a mass uprising four years ago, in protest at an “anti-subversion law” that China wanted Hong Kong's government to introduce. Seeing their civil liberties threatened, Hong Kong's people took to the streets and won a deferral of the law. Their political freedoms, too, are proving resilient. September 03 Why do cats hate getting wet? Why do cats hate getting wet?
From Popular Science A misbehaving cat caught in the sights of a spray bottle doesn't necessarily run away because it hates getting soaked. It's probably afraid of water. Scientists believe that house cats’ limited experience with water – mostly leaky faucets and water dishes – makes them fearful of wet stuff. The domestic cat’s desert-dwelling ancestors also had limited experience with water. Genetic studies conducted at the National Cancer Institute show that the house cat’s closest relatives are wild cats from Africa and Europe and the Chinese desert cats – the earliest evidence dates to Cyprus 9,500 years ago – cat owners have protected their pets form the element.” Cats have not evolved to do much with water,” says animal behavior specialist Katherine Houpt of Cornell University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. Whether a cat enjoys water depends not only on where it lives but on its interactions with predators and prey, says Jack Grisham, the St. Louis Zoo’s director of animal collections. Lions stay on dry land to avoid bathing in rivers patrolled by crocodiles, and leopards live in trees, away from water and predators below. In contrast, some domesticated farm cats prowl ponds for frogs. And the fishing cat, native to wetlands from India to Indonesia, taps the water’s surface with its paw and then snatches its prey with webbed claws. Owners can also train the fear of water out of cats by bathing them as kittens. Most vets don’t recommend this, however, because it can dry out a cat’s skin and wash away pheromones essential for communicating with other felines. Besides, a cat already has all the supplies it needs to keep itself clean: Its saliva contains a natural detergent to reduce grease, and its barbed tongue combs out dirt. Still, some cats enjoy getting wet so much, Houpt says, “They actually play with water.” Even the threat of the spray bottle, she admits, stop only 70 percent of cats from scratching the sofa.—COREY BINNS August 31 China's Trade in Africa Carries a Price TagChina's Trade in Africa Carries a Price Tag
By LYDIA POLGREEN and HOWARD W. FRENCH
Published: August 21, 2007 KABWE, Zambia — The courtyard in front of the Zambia China Mulungushi Textiles factory is so quiet, even at midday, that the fluttering of the ragged Chinese and Zambian flags is the only sound hanging in the air.
The factory used to roar. From the day it opened more than 20 years ago, the vast compound had shuddered to the whir of rollers and the clatter of mechanical weaving machines spooling out millions of yards of brightly colored African cloth.
Today, only the cotton gin still runs, with the company's Chinese managers buying raw cotton for export to China's humming textile industry. Nobody can say when or even if the factory here will reopen.
"We are back where we started," said Wilfred Collins Wonani, who leads the Chamber of Commerce here, sighing at the loss of one of the city's biggest employers. "Sending raw materials out, bringing cheap manufactured goods in. This isn't progress. It is colonialism."
Chinese officials and their African allies like to call their growing relationship a win-win proposition, a rising tide that lifts all boats in China's ever-widening sea of influence.
This year, China pledged $20 billion to finance trade and infrastructure across the continent over the next three years. In Zambia alone, China plans to invest $800 million in the next few years.
From South Africa's manganese mines to Niger's uranium pits, from Sudan's oil fields to Congo's cobalt mines, China's hunger for resources has been a shot in the arm, increasing revenues and helping push some of the world's poorest countries further up the ladder of development.
But China is also exporting huge volumes of finished, manufactured goods — T-shirts, flashlights, radios and socks, just to name a few — to those same countries, hampering Africa's ability to make its own products and develop healthy, diverse economies.
"Most of our countries have been independent for 35 to 50 years," said Moeletsi Mbeki, a South African entrepreneur and a political analyst. "Yet they have failed to develop manufacturing for a variety of reasons, and for the Chinese that's a huge opportunity. We are a very important market for China."
On the one hand, Chinese imports give Africans access to goods and amenities that developed countries take for granted but that most people here could not have dreamed of affording just a few years ago — cellular telephones, televisions, washing machines, refrigerators, computers. And cheaper prices on more basic items, like clothing, light bulbs and shoes, mean people have more money in their pockets.
"There is no doubt China has been good for Zambia," said Felix Mutati, Zambia's minister of finance. "Why should we have a bad attitude toward the Chinese when they are doing all the right things? They are bringing investment, world-class technology, jobs, value addition. What more can you ask for?"
But across Africa, and especially in the relatively robust economies of southern Africa, there are clear winners and losers. Textile mills and other factories here in Zambia have suffered and even closed as cheap Chinese goods flood the world market, eliminating jobs in a country that sorely needs them.
The Chinese investment in copper mining here has left a trail of heartbreak and recrimination after one of the worst industrial accidents in Zambian history, a blast at a Chinese-owned explosives factory in Chambishi in 2005 that killed 46 people, most of them in their 20s.
"Who is winning? The Chinese are, for sure," said Michael Sata, a Zambian opposition politician who campaigned in last year's presidential election on an anti-China platform. He lost, but with a surprisingly strong showing, and his party, the Patriotic Front, won many seats in local and parliamentary elections in Lusaka, the capital, and the Zambian industrial heartland, where China has made its biggest investments.
"Their interest is exploiting us, just like everyone who came before," he said. "They have simply come to take the place of the West as the new colonizers of Africa."
Officials at the Chinese Embassy in Lusaka did not respond to repeated requests to discuss the country's role in Zambia. But Chinese diplomats across Africa and top officials in Beijing have emphasized the money and opportunity they bring to Africa. In Zambia, for example, government officials say that the Chinese are sending dozens of workers for training in China and that their investments will create thousands of high-wage jobs.
Measured in some ways, Zambia's economy is booming. Copper prices have soared from 75 cents a pound in January 2003 to more than $3 a pound this year, driven in large part by Chinese demand. That demand has pushed Zambia's long-dormant copper mines into record production.
China's Nonferrous Metals Corporation, a state-owned company, purchased rights to develop a mine in Chambishi, in the heart of the copper belt, in 1998, and it plans to build factories in an export processing zone that will bring as many as 60,000 jobs, according to government officials.
But China's growing presence in global trade is wiping out thousands of jobs in countries with fledgling manufacturing sectors like Zambia and South Africa.
Despite relatively low wages in many countries, African manufacturers find it very hard to compete, arguing that China's currency policies undervalue the yuan and give Chinese exporters a huge advantage.
Many industries in China also benefited at various points from subsidies and free or low-cost government financing, making their costs lower. Beyond that, there are major infrastructure problems in Africa, where industry struggles with inadequate roads and railways, and unreliable electricity and water supplies.
"So who do you blame?" said Martyn J. Davies, director of the Center for Chinese Studies at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. "You can't blame China for being too competitive. China is doing what every other emerging market is doing."
The textile and clothing industry, one of the engines China used to fuel its own economic expansion in the 1980s, has been particularly hard hit in Africa. For decades, African countries exported large quantities of clothes and textiles to developed countries under a trade agreement intended to protect European and American markets from competition from China and others, while encouraging exports from the world's poorest nations. But the trade provision, the Agreement on Textiles and Clothing, expired in January 2005, putting these countries in direct export competition with China.
Africa found itself once again on the losing end of globalization. If copper is Zambia's bread and butter, manufacturing should have been its main meal — just as many economies across the globe have progressed from producers of raw materials to low-tech manufacturing and beyond, a well-trod path to development.
Ms. Zimba, 40, a quality-control worker at the plant here who asked to be identified only by her common last name because she feared losing her termination benefits, first got a job at the factory in 1989, after moving to Kabwe from the depressed eastern region of the country with her brother.
She earned a little less than $100 a month, as well as free health care and a pension, and a little three-room house in the workers' compound. But since she lost her job, her family's standard of living has plummeted. The water was turned off, and Ms. Zimba does not know where she will come up with next semester's tuition for her 20-year-old daughter's trade school.
"We will see what God brings me," Ms. Zimba said.
For Ms. Zimba, the transition from salaried work to selling goods for pocket change in the market is a devastating setback to a grim fate she thought she had escaped — her mother was widowed when Ms. Zimba was 15 and reduced to selling in the market as well.
"I am right back where I started," Ms. Zimba said.
As for the Chinese, she bitterly refers to them as "briefcase investors."
"They just fill their briefcases with our wealth and leave," she said.
Such anti-Chinese sentiment has been brewing here for several years. When China's president, Hu Jintao, visited Zambia earlier this year he received the usual red carpet treatment from his Zambian host, President Levy Mwanawasa , but the reception from many ordinary Zambians was nasty. A trip to the site of China's big new investment, Chambishi, had to be scuttled entirely because of fears of unrest, and the circumstances of the industrial disaster there are still not entirely understood.
The mine at Chambishi had for decades been run by the government, and had limped along while copper prices slumped in the 1980s. When the Non-ferrous Metal Mining Group bought the rights to develop the mine in 1998, local residents cheered, hoping for new jobs.
In 2003, Keegan Chibuye got one as a mechanic at the mine, a job he was grateful to have in a country where even skilled men like himself struggled to find work. Mr. Chibuye's sister, Vennie, 27, also found work for the Chinese, as a computer specialist at an explosives factory on the mine's grounds. Ms. Chibuye was the eldest of seven, and her parents had sent her to Britain at great expense, to a technical college in Derbyshire, where she earned a diploma in information technology. A brother, Mwape, got a job as a casual worker in the explosives factory, for a little more than a dollar a day, to save money for college.
Keegan Chibuye said he had concerns about the way the Chinese managers were running the mine almost from the beginning. "They were careless," he said. "Safety was not their priority. Everything was about productivity no matter what."
On April 20, 2005, Keegan Chibuye heard an ear-splitting boom that would shatter his world — a huge blast at the explosives factory.
There was almost nothing left of Vennie and Mwape left to bury. Virtually all the bodies had been incinerated. Only fragments were buried just off the main road at the graveyard built by the Chinese owners — a finger, an ear, a bit of scalp. As the 46 headstones testify, most of the workers were young, born after 1980.
Officials of the company that runs the mine did not respond to repeated telephone requests for an interview to talk about working conditions and safety at the mine. But at the Chinese workers' compound in Chambishi, Han Yaping, who identified himself as the company's human resources manager, said that the company hoped to help Zambia develop.
"China works here in cooperation with Zambia," Mr. Han said in English. "It is friendship."
Asked why the wages at the mine were lower than those paid by other companies, Mr. Han said that Zambian workers had limited skills and no experience with technology. By way of example, he said, a Chinese worker trying to remove a screw would use a screwdriver.
"But a Zambian worker," he continued with a chuckle, "he use his finger."
A look around the compound for Chinese workers illustrates why China is able to do business so profitably in Africa. While Western companies must provide relatively plush and private accommodations to attract expatriate workers, the Chinese employees at Chambishi live in barracks-like conditions, several to a room. A table for table tennis and a dusty soccer field are the only recreational facilities.
"We like simple," Mr. Han explained.
Many African scholars and political leaders say Africa has no need for the colonial baggage and paternalism of the West, and they welcome the Chinese approach of cowboy capitalism. "Let the Chinese come," said Mahamat Hassan Abakar, a lawyer in Chad, a former French colony in central Africa with deepening ties to China. "What Africa needs is investment. It needs partners. All of these years we have been tied to France. Look what it has brought us."
In South Africa, dozens of clothing and textile companies closed, according to trade organizations representing manufacturers. Tens of thousands of jobs were lost because of Chinese imports, and in response the government negotiated temporary voluntary restraints on some items.
But Iqbal Meer-Sharma, deputy director of South Africa's Department of Trade and Industry, said that the clothing industry was ultimately less valuable to South Africa than the other benefits of its growing relationship with China.
"We've always known we have a dysfunctional relationship with the West," Mr. Sharma said. "Now with China we have a relationship as equals. They don't look down on us. They are not condescending."
In an era of ruthless global competition, Mr. Sharma said, Africa should stop trying to compete with China at what it does best — producing cheap goods for export — and find other ways to compete instead.
In the meantime, many Africans are caught in limbo.
Clarissa Fabrik, 19, lives at the edge of Atlantis, a depressed industrial town in South Africa's Western Cape. She had hoped to earn an engineering degree, courtesy of the scholarship fund from her mother's clothing workers' union benefit package. But her mother's factory closed, and now she is trying to teach herself basics from a textbook on industrial electronics when she is not at her retail job.
"I don't know what the future will bring," she said.
August 30 The world's worst holiday destinationThe world's worst holiday destination
North Korea through Chinese eyes
May 24th 2007 | PYONGYANG From The Economist print edition All the misery of Maoism with none of the redeeming features 
THE place often seems like a black box from which the occasional horror (like a nuclear bomb) emerges without warning or welcome. North Korea certainly deserves its nickname, the hermit kingdom. Visitors are tightly controlled and only a trickle of Westerners admitted. Yet even North Korea needs dollars, and tries to get them by attracting Chinese tourists, who go for the gambling, and the bizarre allure of a bygone era of fanaticism and privation that China itself once endured. Joining a group of 60 visitors, this is what you find.
The North Koreans can put on a good show. In April and May, no fewer than 100,000 performers went through a series of synchronised gymnastic displays at the May 1st Stadium in Pyongyang, the capital. Even a few hundred Western tourists got a peek (many from the arch-enemy, America, whose tourists are normally kept at bay). To Chinese visitors, the show, known as Arirang, was reminiscent of similar extravaganzas in Beijing during the days of Mao Zedong. “Nowadays I doubt whether we could do it,” says one, wistfully. Next year's Olympic Games in Beijing, he suggests, might prove an exception.
In the late 1990s, the North Koreans allowed investors from Hong Kong and Macau to set up casinos in their closed world. One was in Rajin-Sonbong, a failed investment zone close to the Chinese border; another lurked in the basement of an isolated hotel for foreigners in Pyongyang. North Korea correctly reckoned that, since gambling is banned in China, these would be a big attraction (gambling is also banned in North Korea for ordinary citizens, but the government allowed Chinese to staff the casinos).
As China saw it, the casinos proved rather too popular, drawing huge numbers of corrupt officials. Two years ago, China cracked down on cross-border gambling—appealing to neighbouring countries to close down casinos, banning travel agents from offering gambling tours, restricting foreign visits by officials—after one official allegedly embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars of government funds and gambled the money away at the casino in Rajin-Sonbong. This has now been closed. The one in Pyongyang is still open, but is beyond the range of weekend holiday-makers. These days you find few gamblers there, mostly Chinese tourists betting a few tens of dollars to help relieve the tedium of endless mind-numbing tours of political monuments.
Neither China nor North Korea publishes regular figures for tourism in each other's country but the crackdown seems to have taken its toll. One Chinese newspaper said there had been 20,000 job losses in Dandong, a border town through which Chinese tourists usually pass on their way to North Korea by train. The number of Chinese visitors to Dandong has fallen to a quarter of what it was in the peak years. Last August many travel agencies said North Korea had stopped accepting Chinese visitors. It is not clear why. Some cited floods. One official newspaper said it was because North Korea had reduced its annual quota for Chinese tourists. It is likely that it was also piqued by China's unusually tart response to its supposed ally's missile and nuclear tests. Early this year, restrictions appeared to ease again.
What remains is a niche market for the curious and sated. For all their professed ideological similarities, North Korea and China are worlds apart. Affluent urban Chinese who have travelled to other parts of Asia now visit North Korea for its rarity value, and for a taste of what they themselves have escaped from. One member of your correspondent's group was the son of a Korean war veteran. He and other Chinese visitors were disappointed to find little public acknowledgement of China's role in the Korean war of 1950-53, when hundreds of thousands of Chinese died fighting the Americans.
Older Chinese visitors find striking comparisons with their own country, 30 or more years ago. The public worship of North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, and of his late father, Kim Il Sung, is similar to the cult of Mao. The state ideology of juche (self-reliance) has much in common with Mao's isolationism. Chinese tourists are given warning, before leaving, to avoid commenting on North Korean politics and to be careful where they point their cameras. China was once as prickly.
North Korea is almost as wary of Chinese visitors as it is of Westerners. Like Westerners, Chinese are assigned guides whose job is to prevent spontaneous contact with locals. Some guides express disdain for Chinese socialism. “China is so dirty now and so expensive, and takes no stance whatsoever against the American imperialists”, says one (with its industry barely operating, North Korea's air does seem refreshingly unpolluted to Chinese visitors).
The kind of tourism North Korea prefers is the carefully controlled tours by South Koreans to Mount Kumgang, a scenic resort on the northern side of their common border. There, they have virtually no contact with locals (South Korean tourists are rarely welcome in Pyongyang). On May 17th, North and South Korea opened the first rail links across the border since the Korean war. It was largely a symbolic act. Maybe one day such links will make it easier to travel to Mount Kumgang and to Kaesong, a South Korean investment zone in the north. But there is no sign North Korea plans to let South Koreans travel freely. Regular train services are still a distant prospect.
As mobile-phone-loving Chinese tourists frequently complain, North Korea does not allow visitors to bring their phones into the country—so fearful is it of unmonitored information conduits to the outside world. There is no internet access even in expensive hotels. North Koreans authorised to speak to visitors appear to be oblivious of their guests' annoyance at such privations. They boast that North Korea's economy once outperformed China's, particularly in the 1960s when China was gripped by famine. One Chinese visitor says her brother fled to North Korea then. The North Koreans do not allow her to try to contact him.
A Chinese travel agent says North Korea's poverty is part of its off-beat appeal. If North Korea were to become richer, she says, it would lose its competitive tourism advantage. Not that it is a huge draw, even when it does welcome tourists. The Arirang performance, originally due to last for a month, ended several days early because of insufficient paying visitors.
August 29 Potter Has Limited Effect on Reading HabitsPotter Has Limited Effect on Reading Habits
By MOTOKO RICH Published: July 11, 2007 From NewYork Times
Of all the magical powers wielded by Harry Potter, perhaps none has cast a stronger spell than his supposed ability to transform the reading habits of young people. In what has become near mythology about the wildly popular series by J. K. Rowling, many parents, teachers, librarians and booksellers have credited it with inspiring a generation of kids to read for pleasure in a world dominated by instant messaging and music downloads.
And so it has, for many children. But in keeping with the intricately plotted novels themselves, the truth about Harry Potter and reading is not quite so straightforward a success story. Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.
There is no doubt that the books have been a publishing sensation. In the 10 years since the first one, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” was published, the series has sold 325 million copies worldwide, with 121.5 million in print in the United States alone. Before Harry Potter, it was virtually unheard of for kids to queue up for a mere book. Children who had previously read short chapter books were suddenly plowing through more than 700 pages in a matter of days. Scholastic, the series’s United States publisher, plans a record-setting print run of 12 million copies for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the eagerly awaited seventh and final installment due out at 12:01 a.m. on July 21.
But some researchers and educators say that the series, in the end, has not permanently tempted children to put down their Game Boys and curl up with a book instead. Some kids have found themselves daunted by the growing size of the books (“Sorcerer’s Stone” was 309 pages; “Deathly Hallows,” will be 784). Others say that Harry Potter does not have as much resonance as titles that more realistically reflect their daily lives. “The Harry Potter craze was a very positive thing for kids,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who has reviewed statistics from federal and private sources that consistently show that children read less as they age. “It got millions of kids to read a long and reasonably complex series of books. The trouble is that one Harry Potter novel every few years is not enough to reverse the decline in reading.”
Educators agree that the series can’t get the job done alone.
“Unless there are scaffolds in place for kids — an enthusiastic adult saying, ‘Here’s the next one’ — it’s not going to happen,” said Nancie Atwell, the author of “The Reading Zone: How to Help Kids Become Skilled, Passionate, Habitual, Critical Readers” and a teacher in Edgecomb, Me. “And in way too many American classrooms it’s not happening.”
Young people are less inclined to read for pleasure as they move into their teenage years for a variety of reasons, educators say. Some of these are trends of long standing (older children inevitably become more socially active, spend more time on reading-for-school or simply find other sources of entertainment other than books), and some are of more recent vintage (the multiplying menagerie of high-tech gizmos that compete for their attention, from iPods to Wii consoles). What parents and others hoped was that the phenomenal success of the Potter books would blunt these trends, perhaps even creating a generation of lifelong readers in their wake.
“Anyone who has children or grandchildren sees the competition for children’s time increasing as they enter adolescence, and the difficulty that reading seems to have to compete effectively,” Mr. Gioia said.
Many thousands of children have, indeed, gone from the Potter books to other pleasure reading. But others have dropped away.
Starting when Avram Leierwood was 7, he would read the books aloud with his mother, Mina. “We’d sit in the treehouse in our backyard and take turns,” recalled Ms. Leierwood, of South Minneapolis.
But while Ms. Leierwood has remained an avid fan, Avram, now 15, is indifferent. When “Deathly Hallows” comes out, he will be on a canoe trip. As for reading, he said: “I don’t really have much time anymore. I like to hang out with my friends, talk, go watch movies and stuff, go to the park and play ultimate Frisbee.”
According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a series of federal tests administered every few years to a sample of students in grades 4, 8 and 12, the percentage of kids who said they read for fun almost every day dropped from 43 percent in fourth grade to 19 percent in eighth grade in 1998, the year “Sorcerer’s Stone” was published in the United States. In 2005, when “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince,” the sixth book, was published, the results were identical.
Many parents, educators and librarians say that despite such statistics, they have seen enough evidence to convince them that Harry Potter is a bona fide hero.
“Parents will say, ‘You know, my son never spent time reading, and now my son is staying up late reading, keeping the light on because he can’t put that book down,’ ” said Linda B. Gambrell, president of the International Reading Association, a professional organization for teachers.
In a study commissioned last year by Scholastic, Yankelovich, a market research firm, reported that 51 percent of the 500 kids aged 5 to 17 polled said they did not read books for fun before they started reading the series. A little over three-quarters of them said Harry Potter had made them interested in reading other books.
Before she discovered Harry Potter, Kara Havranek, 13, spent most of her time romping outside in Parma, a suburb of Cleveland, or playing video games like Crash Bandicoot.
But four years after struggling through “Sorcerer’s Stone,” Kara has read and reread all six books, decorated her bedroom with Potter memorabilia and said she could hardly wait for “Deathly Hallows.”
But although Kara said she has enjoyed other books, she was not sure what lasting influence the series would have. “I probably won’t read as much when Harry Potter is over,” she said.
In a way that was previously rare for books, Harry Potter entered the pop-culture consciousness. The movies (the film version of “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” the fifth in the series, just opened) heightened the fervor, spawning video games and collectible figurines. That made it easier for kids who thought reading was for geeks to pick up a book.
Until Harry Potter, “I don’t think kids were reading proudly,” said Connie Williams, the school librarian at Kenilworth Junior High School in Petaluma, Calif. “Now it’s more normalized. It’s like, ‘Gosh we can read now, it’s O.K.’ ”
But creating a habit of reading is a continuous battle with kids who are saturated with other options. During a recent sixth-grade English class at the John W. McCormack Middle School in the Dorchester section of Boston, Aaron Forde, a cherubic 12-year-old, said he loved playing soccer, basketball and football. On top of that, he spends four hours a day chatting with friends on MySpace.com, the social networking site.
He had read the first three Harry Potter books, but said he had no particular interest in reading more. “I don’t like to read that much,” he said. “I think there are better things to do.”
Neema Avashia, Aaron’s English teacher, said it was rare for the Harry Potter series to draw reluctant readers to books. “I try to have a lot of books in my library that reflect where kids are coming from,” Ms. Avashia said. “And Harry Potter isn’t really where my kids are coming from.” She noted that her class is 85 percent nonwhite, and Harry Potter has few characters that belong to a racial minority group.
Some reading experts say that urging kids to read fiction in general might be a misplaced goal. “If you look at what most people need to read for their occupation, it’s zero narrative,” said Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford University. “I don’t want to deny that you should be reading stories and literature. But we’ve overemphasized it,” he said. Instead, children need to learn to read for information, Mr. Kamil said, something they can practice while reading on the Internet, for example.
Still, there is something about seeing the passion that a novel can inspire that excites those who want to perpetuate a culture of reading. Even as the Harry Potter series draws to a close, there are signs that other books are coming up to take its place.
On a recent afternoon at at Public School 54 on Staten Island, a group of fifth grade boys shouted with enthusiasm for the “Cirque du Freak” series by Darren Shan, about a boy who becomes entangled with a vampire.
“I like the books so much that even when the teacher is teaching a lesson, I still want to read the books,” said Vincent Eng, a wiry 11-year-old. His classmate Thejas Alex said he had stopped reading a Harry Potter book to jump into “Cirque du Freak.”
“While I was reading them,” Thejas said, referring to the “Cirque” books, “I was like, addicted.”
August 28 Sex surveys don't add upSex surveys don't add up By Gina Kolata Published: August 12, 2007 From IHTNEW YORK: Everyone knows men are promiscuous by nature. It's part of the genetic strategy that evolved to help men spread their genes far and wide. The strategy is different for a woman, who must go through so much just to have a baby and then nurture it. She is genetically programmed to want just one man who will stick with her and help raise their children. Surveys bear this out. In study after study and in country after country, men report more, often many more, sexual partners than women. One survey, recently reported by the U.S. government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5. But there is just one problem, mathematicians say. It is logically impossible for the mean number of partners for men to be different from the mean for women in any given population with equal numbers of heterosexual men and women, although the mean, or mathematical average, can differ from the median, the middle point of a range. Surveys typically report the median. Still, mathematicians should set the record straight, said David Gale, an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of California. "Surveys and studies to the contrary notwithstanding, the conclusion that men have substantially more sex partners than women is not and cannot be true, for purely logical reasons," Gale said. He even provided a proof that the mean number for each group must be the same, writing in an e-mail message: "By way of dramatization, we change the context slightly and will prove what will be called the High School Prom Theorem. We suppose that on the day after the prom, each girl is asked to give the number of boys she danced with. These numbers are then added up, giving a number G. The same information is then obtained from the boys, giving a number B. "Theorem: G = B "Proof: Both G and B are equal to C, the number of couples who danced together at the prom. QED." Sex survey researchers say they know that men and women in a population must have roughly equal numbers of partners. So, when men report many more than women, what is going on and what is to be believed? "I have heard this question before," said Cheryl Fryar, a health statistician at the National Center for Health Statistics and a lead author of the new federal report, "Drug Use and Sexual Behaviors Reported by Adults: United States, 1999-2002," which found that men had a median of seven partners and women four. But when it comes to an explanation, she added, "I have no idea." "This is what is reported," Fryar said. "The reason why they report it I do not know." Sevgi Aral, who is associate director for science in the division of sexually transmitted disease prevention at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said there are several possible explanations, and all are probably operating. One is that men are going outside the population to find partners, to prostitutes, for example, who are not part of the survey, or are having sex when they travel to other countries. Another, of course, is that men exaggerate the number of partners they have and women underestimate. Aral said she could not determine what the true number of sex partners is for men and women. "I would say that men have more partners on average," she said, "but the difference is not as big as it seems in the numbers we are looking at." Gale is still troubled. He said invoking women who are outside the survey population cannot begin to explain a difference of 75 percent in the number of partners, as occurred in the study saying men had seven partners and women four. Something like a prostitute effect, he said, "would be negligible." The most likely explanation, by far, is that the numbers cannot be trusted. Ronald Graham, a professor of mathematics and computer science at the University of California, San Diego, agreed with Gale. After all, on average, men would have to have three more partners than women, raising the question of where all those extra partners might be. "Some might be imaginary," Graham said. "Maybe two are in the man's mind and one really exists." Gale added that he is not just being querulous when he raises the question of logical impossibility. The problem, he said, is that when such data are published they just "reinforce the stereotypes of promiscuous males and chaste females." In fact, he added, the survey data themselves may be part of the problem. If asked, a man, believing that he should have a lot of partners, may feel compelled to exaggerate, and a woman, believing that she should have few partners, may minimize her past. "In this way," Gale said, "the false conclusions people draw from these surveys may have a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy." August 27 As Diet Ideas Abound, Is Willpower Obsolete?As Diet Ideas Abound, Is Willpower Obsolete?
By BARRON H. LERNER, M.D. Published: July 10, 2007 When I was growing up, the word “willpower” was used a lot. If only one was strong enough to resist sweets, according to logic of the time, one could stay thin.
Yet today, based on a series of scientific discoveries, the importance of willpower in promoting weight loss is becoming an obsolete notion. Is it worth saving?
The concept of willpower came less from scientific data than from Christian teachings about the dangers of temptation. Gluttony, after all, was one of the seven deadly sins, up there with pride, greed, extravagance, envy, wrath and sloth.
The late 19th century was perhaps the heyday of the revolt against what John C. Burnham, a historian at Ohio State University, calls “bad habits.” Groups like the Salvation Army and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union urged sinners to stop drinking, gambling and smoking.
Comparable sentiments characterized writings about obesity. In 1946, Wilson G. Smillie, a public health professor at Cornell, wrote that the physician should appeal to the obese patient’s “ability to manifest self-control.” Weight-loss programs like Overeaters Anonymous and Weight Watchers have reflected this philosophy.
Similarly, many physicians have also discouraged surgical procedures like stomach stapling or shortening of the intestines, not only because of their risks but also because they were somehow seen as quick fixes for lazy patients who do not stick to their diets.
But as critics have pointed out, while willpower can work, it usually does not. A study published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in 2005 found that regardless of the diet attempted, patients lost an average of only 5 percent of their baseline weight after one year. And dropout rates exceeded 40 percent. [A newer study is reported on this page today, in Vital Signs.]
As a result, strategies for promoting weight loss have recently begun to shift from a focus on individual behaviors to a public health approach.
As the late Dr. Donald H. Gemson of the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia once put it, “the causes of the obesity epidemic are environmental, and the answers will be as well.” Rather than simply urging people to eat better and exercise more, experts like Dr. Gemson have increasingly argued that society has to facilitate such changes by reducing the availability of high-calorie foods, advertisements of junk food to children and reliance on automobiles, while increasing access to healthy foods and exercising.
The environmental theory of obesity is prompting governmental interventions, like New York City’s ban on most trans fats in restaurant food. And environmental strategies have successfully been used in other areas that formerly relied on moral suasion. For example, taxes on cigarettes have contributed greatly to lowered smoking rates. Legislatures have enacted laws making restaurants liable if they permit drunk patrons to drive home.
So will people necessarily lose weight if society actively discourages fattening foods? Maybe not. Consider the genetic hypothesis, the latest reassessment of the obesity problem.
Research suggesting a strong hereditary predisposition to obesity goes back several decades, but several recent findings have put this theory into the forefront. In 1994, for example, Jeffrey M. Friedman, a molecular geneticist at Rockefeller University, discovered the appetite-regulating hormone leptin. Dr. Friedman believes that people’s appetites are largely controlled by genetics, which causes them to have different “set points” at different times in their lives.
A study in The Journal of the American Medical Association in May suggested another way in which genetics might affect changes in weight. Researchers from Children’s Hospital in Boston reported that differences in how young adults secrete the hormone insulin determine how well they respond to various dietary interventions.
So maybe it is time for health professionals to stop reflexively assuming that personal sacrifice will lead to weight loss. But this will not be easy.
For one thing, there certainly are success stories of people who have dropped dozens of pounds by drastically altering their lifestyles. Moreover, watching one’s diet can have beneficial health effects beyond losing weight.
And I just cannot conceive of a session with an overweight patient that does not involve a discussion of being careful at holiday meals, controlling portion size, avoiding bedtime snacks and trying to exercise three times a week. Somehow it still seems to me that part of a doctor’s job is to push patients to try harder. Just call me old-fashioned.
Barron H. Lerner teaches medicine and public health at Columbia University Medical Center. August 24 A CEO's Personal Touch Revs Up Mitsubishi in U.S.A CEO's Personal Touch Revs Up Mitsubishi in U.S.
By AMY CHOZICK July 10, 2007; Page B1 TOKYO -- When Hiroshi Harunari took over as chief executive of Mitsubishi Motors Corp.'s struggling North American operation in January 2006, morale among dealers and employees was at an all-time low.
The car maker as a whole had lost more than $2 billion a year earlier and had been losing money in the U.S. for three consecutive years. The unit had gone through three chiefs in four years, and its partner, Daimler Chrysler AG, had sold its stake in Mitsubishi in 2005. Many predicted it was a matter of time before Mitsubishi pulled out of the competitive North American market.
Mr. Harunari embarked on a cross-country pilgrimage to win back dealers' trust. In the first two months on the job, the earnest Japanese executive visited 139 Mitsubishi dealerships in 29 states. He didn't propose any sweeping changes, but focused on listening to dealers' long lists of grievances, and assured them that Mitsubishi was committed to the U.S. market. He then took steps to address such basic problems as slow delivery of parts from suppliers. "I knew the situation was bad," says Mr. Harunari, 59 years old, formerly the head of overseas operations based in Tokyo.
He also had an additional challenge because the dealers he had to woo aren't employees, but independent small-business owners who need to make a profit to stay in business. "I had to show I was ready to pick up the chestnut," he says, citing an old Japanese proverb that says you should try to pick up a chestnut out of a burning flame -- in other words, embrace a big challenge. So far, Mr. Harunari's personal touch seems to be working. In a surprise turnaround, Japan's No. 4 car maker by sales volume swung back to a full-year operating profit of $5 million in North America in the fiscal year ended March 31. Sales in the U.S. in that period, led by the new Lancer sedan and Outlander sports utility vehicle, reached 124,000 vehicles, an 8% increase from the previous year, reversing a four-year drop. Sales per dealer increased by as much as 21% compared with a year earlier, indicating that dealers were encouraged to order more cars from Mitsubishi.
Don Herring Sr., owner of three Mitsubishi dealerships in Dallas, had doubts about Mitsubishi's future before Mr. Harunari dropped by -- on at least three occasions -- and "just asked us what we thought," he says. Mr. Herring says the personal visits indicated the company was sincere about trying to make a comeback. He recently remodeled one of his five-acre lots and converted a 30,000-square-foot former Circuit City store into another giant Mitsubishi showroom.
While case studies abound of charismatic chief executives announcing ambitious goals to jump-start a company, Mr. Harunari has invigorated Mitsubishi in the U.S. by focusing on good old-fashioned bonding with people in the trenches. This "inverted pyramid" style of management is a growing trend in corporations, says Paul Rogers, the London-based head of the global-organization practice for U.S. consulting firm Bain & Co. Top executives are realizing that getting to know the frontline can build employee loyalty and "loyal customers are driven by loyal employees," Mr. Rogers says. Mitsubishi's turnaround poses an added threat to other Asian rivals, such as Japan's Nissan Motor Co., which saw its sales drop last year in the key U.S. market. It also adds more competition to Detroit's Big Three, which have been reporting heavy losses.
Mitsubishi's challenge isn't over yet. Even with stronger sales, the company holds less than 1% of the U.S. market share. And at a time when the overall demand for cars in the U.S. is showing signs of slowing, competition is heating up, both from higher-end models by Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co., and from lower-priced cars by Hyundai Motor Co.
What's more, Mitsubishi's results were helped in the latest fiscal year by the weak yen, which increases the value of overseas earnings when converted into Japanese currency. The company forecasts that the yen will be much stronger this year, causing a slight drop in operating profit in North America in the year ending March 31, 2008, despite a rise in sales volume. Analysts have said, however, that the yen has been much weaker so far than the company's estimates. Unlike many top executives in Japanese car companies, Mr. Harunari, who likes to read German science-fiction novels in his spare time, didn't spend his whole career at Mitsubishi Motors. He worked for over 25 years at trading house Mitsubishi Corp., another company that is part of the umbrella Mitsubishi Group. The trading house was among several companies in the group that rushed to $3 billion bailout of the car company after Daimler Chrysler sold its remaining shares in Mitsubishi.
Mitsubishi Motors equipped Mr. Harunari with a sweeping revitalization plan. After racking up bad consumer loans by targeting young drivers with poor credit records, the company switched to older, more financially secure drivers with new models like the Lancer. Mitsubishi also tied up with Merrill Lynch & Co. in the U.S. to fund its loans to car buyers, rather than finance its own loans.
But Mr. Harunari felt his biggest task was to win back the disgruntled dealers who felt alienated by the string of management changes and persistent rumors that Mitsubishi was pulling out of the U.S. While he had never lived in the U.S., he made a point of driving himself to many of the dealerships. On a recent trip to Texas, he flew to Dallas, then drove a borrowed Outlander to visit dealers in San Antonio, Austin and Waco. "Visiting a dealer's place of business is like visiting their home," says Mr. Harunari. It shows "we appreciate them."
To underscore Mitsubishi's intention to remain in the U.S. market, Mitsubishi launched in April last year a 25th anniversary advertising campaign. "It's been 25 years since we made our first mark in America. The next 25 years begins today!" said the ads, which ran in print and on television. To show dealers his responsiveness, Mr. Harunari launched a "Dealer Co-Op" program that gives individual dealers financial assistance with local marketing efforts, such as sponsoring local charity events or running ads in a community newspaper.
Mike Graeber, owner of a Mitsubishi dealership in San Bernardino, Calif., says the co-op program was something nationwide dealers had been pushing for but that no one else had responded to. "We finally feel like our voices and concerns are going to senior management," Mr. Graeber says.
Back in his office in Cypress, Calif., Mr. Harunari gets to work at 7 a.m. to respond to 200 emails from employees and dealers before 9 a.m., often about new problems cropping up. "Frustration can build up like a volcano," he says. "My job is to settle it before it explodes."
Mr. Harunari says that for now, he is keeping his goals modest. He would like the company to capture 1% to 2% of the U.S. market share this year, up from about 0.8% in 2006.
"If I said we're going to sell like Toyota, everyone would laugh," Mr. Harunari says. "We're just aiming for satisfied customers."
August 23 Weirdest workplace disputesWeirdest workplace disputes (From TimesOnline) 
Last month, the Employment Appeal Tribunal celebrated its 30th anniversary. We marked the occasion by trawling the archives and dusting off some of the more colourful UK employment disputes from the past few years 14. CSI: Farnham. Tony Price, the managing director of WStore UK, an IT company based in Surrey, demanded that his 80 staff submit to a DNA test after a piece of chewing gum got stuck to a directors" suit trousers. When his global e-mail pointing out the firm's chewing gum ban leaked to the media, Price cheekily suggested he would force staff to take lie detector tests to flush out the culprit.
13. Hands on treatment. A 34-year-old masseuse sued the prestigious Old Course Hotel at St Andrews for unfair dismissal and sexual discrimination after she was allegedly fired for accusing a celebrity client of lewd conduct; the employment tribunal later identified the celebrity as Kevin Costner after his name was posted all over the internet. According to the masseuse, the Dances With Wolves star removed his towel and asked her to "touch him everywhere". Costner, who was on his honeymoon and taking part in a golf tournament, denied the accusation vehemently. The hotel later settled with the woman.
12. Porn at sea? No thanks. The cliche of men in the armed serves cheering themselves up with top-shelf literature is well established, but it was too much for the Reverend Mark Sharpe, 37. The trainee chaplain left the Royal Navy declaring himself "horrified" by the amount of pornography below decks and issued a claim for sexual harassment and discrimination on the ground of his religious beliefs. At a tribunal in Exeter, the Navy admitted sexual harassment but denied the religious discrimination charge. Reverend Sharpe accepted an undisclosed sum in damages and is now a rural rector.
11. Fine whine. A Muslim insurance salesman took offence when his employer began offering bottles of wine for good performance. Imran Khan, 25, said that Direct Line"s incentivisation scheme put him at a disadvantage because his religion forbade him to drink alcohol, and he sought damages for "hurt feelings". He lost.
10. Witches have rights, too. Sommer de la Rosa, a former teaching assistant at the Dorothy Stringer School in Brighton, accused the school of unfairly dismissing her because she was a witch. The 34-year-old claimed she had been made to "feel like a freak" after she was forbidden from wearing a pentagram and colleagues compared her Wiccan beliefs to communism. The school claimed she had been let go because of her poor attendance. The dispute was settled out of court.
9. Chard is for lovers. Sally Bing, a 31-year-old town clerk, won her claim for sexual discrimination and victimisation against the mayor of Chard, Tony Prior, after the 67-year-old putative lothario became infatuated with her. "We were standing shoulder to shoulder looking at a wall map of Chard," the mayor explained. "When she stood close to me, it sent a sexual thrill through me. That was possibly when I wondered whether she had sexual feelings towards me." The married Prior invited Bing on a walking tour of Andorra, and his advances eventually became so bad she rearranged the furniture in her office to create an escape route in case he appeared. Bing was awarded ￡25,000 from the council and ￡33,697 from Prior. And all that from starting at a map of Chard.
8. Wicked witchcraft. Sariya Allen, a teaching assistant who quit her job after three years at Durand primary school in Stockwell, London, sued the school for allegedly discriminating against her Pentecostal Christian beliefs. Allen had been disciplined for refusing to let a child read Harry Potter, claiming it glorified witchcraft. She lost.
7. Don"t call me ginger. Sarah Primmer, a 41-year-old former waitress at the Rendezvous Café in Plymouth, was awarded a "staggering" ￡17,618 for unfair dismissal and sexual harassment after suffering taunts over her ginger locks. Primmer alleged the café"s night manager had made a series of lewd and embarrassing comments in front of other staff because "they wanted to know if the colour of my hair matched the rest of my body". Despite her vindication in the eyes of the law, Primmer was intent on ridding herself of her affliction. "I am going to try and get it lighter and lighter," she said. "It is not nice to be ginger."
6. Man"s best friend. David Portman successfully sued the Royal Mail for unfair dismissal after he lost his job for taking time off to mourn the death of his dog. The postman had missed 137 days in five years for reasons including breaking his foot when pushing mail through a letter box, spraining his ankle when standing on a piece of wood and being injured in a car accident. Throughout, his faithful hound Brandy had provided unstinting companionship. When one morning he found her dead at the foot of his bed, Portman took her demise badly and failed to show up to work for a week. He returned to find he had been sacked. A tribunal found that "none of the claimant"s absences were for other than wholly legitimate and genuine reasons".
5. Foamy sales pitch. Wayne Simpson, an EDF Energy salesman, lost his ￡28,000-a-year job after he sent a customer a picture of himself sitting naked drinking whisky in a bubble bath. Simpson had met the female customer while selling door-to-door on Tyneside; he obtained her number and later sent the picture with a message saying, "Fancy going out for a drink sometime?" The woman didn"t and instead reported him to the company and the police. Simpson accused EDF of lacking a sense of humour. "I wasn"t even showing off my naughty bits," he said.
4. The farting chair. Sue Storer, a 48-year-old teacher at Bedminster Down Secondary School in Bristol, sought damages of ￡1 million for sex discrimination and constructive dismissal claiming she had been forced to sit in a chair that made embarrassing sounds every time she moved. "It was a regular joke that my chair would make these farting sounds and I regularly had to apologise that it wasn"t me, it was my chair," she said. Requests for a new chair had been repeatedly ignored while male colleagues were given sleek, executive-style chairs, she said. Her claim was thrown out.
3. Look out for the flour. Caroline Gardener, a lesbian shop worker at a Booker Cash and Carry, won her claim for unfair dismissal after she was fired following an altercation with a customer. Gardner, of Eastleigh, Hampshire, claimed a customer abused her because he couldn't find any lime cordial, telling her to "Get your sex life sorted out." She responded by throwing a bag of flour at him. "When he called me a filthy dyke I had a pack of flour in my hand and, although I regret it now, I threw it at the back of his head," she admitted. "He then turned round and said, ‘You are a dyke and you"re going to get the sack"." Gardner lost other claims for breach of contract and discrimination on the grounds of her sexual orientation.
2. Legal tender? Fred Raine was awarded ￡2,300 after an industrial tribunal agreed that his former employer, Lee"s Coaches, in Langley Moor, had underpaid him when he left the company due to illness in 2005. Nothing out of the ordinary in that, but the same can't be said for his former boss Malcolm Lee's chosen method of payment. The first ￡1,000 of Raine's severance pay was paid by cheque, but the remaining ￡1,300 turned up at his door in the form of a crate full of coins weighing 11 stone. Raine described the gesture as "unacceptable" and said he was consulting his lawyer.
1. An axe to grind. James Robertson, a convicted murderer who had served his time and was working as a health inspector for Preston City Council, found himself back behind bars after threatening a colleague with an axe during an argument at an Indian restaurant in 2001. The council (not unreasonably, you might feel) terminated his employment without notice, but Robertson sued for breach of contract. The employment tribunal ruled that the Council had acted illegally in not giving Robertson sufficient notice and ordered it to pay him two weeks" wages as compensation, amounting to ￡807.50.
August 19 China Shows Concern Over Spate of Export RecallsChina Shows Concern Over Spate of Export Recalls
By JASON LEOW and LORETTA CHAO August 18, 2007; Page A3 BEIJING -- China's decision to appoint the government's top troubleshooter to head a new cabinet panel on product safety reflects Beijing's growing concern about international reaction to a series of scandals involving Chinese exports.
Wu Yi, a Chinese vice premier, will lead a 19-member body that will look into ways to fix the country's problems with food and product safety, the government said Friday on its official Web site. The central government had said last month that such a group would be formed. The widening furor over cases of unsafe Chinese-made products, from toys covered in lead paint to toothpaste tainted with toxic chemicals, has yet to have noticeable effect on the country's overall exports, which continue to grow quickly. But it is clearly worrying Chinese officials, who fear it could do longer-term damage to the country's reputation.
China has vigorously defended the overall quality of its exports but it has also acknowledged that problems exist and has taken steps to demonstrate that it is serious about combating them. Last month, it executed the former head of China's State Food and Drug Administration, for accepting bribes to approve sometimes unsafe drugs for the domestic market.
The new government panel will bring together officials from several agencies that have jurisdiction over food and product supervision. As many as five national agencies, plus a dozen lower-level bureaus, oversee different aspects of the issue. The move appears aimed, in part, at addressing criticism that the handling of the current crisis has been unfocused.
Ms. Wu, China's most senior female official, has developed a reputation during her long career in China's government for fixing thorny problems. She has extensive experience in both trade and public-health issues -- concerns linked to the current crisis.
In 2003, Ms. Wu was brought in as interim health minister after the government sacked the incumbent for his poor handling of the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. She is credited with moving quickly to repair the ministry's weak disclosure practices.
The latest blow to China on the product safety front came this week when Mattel Inc., the world's biggest toy company, launched a second recall of Chinese-made toys in as many weeks. Mattel said some of the toys had lead-contaminated paint supplied by Chinese contracts without its knowledge. Most of the recalled toys, however, were deemed unsafe because their design included small magnets, which children could accidentally swallow.
Friday, the government-linked China Toy Association moved to assuage concerns. Executive Vice President May Liang said the "majority of China-made toys are still very good quality."
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