Saturday June 27, 2009

What the Big Banks Have Won

Mike Whitney
Counterpunch

The trouble started 24 months ago, but the origins of the financial crisis are still disputed. The problems did not begin with subprime loans, lax lending standards or shoddy ratings agencies. The meltdown can be traced back to the activities of the big banks and their enablers at the Federal Reserve.

The Fed's artificially low interest rates provided a subsidy for risky speculation while deregulation allowed financial institutions to increase leverage to perilous levels, creating trillions of dollars of credit backed by insufficient capital reserves. When two Bear Stearns hedge funds defaulted in July 2007, the process of turbo-charging profits through massive credit expansion flipped into reverse sending the financial system into a downward spiral.
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Saturday June 27, 2009

Biofuels could clean up Chernobyl 'badlands'

Fred Pearce
New Scientist

Contaminated lands, blighted by fallout from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, could be cleaned up in a clever way: by growing biofuels. Belarus, the country affected by much of the fallout, is planning to use the crops to suck up the radioactive strontium and caesium and make the soil fit to grow food again within decades rather than hundreds of years.

A 40,000 square kilometre area of south-east Belarus is so stuffed with radioactive isotopes that rained down from the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power station in 1986 that it won't be fit for growing food for hundreds of years, as the isotopes won't have decayed sufficiently.
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Saturday June 27, 2009

5-D Discs to Store 2000 Times More Than DVD

Anuradha Menon
The Future of Things

Researchers from the Centre of Micro-Photonics at Swinburne University of Technology have shown how discs, with storage capabilities of 2,000 times the size of a DVD, can be developed using nanotechnology. Their findings point towards using nanoscopic particles to exponentially boost the amount of information stored on a single disc with a unique ‘five dimensional’ structure.

“We were able to show how nanostructured material can be incorporated onto a disc in order to increase data capacity, without increasing the physical size of the disc,” said Professor Min Gu, one of the researchers on the team. Conventional discs have three spatial dimensions, but in this new process, an extra spectral or color dimension as well as a polarization dimension were added using nanoparticles. These two extra dimensions are the imperative additions in developing ultra-high capacity discs.
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Saturday June 27, 2009

You're still Jewish – even if your mother isn't

Robert Verkaik
Independent

Judges rule that London school's strict admissions policy is in breach of Race Discrimination Act

Britain's Jewish faith schools may have to revise their admission policies after the Court of Appeal ruled that the widely used criteria for selecting pupils breached the Race Discrimination Act.

In a far-reaching judgment, three judges found the well known JFS (formerly the Jews' Free School) in Brent, north-west London, racially discriminated against a 12-year-old boy by denying him a place at the school because his mother was not a recognised Jew.
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Saturday June 27, 2009

Help Save the Earth, Time to Subsitute Hemp for Oil

Dara Colwell
AlterNet

Every man-made fiber we wear, sit on, cook with, drive in, are by-products of the petroleum industry -- all of which could be replaced by hemp.

As the recession renews interest in the growing hemp marketplace as a potential boon for the green economy -- even Fox Business News has touted it -- hemp is becoming impossible to ignore.

But the plant's potential extends far beyond consumer-generated greenbacks. A low-input, low-impact crop, industrial hemp can play a significant role in our desperate shuffle to avoid catastrophic climate change.
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Saturday June 27, 2009

Google told to make Gmail more secure

Tim Greene
Network World (US)

Google has been advised to encrypt its web-based Gmail service by default. A group of internationally prominent Internet security and legal experts has told the company that this is the best way to mitigate privacy and security risks.

In response to the group's open letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, sent to the Washington Post, Google security blogger Alma Whitten said the company is considering whether it makes sense to turn on https for all Gmail users by default, given the potential to slow end-user interactions with the service.
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Saturday June 27, 2009

Auto-ban: German town goes car-free

Tony Paterson
Independent

Vauban hopes to forge a model community without that great staple of modern life – the car. Now the sound of birdsong has replaced the roar of traffic and children can play in the street

The Germans may have given the world the Audi and the autobahn, but they have banished everything with four wheels and an engine from the streets of Vauban – a model brave new world of a community in the country's south-west, next to the borders with Switzerland and France.
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Saturday June 27, 2009

British scientists make key breakthrough in superbug fight

Andrew Pierce
Telegraph

British scientists have made an important breakthrough in the fight against hospital super bugs such as MRSA with a cleaning product which was invented to stop mould growth in bakeries and fish factories.

The Daily Telegraph can disclose that in the biggest trial of its kind the newly developed cleansing agent Byotrol has cut levels of MRSA on wards by one third compared with the NHS gold standard bleach.
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Saturday June 27, 2009

Internet dating unplugged

Tanya Gold
The Guardian

21st-century solution to loneliness or cringe-inducing cyber hell? Nearly five million Britons are searching for love online, but are they looking in the wrong place?

I am in a cafe in London, waiting for a date. His name is Greg007. He has clicked on my pouting and misleading photograph, read my evasive and duplicitous profile - "Lively and a few pounds overweight!" - and has seen something that he thinks he wants.
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Saturday June 27, 2009

Hackers recruited to help fight against cybercrime

Nigel Morris and Jerome Taylor
Independent

Reformed computer hackers are being recruited by the Government to defend Britain from international crime gangs and terrorists plotting cyber attacks on the country.

With internet fraud costing billions of pounds a year and Whitehall computer systems facing repeated assaults from abroad, ministers are hiring hackers to protect state secrets.
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Thursday June 25, 2009

Ice on fire: The next fossil fuel

Fred Pearce
New Scientist

Deep in the Arctic Circle, in the Messoyakha gas field of western Siberia, lies a mystery. Back in 1970, Russian engineers began pumping natural gas from beneath the permafrost and piping it east across the tundra to the Norilsk metal smelter, the biggest industrial enterprise in the Arctic.

By the late 70s, they were on the brink of winding down the operation. According to their surveys, they had sapped nearly all the methane from the deposit. But despite their estimates, the gas just kept on coming. The field continues to power Norilsk today.
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Thursday June 25, 2009

Keep Britain Tidy returns 13,000 rubber bands to Royal Mail

Rebecca Smithers
The Guardian

Rubber bands dropped by postal workers collected by public

More than 13,000 discarded red rubber bands will be sent back to the Royal Mail by an anti-litter campaign after being scooped off the streets by members of the public.

In one of the biggest exercises of its kind, people throughout the UK collected the bands - dropped by postmen on pavements and in doorways - after a national campaign by Keep Britain Tidy.
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Thursday June 25, 2009

New call for ICANN to be privatised

Maxwell Cooter
Techworld

The world's regional Internet registries (RIRs) have added their weight to call for Internet governance to be privatised.

The RIRs have followed the European Union's demand, proposed by European Commissioner Viviane Reding last month, for the ending of the collaboration agreement between ICANN and the US Department of Commerce.
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Thursday June 25, 2009

Twitter usage rises sharply

Juan Carlos Perez
IDG News Service

Twitter grew faster than any other website in May, when its unique visitors rose almost 1,500 percent year-on-year to 18.2 million, according to Nielsen Online.

People also spent significantly more time on Twitter, from an average of six minutes and 19 seconds in May 2008 to 17 minutes and 21 seconds last month.
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Thursday June 25, 2009

Energy bills: the £1.7bn annual rip-off

Martin Hickman
Independent

Average household should pay £74 less a year, consumer group claims

Energy companies are over-charging customers by failing to pass on £1.66 billion of savings they have made on falling wholesale gas and electricity prices.

Gas prices should be 7.4 per cent cheaper and electricity bills 3.1 per cent cheaper, saving an average household £74 a year, research obtained by The Independent suggests.
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Thursday June 25, 2009

UK cocaine market is the largest in Europe

Jack Doyle
Press Association

The UK is the cocaine capital of Europe, the UN said today.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said the UK was Europe's largest cocaine market - with more than one million regular users.

But its report revealed the quality of the Class A drug has declined dramatically in recent years.

A crackdown on traffickers has pushed prices up and led to dealers cutting even more.
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