Four philosophical questions to make your brain hurt

It's World Philosophy Day - an opportunity to contemplate one's very existence and whether computer monitors really exist, says David Bain.

People expect different things of philosophers. Some expect us to be sages. When these people meet me, my heart sinks, since I know theirs is about to. Others expect us to have a steady supply of aphorisms up our sleeves, such as that love is never having to say you're sorry (something no partner of mine has ever been persuaded of).

They too are disappointed when they meet me, especially when I say that the glass so beloved by optimists and pessimists is both half full and half empty.

Others expect of us not sagacity, but madness, or at least outlandish beliefs. And here, it must be said, some philosophers really have delivered. Thales believed that everything is made of water, for example, while Pythagoras avoided eating beans because he believed they have souls.

As Princeton philosopher David Lewis once said: "When philosophers follow where argument leads, too often they are led to doctrines indistinguishable from sheer lunacy."

But beware. this is the same David Lewis who believed that, for each of the ways things might have been but are not, there is a world at which they are that way, eg a world at which your counterpart is spending today with the world's greatest sex god or goddess.

And, reassuring though it can be to think that at least that counterpart is having fun, even those impressed with Lewis's towering intellect have often found these other worlds of his hard to swallow.

Not all philosophers pin such striking colours to the mast, but there is a good reason why people associate the subject with surprising views. Philosophy involves standing back and thinking - intensely and rigorously - about aspects of our lives that are at once ordinary and fundamental.

And when the surface is scratched, what you find below is extraordinary - or, rather, extraordinarily difficult to make good, clear sense of. Lying in wait are arguments that lead to, if not sheer lunacy, then bullets we're loathe to bite.

So, with World Philosophy Day upon us, here are some pesky arguments to apply your minds to:

1. SHOULD WE KILL HEALTHY PEOPLE FOR THEIR ORGANS?

Suppose Bill is a healthy man without family or loved ones. Would it be ok painlessly to kill him if his organs would save five people, one of whom needs a heart, another a kidney, and so on? If not, why not?

Consider another case: you and six others are kidnapped, and the kidnapper somehow persuades you that if you shoot dead one of the other hostages, he will set the remaining five free, whereas if you do not, he will shoot all six. (Either way, he'll release you.)

If in this case you should kill one to save five, why not in the previous, organs case? If in this case too you have qualms, consider yet another: you're in the cab of a runaway tram and see five people tied to the track ahead. You have the option of sending the tram on to the track forking off to the left, on which only one person is tied. Surely you should send the tram left, killing one to save five.

But then why not kill Bill?

2. ARE YOU THE SAME PERSON WHO STARTED READING THIS ARTICLE?

Consider a photo of someone you think is you eight years ago. What makes that person you? You might say he she was composed of the same cells as you now. But most of your cells are replaced every seven years. You might instead say you're an organism, a particular human being, and that organisms can survive cell replacement - this oak being the same tree as the sapling I planted last year.

But are you really an entire human being? If surgeons swapped George Bush's brain for yours, surely the Bush look-alike, recovering from the operation in the White House, would be you. Hence it is tempting to say that you are a human brain, not a human being.

But why the brain and not the spleen? Presumably because the brain supports your mental states, eg your hopes, fears, beliefs, values, and memories. But then it looks like it's actually those mental states that count, not the brain supporting them. So the view is that even if the surgeons didn't implant your brain in Bush's skull, but merely scanned it, wiped it, and then imprinted its states on to Bush's pre-wiped brain, the Bush look-alike recovering in the White House would again be you.

But the view faces a problem: what if surgeons imprinted your mental states on two pre-wiped brains: George Bush's and Gordon Brown's? Would you be in the White House or in Downing Street? There's nothing on which to base a sensible choice. Yet one person cannot be in two places at once.

In the end, then, no attempt to make sense of your continued existence over time works. You are not the person who started reading this article.

3. IS THAT REALLY A COMPUTER SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOU?

What reason do you have to believe there's a computer screen in front of you? Presumably that you see it, or seem to. But our senses occasionally mislead us. A straight stick half-submerged in water sometimes look bent; two equally long lines sometimes look different lengths.

But this, you might reply, doesn't show that the senses cannot provide good reasons for beliefs about the world. By analogy, even an imperfect barometer can give you good reason to believe it's about to rain.

Before relying on the barometer, after all, you might independently check it by going outside to see whether it tends to rain when the barometer indicates that it will. You establish that the barometer is right 99% of the time. After that, surely, its readings can be good reasons to believe it will rain.

Perhaps so, but the analogy fails. For you cannot independently check your senses. You cannot jump outside of the experiences they provide to check they're generally reliable. So your senses give you no reason at all to believe that there is a computer screen in front of you."

4. DID YOU REALLY CHOOSE TO READ THIS ARTICLE?

Suppose that Fred existed shortly after the Big Bang. He had unlimited intelligence and memory, and knew all the scientific laws governing the universe and all the properties of every particle that then existed. Thus equipped, billions of years ago, he could have worked out that, eventually, planet Earth would come to exist, that you would too, and that right now you would be reading this article.

After all, even back then he could have worked out all the facts about the location and state of every particle that now exists.

And once those facts are fixed, so is the fact that you are now reading this article. No one's denying you chose to read this. But your choice had causes (certain events in your brain, for example), which in turn had causes, and so on right back to the Big Bang. So your reading this was predictable by Fred long before you existed. Once you came along, it was already far too late for you to do anything about it.

Now, of course, Fred didn't really exist, so he didn't really predict your every move. But the point is: he could have. You might object that modern physics tells us that there is a certain amount of fundamental randomness in the universe, and that this would have upset Fred's predictions. But is this reassuring? Notice that, in ordinary life, it is precisely when people act unpredictably that we sometimes question whether they have acted freely and responsibly. So freewill begins to look incompatible both with causal determination and with randomness. None of us, then, ever do anything freely and responsibly."

IN CONCLUSION

Let me be clear: the point is absolutely not that you or I must bite these bullets. Some philosophers have a taste for bullets; but few would accept all the conclusions above and many would accept none. But the point, when you reject a conclusion, is to diagnose where the argument for it goes wrong.

Doing this in philosophy goes hand-in-hand with the constructive side of our subject, with providing sane, rigorous, and illuminating accounts of central aspects of our existence: freewill, morality, justice, beauty, consciousness, knowledge, truth, meaning, and so on.

Rarely does this allow us to put everything back where we found it. There are some surprises, some bullets that have to be bitten; sometimes it's a matter simply of deciding which. But even when our commonsense conceptions survive more or less intact, understanding is deepened. As TS Eliot once wrote:

"…the end of our exploring,

Will be to arrive where we started,

And know the place for the first time."

David Bain is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Glasgow

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Author: David Bain
Original Source: BBC News
Date Published: 20 November 2008
Web Source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7739493.stm
Date Accessed Online: 2008-11-23

Three characteristics make fiscal policy more effective

The two rounds of proactive fiscal policies carried out in 1998 and 2008 are major macro-control measures to tackle financial crisis and prevent economy from further declining. Thanks to government's resolute decisions and prompt actions, these measures expand social demand through raising government expenditure to boost social investment and economic growth.

However, the 1998 policy was aimed at coping with regional crisis in Asia, particularly in financial field. The current global economic recession, comparatively more serious and more complicated, is spreading from western industrialized nations to emerging economies and developing countries and from financial field to national economy.

The CPC Central Committee is more confident and rational in dealing with the crisis in light of the experiences drawn from 1998 Asia economic meltdown. The State Council urges prompt measures, forceful implementation, correct actions and substantial work to expand investment, a thorough interpretation of the new fiscal policy.

Three characteristics make the new and proactive fiscal policy more effective:

First, the policy issued this time to facilitate economy with investment focuses more on people's livelihood. Although investment remains the key method to expand domestic economy, the policy this time attaches more importance to people's livelihood, with at least five measures out of ten concerning that or low-income group, for instance, building more economically affordable houses, speeding up infrastructure construction in rural areas, accelerating poverty alleviation effort, boosting the development of medical care, culture and education, speeding up ecological construction, sewage and garbage treatment, pollution prevention and post-quake relief and reconstruction.

Secondly, income raise for urban and rural residents and reform of tax system are included in the measures to expand domestic demand for the first time. All regions and trades will comprehensively forge ahead with the reform of value-added tax, encourage technical reform in enterprises and alleviate the loan burden of some 120 billion yuan for enterprises. It is regarded as a great leap forward. In the future, it will also lower the income tax for wage-earners, the self-employed and SMEs, enlarge the circle of consumption subsidies for urban and rural residents and put more effort on enhancing consumer credit so as to stimulate consumer demand.

Thirdly, the new policy combines short-term goal with long-term one. It will help to boost economic growth and structural adjustment, encourage independent innovation, support high-tech, technical progress and the development of service sector. Furthermore, the new policy also combines investment expansion with consumption stimulation and puts forward measures such as establishing a grass-root medical care system, speeding up schoolhouse renovation in middle schools in mid and west China, pushing forward the construction of special education school and cultural centers in rural areas, accelerating the construction of economically affordable houses and low-rent houses, renovation of dangerous dwelling houses and settlement of herdsmen, as well as speeding up infrastructure construction in countryside. These measures will help boost consumption and economic growth, and build up a harmonious and well-off society.

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Author: None listed
Original Source: People's Daily Online
Date Published: November 18, 2008
Web Source: http://english.people.com.cn/90001/90780/6536000_txt.html
Date Accessed Online: 2008-11-21

100,000 Chinese migrate to EU in 2006

About 100,000 Chinese migrated to the European Union (EU) in 2006, making China the second largest outside source of immigration for the EU after Morocco, the 27-nation bloc's statistics bureau Eurostat said on Tuesday.

In 2006, there were about 140,000 Moroccan citizens who migrated to the EU, the biggest outside immigrant group, followed by Chinese and Ukrainians. Both were around 100,000.

As to the 27 EU member states, Chinese ranked the second among foreign immigrants to Romania in 2006, and the third for Britain, France and Hungary.

If EU citizens who migrated to another member state were included, the total amount of foreign immigrants settled in a country in the EU would be about 3 million in 2006, with 40 percent migrating within the EU and the remaining 60 percent coming from outside.

The outside immigrants were almost equally divided between citizens of countries in non-EU Europe, Asia, America and Africa, with each accounting for about 15 percent, according to Eurostat.

Poland was the largest supplier of immigrants within the EU. About 290,000 Polish people migrated to other EU countries in 2006and many of them hoped to find a well-paid job in Western European countries.

In 2006, Spain recorded the largest number of foreign immigrants, totaling 803,000, followed by Germany and Britain. The three countries received 60 percent of all foreign immigrants in the EU.

Eurostat said immigration means the action by which a person who has previously lived in a country establishes his or her usual residence in the territory of another country for a period of at least 12 months.

The figure does not include persons already living in the country who migrated before 2006.


Source: Xinhua

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Author: Not Listed
Original Source: People's Daily
Date Published: November 19, 2008
Web Source: http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90001/90776/90883/6536119.html
Date Accessed Online: 2008-11-20

Obama et l'islam, délicate équation

L'élection de Barack Obama a soulevé un vent d'espoir aux Etats-Unis, mais aussi dans le monde musulman, où l'Amérique se trouve engagée sur plusieurs fronts depuis les attaques du 11-Septembre.

Barack Obama arrive avec quatre atouts : le fait de succéder à un président honni, George Bush, ne peut que le servir ; le fait que son père l'ait appelé Hussein, son second prénom, qui est celui du petit-fils du prophète, ne peut que susciter la curiosité et la sympathie des musulmans, notamment des chiites ; le fait qu'il ait vécu une partie de son enfance dans des pays musulmans. Enfin, le fait qu'il soit métis rompt avec l'identification de l'Amérique à un pays d'impérialistes blancs. En outre, au cours des primaires, il a promis d'organiser un sommet entre les Etats-Unis et les pays musulmans pour traiter de l'incompréhension qui caractérise leurs relations.

Malgré ces atouts, rien n'est gagné, car la politique internationale est une affaire de rapports de forces. Or, il ne suffit pas d'être beau et sympathique, métis et de père musulman pour réussir dans l'aire arabo-islamique. L'héritage désastreux du président Bush prive en effet son successeur tant de moyens de séduction que de répression. L'état des finances - publiques et privées -, du déficit et de la dette, est tel qu'il plonge les Américains dans le doute. L'onde de choc de la crise financière peut anéantir la croissance mondiale. Quant au recours à la force, on perçoit ses limites avec l'enlisement de l'armée américaine en Afghanistan et en Irak, et avec le discrédit de la puissance américaine au Moyen-Orient face à la montée de l'Iran. Dans ces conditions, il est difficile d'imaginer que l'armée américaine s'engage dans un nouveau conflit.

Pour retrouver une marge de manoeuvre et permettre à l'économie de rebondir, la première mission d'Obama sera de rétablir la confiance chez les Américains. Il n'est donc pas dit que ces derniers continuent d'accepter que leur Etat dépense tant de milliards sur la scène internationale et néglige ses secteurs vitaux, comme la sécurité sociale ou l'enseignement.

Avec la perspective d'un repli sur les préoccupations domestiques, de quels moyens les Etats-Unis disposeront-ils pour s'imposer à l'étranger ? Le candidat Obama a annoncé, avec raison, sa volonté de mobiliser les moyens nécessaires pour remporter la guerre en Afghanistan, et conjointement au Pakistan. Cette approche peut difficilement être contestable.

En revanche, le retrait de l'armée américaine d'Irak en seize mois n'est pas seulement une utopie, ce serait une erreur qui ne manquerait pas de se traduire par une défaite stratégique pour les Etats-Unis. Un retrait prématuré d'Irak, avant qu'une armée nationale ne soit constituée et opérationnelle, livrerait le pays à l'influence de l'Iran et permettrait le retour triomphal d'Al-Qaida, alors même que le général Petraeus est parvenu à retourner la population sunnite contre l'organisation d'Oussama Ben Laden. Un retrait précipité affaiblirait aussi les alliés de l'Amérique dans la région et sonnerait le glas de la présence de bases américaines dans les pétromonarchies, indispensables à la stabilité du Golfe et des approvisionnements pétroliers.

Quant aux négociations "inconditionnelles" avec l'Iran, préconisées par le candidat Obama, elles ne peuvent qu'être sanctionnées par un échec, à l'image de celles entreprises par les Européens et qui n'en finissent pas de jouer les prolongations. Or, pendant ce temps, l'Iran poursuit sa politique du fait accompli dans le domaine nucléaire, de même qu'il renforce son influence dans le "croissant chiite", qui s'étend désormais de la Caspienne à la Méditerranée en comprenant l'Irak post-Saddam, la Syrie alaouite, le Liban dominé par le Hezbollah, et même le Hamas palestinien, pourtant sunnite.

Il faut reconnaître que cette domination iranienne est due aux erreurs de George Bush, dont le deuxième mandat a été marqué par l'affaiblissement de sa politique et par l'échec d'Israël face au Hezbollah en 2006. Le seul point positif est le retrait de l'armée syrienne du Liban, en 2005, obtenu il est vrai grâce à une étroite concertation avec le président Jacques Chirac. Mais cela risque de n'être qu'un repli, puisque Damas rêve de retour et engage des manoeuvres à cet effet. Contrairement aux attentes syriennes, Barack Obama et Nicolas Sarkozy ne doivent pas laisser faire.

En outre, la satisfaction des attentes de l'Iran constituerait une victoire sans appel pour la République islamique. Elle renforcerait la poursuite de l'enrichissement ; la sanctuarisation du régime des mollahs ; la constitution d'un condominium régional, identique à celui qui était jadis en vigueur entre le chah et Washington ; et le retrait des bases américaines de la région. Les relations de Washington avec les monarchies sunnites du Golfe s'en trouveraient perturbées, ces bases permettant aussi d'endiguer l'hégémonie iranienne. Un éventuel repli américain d'Irak et de la région précipiterait ces pays dans l'orbite de Téhéran et permettrait à ce dernier de contrôler les deux tiers des réserves mondiales d'hydrocarbures.

Enfin, Barack Obama a soulevé beaucoup d'espoir chez les Palestiniens - espoir qui s'est émoussé au fil de la campagne avec des positions de plus en plus proches d'Israël. La première nomination du président élu donne déjà le ton : c'est un Israélo-Américain qui a été placé à la tête de l'administration de la Maison Blanche. Il a servi dans l'armée de Tsahal et est connu pour son militantisme. Néanmoins, il n'est pas interdit d'espérer que M. Obama aborde la question israélo-palestinienne sur le terrain politique et non plus exclusivement sécuritaire, ce qui permettra aux Palestiniens de faire valoir leur droit à un Etat, aux côtés d'un Israël sécurisé.

L'agenda des prochains mois n'est pas propice à la recherche de solutions puisque les Israéliens et les Palestiniens ont rendez-vous avec les urnes. En outre, le conflit israélo-palestinien ne devrait pas être la priorité de Barack Obama, d'abord préoccupé par le règlement des conflits où l'armée américaine se trouve déjà engagée. La crédibilité du nouveau président dans le monde musulman dépend pourtant du règlement de cette crise. D'autant plus que la réconciliation entre l'Amérique et les musulmans est indispensable pour mieux isoler et combattre l'idéologie islamiste belliqueuse qui considère la civilisation occidentale comme l'incarnation du "mal absolu".

Finalement, ce qui menace le plus le nouveau président américain est une érosion rapide des espoirs qu'il a soulevés, parce que la conjoncture économique et l'image de Washington sont au plus mauvais et que l'homme arrive à la Maison Blanche dépourvu de la "carotte" et du "bâton" qui, par le passé, ont permis aux Etats-Unis d'asseoir leur puissance.

Antoine Basbous est directeur de l'Observatoire des pays arabes.

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Author: Antoine Basbous
Original Source: LE MONDE
Date Published: 17.11.08
Web Source: http://www.lemonde.fr/opinions/article/2008/11/17/obama-et-l-islam-delicate-equation-par-antoine-basbous_1119573_3232.html
Date Accessed Online: 2008-18-03

Go ahead, pretend you're Cinderella and he's Prince Charming

SOME Chinese young lovers don't want traditional weddings and instead choose innovative rites. They act out Cinderella and Prince Charming, release butterflies and pretend they're lovers in old Shanghai, writes Xu Wei.

Shen Chen and his bride Liu Shanshan wore radiant Thai silk costumes, holy water was poured into their cupped hands, and every guest tied a string around the couple's joined hands to signify unity.

It was a perfect Thai-style October wedding in Shanghai for the young white-collar workers from Harbin in northeastern China's Heilongjiang Province.

In Thai style, too, Chinese elders gave their blessing to the union, though the couple's parents stayed home and missed the very nontraditional ceremony.

Shen and Liu had planned a traditional Chinese wedding, but on a trip to Shanghai they were attracted by a promotion for a Thai-style wedding.

"We came all the way here to make our big day special and sweet," Shen says. "The Thai-style wedding didn't let us down. It was a unique and fresh experience. We didn't want our wedding to be an awesome ritual."

There's no report on what their parents back in Harbin said.

The unusual nuptials are becoming more popular for couples in the 1980s generation, usually only children who were lavished with attention.

They have been called the "Me Generation" because they are often self-centered.

At the same time they remain conventional in pursuit of marriage.

They take their individual style right up to the altar, as it were.

Young people are looking for unique weddings, documented in lots of photos, that are very unlike their parents' and peers' ceremonies.

Innovative weddings are increasingly popular. Some couples wed on snowy mountains, in underwater gardens and in the baskets of hot-air balloons. Some even go to Paris.

Wu Weikang, a Shanghai police officer, and his bride Lou Hongli are just back from Canada for the annual Rose Wedding (a Shanghai Tourism Festival event) trip that took them to Toronto, Ottawa and Niagara Falls where they tied the knot.

Last month, 11 Chinese couples (who already had registered) took a 10-day trip to Canada, sightseeing by helicopter and enjoying maple syrup.

The honeymoon was videotaped and screened on the Shanghai matchmaking TV program "Date on Saturday."

"This travel-themed wedding offered us great fun and many memorable moments," Wu says. "We were warmly welcomed by locals. In turn, we presented chocolate and candies to them, sharing our happiness."

Wu says he didn't want a routine traditional wedding, which can have complicated rites but is largely about eating and drinking.

Bride and bridegroom must toast table by table. Refusing to drink is considered rude and many a bride has been virtually carried out of her own wedding banquet.

Wedding planners are always trying to tap trends in wedding culture, such as travel.

This year Rose Wedding Cultural Development Co Ltd sent couples to Canada: every year, it's a different place.

"The itinerary is carefully designed for newlyweds," says Rose Wedding General Manager Cao Zhonghua." We didn't focus on the number of places. Instead, scenic resorts with romantic fun were our top priority."

Every year about 150,000 couples get married in Shanghai.

Wang Gaosong, a veteran wedding planner at Original Wedding Assembly Hall, has watched the trend in creative weddings.

Noisy banquets

Many young people find traditional weddings, including a ceremony and sumptuous feast, tiring and unromantic.

"A successful wedding ceremony need not be costly or luxurious, but it should be unique and perfectly suit your personality," Wang says.

He says many weddings are stereotypically big noisy banquets.

Brides usually carry the same Chinese-style bouquets and wedding hall decorations are very similar.

Wang has planned many creative weddings such as Scuba-diving and hot-air balloon weddings.

He can do close-up magic, mini dramas and carrying and lighting the "torch of love."

An old Shanghai-style wedding was one of the most successful weddings planned by Wang and his team. The show was full of 1930s nostalgia and involved amateur actors playing flower-selling girls, rickshaw pullers and cops of that period.

At the ceremony, each guest receives a lottery ticket, conveying wishes for good luck from the newlyweds.

"Though traditional wedding ceremonies are still dominant, we bring fresh elements and concepts to satisfy the needs of young people," Wang says. "Diversity should be always a key component of this vibrant wedding industry."


Creative weddings

Cinderella

The Cinderella fairytale has touched many girls since childhood. It has inspired couples to re-create the Cinderella-Prince Charming fantasy in their weddings.

The show includes pumpkin carriage favors, castle-like candles and wedding cake figurines of Cinderella and Prince Charming.

Crystal slippers, of course. The slipper is hidden and the bridegroom hunts for it as he is teased by guests. Then he finds it and looks for Cinderella. When the shoe fits, the wedding reaches a climax of fireworks, raindrops on falling flower petals and romantic music.

Butterfly

Butterflies, emerging from the chrysalis and spreading their wings, symbolize new beginnings the world over. In Chinese legend, butterflies are romantic and the tale of the separated and reunited "butterfly lovers" is famous.

In this wedding, butterflies are released into the air.

Butterfly weddings began overseas but they are no longer a novelty in Shanghai.

The wedding features butterfly decorations and accessories, butterfly guestbooks, ring pillows and flower-girl baskets. The cake is shaped like a butterfly and/or frosted with butterflies.

The highlight is the moment when the newlyweds release a pair of butterflies from a box. Then many butterflies are released, fluttering about, perhaps alighting on a guest.

Mini drama

A favorite is set in 1930-40s Shanghai. The backdrop and props are all there. The bride wears elegant qipao, reminding guests of scenes from Wong Kar-wai's romance film "In the Mood for Love."

The newlyweds play a couple who often play together innocently in childhood, they come to love each other as they get older and pledge their hearts.

After a long separation, the lovers are reunited to the soothing sounds of a guzheng (Chinese zither). They keep their long-ago promise and raise the curtain on a traditional Chinese wedding.

The bride and bridegroom first bow to heaven and earth, then to the bridegroom's parents and last to each other. It's a red-red, double-happiness Chinese wedding in the grand tradition.

(Source: Original Wedding Assembly Hall)

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Author: Xu Wei
Original Source: Shanghai Daily
Date Published: 2008-11-17
Web Source: http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/?id=380871
Date Accessed Online: 2008-11-17

U.N. Reports Pollution Threat in Asia

BEIJING — A noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations.

The byproduct of automobiles, slash-and-burn agriculture, cooking on dung or wood fires and coal-fired power plants, these plumes rise over southern Africa, the Amazon basin and North America. But they are most pronounced in Asia, where so-called atmospheric brown clouds are dramatically reducing sunlight in many Chinese cities and leading to decreased crop yields in swaths of rural India, say a team of more than a dozen scientists who have been studying the problem since 2002.

“The imperative to act has never been clearer,” said Achim Steiner, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program, in Beijing, which the report identified as one of the world’s most polluted cities, and where the report was released.

The brownish haze, sometimes in a layer more than a mile thick and clearly visible from airplanes, stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to the Yellow Sea. In the spring, it sweeps past North and South Korea and Japan. Sometimes the cloud drifts as far east as California.

The report identified 13 cities as brown-cloud hot spots, among them Bangkok, Cairo, New Delhi, Tehran and Seoul, South Korea.

It was issued on a day when Beijing’s own famously polluted skies were unusually clear. On Wednesday, by contrast, the capital was shrouded in a thick, throat-stinging haze that is the byproduct of heavy industry, coal-burning home heaters and the 3.5 million cars that clog the city’s roads.

Last month, the government reintroduced some of the traffic restrictions that were imposed on Beijing during the Olympics; the rules forced private cars to stay off the road one day a week and sidelined 30 percent of government vehicles on any given day. Over all, officials say the new measures have removed 800,000 cars from the roads.

According to the United Nations report, smog blocks from 10 percent to 25 percent of the sunlight that should be reaching the city’s streets. The report also singled out the southern city of Guangzhou, where soot and dust have dimmed natural light by 20 percent since the 1970s.

In fact, the scientists who worked on the report said the blanket of haze might be temporarily offsetting some warming from the simultaneous buildup of greenhouse gases by reflecting solar energy away from the earth. Greenhouse gases, by contrast, tend to trap the warmth of the sun and lead to a rise in ocean temperatures.

Climate scientists say that similar plumes from industrialization of wealthy countries after World War II probably blunted global warming through the 1970s. Pollution laws largely removed that pall.

Rain can cleanse the skies, but some of the black grime that falls to earth ends up on the surface of the Himalayan glaciers that are the source of water for billions of people in China, India and Pakistan. As a result, the glaciers that feed into the Yangtze, Ganges, Indus and Yellow Rivers are absorbing more sunlight and melting more rapidly, researchers say.

According to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, these glaciers have shrunk by 5 percent since the 1950s and, at the current rate of retreat, could shrink by an additional 75 percent by 2050.

“We used to think of this brown cloud as a regional problem, but now we realize its impact is much greater,” said Veerabhadran Ramanathan, who led the United Nations scientific panel. “When we see the smog one day and not the next, it just means it’s blown somewhere else.”

Although the clouds’ overall impact is not entirely understood, Mr. Ramanathan, a professor of climate and ocean sciences at the University of California, San Diego, said they might be affecting precipitation in parts of India and Southeast Asia, where monsoon rainfall has been decreasing in recent decades, and central China, where devastating floods have become more frequent.

He said that some studies suggested that the plumes of soot that blot out the sun have led to a 5 percent decline in the growth rate of rice harvests across Asia since the 1960s.

For those who breathe the toxic mix, the impact can be deadly. Henning Rodhe, a professor of chemical meteorology at Stockholm University, estimates that 340,000 people in China and India die each year from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases that can be traced to the emissions from coal-burning factories, diesel trucks and wood-burning stoves. “The impacts on health alone is a reason to reduce these brown clouds,” he said.

Andrew C. Revkin contributed reporting from New York.

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Author: ANDREW JACOBS
Original Source: New York Times
Date Published: November 14, 2008
Web Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/world/14cloud.html
Date Accessed Online: 2008-11-18

Lenovo Goes Global, but Not Without Strife

BEIJING -- As recently as 2005, Lenovo Group Ltd. was a little-known computer maker that sold only in China, sometimes relying on deliverymen on bicycles.

Lenovo Group, the world's fourth-largest computer maker, has been lagging behind competitors.
Its acquisition of IBM's personal-computer business catapulted Lenovo onto the world stage: Now about 60% of the company's sales come from outside China, and it is the fourth-biggest computer maker by shipments.

Lenovo has filled its ranks with Westerners from IBM and Dell Inc., opened factories in Mexico and Poland, and gone on an Olympics-led marketing blitz. While Lenovo has fared better than other Chinese companies that have tried to become global players, it has fallen behind competitors in the PC industry.

Lenovo's computer shipments rose 8% in the third quarter, but its growth was eclipsed by the overall market, which grew nearly twice as fast. That left Lenovo's global market share at 7.3%, down from 7.8% a year ago, according to research firm Gartner.

Analysts have scaled back their expectations for Lenovo, which reports its quarterly earnings on Thursday. Morgan Stanley, for example, expects a weak quarter and now projects Lenovo's net income will fall 20% in the current fiscal year, the first year of decline since the IBM PC acquisition, which was completed in May 2005.

In the early days after the IBM deal, cultural clashes and power struggles nearly derailed the Chinese computer maker's aggressive strategy to become a world player, say current and former executives. Now the company's global ambitions must confront the economic malaise in the U.S. and Europe -- two markets that were key to its expansion plans.

Lenovo's $1.25 billion deal to buy the PC arm of International Business Machines Corp. gave it brand credibility, a global sales force and access to Western management skills. In turn, investors hoped, Lenovo's low-cost structure in China would bring new efficiency to the IBM business, which had been unprofitable for years.

"We knew we could not fail," says Mary Ma, a Lenovo director and former chief financial officer. "Not just for us, but for all of China. They viewed us as a symbol of a Chinese company going global, and we felt a great responsibility."

Before the deal, Lenovo's business culture was steeped in militaristic discipline. At the China headquarters in a dusty industrial park in northwestern Beijing, calisthenics were broadcast twice daily over the public-address system. Employees who arrived late to meetings were humiliated by having to stand in front of the room while other executives went silent and bowed their heads for a full minute.

After the takeover, Lenovo Chairman Yang Yuanqing gave up the chief-executive position to a Western executive, and switched the company's official language to English. Still, the culture clashes persisted. Bill Amelio, a former Dell executive who became Lenovo's CEO in late 2005, was sometimes frustrated by his Chinese colleagues' reluctance to speak their minds.

"You don't want everyone saying 'Yes, Yes, Yes' all the time," says Mr. Amelio, a brawny former college wrestler. "You want them to be able to smack you upside the head and say 'Hey, I've got a better idea.'"

Conference calls were difficult as Americans hogged the airtime. "The Americans would just talk and talk," says Qiao Jian, a vice president of human resources. "Then they'd say 'How come you don't want to add value to this meeting?'"

Working closely with Mr. Yang, Mr. Amelio ordered two major restructurings that have slashed more than 2,400 jobs, which amount to roughly 10% of the company's current global work force. The company also shifted jobs to lower-cost areas. Development of desktop computers has been shifted to Beijing, while Lenovo's marketing headquarters have been moved to Bangalore, India.
While IBM had focused on selling laptops to businesses, Lenovo is aggressively expanding into on the cutthroat consumer market despite the souring economy. Last month, Lenovo began selling a $399 mini-laptop called the IdeaPad S10 -- its first foray into the fast-growing "netbook" market.

"If you think about going after the next billion computer users, this is a great way to do it," says Mr. Amelio. "While we're a bit late to the party, it's still not late enough not to be in the game."
At the same time, Hewlett-Packard Co., the biggest of Lenovo's competitors, is making international-market gains, Apple Inc. has revitalized its Macintosh business, and fast-growing Taiwanese rival Acer Inc. surpassed Lenovo as the third-largest PC maker by units shipped by acquiring Gateway Inc.

To streamline its supply chain, Lenovo has shifted more manufacturing to new factories outside of Asia. In October, it opened a 260,000 square-foot plant in Monterrey, Mexico. While shipping a PC to the U.S. from China can take 30 days, shipping from Mexico takes just three or four. Lenovo's global supply network was a problem since the beginning of the marriage. "It looked like spaghetti," says Gerry Smith, senior vice president, global supply chain. While rivals such as Dell could deliver a PC within days, Lenovo deliveries sometimes took weeks or months.

But the early efforts to fix the supply chain sparked an internal backlash. Because Mr. Amelio felt the efforts weren't moving fast enough, he removed a popular Chinese executive, Liu Jun, as head of Lenovo's supply chain in 2006 and replaced him with an executive from Dell.

Mr. Liu, who was given a sabbatical to study in the U.S., had long been viewed as a rising star. His removal from a senior position inflamed tensions. Two other Chinese executives quit shortly after.

"The Chinese staff wondered if they were needed anymore at this company," says Mr. Yang.
The friction over Mr. Jun's departure -- he has since returned as senior vice president of Lenovo's consumer business -- was a "catalytic moment" for Lenovo, says Ken DiPietro, senior vice president of human resources. "We had people derailing. And we were starting to see factions develop."

In fact, tension had been brewing from the beginning. Salary has been one major point of contention. After the IBM acquisition, many Americans far outearned their Chinese peers, even though the Chinese arm was profitable and the American arm wasn't.

"I was the CFO and my subordinates were making far more than me," says Ms. Ma, the former financial chief.

At IBM, base compensation accounted for roughly 80% of salary, and performance-based bonuses about 20%. That meant Americans could miss targets and still get paid decently. For the Chinese managers, pay was almost entirely performance-based.

The company, which rotates its headquarters between Paris, Beijing and Raleigh, N.C., says it has narrowed the gap in compensation structures for senior executives.

Bridging the East-West divide also has included smaller efforts. Silkworms have been taken off the menu in the Beijing cafeteria. Sports metaphors, which were a source of confusion, have been banned from conference calls.

Confusion over the meaning of silence was another problem. "When we disagreed in meetings, we would keep silent," says Chen Shaopeng, president of Lenovo's China operations. "But the Americans assumed we were agreeing."

This spawned system of backchannel communications that eroded trust between top executives. After staying quiet in meetings, Chinese executives would often voice their complaints privately to Mr. Yang or Mr. Amelio, in what the Americans called "end runs."

Peter Hortensius, senior vice president of the notebook business, recalls being furious when he found out a Chinese colleague had reported a minor quality problem with a computer shipment directly to the chief executive, without informing him first. "I was going, 'Why the heck did he go behind my back on this one?" says Mr. Hortensius.

Mr. Hortensius's colleague was trying to be polite. In Chinese companies, executives often take problems to a boss instead of a colleague of similar rank to maintain harmony.

Juliet Ye and Gao Sen contributed to this article.

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Author: JANE SPENCER and LORETTA CHAO
Original Source: Wall Street Journal
Date Published: NOVEMBER 4, 2008
Web Source: http://wsjofharryliuhao.blogspot.com/2008/11/lenovo-goes-global-but-not-without.html
Date Accessed Online: 2008-11-16

How Industries Survive Change. If They Do.

By some logic, there is no earthly reason why bicycles should still exist.

They are a quaint, 19th-century invention, originally designed to get someone from point A to point B. Today there are much faster, far less labor-intensive modes of transportation. And yet hopeful children still beg for them for Christmas, healthful adults still ride them to work, and daring teenagers still vault them down courthouse steps. The bicycle industry has faced its share of disruptive technologies, and it has repeatedly risen from the ashes.

Other industries (cough, cough, newspapers) should be so lucky.

For some businesses, the current economic downturn is a bit problematic. For those already facing fundamental threats — like newspapers and American auto makers — it could accelerate the path to what, it has been said, might be death.

But history offers some reason for optimism. Industries like bicycle manufacturers, when faced with a threat of obsolescence, managed to creatively reinvent themselves. What lessons do they provide for today’s struggling industries?

There’s no clear route to cheating industrial death. Those companies that have survived technological challenges have in common some combination of perseverance, creativity, versatility and luck. Their precise strategies vary. Some made sweeping changes, and abandoned their original products entirely; others were able to endure by changing little but their marketing.

Take, for example, a certain class of luxury goods. Inventors have created more user-friendly writing implements than fountain pens, more dependable time-keeping devices than mechanical wristwatches, and more efficient ways to heat houses than fireplaces. Yet, many consumers still gladly opt for the cultural cachet of technologically more primitive goods.

These older technologies have survived by recasting themselves as luxuries and by marketing their sensory, aesthetic and nostalgic appeal. Their producers emphasize their experiential rather than functional qualities.

In short, they were Ye-Olde-ed, and a boutique-y rump of the original industry now survives.

The popularity of newspapers the day after Barack Obama’s election — when they were probably valued more as historical artifacts than as sources of news — had a whiff of this development.

But newspapers were not designed with maximum tactile pleasure and durability in mind. “Newspapers were always this scrubby sheet of paper with ink that came off, and that deteriorate in a few hours,” said Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California at Davis.

For that reason, he said, it is somewhat difficult to imagine newspapers remarketing themselves as a luxury product.

Perhaps there are other qualities unique to newspapers that can be exploited, just as previous creative industries have discovered when facing disruptive technologies.

Photography might have killed Western painting and portraiture, for example, because painters knew they couldn’t compete with the speed and accuracy with which photographs represented the visual world. Instead, many painters and other traditional visual artists innovated with more abstract and less representational images.

Similarly, television might have crowded out movies. Instead, Hollywood focused on bigger, more spectacular, more risqué films — the stuff that television couldn’t deliver.

Some survivor industries discovered new customer bases.

Bicycles, for example, grew in popularity through the late 19th century, peaking in the 1890s, but the craze weakened around the turn of the last century. After the First World War, manufacturers discovered a new youth market, which lasted until the baby boomers were kids. Then bikes fell out of favor again, but were revived during the 1970s when those boomers, and their kids, became more interested in personal exercise and gas-free, environmentally friendly modes of transportation.

Radio is an even better example. In its 1940s heyday, it was the center of national entertainment. Then, in the 1950s, television began stealing radio’s biggest stars, like Jack Benny and Abbott and Costello. National advertisers — radio’s revenue base — followed the talent. “Radio, actually shockingly, was pronounced dead in 1953,” says Susan J. Douglas, chair of the communication studies department at the University of Michigan.

But the industry revitalized itself by tapping into new markets. First it stumbled upon the youth music market, congregating around the car radio. Then radio innovators found other neglected markets, including underground music movements, longer-form news and talk radio. Along the way, radio’s business model changed; the medium cultivated new niche advertisers, rather than national advertisers, to pay for its new niche programming.

For some companies, nestling into a marketing nook wasn’t enough. They made radical transitions to new products and new industries, and survived through evolution, not preservation.

“Much of the history of the ‘American system of manufacturing’ is the story of inventors moving from a declining industry to a new expanding industry,” says Petra Moser, an economic historian at Stanford who studies innovation. “Inventors take their skills with them.”

Gun makers learned to make revolvers with interchangeable parts in the mid-19th century, Ms. Moser says. Then those companies (and some former employees, striking out on their own) applied those techniques to sewing machines when demand for guns slackened. Later, sewing machine manufacturers began making woodworking machinery, bicycles, cars and finally trucks.

Some famous companies have taken more improbable turns, either because their original business was fading or because they saw better growth opportunities. Before making cellphones, Nokia made paper. Before making cars, Toyota made looms (a Toyota textile business still exists). Corning is still a specialty glass and ceramics company known to most consumers for its tableware, but for more than a century it has also profited from uses as diverse as early light bulbs, space, defense and fiber-optic cable.

Some superstar companies managed to reinvent themselves multiple times — I.B.M., for example. Over a century, the company has nimbly transitioned from punch-card accounting equipment (its original business) to large mainframe computers, to personal computers, and finally to information-technology — each time facing skepticism from analysts who thought I.B.M. might be too big, too old or too entrenched to adapt.

These companies survived by keeping their ears to the ground. New customer needs emerged, and smart corporations positioned themselves to meet them. “You have to be willing to walk away from the things that have made you great,” says Scott D. Anthony, president of Innosight, which consults with companies (including newspapers and automotive businesses) on how to foster a culture of innovation. He argues that the incumbents in the newspaper industry were caught sleeping during the initial meteoric growth period of Web sites like Wikipedia because the avenue for innovation — letting crowds rather than experts aggregate and filter data — seemed so antithetical to what newspapers did well.

Of course, straying too far from what a company does well has also proven dangerous. “If you look at the history of firms that have tried to diversify their businesses, you’ll see it’s virtually an impossible thing to do,” says David A. Hounshell, a historian at Carnegie Mellon University who studies technology and social change. “Usually when a firm announces a program to diversify, they’ve pretty much written their death warrant.”

Newspapers have faced challenges before and have adapted — including through efforts at diversification. Can these historical precedents teach newspapers how to defeat the economic forces of technological change once again?

Like previous industries fearful of obsolescence, newspapers can either develop a new product, or find a way to remarket and remonetize the old one. Right now, newspapers are doing a little of both: They’re adapting their product to the Web to attract new audiences, and they’re trying to re-monetize by delivering more targeted advertising.

Meanwhile, we’ve already seen some of the “destruction” half of Joseph Schumpeter’s famous “creative destruction” paradigm, with many newspapers cutting staff and other production costs. Unfortunately for newspapers, historians say, the survivors in previous industries facing major technological challenges were usually individual companies that adapted, rather than an entire industry. So a bigger shakeout may yet come.

But perhaps the destruction will lead to more creativity. Perhaps the people we now know as journalists — or, for that matter, autoworkers — will find ways to innovate elsewhere, just as, over a century ago, gun makers laid down their weapons and broke out the needle and thread. That is, after all, the American creative legacy: making innovation seem as easy as, well, riding a bike.

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Author: Catherine Rampell
Original Source: New York Times
Date Published: November 16, 2008
Web Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/16/weekinreview/16rampell.html
Date Accessed Online: 2008-11-18