Emission-cutting scheme to target country's 500 worst polluting companies
The Australian government has unveiled one of the world's most ambitious schemes to tackle climate change, a plan to tax carbon emissions from the country's worst…
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--Labor's climate change measures – modest, riddled with exclusions, bribing voters and corporations – are a beginning
Australia's Black Saturday fires of February 2009 burned over a million acres of land and killed 173 people. It happened because of…
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--As Australia unveils a radical plan to tax carbon emissions, how do China, the US, Europe and India measure up?
China
Plans have been announced for emissions trading systems to be rolled out in six regions by 2013 and nationwide by 2015. China's…
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--Final Solution: Post-Bersih: Review 1
The mobile phone market is slipping out of its hands, but is Nokia getting the message?
By Simon MunkLast year, the company’s global share of phone sales sank below 30 per cent for the first time since 1999. Its descent is destined to become a business textbook study of how a trusted business built on a simple product can, in a matter of a few short years, lose its way
In 2000, the Nokia 3210 (left) could make texts and play Snake. 160 million handsets were sold - making it one of the most popular phones in history. Nokia's share price stood at €65. In 2011 the Nokia N8 (right) can stream web video, take 12-megapixel pictures and navigate you through traffic jams. Nokia expects to sell just nine million this year: Nokia's share price stands at €4.3
Take the E18 west from Helsinki, through Finnish forests and round lakes, and in around 90 minutes you’ll reach a town called Salo. The place would be unremarkable were it not for the sleek, tinted-glass factory at its heart, the production hub of Nokia.
Here, in March this year, a small army of the company’s engineers and workers were invited to walk to a nearby gymnasium to be told why everything they were doing was wrong.
The message was delivered by Nokia’s new chief executive, 47-year-old Canadian Stephen Elop. His appointment had been hugely controversial for a close-knit, patriotic concern, but his speech would be more daring still. He drew attention to missed opportunities, bad decisions and complacency within the company.
Halfway through, he asked how many of the staff present used an iPhone or Google Android phone. After a nervous silence, clearly fearful of admitting to owning a rival’s product, a few timid hands were finally raised.
Elop was astonished at the response – not by how many, but by how few.
‘I’d rather people have the intellectual curiosity to understand what we’re up against,’ he told them baldly.
The gesture was typical of the man. On his first day at the company’s headquarters in Espoo, a drab, modern complex of connected glass buildings in a suburb of Helsinki, he sent an email to every Nokia employee asking what they thought he should do, encouraging people to speak up. He received more than 2,000 replies and, even more unusually, he answered each one personally.
He then sent a memo to everyone, offering an assessment of his new company by likening it to a worker who was caught on a burning oil platform: ‘When he looked down, all he could see were the dark, cold, foreboding Atlantic waters… He could stand on the platform, and inevitably be consumed by the burning flames.
Nokia workers in 1981 making rubber boots. Until the early Nineties, the company sold bicycle tyres, rubber boots - and gas masks to the Finnish army
'Or he could plunge 30 metres into the freezing waters. The man was standing upon a burning platform and he needed to make a choice. He decided to jump. We, too, are standing on a burning platform and we must decide how we’re going to change…’
He continued: ‘There is intense heat coming from our competitors. The first iPhone shipped in 2007 and we still don’t have a product that is close to their experience… If we continue like before, we will get further and further behind, while our competitors advance further ahead.’
His case was as unarguable as it was incendiary. Nokia sold 450 million phones in 2010, 402 million more than Apple. Yet in the past four years Nokia has shed 75 per cent of its market value.
While Apple has changed the game at the high end of the market, and Google’s Android has taken over the mid-market, Nokia’s share in emerging markets is now being ruthlessly plundered by Chinese manufacturers.
Here was a timely reminder that in the world of technology, businesses can be balanced on a knife edge. In 1997, Apple had been widely written off, before it dramatically turned itself around with the launch of the iPod, iPhone and iPad. In 2002, Nokia was Britain’s number two super brand; by 2010 it was 89th.
Elop warned his staff of upcoming layoffs and said, ‘We will get through this as quickly and transparently as we can.’ He was, in essence, asking the staff to help save the world’s biggest mobile phone company.
Last year, Nokia’s global share of phone sales sank below 30 per cent for the first time since 1999. Its descent is destined to become a business textbook study of how a trusted business built on a simple product can, in a matter of a few short years, lose its way.
The burning question is: how did Nokia manage it?
Until the early Nineties, Nokia sold bicycle tyres, rubber boots – and gas masks to the Finnish army. It had been founded in 1871 by Frederik Idestam and Leo Mechelin as a pulp mill; the name came from the town through which the mill’s river ran. Business gradually spread to rubber, electrical cable, telecommunications and consumer electronics.
‘The early days of the mobile phone were an adventure,’ says Juhani Risku, a former senior manager at Nokia.
‘Then, you had to combine mobile networks and gadget technology. At that time, Nokia was a small network business only, selling to the Soviet Union.’
The company's Finnish headquarters today
But Nokia scored a big publicity coup in 1987 when Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev was pictured using a newly launched Nokia Mobira Cityman ‘brick’ phone to talk to his communications minister in Moscow. Rowan Atkinson, too, was later seen using one of these iconic phones in an advert for Eagle Star Investment. Fittingly, the phone was soon adopted by City traders and yuppies.
From 1992, the new CEO Jorma Ollila steered the company into a golden age. Nokia dominated mobile phones throughout the Nineties, and helped create the GSM standard for voice and data. But it was Nokia’s cheap and reliable handsets that really caught the imagination. They shrank from bricks to chocolate bars to tiny flip-out clamshells, all the time falling in price while gaining features and battery life.
The Nokia 1100 is still the biggest-selling mobile of all time – more than 250 million were made. With it, texting became a new form of communication. Beyond Western city offices, the 1100 turned up in the hands of everyone from Bedouin tribesmen to Chinese workers.
Between 1996 and 2001, Nokia’s sales increased almost fivefold, to reach €31 billion; Nokia could sell basic handsets to developing markets while also selling new products to customers in Europe and the U.S. who wanted to keep upgrading. And that was helped by its unique British operating system and its creator, businessman David Potter, CBE.
Potter developed the first mainstream digital alternative to the Eighties yuppie icon, the Filofax: the Psion electronic personal organiser. It used its own software, Symbian, to create an easy-to-use diary and contacts list. A marriage was about to happen.
‘I remember having a joint seminar with Nokia in 1992,’ says Potter. ‘Both Nokia and Psion could see that the mobile phone and the organiser – the PDA – would merge into one device.
'In early 1997 we initiated a programme to merge our software capability on PDAs with a major company in the mobile-phone industry. At that time, Nokia was the world leader in mobiles.’
Together they created a new class of device that was both communicator and diary in one. Email, web browsing and games followed in later devices. Nokia and Symbian should have been a perfect match – and at one stage they were way ahead of the competition in the development of smartphones.
Nokia was leading at the time because of its technology.
‘It built a commanding market share by using Symbian,’ says communications business analyst Pete Cunningham.
‘People were buying its phones because they had the best cameras, the best displays. They were simply the best products.’
Mikhail Gorbachev speaking into a Nokia Mobira Cityman in 1989
But then things began to slip. Juhani Risku points to a corporate arrogance on the part of Nokia during that period, as well as a string of bad decisions.
‘An invasion of businessmen and engineers took over highly sensitive design areas,’ he says.
‘They led Nokia’s visions, strategies and execution without any education, track record or passion. Their arrogance was a compensation for having too much responsibility but no clue as to what to do.’
This ‘invasion’ undermined Nokia’s traditional Finnish culture. One business partner, Mark Watson of Antenna Software, recalls: ‘When I went to my first meeting at Nokia in Espoo five or six years ago, everyone in the room was American. I asked them, “Aren’t there any Finnish people?” They said: “Oh, we exhausted the intellectual capacity of Finland some time ago.’’’
As Nokia grew, it took longer and longer to get anything decided.
‘There were lots of managers,’ says Watson. ‘You would get so far in talks, then it would emerge that some other part of Nokia had already bought a company doing the same thing as us, and was trying to work out what to do with it.
‘They just bought anything and everything. Nokia has a long list of companies it bought and has done nothing with. They even hived off Symbian, recruited senior management for it, then bought it back. Nokia had become so big and so self-congratulatory. It’s lost sight of its roots.’
Meanwhile in California Apple was busy working on the iPhone, which it unveiled in January 2007.
‘At first, we decided it was just one harmless phone,’ says Juhani Risku.
‘Internal strategy analysed touchscreen phones to be marginal, trifling. In 2006 we rejected their development… The funny thing is that Nokia’s touchscreen phone development was restarted in June 2007 by the same person who had killed it off.’
With the iPhone, Apple had performed a triple-whammy. It had taken the iPod – used for music and, increasingly, video – and combined it with a mobile phone. That meant having one rather than two media devices in your pocket.
But there was one more trick: Apple had developed a smartphone with a web browser that was easy to use. Suddenly, people weren’t just using their phone to send texts or talk – they were going online. This was revolutionary.
‘We had the Nokia N97 – Nokia’s first rival to the iPhone – for testing,’ says Watson.
‘We would fire off reports on our problems with the browser to Nokia’s team but they’d just reply, “Thank you.”’
Indeed, Nokia’s every attempt to do more than simply make good quality, basic phones, failed.
Its attempt to produce a gaming phone in 2003 – the N-Gage – was a disaster: with only a few poor-quality games and poorer network connectivity for multi-player or downloads, the phone was killed off by the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS. Nokia’s two-storey stand at the E3 gameshow in Los Angeles was looked at with amusement and bafflement by gamers.
The device barely worked, and games such as Call Of Duty showed the technical limitations of the device to excruciating effect. In 2005, UK sales-tracking firm ChartTrack stopped listing N-Gage games sales, saying bluntly that gamers simply weren’t interested in the device.
The idea for a gaming phone was, of course, only fully realised with the arrival of the iPhone and the iTunes Store. Ovi, Nokia’s answer to the iTunes Store, was another disastrous launch.
‘It was nearly impossible to use,’ says Risku.
Watson adds: ‘They thought it was a success right to the point it failed. In general, in all of these train wrecks, they were followers rather than leaders, and didn’t have enough differentiation to overtake other followers. It’s an issue of insular culture.’
Nokia’s refusal to add touchscreens to its top-end performers was another of the acts of arrogance that probably sank its best handsets.
Like the iPhone, the N95 and N97 had GPS, music players and internet. Email, navigation and the web were controlled by a keyboard that slid out from under the screen. Next to the slick, easy-to-use iPhone, the N95 and N97 were like TVs to which one had lost the remote control. Nokia had missed the crucial next stage in phone evolution – touchscreen control. And without it, fewer and fewer people were interested.
Then came the N8. Launched in September 2010, it is Nokia’s answer to the iPhone 4 – a breathtakingly engineered device with a cool, anodised aluminium exterior that feels like a Mercedes next to the cheaper, glassy finish of the iPhone. It has the best camera seen in a mobile phone: a 12-megapixel monster that was adopted by professional photographers. But when it hit the shelves, it was trounced by the iPhone 4, despite its mere five-megapixel camera.
CEO Stephen Elop is photographed by a shareholder. At a meeting in March he drew attention to missed opportunities, bad decisions and complacency within the company
A survey by Morgan Stanley found that the N8 was being outsold six to one in Europe by Apple’s handsets. It was Nokia’s flagship and meant to mark the point at which the company reclaimed the smartphone market. But with projected sales of a mere nine million this year, it effectively sank without trace.
Initially, the iPhone only sold to a tiny fraction of the wealthiest early adopters in the U.S., Japan and Europe. But then Google began banging on the door with its cheaper Android-powered phones. Nokia had the opportunity to adopt Android but Elop felt Google wouldn’t let Nokia adapt the software to its liking.
Meanwhile, it was assumed there would be places even Google couldn’t reach. This would be the market in which it was presumed Nokia would be safe. In the event, the reality couldn’t have been more different.
The Nokia 3210 was a simple thing. Moulded plastic housing and no-nonsense, high-visibility, sturdy number keys wrapped around a primitive processor and monochrome LCD which could make calls, send texts and run for a week on a single charge.
It had an internal aerial (earlier Nokias had a big plastic knob protruding from the top) and a vibrate function, meaning one could receive calls on the bus or on the street without irritated people turning round looking to see who the show-off with the mobile was.
It came with three games pre-installed, including the iconic Snake, which sapped Britain’s productivity in much the same way Angry Birds does now. Where its predecessors were tailored for company phone users, this was the first of its kind to be aimed at the wider public, and in particular young people. It was a hit. It sold 160 million units. For Nokia, simple was successful.
This could have continued, but Lief Schneider, a London-based brand reputation manager, recalls Nokia’s panicked response to the iPhone.
‘They were like rabbits in the headlights,’ she says.
‘They could easily have responded by positioning Nokia’s key phones as the “non-iPhone”, the drop-it-and-it-won’t-smash phone, the simple, easy-to-use, non-techie choice; perfectly good kit, at a fraction of the price, that lasts much longer. No one was going to beat the iPhone immediately. But they said, “We’re going to catch up” instead of saying, “Forget the technology – this is all you need”.’
It’s worth noting that the world’s largest phone maker is still Nokia. And there are more Nokia handsets out there than anyone else’s. Even in the UK, 63 per cent of consumers still own a non-smartphone.
But elsewhere, the problem was – as Stephen Elop put it – manufacturers in the Shenzhen region of China. Cheap and fast Chinese phone manufacturers had started undercutting Nokia in emerging markets, vying for the crucial non-smart ‘dumbphone’ consumers who wanted traditional, inexpensive, text-and-speech-only handsets.
‘In Shenzhen everything is new,’ says Watson. ‘It’s like watching a SimCity game, where the city is just sprouting and reforming in real time in front of your eyes.’
There is some good news: rural China, Nigeria, Kenya and even Norway, Poland and New Zealand have boosted Nokia's market share recently. But all the time up-and-coming competitors are on Nokia's back
These plants are investing in cutting-edge design and manufacturing processes that previously were used to make Apple, Nokia and others’ products, and are now making cheaper rivals. The gleaming-white, sterile environments and hi-tech assembly lines remain the same, it’s just the name on the badge that’s different.
Elop’s leaked memo to Nokia employees concluded that Chinese manufacturers were now ‘cranking out a device much faster than – as one Nokia employee said only partially in jest – the time that it takes us to polish a PowerPoint presentation. They are fast, they are cheap, and they are challenging us.’
Even in emerging markets – India, Brazil and Saudi Arabia, for example – where people want simple, rather than smartphones, Nokia has lost market share. There is some good news: rural China, Nigeria, Kenya and even Norway, Poland and New Zealand have boosted Nokia’s market share recently. But all the time up-and-coming competitors are on Nokia’s back.
But perhaps Elop’s biggest decision has been to drop Symbian, used by 400 million phones worldwide. The system had become unwieldy and unable to cope, while both Apple and Google had steamed ahead and had helped outside developers to create apps easily.
Instead he has signed up to Windows Phone 7 software (used by four million) made by Microsoft, the very company from which he had just arrived. By doing this he has made sure that the guts of Nokia’s new Windows Mobile phones would, from when the first ones arrive later this year, be owned by Microsoft.
To say many commentators were unpleasantly surprised by the deal would be an understatement. Nokia immediately became the topic of Microsoft takeover rumours; after all, owning a mobile-phone manufacturer would allow the U.S. software giant to line up directly against Apple on smartphones.
‘I’m not sure that’s going to help Nokia in the long term,’ says Watson. ‘If Nokia has got its own design talent, who knows what it’s doing now? It’s not been obvious for some time. If it wants to be bought, it’s going along the right route. If it wants to be a major independent player it’s doing the wrong thing. It needs to innovate in its own right.’
So while Nokia’s traditional dumbphone market is being burnt up by cheaper Chinese competitors, Apple, Android and Windows Mobile are only just beginning to fire up the potentially huge – but currently tiny – smartphone market.
‘Our influence on the first Windows Mobile devices is limited,’ admits Mark Squires, communications director at Nokia UK.
‘But we’re already putting little Nokia bits in. For the next update in 2012 you will see tight integration of Nokia and Microsoft – our hardware and services – for something quite unique.’
A couple of weeks ago Nokia finally unveiled its new N9 smartphone. The device is to run MeeGo – what would have been Nokia’s replacement for Symbian before the Windows Mobile deal was inked in. In a sign of the times, MeeGo, the operating system thousands of Nokia engineers worked on, wasn’t even mentioned in the press conference or press release that heralded the N9’s arrival.
Instead, three days later, Elop showed off the N9’s successor – the first Nokia Windows Mobile, codenamed Sea Ray. At the public unveiling, he very halfheartedly asked reporters to put cameras and mobiles in their pockets, but of course they didn’t – with the happy result that pictures and reports were online in seconds.
Meanwhile, David Potter can only look back ruefully and reflect on what might have been for Symbian.
‘I believe a great opportunity was missed for Symbian with Nokia to have led the smartphone market into the future,’ he says.
Elop insists he has no loyalty to his old paymasters at Microsoft. He has created a secret engineer think- tank dubbed New Disruptions and is already looking to the future, asking them to ‘find that next big thing that blows away Apple, Android, and everything we’re doing with Microsoft right now and makes it irrelevant – all of it.’
He’s told designers to ‘go for it, without having to worry about saving Nokia’s rear end in the next 12 months. I’ve taken off the handcuffs.’
The only question remaining for him is whether he has done it in time. On this, at least, there is one business consensus: it won’t take very long to find out.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2011778/Nokia-The-end-line.html#ixzz1RjfcXBCm
America's cities are beginning to grapple with a fact of life: People are getting old, fast, and they're doing it in communities designed for the sprightly.
To envision how this silver tsunami will challenge a youth-oriented society, just consider that seniors soon will outnumber schoolchildren in hip, fast-paced New York City.
It will take some creative steps to make New York and other cities age-friendly enough to help the coming crush of older adults stay active and independent in their own homes.
"It's about changing the way we think about the way we're growing old in our community," said New York Deputy Mayor Linda Gibbs. "The phrase 'end of life' does not apply anymore."
With initiatives such as using otherwise idle school buses to take seniors grocery shopping, the World Health Organization recognizes New York as a leader in this movement.
But it's not alone.
Atlanta is creating what it calls "lifelong communities." Philadelphia is testing whether living in a truly walkable community really makes older adults healthier. In Portland, Ore., there's a push to fit senior concerns such as accessible housing into the city's new planning and zoning policies.
Such work is getting a late start considering how long demographers have warned that the population is about to get a lot grayer.
"It's shocking how far behind we are, especially when you think about this fact — that if you make something age-friendly, that means it is going to be friendly for people of all ages, not just older adults," said Margaret Neal of Portland State University's Institute on Aging.
While this fledgling movement is being driven by nonprofit and government programs, New York aims to get private businesses to ante up, too.
Last year, East Harlem became the city's first "aging improvement district." Sixty stores, identified with window signs, agreed to put out folding chairs to let older customers rest as they do their errands. The stores also try to keep aisles free of tripping hazards and use larger type so signs are easier to read. A community pool set aside senior-only hours so older swimmers could get in their laps without faster kids and teens in the way.
On one long block, accountant Henry Calderon welcomes older passers-by to rest in his air-conditioned lobby even if they're not customers. They might be, one day.
"It's good for business but it's good for society," too, he said.
The size of the aging boom is staggering. Every day for the next few decades, thousands of baby boomers will turn 65. That's in addition to the oldest-old, the 85- to 90-somethings whose numbers have grown by nearly one-third in the past decade, with no signs of slowing.
By 2050, 1 in 5 Americans will be seniors. Worldwide, almost 2 billion people will be 60 or older, 400 million of them over 80.
That's almost always viewed as a health issue, preparing for the coming wave of Alzheimer's, or as a political liability, meaning how soon will Social Security go bust?
"We think this is something we should be celebrating," says Dr. John Beard, who oversees the World Health Organization's Global Network of Age-Friendly Cities. "They need to live in an environment that allows them to participate."
In East Harlem, a yellow school bus pulls up to a curb and 69-year-old Jenny Rodriguez climbs off. The bus had already dropped a load of kids at school. Now, before the afternoon trip home, it is shuttling older adults to a market where they flock to fresh fruits and vegetables.
Rodriguez usually goes shopping on foot, pulling along a small cart. It can be a hike. Supermarkets aren't too common in this lower-income part of the city, and there's less to choose at tiny, pricier corner bodegas.
"You can only buy so much. Some streets, the cracks are so bad, you're pushing the shopping cart and almost go flying," Rodriguez said, examining sweet potatoes that she pronounced fresher and cheaper than at her usual store. "This is so much easier."
More than 200 times, school buses have taken older adults from senior centers to supermarkets in different neighborhoods. It's just one of a variety of initiatives begun in 2009 by the New York Academy of Medicine and the city's government to address the needs of older residents. Already, they're showing results.
A city report found the number of crashes has dropped at busy intersections in senior-heavy communities where traffic signals now allow pedestrians a few more seconds to cross the street.
Benches have been placed in nearly 2,700 bus shelters to give waiting seniors a place to rest.
The city's aging taxi fleet is scheduled to be replaced by a boxier model designed to be easier for older riders and people with disabilities to open the doors and slide in and out.
On the Upper West Side, seniors snapped up a report card of grocery stores deemed age-friendly because they offer deliveries, have public bathrooms — a rarity in the city — and sell single portions of fresh meat, poultry or fish, important for people who live alone.
Artists volunteer to teach at senior centers in return for space to work on or display their own creations.
And a "Time Bank" is letting hundreds of people of different ages and with different skills essentially barter services. A retired English teacher may do some tutoring, for example, and use the credit she earns to get computer help from another volunteer.
Aging expert Andrew Scharlach of the University of California, Berkeley, sees a common thread in these changes and the work of other cities. Combat the social isolation that too easily sneaks up on older adults and it has a huge impact not just on how many years they will live, but how well they live them.
Cities and suburbs were designed for younger people, full of stairs and cars, he explained. As they become increasingly difficult to navigate, older people gradually retreat.
Revamping a lot of infrastructure may not happen in a tough economy. But some communities are building age-friendly changes into planned upgrades or maintenance, such as New York's street crossings, or into requirements for future development.
The WHO's Beard says some changes aren't that costly, noting that seniors around the world say more benches and access to bathrooms will help them get out and about.
Among other cities' work:
—The Atlanta Regional Commission's Lifelong Communities Initiative is pushing communities that help people age in place. Efforts are under way in six metro areas, including work to adapt zoning codes to allow more of a walkable mix of housing and retail. The Mableton community of suburban Cobb County is planning that kind of a town square, and has opened a farmers market — on a weekday morning when seniors preferred to shop — and intergenerational community garden. To the east, DeKalb County is building a library near a senior center, planned senior housing and a bus stop. One town pilot-tested a shuttle for seniors to supplement bare-bones public transit.
The Atlanta Housing Authority is working with the commission to retrofit high-rise apartments that house a lot of older residents, with the goal to improve access to the surrounding community. At one site under construction, changes include a ramp entrance, safer sidewalk to the bus stop and more time for pedestrians to cross the street.
The overall move isn't without controversy.
Sometimes younger residents misunderstand and say they don't want to live in a retirement community, said commission urban planner Laura Keyes.
She said boomers, who are classified as being born from 1946 to 1964, and millenials, the children of baby boomers who came of age in the new millennium, ultimately want the same things: access to shopping, green space, more freedom from the car. The idea is a mix of ages but where older residents don't need to move if their health fails.
Keyes became interested in age-friendly communities when visiting friends in nursing homes built in commercial districts — and saw that they had nowhere to take a walk.
—Philadelphia is the oldest of the nation's 10 largest cities, with 19 percent of its residents over age 60 — and lots of multi-story rowhouses where seniors are stuck on one floor. "They become prisoners in their homes," said Kate Clark of the nonprofit Philadelphia Corporation for Aging.
In redesigning the city's zoning code, proposals are being debated that would allow seniors to rent out their upper floors, and to require that a certain amount of new housing be what's called "visitable" — with such things as ramp entrances, wide hallways and at least a half-bathroom on the main floor, she said.
With funding from the National Institutes of Health, the aging group's Allen Glicksman is studying if seniors who live in a walkable neighborhood really are healthier as a result. He has found that social capital — think friendly neighbors, low crime and good sidewalks that encourage getting out — is as important to older residents as access to supermarkets, public transportation and good housing.
Also, there are calls for age-friendlier parks, with safer steps and places to walk apart from bikers.
To sustain momentum, Clark created GenPhilly, a network of 20- and 30-somethings interested in shaping the city they'll age in by raising senior issues in varying professions.
—Portland was part of WHO's initial study of what makes a city age-friendly, an initiative that helped bring about more handicapped-accessible cars for the city's light-rail system, Neal said.
Now, aging experts are among the advisers as the city develops a master plan for the next 25 years. One issue, Neal said, is how to develop more accessible housing when the city's anti-sprawl policy means a lot of narrow, multistory houses are being squeezed into empty city lots — near transportation but still not age-friendly with all the stairs.
Integrating senior-friendly changes into everyday city policies is less visible than, say, a new retirement home but it's ultimately the goal, says Scharlach, the aging expert.
New York also hopes for some economic return.
Consider La Marqueta in East Harlem. Fifty years ago, it was a bustling, five-block market, a weekly gathering spot for families. But economic downturn left the city-owned building mostly empty for years. Now, as part of a $1.5 million economic revitalization project, an industrial kitchen in the building will train low-income women to start their own food businesses. It joins the fish and butcher shop, a farmer's market, and a high-end food importer — and busing in the seniors once a month boosts the still thin customer traffic.
But it's more than a shopping day. A quick check from a health department nurse reassured 73-year-old Maria Ilarraza that her blood pressure was OK, and she sat to catch up with friends over coffee. In another corner, a crowd listened as a university nutritionist explained how to safely freeze and thaw meat.
Art teacher Piedad Gerena showed off some of the bold landscapes and modern images her students at a nearby senior center learned to paint, and, to her delight, sometimes sell for up to $200 apiece. "Many of these people have no families," Gerena said. "The art makes them feel happy."
___
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--By the standards of very clever men who believe some very silly things, Harry Kroto is a quite unremarkable scientist. Unlike some other Nobel prize winners, he is not an enthusiastic Nazi, a Stalinist, a eugenicist, or even a believer in ESP. He did play a prominent, and I think disgraceful part in the agitation to have Michael Reiss sacked from a job at the Royal Society for being a priest. But the video of his speech at the Nobel laureates meeting this year in Lindau, Bavaria, is something else. Much of it is great stuff about working for love, not money; and about the importance of art, but around eight minutes in he goes off the rails. First there is a slide saying (his emphases): "Science is the only philosophical construct we have to determine TRUTH with any degree of reliability." Think about this for a moment. Is it a scientific statement? No. Can it therefore be relied on as true? No.
But formal paradoxes have one advantage well known to logicians, which is that you can use them to prove anything, as Kroto proceeds to demonstrate. Or, as he puts it: "Without evidence, anything goes." Remember, he has just defined truth (or TRUTH) as something that can only be established scientifically. So nothing he says about ethics or intellectual integrity after that need be taken in the least bit seriously. It may be true, but there is no scientific way of knowing this and he doesn't believe there is any other way of knowing anything reliably.
Note how this position completely undermines what he then goes on to say – that "the Ethical Purpose of Education must involve teaching our young people how they can decide what they are being told is true" (his caps). Again, this is not a scientific statement, and therefore cannot, on Kroto's terms, be a true one.
The rest of us, of course, are perfectly free to believe that education should involve the promotion of critical thought, or at least to consider the question seriously. We are under no obligation to believe anything half so silly as that science is the only road to truth. We can reasonably argue that there are lots of ways to establish truth that are not scientific. Obviously they rely to some extent on the sifting and weighing of evidence, but that doesn't make them part of science, or else every member of a jury would be a scientist.
In a similar way, we can believe that ethical truths exist, even though these clearly aren't scientific, or the products of science; but Kroto can't. Not that this stops him. Like anyone else who is sane he talks as if ethical truths do matter, and exist.
When he goes on to say: "The teaching of a sceptical, evidence-based assessment of all claims without exception is fundamentally an issue of intellectual integrity," he absolutely believes that what he's saying is true (and so do I for that matter). But he has no scientific grounds whatever for believing it could be true and it is impossible to imagine any.
What makes this even funnier is that he then starts talking about the Galileo affair. He asks his audience how many of them could recapitulate Galileo's arguments for the Earth's going round the sun. Hardly any can. "See!" he said. "You've accepted it. You've accepted it without evidence. And 70-80% of people do that."
I'm prepared to accept on trust his figure of 70-80% even though it is of course very low. If by "evidence" he means "people familiar with Galileo's arguments" it's unlikely to be more than about 1% of the scientifically literate; and if he means "people who have actually read the source material", the proportion is just about infinitesmal. The idea that we should test everything against the evidence crumbles to dust the moment it is itself tested that way.
Still, let's assume that Kroto has himself studied Galileo's arguments for heliocentrism. He should therefore be familiar with the contemporary scientific arguments against them. Because if there is one thing that has been established in the history of science in the last 50 years, it is that in strictly scientific terms, and going by the evidence available to him and to his contemporaries, Galileo was wrong and Cardinal Bellarmine was right. Heliocentrism was a beautiful theory, and Galileo would have been free to teach it as such – but the observation of stellar parallax, or rather the discovery that none could be observed, should have knocked it on the head (for a fuller explanation, see here and here).
Obviously it was wrong to suppress Galileo's views entirely; but if only what is scientifically justified may be taught, then Bellarmine would have been right to do so.
This isn't just a matter of historical curiosity. The illogical positivism of Kroto's talk is symptomatic of a widespread problem. Although Kroto is exceptional in his self-confidence and lack of intellectual self-awareness – few other people would state as baldly as he does that science is the only way to establish the truth – no one in the audience seems to have reacted with a healthy giggle. They may have felt there was something a bit off about the idea, but the full absurdity was veiled by layers of deference and convention. The great attraction of telling everyone else to think, to question, and to take nothing for granted is that it makes a very pleasant substitute for doing these things yourself.
• This article was amended on 6 July 2011. It originally placed Lindau in Austria. This has now been corrected
Posted by Andrew Brown Monday 4 July 2011 15.08 BST guardian.co.uk
After the News of the World's closure, family feuds at the heart of the Murdoch empire do not bode well for News Corp
The chances that Rupert Murdoch would choose to shut a 168-year-old newspaper, a profitable one at that, are nil. The News of the…
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--Libyan leader says he will send hundreds of supporters to 'martyr' in Europe in revenge for NATO campaign
Muammar Gaddafi has threatened to send hundreds of Libyans to launch attacks in Europe in revenge for the Nato-led military campaign against…
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--We all know how great a good night’s rest can leave us feeling, but did you know that proper rest and high-quality sleep can also improve your workouts and help keep you at a healthy body weight? It's true! According to the National Sleep Foundation, sleep is essential for a person’s health and well-being, although, unfortunately, reports show that catching zzz’s has become a luxury rather than a priority for many of us. Sad face.The good news is that studies suggest that regular exercise helps you fall asleep faster, sleep longer and wake up less frequently during the night. In fact, just 20 minutes of exercise a day can help you when it comes to sleep. Here are some other fun facts from the exercise experts at Life Fitness about how getting beauty rest can actually impact your workout.
5 Ways That Exercise Affects Sleep1. Hit the hay before a workout. When strength training, you want to have had at least six to eight hours of sleep the night before to make sure that your muscles are well-rested and performing at their best. Same is true when engaging in intense cardio training.2. Don’t deprive yourself of sleep. Sleep deprivation can slow glucose metabolism, the energy source for the brain, by as much as 30 to 40 percent. Because of this, a lack of sleep can not only affect your exercise performance and level of motivation, but it can also lead to potential accidents and injuries due to slower reaction time and reduced concentration. Not fun!
3. Work out hard. Sleep hard. Intense workouts and lack of sleep do not make good partners because while you’re sleeping, your body works to repair muscle stress that occurred during exercise. The harder you train, the more sleep and rest you need to recover; otherwise, you will might suffer from injury and overtraining.4. Having problems falling asleep? Try an intense workout like a group cycling class, circuit training or a 30-minute interval training program on the treadmill or elliptical earlier in the day. The high intensity of the workout will cause your muscles to fatigue, sending dopamine, the hormone that helps you sleep, throughout your body.5. Obesity and sleep are linked. Research has shown that people who sleep less than seven to nine hours a night are up to 75 percent more likely to be obese. This makes sense because studies have found that sleep deprivation increases levels of the hunger hormone (ghrelin) and decreases levels of the hormone that makes you feel full (leptin), ultimately slowing down your metabolism. For those who live in a constant tired state, the effect of lack of sleep often leads to overeating, lack of motivation to work out and weight gain.See? Be sure to get those zzz’s!
Stories in which the media covers the media, generally speaking, often get filed under: "navel gazing"; "inside baseball"; "who cares"--at least as far as mass readerships are concerned.
But that hasn't stopped newspapers from Times Square to Fleet Street from covering the demise of one of their own with the journalistic vigor you'd expect to see in the wake of a world catastrophe.
Or, as the case may be, a News of the World catastrophe. The British tabloid's parent company, News Corp.--via its British publishing arm, News International--made the decision Thursday to pull the plug on the 168-year-old Sunday paper as a result of the phone-hacking saga that's been engulfing it off and on for the past five years. It turns out that the paper sniffed around the voice mailboxes not only of U.K. celebrities, politicians and royals, but also those of a 13-year-old murder victim and various people who died in Britain's notorious 7/7 terror attack. And it scarcely helped matters that this week also saw the revelation that the paper had been bribing London police.
Here in the United States, the shuttering of News of the World, which will go to press for the last time on Sunday, has transcended even the most salacious and highly-trafficked media scandals--say, the bombshell New York Times expose of Tribune Company's sex-crazed corporate governance, or the debate that cropped up over Rolling Stone's career-killing profile of four-star Army Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The blaring headlines across the pond, meanwhile, seem a fitting send-off for a paper that used many of the same terms to characterize its chosen quarry of "SHOCKERS," "OUTRAGE" and "SHAME."
Indeed: "PAPER THAT DIED OF SHAME" is the phrase that occupies most of the cover of Friday's Daily Mail. The Daily Telegraph took a more poetic tack with, "Goodbye, cruel World," while The Guardian, which reignited the phone-hacking story this week and has covered it perhaps more closely than any other news organization, went the direct route: "The scandal that closed News of the World." All three front pages prominently feature Rebekah Brooks, the News International chief executive and former News of the World editor-in-chief who has managed to hold on to her job even as 200 News of the World journalists prepare to lose theirs--making her, by all accounts, the newsroom's most-hated woman.
News International's own papers were no less tempered in their treatments. The prestigious Times of London seems none too saddened that its lurid cousin has been "Hacked to death," as it noted in large type below a vintage black-and-white photo of News Corp honcho Rupert Murdoch reading the paper as a much younger man. And News of the World's six-day sister tab, The Sun, which media watchers speculate will launch a Sunday edition to fill the void, delivered the apocalyptic headline, "WORLD'S END."
Murdoch's prized stateside paper, the Wall Street Journal, put the story above the fold even though its patriarch dodged one of its own reporters (plus a correspondent from the News Corp-owned Fox Business Network) Thursday at the annual Sun Valley mogul bonanza. As for Murdoch's beloved New York Post, it may be America's closest approximation to News of the World (supermarket tabloids don't count), but the editors (rightfully) decided that its core five-borough readership would probably be more interested in Casey Anthony's apparent makeover than a foreign paper they may or may not have heard of. (News of the World did get some play in the Post's print edition--albeit buried inside the business section in the form of a nine-graph, 282-word brief.)
Some of the most comprehensive coverage, however, can be found in the pages of the New York Times. News of the World got the most prominent A1 placement of all the headlines in today's edition, which includes six related pieces written and reported by 10 journalists among them. With implications spanning crime, politics, business and perhaps even human rights, this is no doubt a story that has resonated from the trending topics of Twitter to the tops of cable news broadcasts. But one can't help but wonder if the surfeit of coverage in the paper of record might have been the Gray Lady's own way of sticking it to its arch-rival Rupert.
Representatives for the Times declined to comment.
Minister's suggestion of a mandatory rest day for all domestic workers reignites a long-running debate over workers' rights
If you're a domestic maid in Singapore, there's no such thing as the weekend. Since employers are not legally bound to grant…
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