December 14, 2010

To Conquer Wind Power, China Writes the Rules

By KEITH BRADSHER

Doug Kanter for The New York Times

Employees at work on wind turbine hubs at the Gamesa factory in Tianjin, China, in October.

TIANJIN, China — Judging by the din at its factory here one recent day, the Spanish company Gamesa might seem to be a thriving player in the Chinese wind energy industry it helped create.
But Gamesa has learned the hard way, as other foreign manufacturers have, that competing for China’s lucrative business means playing by strict house rules that are often stacked in Beijing’s favor.
Nearly all the components that Gamesa assembles into million-dollar turbines here, for example, are made by local suppliers — companies Gamesa trained to meet onerous local content requirements. And these same suppliers undermine Gamesa by selling parts to its Chinese competitors — wind turbine makers that barely existed in 2005, when Gamesa controlled more than a third of the Chinese market.
But in the five years since, the upstarts have grabbed more than 85 percent of the wind turbine market, aided by low-interest loans and cheap land from the government, as well as preferential contracts from the state-owned power companies that are the main buyers of the equipment. Gamesa’s market share now is only 3 percent.
With their government-bestowed blessings, Chinese companies have flourished and now control almost half of the $45 billion global market for wind turbines. The biggest of those players are now taking aim at foreign markets, particularly the United States, where General Electric has long been the leader.
The story of Gamesa in China follows an industrial arc traced in other businesses, like desktop computers and solar panels. Chinese companies acquire the latest Western technology by various means and then take advantage of government policies to become the world’s dominant, low-cost suppliers. It is a pattern that many economists say could be repeated in other fields, like high-speed trains and nuclear reactors, unless China changes the way it plays the technology development game — or is forced to by its global trading partners.
Companies like Gamesa have been so eager to enter the Chinese market that they not only bow to Beijing’s dictates but have declined to complain to their own governments, even when they see China violating international trade agreements.
Even now, Gamesa is not crying foul — for reasons that are also part of the China story. Although the company’s market share in China has atrophied, the country’s wind turbine market has grown so big, so fast that Gamesa now sells more than twice as many turbines in China as it did when it was the market leader five years ago.
So as Gamesa executives see it, they made the right bet by coming to China. And they insist that they have no regrets about having trained more than 500 Chinese machinery companies as a cost of playing by Beijing’s rules — even if those rules have sometimes flouted international trade law. It is simply the table stakes of playing in the biggest game going.
“If we would not have done it, someone else would have done it,” said Jorge Calvet, Gamesa’s chairman and chief executive.
Entry Into China
Gamesa, an old-line machinery company that entered the wind turbine business in 1994, is a modern Spanish success story.
Its factories in Pamplona and elsewhere in Spain have produced wind turbines installed around the world. With sales of $4.4 billion last year, Gamesa is the world’s third-largest turbine maker, after Vestas of Denmark, the longtime global leader, and G.E.
With its relatively low Spanish labor costs, Gamesa became an early favorite a decade ago when China began buying significant numbers of imported wind turbines, as Beijing started moving toward clean energy. Gamesa also moved early and aggressively to beef up sales and maintenance organizations within China, amassing 35 percent of the market by 2005.
But Chinese officials had begun to slip new provisions into the bidding requirements for some state-run wind farms, requiring more and more of the content of turbines to be equipment produced within China — not imported.
Those piecemeal requirements soon led to a blanket requirement. On July 4, 2005, China’s top economic policy agency, the National Development and Reform Commission, declared that wind farms had to buy equipment in which at least 70 percent of the value was domestically manufactured.
“Wind farms not meeting the requirement of equipment localization rate shall not be allowed to be built,” stated the directive, known as Notice 1204.
Trade lawyers say that setting any local content requirement — let alone one stipulating such a high domestic share — was a violation of the rules of the World Trade Organization, the international body that China had joined just four years earlier. Joanna I. Lewis, a Georgetown University professor who is a longtime adviser to Chinese policy makers on wind energy, said she and others had repeatedly warned Beijing that the local-content policy risked provoking a W.T.O. challenge by other countries.
But the Chinese government bet correctly that Gamesa, as well as G.E. and other multinationals, would not dare risk losing a piece of China’s booming wind farm business by complaining to trade officials in their home countries.
Rather than fight, Gamesa and the other leading multinational wind turbine makers all opted to open factories in China and train local suppliers to meet the 70 percent threshold.
Mr. Calvet said Gamesa would have opened factories in China at some stage, regardless of the content policy.
“If you plan to go into a country,” Mr. Calvet said, “you really need to commit to a country.”
Ditlev Engel, the chief executive of Vestas, said in an interview, “We strongly believed that for us to be competitive in China, it was very important for us to develop an Asia supplier base.”
A top executive at a rival of Gamesa and Vestas, who insisted on anonymity for fear of business retaliation by Beijing, said that multinationals had another reason for going along with China’s dictates: “Everybody was too scared.”
There is a difference between setting up an assembly plant in a host company — as many European wind turbine companies, including Gamesa, have done in the United States, for example — and ceding the production of crucial parts to companies in the host country.
In the United States, where there are no local-content requirements, the wind turbine industry uses an average of 50 percent American-made parts. For its American operations, Gamesa relies somewhat more than that on American suppliers, but it still imports some parts from Spain, including crucial gearboxes.
Within weeks after Beijing’s issuance of Notice 1204, Gamesa sent dozens of Spanish engineers to Tianjin. The engineers did not just oversee the construction of the assembly plant, but fanned out to local Chinese companies and began teaching them how to make a multitude of steel forgings and castings, and a range of complex electronic controls.
One Chinese supplier here became so adept at making a 10-ton steel frame that keeps a wind turbine’s gearbox and generator aligned even under gale-force conditions, and making it so cheaply, that the Spanish company now ships the Chinese frame halfway around the world for turbines that Gamesa assembles at its American plant in Fairless Hills, Pa. Mr. Calvet said the American manufacturing sector had been so weakened in recent decades that for some components there were no American machinery companies readily available.
It was not until the summer of 2009, when senior Obama administration officials started looking at barriers to American clean energy exports, that the United States pressed China hard about Notice 1204. The Chinese government revoked it two months later.
But by then, the policy was no longer needed. Some Gamesa wind turbines exceeded 95 percent local content.
“The objectives of the local content requirement were achieved, and probably more achieved than anyone expected,” said Steve Sawyer, the secretary general of the Global Wind Energy Council, a trade group based in Brussels that represents wind energy companies from around the world, including China.
A Battle Takes Shape
China agreed to abide by the W.T.O.’s trade rules when it joined the organization in 2001. And Chinese officials, when willing to comment on such matters at all, typically defend their actions as being within the bounds of fair play.
Li Junfeng, an official at the National Development and Reform Commission who oversees renewable energy policy, defended the local content policy.
“It was localization support,” Mr. Li said in an interview. China is a developing country, he said, and developing countries need to do what they can to foster industrial development.
But the Obama administration takes a different view. It included the local content rule in the investigation it announced on Oct. 15, an inquiry into whether China’s clean energy policies had violated W.T.O. rules. The investigation was spurred by the United Steelworkers union, which has no qualms about taking on Beijing because it has no sales contracts at risk in China.
Zhang Guobao, the director of China’s National Energy Administration, said at an Oct. 17 press conference that the United States was wrong to cite the local content rule in its investigation — because China had already abolished it. Mr. Zhang did have a point: the W.T.O.’s main redress for a local content protection is to push the offending country to revoke it.
But the United States investigation of China goes beyond local content, and the W.T.O. has other weapons at its disposal.
The trade organization, for example, has authority to order the repayment of subsidies a government gives to its export industries to the detriment of foreign competitors. The steelworkers’ petition cites various forms of subsidies and support that China has given to its industries in potential violation of international trade rules. That includes low-interest loans from state-owned banks and grants of cheap or free land, as well as other perks not available to foreign companies operating in China.
As for the state-owned wind farms that are the main buyers of wind energy equipment, China has many policies to preserve their dominance, while limiting market opportunities for foreign companies that might try to develop wind farms.
Those policies — all potential W.T.O. violations, according to some experts — are an open secret.
Earlier this autumn the Chinese wind turbine maker Ming Yang Wind Power Group made an initial public offering of its shares on the New York Stock Exchange, as prelude to entering the American wind energy market. The financial disclosures in the company’s prospectus acknowledged that “we obtained land and other policy incentives from local governments,” as well as deals requiring that the municipal governments’ wind farms buy turbines only from Ming Yang.
China Looks Abroad
Gamesa, among other multinational turbine makers, so far has benefited from the growing market in China, despite policies that have increasingly relegated those companies to fighting over ever-thinner slices of the pie.
But that dynamic could be changing. The Chinese government is now slowing the approval of new wind farms at home. The pause, whose duration is unclear, is meant to give the national electricity system time to absorb thousands of new turbines that have already been erected and not yet connected to the grid.
Gamesa had an ample order book lined up before the government applied the brakes. But the government policy means that the Chinese turbine makers, having become giants on the backs of companies like Gamesa, must now look beyond their captive national market for further growth.
Sinovel, China’s biggest wind turbine maker, has said it wants to become the world’s largest by 2015. The company’s chairman and president, Han Junliang, said in October at the annual China Wind Power industry conference in Beijing that his goal was to sell as many turbines overseas as within China.
Sinovel is among the Chinese companies now opening sales offices across the United States in preparation for a big export push next year. They are backed by more than $13 billion in low-interest loans issued this past summer by Chinese government-owned banks; billions more are being raised in initial public offerings led mainly by Morgan Stanley this autumn in New York and Hong Kong.
Multinationals are alarmed. Vestas, for example, is closing four factories in Denmark and one in Sweden, and laying off one-eighth of its 24,000-person labor force this autumn, in an effort to push its costs down closer to Asian levels, its chief, Mr. Engel, said.
The Chinese push, clouded by the Obama administration’s investigation of the steelworkers’ complaint, could complicate the climate change debate in the West. Wind farm developers in the West are worried that Western governments may be less enthusiastic about encouraging renewable energy requirements if these programs are perceived as creating jobs in China instead of at home.
The provincial government of Ontario in Canada now wants to take a page from China’s playbook by trying to require 25 percent local content for wind energy projects and 50 percent for solar power projects in the province. The Japanese government responded by filing a W.T.O. complaint against Canada in September, asserting that Ontario was violating the W.T.O. prohibition on local content requirements. By contrast, Japan has never filed a W.T.O. complaint on any issue against China, for fear of harming diplomatic relations with its large neighbor.
Meanwhile, the Chinese government is intent on turning its wind energy industry into the global leader, helping manufacturers coordinate export strategies and providing various sorts of technical assistance.
Mr. Li, the overseer of the Chinese renewable energy industry, publicly exhorted the leaders of the nation’s biggest wind turbine makers at the China Wind Power conference, a three-day event that drew hundreds of executives from around the world.
“You cannot be called a winner if you are the leader for three or five years,” Mr. Li told the Chinese executives. “You can only stand on the top line if you are the leader for 100 or 200 years.”
The Chinese presidents sat quietly and respectfully, chins down. Senior executives from the foreign manufacturers — including Vestas, G.E. and Gamesa — sat alongside them, staring straight ahead in stony silence.

The Opinion Pages

---

December 13, 2010, 8:16 pm

The Human Incubator

By TINA ROSENBERG

Tags:

Hospitals, Medicine and Health, Nursing and Nurses, Premature Babies, Third World and Developing Countries

A mother in the Philippines used the warmth of her body to nurture her prematurely born daughter.

 

Sometimes, the best way to progress isn’t to advance — to step up with more money, more technology, more modernity. It’s to retreat.

Towards the end of the 1970s, the Mother and Child Institute in Bogota, Colombia, was in deep trouble. The institute was the city’s obstetrical reference hospital, where most of the city’s poor women went to give birth. Nurses and doctors were in short supply. In the newly created neonatal intensive care unit, there were so few incubators that premature babies had to share them — sometimes three to an incubator. The crowded conditions spread infections, which are particularly dangerous for preemies. The death rate was high.
Dr. Edgar Rey, the chief of the pediatrics department, could have attempted to do what many other hospital officials would have done: wage a political fight for more money, more incubators and more staff.

He would likely have lost. What was happening at the Mother and Child Institute was not unusual. Conditions were much better, in fact, than at most public hospitals in the third world. Hospitals that mainly serve the poor have very little political clout, which means that conditions in their wards sometimes seem to have been staged by Hieronymous Bosch. They have too much disease, too few nurses and sometimes no doctors at all. They can be so crowded that patients sleep on the floor and so broke that people must bring their own surgical gloves and thread. I recently visited a hospital in Ethiopia that didn’t even have water — the nurses washed their hands after they got home at night.

Proof that more money and more technology isn’t always the answer.

Rey thought about the basics. What is the purpose of an incubator? It is to keep a baby warm, oxygenated and nourished — to simulate as closely as possible the conditions of the womb. There is another mechanism for accomplishing these goals, Rey reasoned, the same one that cared for the baby during its months of gestation. Rey also felt, something that probably all mothers feel intuitively: that one reason babies in incubators did so poorly was that they were separated from their mothers. Was there a way to avoid the incubator by employing the baby’s mother instead?
What he came up with is an idea now known as kangaroo care. Aspects of kangaroo care are now in use even in wealthy countries — most hospitals in the United States, for example, have adopted some kangaroo care practices. But its real impact has been felt in poor countries, where it has saved countless preemies’ lives and helped others to survive with fewer problems.

A mother and child in Colombia, where the “kangaroo care” method was first used in the late 1970s.

 In Rey’s system, a mother of a preemie puts the baby on her exposed chest, dressed only in a diaper and sometimes a cap, in an upright or semi-upright position. The baby is strapped in by a scarf or other cloth sling supporting its bottom, and all but its head is covered by mom’s shirt. The mother keeps the baby like that, skin-to-skin, as much as possible, even sleeping in a reclining chair. Fathers and other relatives or friends can wear the baby as well to give the mother a break. Even very premature infants can go home with their families (with regular follow-up visits) once they are stable and their mothers are given training.

The babies stay warm, their own temperature regulated by the sympathetic biological responses that occur when mother and infant are in close physical contact. The mother’s breasts, in fact, heat up or cool down depending on what the baby needs. The upright position helps prevent reflux and apnea. Feeling the mother’s breathing and heartbeat helps the babies to stabilize their own heart and respiratory rates. They sleep more. They can breastfeed at will, and the constant contact encourages the mother to produce more milk. Babies breastfeed earlier and gain more weight.
The physical closeness encourages emotional closeness, which leads to lower rates of abandonment of premature infants. This was a serious problem among the patients of Rey’s hospital; without being able to hold and bond with their babies, some mothers had little attachment to counter their feelings of being overwhelmed with the burdens of having a preemie. But kangaroo care also had enormous benefits for parents. Every parent, I think, can understand the importance of holding a baby instead of gazing at him in an incubator. With kangaroo care, parents and baby go through less stress. Nurses who practice kangaroo care also report that mothers also feel more confident and effective because they are the heroes in their babies’ care, instead of passive bystanders watching a mysterious process from a distance.
The hospitals were the third beneficiaries. Kangaroo care freed up incubators. Getting preemies home as soon as they were stable also lessened overcrowding and allowed nurses and doctors to concentrate on the patients who needed them most.
Kangaroo care has been widely studied. A trial in a Bogota hospital of 746 low birth weight babies randomly assigned to either kangaroo or conventional incubator care found that the kangaroo babies had shorter hospital stays, better growth of head circumference and fewer severe infections. They had slightly better rates of survival, but the difference was not statistically significant. Other studies have found fewer differences between kangaroo and conventional methods. A conservative summary of the evidence to date is that kangaroo care is at least as good as conventional treatment — and perhaps better.

In much of the world, however, whether a mother’s chest is better or worse than an incubator is not the point. Hospitals have no incubators, or have only a few. And millions of mothers never see a hospital — they give birth at home. In very poor countries, where pregnant women are unlikely to get the food and care they need, low birth weight babies are very common — nearly one in five babies in Malawi, for example, is too small. Nearly a million low birth weight babies die each year in poor countries. But thanks to kangaroo care, many of them can be saved. The Manama Mission Hospital in southwest Zimbabwe, for example, had available only antibiotics and piped oxygen in its neonatal unit. Survival rates for babies born under 1500 grams (3.3 lbs.) improved from 10 percent to 50 percent when kangaroo care was started in the 1980s. In 2003, the World Health Organization put kangaroo care on its list of endorsed practices.

Dr. Rey took a challenge that most people would assume requires more money, personnel and technology and solved it in a way that requires less of all three. I am not a romantic who wants to abandon modern medical care in favor of traditional solutions. People with AIDS in South Africa need antiretroviral therapy, not traditional healers’ home brews. If you are bitten by a cobra in India, you should not go to the temple. You should go to the hospital for antivenin. Modern medical care is essential and technology very often saves lives.
Kangaroo care, however, is modern medical care, by which I mean that its effectiveness is proven in randomized controlled trials — the strongest kind of evidence. And because it is powered by the human body alone, it is theoretically available to hundreds of millions of mothers who would otherwise have no hope of saving their babies.
But theoretical availability is only helpful for theoretical babies. Another of kangaroo care’s important innovations is that its inventors realized that ideas don’t travel by themselves. They established a way to get the practice from Bogota into hospitals and clinics all over the world — something that takes a lot more creativity and work than it sounds. On Saturday I’ll respond to comments and talk about how kangaroo care has been able to reach the places that need it most.
Join Fixes on Facebook »

---

Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and now a contributing writer for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Her new book, “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World,” is forthcoming from W.W. Norton.

Safari: Where the Wild Things Are

Safari: Where the Wild Things Are

By Kavitha Rao Thursday, Dec. 09, 2010

 

It's a jungle out there: Get up close and personal with a fantastic range of Indian fauna at Kabini

Ashish Parmar

I am six meters away from an enormous tusker that looks me in the eye before returning to its meal of bamboo. Rampant poaching means that elephants are rare through most of India. But at the Kabini River Lodge — about a five-hour drive from the southwestern city of Bangalore — you can see whole herds of wild elephants. You might also spot bison, sambar deer, boars, dhole (wild dogs), sloth bears, exotic birdlife and the odd leopard. The highlight of my visit: seeing a deer escape a pack of dhole by leaping into the river.

Set on the banks of the serene Kabini, and bordering Nagarhole National Park, this was once the hunting lodge of a maharaja. It was taken over by the Indian government and reopened in 1984 under Indian-born, British conservationist Colonel John Wakefield, who presided over it until his death last April at the age of 95. (See 25 authentic Asian experiences.)

The lodge retains something of the no-nonsense feel of a colonial jungle post. The cottages are clean and spacious, and the new Maharaja bungalows offer views of the river and a hammock for lounging. But there are no telephones, TVs or swimming pools. Food is a basic but tasty Indian buffet; room service is not offered. You're not there to be waited on, but to see wildlife.
Jeep and boat safaris are available, or try a traditional coracle ride, from which you might spot a crocodile. The best time to visit is in April or May, when elephants emerge from the jungle to drink, or after the monsoons in November and December, when animals are scarce but Kabini is at its greenest. Like many sanctuaries in India, Nagarhole is threatened by development, so go while the going's good.

For foreigners, rooms start at $160 per person per night, including meals, safaris and taxes. Indian nationals are entitled to a cheaper tariff. See www.junglelodges.com

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/travel/article/0,31542,2036100,00.html#ixzz187Qt6Pvt

The Lab Rat: What If You Could Only See the World in 2-D?

By John Cloud Tuesday, December 14, 2010 | 19 comments

I don't see the world the way you do. I mean this literally. Like approximately 15 million other Americans, I arrived in November 1970 with strabismus — eyes that are visibly crossed (in my case) or, at the very least, not properly aligned. My parents got me into surgery around the age of 1 to fix, cosmetically, my severe strabismus so that I wouldn't look cross-eyed the rest of my life. But my eyes have never aligned properly.

Consequently, I lack binocular vision — what optometrists call stereopsis — which means I have very poor depth perception. Stereopsis is something you probably take for granted: the world looks 3-D to you, and when you put on those plastic glasses to see, say, Avatar, the arrows and hammerhead titanotheres pop out from the screen. If you have normal vision, even a simple glass on a table has a spherical quality to it. For me, the glass is 2-D, as though I were looking at a photograph. I enjoyed Avatar, but the mountain banshees were just flat creatures. (More on Time.com: It Had to Happen: Breasts in 3D)
When I was a child, it wasn't immediately obvious that my vision differed from that of others. But one day when I was about 10, my dad took me out to toss a football. On his first throw, the ball hit me squarely on the bridge of my nose and knocked me to the ground. My dad was horrified, and we realized something was wrong with my eyes.
Multiple sessions with optometrists ensued. One of the doctors suggested an eye patch on my left eye, the stronger one, so that the right eye could strengthen. Both eyes must be of roughly equal sturdiness to develop binocular vision, and my right eye was very weak. My mother vetoed the patch idea because I would suffer ridicule at school if I showed up looking like a pirate every day. I was already an awkward boy — incipiently gay, a poor athlete (thanks partly to the strabismus), and bookish — and she didn't want me teased further.
But the brain possesses remarkable plasticity, and eventually I learned to judge depth by monocular cues: trees in the distance look smaller than those just in front of me; shading changes as an object moves through light. I learned to notice that a ball thrown toward me grows larger as it approaches my waiting hands. But I was still terrible at sports; when I applied for a 1993 Rhodes Scholarship, I listed “hiking” in the section that required athletic accomplishments. Somehow, this embroidery was sufficient for me to win the scholarship. (More on Time.com: Why Surgeons Dread Redheads)
Years later, in 2006, The New Yorker published an article by Dr. Oliver Sacks, the acclaimed writer and neurologist. He wrote about Susan Barry, a woman who had been born with strabismus but, in her 50s, trained herself — after many hours over many weeks — to develop stereopsis. She did so by actively forcing her eyes to align. In his new book The Mind's Eye, Sacks expounds on Barry's experience. Barry spoke to Sacks of acquiring binocular vision in nearly religious terms. “The world really does look different,” she told him. Flowers looked “intensely real ... I could see the space between each [snow] flake, and all the flakes together produced a three-dimensional dance.”
I decided I had to try the same training that Barry underwent. I discovered that there are so many stereoscopic aficionados that there is even a New York Stereoscopic Society. The group, which has approximately 75 members, meets regularly to test the limits of their binocular ability by looking at complicated artwork and videos that can be seen only with advanced stereopsis. The interest in stereopsis dates back at least to the 19th century, when Oliver Wendell Holmes invented the Holmes Stereo Viewer (a kind of precursor to the View-Master) and wrote articles about stereopsis for The Atlantic. Nearly a century later, the first 3-D films began to appear.
One's eyes must align perfectly to see such art properly. If you can train your eyes to line up with precision, images jump with thrilling intensity from otherwise flat surfaces. Even if you have normal vision, you might have to practice alignment in order to see some of the more complicated 3-D artwork. These complex images aren't like watching Avatar with little glasses. Rather, even “ordinary things can look extraordinary,” Barry wrote to Sacks. After half a century, her world had changed. (More on Time.com: Digital Diagnosis 2010: The Most Popular Health Stories of the Year)
Intrigued, I made an appointment with Gerald Marks, an enthusiastic member of the New York Stereoscopic Society who owns a multitude of 3-D artwork and videos, many of his own creation. Marks, who used to teach printmaking at The Cooper Union in New York City, will turn 70 on Jan. 29. He is best known as the artist who created the 3-D videos that the Rolling Stones used during their 1989-90 tour. He did a “Painted Black” video that wowed fans around the world.
Marks has salt-and-pepper hair that grows in farcical tendrils. On the day I arrived in his studio, which is also his home, he wore cargo pants and a black fleece jumper and displayed an irrepressible passion for all his gadgets. He owns four computers and an expensive video projector mounted on the ceiling of one room. A sort of day bed with a pillow sits on the floor in front of the projector for maximum 3-D enjoyment. File boxes are stacked everywhere, and he maintains large plants in addition to all his tech equipment. I couldn't help but seeing him as a mad eye scientist even though he holds no optometry degree.
Marks put me through a set of experiments to see whether I could develop stereopsis. But I couldn't see even the simplest 3-D artwork with binocular vision even though the art had depth-perception cues such as some figures being smaller than others. I strained my eye muscles as hard as I could, but everything remained flat.
Finally, Marks gave me the toughest test: he showed me a random-dot stereogram, a stereo image he created that has no depth-perception cues whatsoever. To me, it looked like a Jackson Pollock painting: just squiggles on a flat plane. Marks told me that those who have trained themselves to have advanced binocular vision can see a box rise “above” that flat plane, and that when he moves his hand into the image, it appears as though his hand is moving into the box. (More on Time.com: Be Honest. Does this Study Make My Butt Look Big?)
Discouraged, I visited my optometrist of 13 years, Roy Cohen of Town Optical in midtown Manhattan. A few years ago, Cohen had used a new photographic technology to produce incredibly detailed images of the insides of my eyes.
It turns out I have a rare condition with a lovely name: Morning Glory Syndrome. Only about 1 in 2 million people are born with this congenital defect. There is no cure. The syndrome refers to the lack of nerve bundling in one or both eyes. (Thankfully, I got it only in my right eye.) When you are a fetus, the nerves in your eyes typically clench into a bundle. This allows the nerve endings to connect to the brain in an orderly fashion. Instead, my right eye developed with coloboma, a malformation that causes the nerves to splay into a wild configuration that means they can't reach the brain. The image looks like a bit like a morning glory flower.
In plain language, my Morning Glory Syndrome means I am mostly blind in my right eye. I was born not only with strabismus but with the syndrome. I was depressed to discover that I will never be able to enjoy a 3-D movie the way most people can or experience the transcendental vision that Sue Barry described with such avidity to Oliver Sacks. As Sacks points out, I will always have trouble threading needles — a huge chore for me — because I can see only the hole in the needle, not the roundness of the edges that makes it easier to position the thread.
But Sacks does offer a silver lining: although I am a writer, I might make a good photographer, filmmaker or painter. Such artists depend on flatness to make their images. In a footnote, Sacks points out that two Harvard neurobiologists have posited that, because of the deftness with which Rembrandt understood the flat plane, he was likely stereo-blind like me. The documentarian Errol Morris, who has an undeniable skill with images, also has strabismus so serious that he has only monocular vision. Morris told Sacks that the fascination with stereopsis was “bizarre.”
I am resigned to the fact that the world will always look flat to me, but that doesn't mean I don't see beauty. When it snows, I don't feel that I am among the snowflakes, but the way they fall on my shoulders is still moving. I may not see the world the way you do, but I appreciate its splendor just as much.
Follow me on Twitter @ JohnAshleyCloud.

Read more: http://healthland.time.com/2010/12/14/the-lab-rat-how-3-d-vision-works/#ixzz187QL3m7Z

What If Yemen Is the First Country to Run Out of Water?

Posted by Krista Mahr Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 5:40 am

1 Comment • Related Topics: Water , al Qaeda, water management, Yemen

Experts cited by CNN say Yemen could be the first nation to completely run out of water in a few years, a prospect that does not bode well for its young population of 24 million that is expected to double in 20 years, or anyone worried about the rising influence (and ability to get bombs on planes) of an al Qaeda branch in one of the Middle East's poorest nations.

In Sana'a, which could be the world's first capital city to go dry, the population is growing at a rate of 7% per year as people flee from the parched outer reaches of the country. Part of the problem is qat, an addictive plant like chewed by about 75% of men in Yemen that takes a whole lot of water to grow. In places where vineyards used to be, farmers now are growing the more lucrative qat, which uses five times the amount of water as grapes but can be harvested and sold relatively quickly after it's planted.
Farmers' ambition to better their lot is more than understandable in a nation where five million people — over a fifth of the population — go hungry each day. And though Yemen's qat farmers are estimated to now be using some 40% of the nation's domestic water supply, they are hardly  the only actors in this looming crisis. Yemen's water table is falling about 6.6 feet per year, yet the central government has been ineffective at managing the piecemeal drilling of water wells (the government itself estimates an astonishing 99% of water extraction in Yemen is unlicensed) or regulating water management in more farflung parts of the country. Instead, as Sana'a gets more and more water migrants, authorities have discussed relocating the capital to the coast where they might be better able to take advantage of desalination as other Middle Eastern countries have.
The water shortage is also a global problem, because, like Somalia across the Gulf of Aden, where desertification has been linked with that county's ongoing conflict, fights and desperation over water in Yemen would be exactly the kind of destabilizing factor that insurgents will need  to continue to strengthen their base in remote areas far from the halls of power. As the water crisis has gotten worse, observers have noted that the government has concentrated its efforts to manage water resources in urban centers where it has (and wants to keep) political support, and many of the outlying areas not receiving help have been overlooked before.
As Christopher Boucek of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in testimony to Congress in February: "The failure to establish local water corporations in several governorates that historically have not received much support or social services from the central government has raised fear that a resurgent al Qaeda may seek refuge there.”
Boucek goes on to list what could possibly be done, including stopping government subsidies and public purchases of qat, and constructing a better legal system to deal with the nation's increasingly scarce resource. “If such measures are not taken in the near term,” he writes, “more dramatic steps will be required in the future, such as stopping rural populations from moving to overcrowded cities, and, more drastically, relocating population centers from the center of the country to the coasts.” In other words, the government will be forced to create a lot more unhappy citizens. And that would make insurgents that find recruits in disgruntled communities very happy indeed.

Read more: http://ecocentric.blogs.time.com/2010/12/14/what-if-yemen-is-first-country-to-run-out-of-water/#ixzz187PvypUS

• News : Science : Psychology

The wealth of many Chinese has increased sharply but surveys suggest their happiness has not followed suit. Photograph: Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty Images

Getting richer does not make a country happier in the long run, according to the largest-ever review of the links between a nation's wealth and the wellbeing of its citizens.
The researchers looked at life satisfaction data from 37 countries collected over various time periods, from 12 to 34 years, up to 2005. The sample included nations that are developed and developing, rich and poor, ex-Communist and capitalist.
It was specifically designed to test the paradox that although people in richer countries tend to be happier on average, as a country gets richer its inhabitants don't necessarily become happier.

The lead author of the paper, economist Richard Easterlin of the University of South California, has been studying the concept of national happiness since the 1970s, when he formulated his "Easterlin Paradox".

"Simply stated, the happiness-income paradox is this: at a point in time both among and within countries, happiness and income are positively correlated," he said. "But, over time, happiness does not increase when a country's income increases."

Until now, the long-term statistics looking at links between wellbeing and GDP have been limited to developed countries. Easterlin's study brings in developing countries and his conclusions rebut claims by other researchers over the past decade that national happiness can indeed increase (pdf) in line with wealth.

Easterlin says that any ups and downs measured by these recent studies are simply the short-term effects of, for example, economic collapse and recovery in individual countries. He says they do not seem to hold up over the long term – typically more than 10 years.
"With incomes rising so rapidly in [certain] countries, it seems extraordinary that no surveys register the marked improvement in subjective wellbeing that mainstream economists and policy makers worldwide expect to find," he said.
In the paper, Easterlin cites surveys from Chile, China and South Korea. In these countries, per capita income has doubled in less than 20 years but overall happiness does not seem to have followed the same path. In China and Chile, there appeared to be small drops in life satisfaction, but the numbers were not statistically significant. For South Korea there was a modest, again not statistically significant, increase in life satisfaction in the early 1980s, but it declined slightly from 1990 to 2005.

The results, he said, were "strikingly consistent": over the long term, the sense of wellbeing in a country's citizens did not go up with income. His work is published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"Where does this leave us? If economic growth is not the main route to greater happiness, what is?" said Easterlin. "We may need to focus policy more directly on urgent personal concerns relating to things such as health and family life, rather than on the mere escalation of material goods."
David Bartram, a sociologist at the University of Leicester, said that if the UK government were serious about the public's happiness, the prime minister, David Cameron, would rethink cutting public spending, "putting people out of work and undercutting the conditions for his vaunted 'Big Society' – and all for the sake of a headline growth rate that apparently depends on avoiding tax increases affecting mainly the wealthy (including corporations)."

The results come just a few weeks after the UK government unveiled plans to measure and raise the happiness and wellbeing of Britons – rather than simply relying on GDP as an index of general satisfaction. Cameron has said that "improving our society's sense of wellbeing is, I believe, the central political challenge of our times."

Commenting on the new results, Alexander Gorban, a mathematician at the University of Leicester, said it was difficult to quantify happiness because of the problem of comparing material and subjective wellbeing. "Unfortunately, both are very difficult to put in numbers. It is a priori clear that subjective happiness or satisfaction is a very fragile and non-universal concept strongly influenced by cultural and even linguistic intercultural differences. Moreover, the material wellbeing is also not easy to quantify."
He said that Easterlin had taken GDP as a major index of objective prosperity, for example, but this did not necessarily reflect the average income of a typical person in a country and therefore it might be poorly related to personal satisfaction from life.
He warned against over-interpreting the results. "Life is complex and non-linear. The connection between happiness and material wellbeing is also non-linear, and it is difficult to suggest and verify some universal conclusions in an unbiased way. The authors of the article make a valuable and very professional effort in this direction by considering a representative set of countries (developed, developing, in transition). However, the conclusions are in general dependent on concrete implementation of statistical procedures and should be handled with care, especially when taken for construction of society development programmes."

Happiness doesn't increase with growing wealth of nations, finds study

A survey of developed and developing countries suggests citizens' sense of wellbeing does not rise with increasing wealth

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/dec/13/happiness-growing-wealth-nations-study

ALL ABOUT THE KING GEORGE V: MOVIE WINS 6 GOLDEN GLOBES

Culture : The King's Speech

Golden Globes nominations: The King's Speech wears the crown

Royal drama rewarded with seven nominations in the US Golden Globes film awards, edging ahead of The Social Network and The Fighter, which took six each

WATCH THE VIDEO: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2010/dec/14/golden-globes-nominations-kings-speech

In what looks set to be hailed as a triumph for British cinema, The King's Speech today led the field at the Golden Globe award nominations, making the shortlist in seven categories including best dramatic film.

1. The King's Speech
2. Production year: 2010
3. Countries: Rest of the world, UK
4. Directors: Tom Hooper
5. Cast: Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Gambon
6. More on this film

The nominations anointed three very different films – and three very different heroes, a boxer, a geek as well as the stuttering king – as frontrunners for awards glory next year.
Hot on the heels of the British film was David O Russell's boxing saga The Fighter and David Fincher's The Social Network, an unauthorised biopic of the billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, both tied on six nominations apiece. Early evidence, however, suggests that the monarch may just take the crown. The winners will be announced in Hollywood on January 16.

The King's Speech stars Colin Firth as George VI and Geoffrey Rush as Lionel Logue, the Australian speech therapist who helps the monarch find his voice in the run-up to the second world war. Hailed by Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw as "a handsomely produced, massively confident crowd-pleaser", it was shot on a comparatively meagre budget of £4.5m with help from the now defunct UK Film Council. The picture picked up acting nominations for Firth, Rush and Helena Bonham Carter, who plays plays Elizabeth, the future Queen Mother. There was also a director nod for its British film-maker, Tom Hooper.

Other British hopes include Christian Bale, nominated for his supporting role in The Fighter, and rising star Andrew Garfield. Born in the US but raised in England, Garfield was shortlisted for his performance in The Social Network. He has since been cast as Spider-Man in the reboot of the superhero series of films.
Joining The King's Speech on the best dramatic film shortlist were Inception, Black Swan, The Fighter and The Social Network. Elsewhere, Alice in Wonderland, Burlesque, The Kids Are All Right, Red and The Tourist were all nominated for best comedy/musical.
Today's announcement spelled good news for Johnny Depp, who picked up two nominations in the best comedy/musical category for his performances in Alice in Wonderland and The Tourist. But the sentimental favourite in the acting race is likely to be Michael Douglas. Currently battling stage-four cancer, Douglas was nominated for his barnstorming role as a semi-reformed Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone's Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.

The Golden Globes are traditionally regarded as a crucial dress rehearsal for the all-important Academy awards. But its reputation as a reliable guide to Oscar glory is no longer what it was. Slumdog Millionaire is the only film in the past six years to have followed a Golden Globe with a best picture Oscar. Last year's best film and director Globes went to James Cameron for Avatar. That decision was later upended at the Academy awards when Kathryn Bigelow won for her tense Iraq war drama, The Hurt Locker.