Figures from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers show as much as 2bn tonnes of food never makes it on to a plate. 

As much as half of all the food produced in the world – equivalent to 2bn tonnes – ends up as waste every year, engineers warned in a report.

The UK’s Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) blames the “staggering” new figures in its analysis on unnecessarily strict sell-by dates, buy-one-get-one free and Western consumer demand for cosmetically perfect food, along with “poor engineering and agricultural practices”, inadequate infrastructure and poor storage facilities.

Between 30% and 50% or 1.2-2bn tonnes of food produced around the world never makes it on to a plate. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian

In the face of United Nations predictions that there could be about an extra 3 billion people to feed by the end of the century and growing pressure on the resources needed to produce food, including land, water and energy, the IMechE is calling for urgent action to tackle this waste.

Their report, Global Food; Waste Not, Want Not, found that between 30% and 50% or 1.2-2bn tonnes of food produced around the world never makes it on to a plate.

In the UK as much as 30% of vegetable crops are not harvested due to their failure to meet retailers’ exacting standards on physical appearance, it says, while up to half of the food that is bought in Europe and the US is thrown away by consumers.

And about 550bn cubic metres of water is wasted globally in growing crops that never reach the consumer. Carnivorous diets add extra pressure as it takes 20-50 times the amount of water to produce 1 kilogramme of meat than 1kg of vegetables; the demand for water in food production could reach 10–13 trillion cubic metres a year by 2050.

This is 2.5 to 3.5 times greater than the total human use of fresh water today and could lead to more dangerous water shortages around the world, the IMechE says, claiming that there is the potential to provide 60-100% more food by eliminating losses and waste while at the same time freeing up land, energy and water resources.

Tim Fox, head of energy and environment at the IMechE, said: “The amount of food wasted and lost around the world is staggering. This is food that could be used to feed the world’s growing population – as well as those in hunger today. It is also an unnecessary waste of the land, water and energy resources that were used in the production, processing and distribution of this food.”

In order to prevent further waste, governments, development agencies and organisation like the UN “must work together to help change people’s mindsets on waste and discourage wasteful practices by farmers, food producers, supermarkets and consumers,” the IMechE said.

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  Guardian

AntiWorldNews 

Read more: 

The real hunger games: How banks gamble on food prices – and the poor lose out

Ending world hunger is possible – so why hasn’t it been done?

Adventure filmmaker Bryan Smith shot this remarkable clip of American free climber Dean Potter as he traverses a highline tied to Cathedral Peak in Yosemite National Park.

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   the-man-who-can-fly

by AntiWorldNews 

Read more: Evolution of the Moon

Children can really give us an insight into life around the world and their own private sanctuary (which is not always their own as you will see) gives an even deeper look at how they live. The idea of where children sleep seems innocuous at first, but on closer inspection these images reveal incredible stories of courage, despair, and – for the lucky few – joy. The source of this list is an incredible book which is called “Where Children Sleep” and the author (and photographer and copyright holder of all the pictures found here) is James Mollison. 

Risa lives with thirteen women in a teahouse in Kyoto where she is training to be a geisha. She chose to train as a geisha after watching them on TV. She trains every day for hours practising tea-making, elocution, singing, and dancing. She is the youngest maiko (someone who has passed the test to train as a geisha) in Japan. She has two days holiday each month.

Dong shares a room with his sisters and parents. His family owns just enough land to provide rice and sugar cane. Dong gets a free education because he lives in the country but his parents have to pay for his uniform and tuition. When he grows up, Dong wants to be a policeman so he can ‘catch thieves’.

Alex doesn’t go to school; he spends his days begging on the streets. He also makes a living stealing from old people or people sitting in cars waiting at street lights. He is addicted to sniffing glue and sleeps mostly outside on an empty bench or an abandoned sofa. He visits his family occasionally to share a meal with them.

This boy (who remains anonymous for his own safety) was a child soldier during the way in Liberia. He became a soldier because the offer of food and money was too hard to refuse. He goes to a school for ex-child-soldiers. He is an orphan and has three brothers. He wants to be a teacher when he grows up.

Lay Lay is Burmese but she lives in Thailand as a refugee. She is an orphan and lives in an orphanage which has two rooms – classrooms by day and bedrooms by night. At night the tables are pushed to the side to make the bedroom shared by twenty-one other children of her age. Each child has a small box to keep their belongings in; in Lay Lay’s case this is just a few items of clothing.

Yiftach lives in an impressive wooden home built by his father, a Jewish Zionist who believes that the land was a gift to them from God. Yiftach enjoys studying solar energy and nature and when he grows up he wants to be a pilot in the Israeli army. His father carries a gun at all times because he believes his children are not safe from the Palestinians who live nearby.

Douha lives in a Palestinian refugee camp because her brother Mohammed killed himself and twenty-three civilians in a suicide bomb attack against the Israelis. The Israeli government punished Douha and her family for his attack by destroying their family home and all their possessions. Douha keeps a poster of her brother on her bedroom wall.

Netu was sent from her home in India to live with her aunt in Nepal because they could not afford the food to survive. Netu’s aunt is not much better off so Netu begs for food everyday. She seldom makes any money as only tourists offer help. Her home is a shack made from plastic sheets which is four meters by six; she shares her home with eleven others.

Roathy and his family live in a huge rubbish dump. They re-use whatever rubbish they can find to live on; Roathy’s bed is made from old tires. The dump is swarming with flies which swirl around the five thousand people who live, work, and pay rent there. Mostly the inhabitants scavenge old bottles and tins to sell to a recycling company.

Jasmine, who prefers to be called “Jazzy” lives with her parents and three brothers in a large house in the countryside. Her room is full of crowns and sashes she has won in child beauty pageants. She attends a pageant every weekend at the cost of $1,000 per event. She loves being treated like a princess. When she grows up, Jazzy would like to be a rock star.

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Source:  listverse.com/

AntiWorldNews 

Read more: 

Portraits of Classrooms Around the World

Child Labor Is increasing Around The World

   by Sonia Faleiro, the author of “Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay’s Dance Bars.”

I LIVED for 24 years in New Delhi, a city where sexual harassment is as regular as mealtime. Every day, somewhere in the city, it crosses the line into rape. As a teenager, I learned to protect myself. I never stood alone if I could help it, and I walked quickly, crossing my arms over my chest, refusing to make eye contact or smile. I cleaved through crowds shoulder-first, and avoided leaving the house after dark except in a private car. At an age when young women elsewhere were experimenting with daring new looks, I wore clothes that were two sizes too large. I still cannot dress attractively without feeling that I am endangering myself. 

Things didn’t change when I became an adult. Pepper spray wasn’t available, and my friends, all of them middle- or upper-middle-class like me, carried safety pins or other makeshift weapons to and from their universities and jobs. One carried a knife, and insisted I do the same. I refused; some days I was so full of anger I would have used it — or, worse, had it used on me.

The steady thrum of whistles, catcalls, hisses, sexual innuendos and open threats continued. Packs of men dawdled on the street, and singing Hindi film songs, rich with double entendres, was how they communicated. To make their demands clear, they would thrust their pelvises at female passers-by.

If only it was just public spaces that were unsafe. In my office at a prominent newsmagazine, at the doctor’s office, even at a house party — I couldn’t escape the intimidation.

On Dec. 16, as the world now knows, a 23-year-old woman and a male friend were returning home after watching the movie “Life of Pi” at a mall in southwest Delhi. After they boarded what seemed to be a passenger bus, the six men inside gang-raped and tortured the woman so brutally that her intestines were destroyed. The bus service had been a ruse. The attackers also severely beat up the woman’s friend and threw them from the vehicle, leaving her to die.

The young woman didn’t oblige. She had started that evening watching a film about a survivor, and must have been determined to survive herself. Then she produced another miracle. In Delhi, a city habituated to the debasement of women, tens of thousands of people took to the streets and faced down police officers, tear gas and water cannons to express their outrage. It was the most vocal protest against sexual assault and rape in India to date, and it set off nationwide demonstrations.

To protect her privacy the victim’s name was not released publicly. But while she remains nameless, she did not remain faceless. To see her face, women had only to look in the mirror. The full measure of their vulnerability was finally understood.

When I was 26, I moved to Mumbai. A commercial and financial megalopolis, it has its own special set of problems, but has, culturally, been more cosmopolitan and liberal than Delhi. Giddy with my new freedom, I started to report from the red-light district and traveled across rough suburbs late at night — on my own and using public transit. It seemed that something good had come out of living in Delhi: I was so grateful for the comparatively safe environment of Mumbai that I took full advantage of it.

The young woman, however, will never have such an opportunity. On Saturday morning, 13 days after she was brutalized, this student of physical therapy, who had, no doubt, dreamt of improving lives, lost her own. She died of multiple organ failure.

India has laws against rape; seats reserved for women in buses, female officers; special police help lines. But these measures have been ineffective in the face of a patriarchal and misogynistic culture. It is a culture that believes that the worst aspect of rape is the defilement of the victim, who will no longer be able to find a man to marry her — and that the solution is to marry the rapist.

These beliefs aren’t restricted to living rooms, but are expressed openly. In the months before the gang rape, some prominent politicians had attributed rising rape statistics to women’s increasing use of cellphones and going out at night. “Just because India achieved freedom at midnight does not mean that women can venture out after dark,” said Botsa Satyanarayana, the Congress Party leader in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

Change is possible, but the police must document reports of rape and sexual assault, and investigations and court cases have to be fast-tracked and not left to linger for years. Of the more than 600 rape cases reported in Delhi in 2012, only one led to a conviction. If victims believe they will receive justice, they will be more willing to speak up. If potential rapists fear the consequences of their actions, they will not pluck women off the streets with impunity.

The volume of protests in public and in the media has made clear that the attack was a turning point. The unspeakable truth is that the young woman attacked on Dec. 16 was more fortunate than many rape victims. She was among the very few to receive anything close to justice. She was hospitalized, her statement was recorded and within days all six of the suspected rapists were caught and, now, charged with murder. Such efficiency is unheard-of in India.

In retrospect it wasn’t the brutality of the attack on the young woman that made her tragedy unusual; it was that an attack had, at last, elicited a response.

   nytimes.com

AntiWorldNews 

Read more:    

Impressive Facts About India

Comparing India and China

Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Harvey Milk, Martin Luther King. 

I am prepared to die, Nelson Mandela

One of the most memorable speeches in modern history comes from Nelson Mandela, the man who fought tirelessly against South African apartheid. His revolutionary work, however, had him wrongfully arrested in 1962 on charges of treason and for inciting the public to strike against the government. Mandela was sentenced to life in prison but delivered this great speech during his trial.

One-liner:

“I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal, which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Quit India, Mahatma Gandhi

Suppressed under British rule for almost a century, the Quit India movement and Mahatma Gandhi’s subsequent speech prompted the Indian people to fight for their freedom. Given in August 1942, Gandhi called for a passive but determined resistance in order to achieve complete independence from British rule. Gandhi’s dreams were eventually actualized five years later: India finally received its independence on August 15th, 1947.

One-liner:

“In the democracy which I have envisaged, a democracy established by non-violence, there will be equal freedom for all. Everybody will be his own master.”

I have a dream, Martin Luther King

Delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in 1963, this iconic speech marked a watershed in the struggle for equality raging in America. Interestingly enough, Martin Luther King actually ad-libbed the famous four lines that remain etched in oration history.

One-liner:

“I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.’”

Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln

Delivered by Abraham Lincoln on November 19, 1863, the Gettysburg Address is arguably the most famous speech in American history. Though the original wording is unknown, the short speech – given during the American Civil War at the dedication of the Soldiers’ National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania – encapsulated the very things that define America as a nation.

One-liner:

“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”

Hope Speech, Harvey Milk

Harvey Milk was the first openly gay man elected to California public office before being shot down and killed by a city supervisor. During his political career and gay rights activism, he was particularly renowned for his rousing “Hope Speeches” that encouraged equality and envisioned a hopeful future for all citizens. His last hope speech is considered the best.

One-liner:

“Without hope, not only gays, but those who are blacks, the Asians, the disabled, the seniors, the us’s; without hope the us’s give up. I know that you cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living. And you, and you, and you, and you have got to give them hope.”

by AntiWorldNews 

Sony, Sharp and Panasonic Fixated on Hardware Breakthroughs; ‘Sometimes, It’s Easier to Run From Behind. 

During a business trip to Japan in 2004, technology analyst Michael Gartenberg caught a glimpse of Sony Corp.’s  Librie, the first e-book reader with an electronic ink display.

Mr. Gartenberg was impressed. He saw it as a harbinger of a new wave of products that would hit the U.S. But there were problems. The software was in Japanese. It required a computer to download a book and selection was limited.

Today, Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle dominates the e-reader business and the Librie is little remembered. Sony is playing catch-up with a successor device, which ranks a distant third in the global market.

It is a story that has played out repeatedly over the past 20 years for Japan’s once-world-dominant electronics firms. Japanese companies have beaten rivals to the market with hardware breakthroughs—from flat-panel televisions to advanced mobile phones.

But in each case, foreign rivals have cashed in by delivering faster improvements, integrating the products with easy-to-use software and online services, and delivering a smarter marketing message.

That has left one of Japan’s prized electronics manufacturers, Sharp Corp., eetering, as it grapples with an acute cash crunch and plunging stock price. Sony is in the midst of another restructuring after four years in red ink. And Panasonic Corp. is pulling back from consumer electronics.

“Japanese firms were too confident about our technology and manufacturing prowess. We lost sight of the products from the consumer’s point of view,” said Panasonic President Kazuhiro Tsuga at a news conference in June upon taking over as the company’s new leader after it posted the biggest annual loss in its 94-year history.

Sony, Sharp and Panasonic combined to lose about $20 billion in the past fiscal year. That is a contrast with the glory days of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when Japan started to dominate the world of consumer electronics. As the Japanese economy surged, the electronics conglomerates ruled the market for memory chips, color TVs, and videocassette recorders, while their research labs gave birth to gadgets that would define an era: the Walkman, CD and DVD players.

Now, Japan’s device makers are an afterthought to Apple Inc., Google Inc. and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co.

Japan’s current weakness is rooted in its traditional strength: a fixation with “monozukuri,” or the art of making things, focused on hardware advances.

This concept, a source of national pride, pushed Japan’s electronics firms to strive for products that were often the world’s thinnest, smallest, or delivered other incremental improvement—while losing sight of factors that really mattered to people such as design and ease of use.

In the case of the e-reader, Sony was focused on selling devices, while Amazon was focused on selling books. As a result, the Kindle was more in tune with the raison d’être for purchasing the device: to buy and read books.

“Even though the first device definitely pointed the way to the future, it’s a market that got away from Sony,” said Mr. Gartenberg, research director at Gartner Inc. “Others have far more successfully capitalized.”

To compound matters, the strong yen has made it more difficult to follow up new innovations with the requisite cost reductions to appeal to the mass market. For cutting-edge products, Japanese firms often rely on domestic production and then sell the goods abroad.

The strong yen, near record levels, has narrowed the profit margin of Japanese goods sold abroad—a problem that Korean manufacturers have avoided with the relatively weaker won. The erosion in earnings has also made it difficult to invest in future products and technologies.

In the latest example of the country’s lose-the-lead affliction, Japanese companies are falling behind in the race to develop what is likely to become the dominant technology format for next-generation televisions: OLEDs, or organic light emitting diodes. The new displays are thinner and require less energy.

Samsung, Korea’s top TV maker, already dominates the market for smaller-size OLED displays featured in smartphones and other mobile devices. Now Samsung and domestic rival LG Electronics Co. each plans to launch a 55-inch OLED television later this year.

It is a major step forward compared with the Japanese firms—Sony, Panasonic, Sharp, and Toshiba Corp. —that have spent years developing the technology while struggling with how to commercialize it.

In an attempt to close the gap on their Korean rivals, Sony and Panasonic, once bitter rivals, agreed to an unprecedented alliance in June to develop OLED production technology together.

That is a poignant comedown for Sony, which five years ago became the first manufacturer to sell an OLED television. At the time, company executives hailed it a “symbol of Sony’s comeback.” The 11-inch model—with a screen about one-tenth of an inch thick—was a technological marvel. But at $2,500 a pop, the OLED TV was a financial flop.

The OLED stumble came just a few years after a similar setback in the last generation of TV technology. In 2004, Sony was the first company to introduce LCD televisions that replaced the TV’s fluorescent backlight with brighter and more energy efficient light-emitting diodes, or LEDs. It also introduced the first TV that arranged the LEDs around the edges in 2008 to allow the screens to be thinner.

When Samsung came out with its models a year later, the company called them “LED TVs,” a moniker to distinguish the new TVs from existing LCD models.

The marketing strategy was a success and Samsung was able to get consumers to pay a premium for the new LED models, helping to slow the sharp decline in TV prices.

According to research firm NPD, Samsung accounts for nearly half of all the LED televisions sold in North America while Sony didn’t rank among the top five sellers in the first half of 2012.

After years of missed chances, Sony has now officially shifted gears, deciding recently that it actually makes more sense to let Samsung and others take the lead in developing innovations.

For all its pains of delivering groundbreaking technologies first, Sony executives concluded they were only creating targets for competitors to pursue and possibly imitate at a cheaper cost.

“The first runner has to face the wind—sometimes, it’s easier to run from behind,” said Tadashi Saito, who took over in April as Sony’s chief strategy officer.

Another official familiar with Sony’s thinking said the losses at its television business made it harder to take a “gamble” on aggressively pursuing OLED.

That is a far cry from the early days of Sony when founders Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka nearly bankrupted the company in order to build a new type of color television. After unveiling prototypes in 1964, Sony struggled to develop the technology for mass production as the company burned through money. It took four years of development before Sony unveiled the Trinitron, a product that would underpin the company’s success for the next three decades.

These days, the feeling is: “Financially, the Japanese firms can’t take the risks,” said Yuji Fujimori, a Tokyo-based electronics analyst for Barclays.

But the choice not to take risks has its own risks: the danger of falling into a downward spiral. Losses can lead to smaller investments in future technologies or new products.

Better-funded rivals can gain a leg-up with new products or developing new technologies that may make gadgets from Japan less competitive and ultimately lead to more losses for the Japanese firms.

The danger is evident in the gap in research and development spending between the Japanese and Korean leaders. Historically, Sony and Panasonic outspent Samsung on R&D, but starting in 2009, the Korean firm surpassed its Japanese rivals and the gap has widened.

In 2011, Samsung spent about $8.7 billion on R&D, compared with $5.5 billion for Sony and $6.6 billion for Panasonic in their fiscal years.

  wsj.com

AntiWorldNews

As technology shifts the workforce, some surprisingly traditional jobs are on the chopping block. 

In 1945, when more than 15,000 Manhattan elevator operators and maintenance workers went on strike, New York’s skyline simply shut down. Business ground to a halt for a full workweek, causing Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia to desperately appeal for the strikers to return to work. Today, of course, the elevator operator is another casualty of automation, along with the likes of the professional typist and the switchboard operator. But though fears of a robot army displacing hordes of human laborers have so far proved premature, today’s global workforce is at a moment of major upheaval (even putting aside widespread unemployment).

We’re still not quite at Ray Kurzweil’s “singularity” — the move to a world where humans are more integrated with digital and automated technologies — but get ready: Many jobs we now take for granted will soon disappear, while others will emerge that are simply unimaginable today.

Here’s a look at five jobs that may be on the chopping block and what might replace them:

Market researcher —> Predictive data analyst

Every minute YouTube users upload 48 hours of video, Facebook users share 684,478 pieces of content, and Google receives 2 million search queries, according to the business analytics company Domo. As Big Data gets even bigger, fewer people will be needed to collect information, and more people will be needed to analyze and discover the value stored within these billions of terabytes. Some of the sexiest and best-paying jobs of the next 10 years will belong to the likes of Internet statisticians and data miners, people who don’t just crunch raw numbers but analyze their hidden patterns to shape business decisions.

Visionary: Andrew Pole, statistician for Target and leading practitioner of consumer behavior prediction.

Hospital orderly —> Medical roboticist

In this summer’s sci-fi blockbuster Prometheus, an astronaut climbs into a fully robotic surgical pod to have an alien baby removed by cesarean section. Although extraterrestrial cross-breeding is a ways off (let’s hope), advanced medical robots are rapidly evolving to keep up with an aging global population. Japan leads the way in robot innovation to care for its growing elderly population, including rehabilitative and therapeutic robots from Honda and Toyota. Medical roboticists will be needed to design, build, and operate these intelligent devices, which will increasingly replace humans — and provide more precise care — in doctors’ offices and hospitals.

Visionary: Catherine Mohr, director of medical research at Intuitive Surgical, which develops cutting-edge surgical robots and procedures.

Teaching assistant —> Educational technologist

While public university systems in many countries are plagued by inadequate funding, higher education as a whole is one of the fastest-growing sectors: 170 million people were enrolled in higher ed in 2009, a 160 percent increase from 1990. And online education, once derided as correspondence classes for those who couldn’t get into a four-year college, is booming. Software coders and curriculum developers will be needed to design online courses that deliver memorable learning in a new virtual medium. On the heels of Udacity and MIT’s OpenCourseWare, new educational platforms have emerged that require the virtual curation of online, collaborative student groups, facilitating a multidirectional learning process. Rejoice! The days of tweed-jacketed professors droning on in lecture halls are nearly over.

Visionary: Salman Khan, founder of the popular, free online education platform Khan Academy, which features more than 3,000 videos teaching everything from basic algebra to the French Revolution.

Construction foreman —> Smart engineer

Bricks and mortar aren’t what they used to be. Construction represents more than $7 trillion of the world’s economic output, and it’s expected to grow to $12 trillion by 2020, as emerging markets bulge in China, India, Latin America, and the Middle East. And new transportation systems — from driverless cars to maglev trains — require infrastructure to be updated and reinvented. In developed countries, creaking urban centers will be retrofitted — or replaced — with new, sustainable technologies and materials. And with the development of “smart houses,” already in the works from Microsoft, new types of engineers, designers, and construction workers will be needed to seamlessly integrate and install digital technology in our homes.

Visionary: Sebastian Thrun, who led development of the Google self-driving car.

Tour guide —> Space navigator

There’s almost nowhere you can’t get to by plane or boat these days. And with a flourishing private space race, a ride above Earth’s atmosphere soon won’t be solely for astronauts (or the ridiculously rich). The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration predicts space tourism will be a billion-dollar industry within the next 10 years. Virgin Galactic has more than 500 reservations for suborbital flights, slated to launch as soon as next year. And the space venture company Bigelow Aerospaceplans to open a space hotel in 2016. It may sound like something out of an Isaac Asimov novel, but if there’s one thing we know about the future of the workforce, it’s that wherever professionals and technologists are going, sci-fi writers have already been.

Visionary: Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Galactic, poised to be the first suborbital space tourism company.

    foreignpolicy.com

AntiWorldNews

Adam Brent Houghtaling, a New York-based author, should be in quite a sour mood by now. After all, he spent months listening to the saddest music ever made, from sorrowful symphonies to tearjerker Billie Holliday tunes to just about every Leonard Cohen song ever. 

But Houghtaling, author of the new book “This Will End in Tears: The Miserabilist Guide to Music,” is actually pretty chipper, all things – and all songs – considered. His fascinating examination of centuries of downer music is getting plenty of attention, and his ranking of the Top 100 Saddest Songs has spawned debate.

I asked Houghtaling to explain what he’s learned and ponder why we like to turn to blue notes, especially when we’re notably blue.

Q: What makes sad songs unique?

A: Sad songs are a really intimate thing. They’re not something you listen to with all your friends at a dinner party or when you’re hanging out at a lake house with your buddies. You’re doing it by yourself.

If you’re listening to a lot of sad music, it’s because you’re not in a great state of mind. You’ve just gotten your heart broken or suffered some kind of loss. It becomes intimate, but it’s also comforting in a way.

Q: Can sad songs actually be good for us when we’re feeling down?

A: There’s this idea that listening to sad songs may drag us deeper into our despair. But it may also help us go deeper into a despair and focus on whatever the problem is that brought us to that point.

Q: Do you mean a kind of catharsis?

A: I found catharsis to be a very tricky topic, but yeah, it’s the idea that when you connect with an artist or a song, you feel like someone else is out there, someone has gone through this before, you’re not alone.

There’s a lot of ways that sad songs help us get through the despair and put us back on track.

Q: How did researching your book affect you personally?

A: It took me a couple of years, if not a little more, to write the book, and I was deeply immersed in the saddest stuff I could find, listening to it over and over again.

My mood depended on what was going on in my life. If everything was going OK, it didn’t affect me much. But if a couple things went wrong, it didn’t help.

It wasn’t always the best thing for me. But I had a deadline.

Q: Do you feel like you’re celebrating sad songs?

A: I want to celebrate being melancholy in the ruminative sense, not depression itself.

That’s nothing I want to make light of and really affects people’s lives in a terrible way. When you’re depressed, you can’t do a heck of a lot and you don’t feel a lot of joy.

But when I’m kind of melancholic, I can still do all that stuff. I feel peaceful and comforted when I’m in that head space.

I wanted to make a case for enjoying that and not trying to end it. These moments of sadness are an important part of life, and you shouldn’t necessarily try to chase them away at all costs.

Q: What did you think about when you developed your Top 100 Saddest Songs list, which is topped by “Adagio for Strings” (composed by Samuel Barber) and “Strange Fruit” (sung by Billie Holiday)?

A: I wanted to include artists who really owned sadness, not just people who did a couple of sad songs.

Q: Do the artists behind these songs tend to have difficult lives?

A: It just makes sense that artists who deal with emotional turmoil would have a truer, stronger sense of the material than someone who doesn’t necessarily know sadness beyond a bad day or weekend. Instead, it’s someone who knows a bad year or a decade.

Q: What makes a good sad song?

A: There isn’t any one thing on its own that does it.

I looked at slow tempo, which can do a good job of slowing your heart rate down. But ambient music has slow tempo too, and it’s not necessarily sad. I looked at minor chords, but there are plenty of upbeat songs that have minor chords. Then there are lyrics, but there are plenty of raging songs that are about loss, grief and heartbreak.

Then I got into the little things, like how someone’s voice can help convey a certain kind of sadness. There are these kinds of really beat-up and broken voices, like Billie Holliday’s in her last years, that convey “I’ve been through it all, and this is a story I have to tell.”

There’s also something about low-fi music, this idea that this is the honest truth: We didn’t shine this up or produce it for you. It’s coming from a kid in his bedroom with a broken heart.

Q: Would you prescribe sad songs to a sad person?

A: I don’t think I’d have to. They probably would have found them on their own.

To listen to Houghtaling’s selection of the saddest songs of all time, sign up for the music service Spotify and head to this link: http://spoti.fi/NqWUwq.

   Randy Dotinga is a Monitor contributor

     csmonitor.com

AntiWorldNews

In terms of specs, performance, and features, the iPhone 5 is Apple’s best to date.  This doesn’t mean it’s as good as it could be, however. There were a few egregious omissions from the keynote presentation – features that we not only want in our iPhone, but that we feel are overdue. 

NFC for mobile payments

Instead of building NFC into the iPhone, Apple would rather have you use its Passbook system, which lets lets users store tickets, gift cards, boarding passes, and the like.

It can handle some (but definitely not all) of the tasks that you might use NFC for. For example, you can’t use Passbook to wirelessly send money to a friend via PayPal.

NFC also lets you beam content between devices just by tapping them together. Samsung’s Galaxy S III takes advantage of this feature.

An improved texting solution on the keyboard, like Swype

Swype is something of a mainstay on Android phones. Instead of tapping out your texts letter by letter, you can drag your finger over them without lifting it. The end result is that you get your message out much more quickly.

SD card support for extra storage

We’d like to be able to extend our device’s storage capability beyond the 64 GB maximum. History suggests that external SD card support isn’t going to be in a mobile Apple device any time soon.

A 128 GB option

The iPod Classic offered users 160 GB of music and video capacity. Many people (ourselves included) had no problem filling it right up.

Now that the iPhone is an easy replacement for your old iPod, we’d love to be able to carry the same amount of content around with us without having to pick and choose what stays at home.

Non-proprietary dock connection

We’ve never understood why our iPhones can’t use a standard USB port and a standard USB cable to sync. Now the iPhone 5 introduces a new micro-dock connection requiring the use of its own special cable.

If you want to use your old sync cables, you have to buy this $29 adapter.

A micro-HDMI port

Once again, if you want to get video off of your phone, it requires the use of a special adapter. (Unless you buy a $99 Apple TV.) The Kindle Fire HD and several Android phones use a micro-HDMI port, letting you run a cable straight from your tablet to the television.

This makes it easier, better, and more affordable for the user.

Replaceable battery

The battery life on the iPhone 5 has seen some nice improvements, but for the power users who are glued to their phones all day, it won’t suffice.

We’d love to be able to carry an additional fully-charged iPhone battery that we could pop in whenever the first one bites the dust.

While we’re at it, better battery life!

The iPhone 5′s battery life is about the same as the iPhone 4S’. Yes, it has a bigger battery, but the new 4G LTE radio and bigger screen use up a lot of that extra power. We wish Apple had included a better battery in the iPhone 5 like the one on Motorola’s Droid Razr Maxx. The Razr Maxx can last several hours longer than the iPhone 5.

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businessinsider.com

AntiWorldNews

by AntiWorldNews 

It doesn’t matter whether you’re employed, whether your children still live at home, or even whether you’re married. Life gets better after age 50. A new phone survey of hundreds of thousands of Americans confirms that people tend to be happier, less anxious, and less worried once they pass the half-century mark. 

The main measure of well-being is called global well-being, which involves asking people how good they feel about their life in general. “That’s been the standard in survey research,” says psychologist Arthur Stone of Stony Brook University in New York state. But, he says, “this kind of question requires people to make a lot of judgments.” For example, who should you be using for comparison: Your peers? Bill Gates? Victims of famine? The life you thought you’d have? It’s also difficult to measure logistically: Scientists often ask people to wear pagers, and researchers beep them several times a day to remind the volunteers to record their feelings.

Stone took a different, easier approach. Thanks to his work as a senior scientist with the Gallup Organization, which conducts a huge, ongoing telephone survey in the United States with questions on topics such as how well the president is doing his job and how confident consumers are in the economy, he was able to help write questions about specific emotions people felt the day before they took the survey. The survey reached more than 350,000 people in 2008 from all regions of the United States.

Stone’s team found that global well-being declines from the 20s to age 50, then increases steadily. Happiness and enjoyment also increase after age 50. Although sadness is fairly flat throughout the age groups, most negative feelings decline with age. Worry stays level until about 50, then drops. Anger falls steadily from the 20s; stress peaks in the 20s, starts a decline, then plummets after age 50. The patterns are almost identical for men and women, although women have more stress, worry more, and are sadder at all ages, despite reporting better global well-being than men at most ages. The study appears online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings make sense to anyone who has gotten out of their 20s, says Stone. “If you were to do a survey and say, ‘How many of you would like to be 25 again?’ you don’t get a lot of takers,” he says.

Stone and his colleagues looked at a few variables to see whether they explained the patterns—for example, whether people had children at home or were unemployed—but found little association. One explanation, says Laura Carstensen, a life-span developmental psychologist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who was not involved in the study, is that older people may be better at regulating their emotions. As we age, she says, we may be more aware that our time is running out and “begin to be much more careful and selective on what we focus on.”

Carstensen is also excited about the new research because it suggests that a relatively inexpensive survey can yield the same answers as asking people how they feel several times a day. “He’s found a way to get just a thin slice of information and found that it corresponds very nicely with reports in the literature” on emotions at different ages, she says.

The study may have global implications, adds Richard Suzman, director of the Division of Behavioral and Social Research of the National Institute on Aging in Bethesda, Maryland. Measuring well-being could help show if a medical treatment is worthwhile; not just whether patients lived or died, but whether the intervention improved their life. And a good index of well-being could give a sense of how a city, county, or country is doing, he says, that reaches beyond the usual economic measures. “[It] would be, metaphorically, the equivalent of a GDP or GNP.”

   sciencemag.org

AntiWorldNews

I’ve heard it said that the most brilliant business ideas are often the simplest. From my experience, it’s true. In fact, when I am fortunate enough to receive sage advice from a famously gifted person, I’ll often ask myself, “Why didn’t I think of that?” So here I humbly share with you a winning formula that I see leaders use again and again and again…to change the world. 

Use this formula the next time you feel stuck—whether you are trying to change your industry, your company or your personal life—and I promise you it will work.

Question Number 1: What’s the outcome I want?

Most people seem to get stuck in the moment, caught up in the drama of a situation they don’t like. They unwittingly wind up playing the helpless victim, and as I’ve written in the past, victims can’t innovate because they are focused on the problem—not solutions. You will hear them talk about how things aren’t fair, who has wronged them, and they look for encouragement or excuses to feel better about the status quo. While this may make them feel good, being energized by problems is a recipe for inaction.

Asking the question “what is the outcome I want?” forces the mind to focus on the final destination, not the current bumps in the road. The brilliance of this question is that it immediately puts you in the “creator” mindset. And once successful people envision the destination, they move quickly to the second, world-changing question.

Question Number 2: What stands in my way?

(Hey, I told you these were simple questions.)

The best leaders are masters at identifying and prioritizing obstacles that are between them and the outcome they want. Then they brainstorm ways to eliminate, avoid or neutralize the obstacles.

Last year I saw George Clooney on a late night talk show. He had recently lost 20-plus pounds that he’d put on for a movie role. The host was amazed at how good Clooney looked and asked him how he had managed to lose the weight so quickly. Clooney’s response sounded something like, “I ate less and exercised more.”

Too often in business, we talk about how hard it is to “lose weight” while reaching for a potato chip. But leaders using this formula move quickly from the outcome, to the plan, to the execution.

“I want to be 20 pounds lighter,” says the enlightened leader. “So what stands in my way?” Let’s see…

I don’t seem to make time for exercise.

So I will start the day with exercise or I will block time on my calendar.
So each weekend, I’ll pack my gym bag for the entire week and put it in my car.

I need to eat better because a bad diet will make this impossible.

So I will do my homework, buy healthy snacks and eat small portions throughout the day.

So I will pack my lunch and stop eating fast food.

Without a bunch of accountability, this will never happen.

So I’ll tell my friends, family and coworkers about my goal and when it will be achieved.

So I will buy a digital scale and weigh myself every day.

Question Number 3: Who has figured it out already?

So now our creators have identified the outcome they want. They have created a list of obstacles, prioritize the list and identified ways to overcome each obstacle. This is where some leaders spring into action while others pause to steal ideas. Yes, I wrote steal ideas. But since stealing is a politically incorrect term, we’ll call their strategy parallel engineering.

In the mid ’90s, our company had grown to about 25 people. We had dozens of projects happening at once and needed a more efficient way to manage the growing complexity of our business. So being the brilliant, naïve entrepreneurs that we were, we naturally decided to build a software system to help us track, manage and optimize each project.

After spending roughly $185,000 and hundreds of hours in time, we scrapped the project. Three phone calls later we bought an off-the-shelf system that did 90 percent of the things we were trying to build into our own custom solution.

Gosh, I wish we had paused to parallel engineer ideas.

Intelligence is learning from your own mistakes; wisdom is learning from the mistakes of others. It’s less painful to be wise than smart. It’s also a lot cheaper. That’s why this third question is so important.

    Mike Maddock ,  forbes.com

AntiWorldNews  

Climate change over the next 50 years is expected to drive a quarter of land animals and plants into extinction, according to the first comprehensive study into the effect of higher temperatures on the natural world.

The sheer scale of the disaster facing the planet shocked those involved in the research. They estimate that more than 1 million species will be lost by 2050.

The results are described as “terrifying” by Chris Thomas, professor of conservation biology at Leeds University, who is lead author of the research from four continents published today in the magazine Nature.

Much of that loss – more than one in 10 of all plants and animals – is already irreversible because of the extra global warming gases already discharged into the atmosphere. But the scientists say that action to curb greenhouse gases now could save many more from the same fate.

It took two years for the largest global collaboration of experts to make the first major assessment of the effect of climate change on six biologically rich regions of the world taking in 20% of the land surface.

The research in Europe, Australia, Central and South America, and South Africa, showed that species living in mountainous areas had a greater chance of survival because they could simply move uphill to get cooler.

Those in flatter areas such as Brazil, Mexico and Australia, were more vulnerable, faced with the impossible task of moving thousands of miles to find suitable conditions.

Birds, which had the greatest chance of escape, could in theory move to a more suitable climate but the trees and other habitat they needed for survival could not keep pace and all would die.

Among the more startling findings of the scientists was that of 24 species of butterfly studied in Australia, all but three would disappear in much of their current range, and half would become extinct.

In South Africa major conservation areas such as Kruger national park risked losing up to 60% of the species under their protection.

In the Cerrado region of Brazil – also known as the Brazilian Savannah – which covers one fifth of the country, a study of 163 tree species showed that up to 70 would become extinct. Many of the plants and trees that exist in this savannah occur nowhere else in the world. The scientists concluded that 1,700 to 2,100 of these species – between 39% and 48% of the total – would disappear.

In Europe, the continent least affected by climate change, survival rates were better, but even here under the higher estimates of climate change a quarter of the birds could become extinct, and between 11% and 17% of plant species.

One British example is the Scottish crossbill which is found nowhere else. The future climate in Scotland will be different and the birds will be unable to survive, especially with rivals from warmer climes moving in.

The crossbill would need to move to Iceland, but currently there are virtually no trees and suitable food. The scientists conclude: “It seems unlikely that the species will manage to move to Iceland.”

In Mexico, studies in the Chihuahuan desert confirmed that on flatter land extinction was more likely because a small change in climate would require migrations over vast distances for survival. One third of 1,870 species examined would be in trouble and three small rodents, the smokey pocket gopher, Alcorn’s pocket gopher, jico deer mouse would go the way of the dodo.

In South Africa, where many popular garden plants originate, 300 plant species were studied and more than one third were expected to die out, including South Africa’s national flower, the king protea.

Commenting on the findings in Nature, two other scientists, J Alan Pounds and Robert Puschendorf, who has studied the extinction of frogs in the mountains of Costa Rica since the 1980s as a result of climate change, say their colleagues have been “optimistic”.

When other factors as well as increased temperatures were taken into account the extinctions would probably be greater.

“The risk of extinction increases as global warming interacts with other factors – such as landscape modification, species invasions and build-up of carbon dioxide – to disrupt communities and ecological interactions.”

So many species are already destined for extinction because it takes at least 25 years for the greenhouse effect – or the trapping of the sun’s rays by the carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide already added to the air – to have its full effect on the planet. Deserts, grasslands and forests are already changing to make survival impossible.

The continuous discharging of more greenhouse gases, particularly by the USA, is making matters considerably worse. The research says if mankind continues to burn oil, coal and gas at the current rate, up to one third of all life forms will be doomed by 2050.

Prof Thomas said it was urgent to switch from fossil fuels to a non-carbon economy as quickly as possible. “It is possible to drastically reduce the output of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and this research makes it imperative we do it as soon as possible. If we can stabilise the climate and even reverse the warming we could save these species, but we must start to act now.”

If conservation groups wanted to save species they should devote at least half their energies to political campaigning to reduce global warming because that was the greatest single threat to survival of the species.

John Lanchbery, climate change campaigner for the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, agreed: “This is a deeply depressing paper. President Bush risks having the biggest impact on wildlife since the meteorite that wiped out the dinosaurs.

“At best, in 50 years, a host of wildlife will be committed to extinction because of human-induced climate change. At worst, the outcome does not bear thinking about. Drastic action to cut emissions is clearly needed by everyone, but especially the USA.”

   guardian.co.uk

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