Eye 'compensates for blind spot'

Partially sighted and registered blind people can be taught to read and see faces again using the undamaged parts of their eyes, say experts. When only the central vision is lost, as with the leading cause of blindness, age-related macular degeneration, peripheral vision remains intact. And patients can be taught to exploit this, the Macular Disease Society says. It has developed a training scheme and is calling for professionals to adopt the system across the UK. The macula is a small area of the retina at the back of the eye made up of specialist cells which process central vision as well as the fine detail of what we see. ur scheme has transformed lives - helping people to relearn basic skills they thought to have lost for good. People with macular degeneration rarely go totally blind but even those with a relatively mild version of the disease cannot drive and have difficulty reading, recognising faces and watching television. But studies show people can be taught to use their peripheral vision to fill in the gaps, using "eccentric viewing" and "steady eye techniques". When someone with central vision loss looks directly at an object it may disappear, go faint, blur or distort. But when they look above, below or to one side of it, they see it more clearly... BBC

Singapore - What costs will go up next ?

Transport costs go up... Utility costs go up... Next to go up ? PM, ministers & MPs pay to go up again next ?

Electricity tariffs up 5 cents

Tue, Sep 30, 2008

my paper

New rate is 30 cents per kWh but rebates will more than offset rise. -myp By Marcel Lee Pereira

FROM tomorrow, taxi driver Amir Hamzah will keep his water heater switched off, and take cold showers instead.

That's when the highest electricity tariffs since 2001 will kick in, and Mr Amir, 33, his wife and three-year-old son - who live in a five-room flat in Sengkang - could end up paying almost $23 more a month for electricity. "We will try and save on electricity as much as we can, and the water heater uses a lot of it," he told my paper. The latest tariffs, announced by SP Services yesterday, mean households will need to pay 30 cents per kWh of electricity, an increase of about 5 cents over the existing tariff of about 25 cents per kWh. Electricity prices have been rising every quarter since last July. The latest hike was due to higher forward fuel-oil prices for the last quarter of the year, said the Energy Market Authority (see box). With the increase, the total utilities bill for families in oneto three-room flats will go up by between $90 and $223 thi year. However, they will receive rebates of between $310 and $330 this year, which will more than offset the rise, said EMA chief executive Khoo Chin Hean. Those in larger flats will pay between $316 and $433 more in total for utilities this year, but will get rebates of between $130 and $295. Fuel costs make up 60 per cent of electricity tariffs, with the remainder coming from the cost of transmitting electricity, as well as machinery and equipment costs, among others. Since 2004, electricity tariffs have been pegged to forward oil prices, instead of spot prices as was the case before, said Mr Khoo. Pegging tariffs to spot prices makes electricity prices very volatile, he explained. Mr Khoo said that though crude-oil prices seemed to be sliding now, it is actually forward fuel-oil prices that are used to set electricity tariffs. He said: "When the spot price comes down, the forward price will follow, but after a time lag."However, he added that in a situation when fuel-oil prices are rising, pegging tariffs to forward prices means they generally will be lower than when pegged to spot prices. Tariffs are reviewed every quarter, and if forward fuel-oil prices come down next month, the tariff for the January to March quarter next year will be reduced accordingly. Mr Khoo added that about 40 per cent of households here are using more electricity than the average household, and encouraged consumers to do more to cut usage. Mr Amir, who currently pays about $90 in utilities a month, said: "I'll ask my wife not to turn on too many lights at night, while I'm out driving."

Singapore - Transport fares go up again!

Transport fares go uo in Oct 2008. Should SBS & SMRT ask themself this question - are their bus drivers & staff providing quality service to us, public taking transport daily to work... ? What do SBS & SMRT expect fare-paying public to do when drivers kept their golden mouths shut & don't even make the effort to ask people who are fearful of ghosts at the back of the bus ? When can the ghost at the back of the bus mentality be solved ? Don't the layout/design of those new double-deck buses make this problem worst ? The over crowded situation will still persist & the flood gates of this tiny island are allowing more foreign workers here. PTC, SBS, SMRT... shouldn't only just justify that transport fares need to go up because of higher oil prices. What kind of service quality these transport providers give us in the first place ?

Singapore transport fares - Why raise fares now ?

Why raise fares now ?

Mon, Sep 15, 2008

The Straits Times

Public Transport Council has announced new fares for transport from Oct 1. One journalist gets a few pressing questions answered. -ST Maria Almenoar THE Public Transport Council (PTC) yesterday announced new fares for public transport, which will take effecton Oct 1.

MARIA ALMENOAR gets the answers to commuters' pressing questions.

With inflation riding high, why must fares be raised now? Fares must be raised for the long-term viability of the public transport operators,so they can continue to make capital investments and provide the quality service expected. The amount of household income spent on public transport, expressed as a percentage of household income, dipped from 7 per cent in 2003 to 6.2 per cent last year. In other words, transport fares have remained affordable for most commuters at a time when the unemployment rate is at its lowest in five years. The PTC said, however, that it was mindful of the prevailing economic conditions and overall cost-of-living issuesthat commuters faced. By raising the transfer rebate this year and making operators absorb the bulk of the cost, thePTC said it had 'struck a balance' between the needs of commuters and the operators. Fares for nine in 10 journeys will change, ranging from about 7 cents less to 4 cents more, depending on the commuter's travel pattern. The average bus and rail fares here are still lower than those in Hong Kong,London and New York. How far do the fare changes affect the transport companies? The fare-cap formula the PTC uses puts a cap on transport operators' revenue from fares. The cap during this review was at 3 per cent but overall, the transport operators will earn just 0.7 per cent more in fare revenue. The PTC also checked the transport operators' Return on Total Assets or Rota a measure of how much profit acompany generates for every dollar of assets invested. The Rota for SBS Transit is 8.6 per cent, and for SMRT, 11.1 per cent. Holding these up to Rotas of other industries,the PTC said it did not think they were 'excessive'. A check against transport operators such as Hong Kong's Transport International Holdings and MTR, the multinational Stagecoach Group and Singapore Airlines, found them to have Rotas ranging between 2.8 per cent and 10.1 per cent. By absorbing a larger share of the transfer rebate, the operators here will jointly give up over $30 million in fare revenue. SBS will earn 0.9 per cent or $5.8 million more in revenue, and SMRT, 0.6 per cent or $4.3 million more. Why the 10-cent across-the-board increase for those who pay fares in cash? Cash fares have stayed unchanged since 2005, and the gap between them and those paid by ez-link cards have sincenarrowed. When the ez-link card was introduced,concessions were given to encourage their use because it costs transport operators more to handle cash fares. The new distance-based fares are supposed to address the current lopsidedness of making commuters who opt for transfer routes 'cross-subsidise' those who take direct routes. How does this work? Currently, a commuter who chooses a transfer route to get from Point A to Point B pays more than a commuter who takes a direct route, even for the same distance. The commuter taking the transfer route is thus being unfairly asked to keep the fare for the direct-route commuter lower than it should be. Eliminating the transfer 'penalty' will correct this imbalance. With the fare review, the transfer rebate was raised from 25 cents to 40 cents. Another 20 cents will be given in the next fare review. This article was first published in The Straits Times on Sept 13, 2008

Running can slow aging process

Regular running slows the effects of aging claim scientists who tracked 500 running grannies for more than 20 years. The study found people who run are less likely to have disabilities in old age and will on average live longer than their non running OAP friends. In 1984 researchers from Stanford University School of Medicine started following 538 over 50s who ran average of about four hours a week. Fast forward 20 years and while 15 percent of the running grannies are dead, this figure is 34 percent in a control sample of non runners. The runners - now in their 70s and 80s - were also found to be living higher-quality lives and more able to perform everyday activities.On average both groups in the study became more disabled after 20 years of aging, but for runners the onset of disability started later with initial disability kicking in 16 years later than non-runners. "The study has a very pro-exercise message," said James Fries, MD, an emeritus professor of medicine at the medical school and the study’s senior author. "If you had to pick one thing to make people healthier as they age, it would be aerobic exercise." The OAP runners admitted the time they spent running each week had dropped from four hours to just 76 minutes ... and for some of them it now takes that long to to put their running shoes on...NewsLite

Running May Help You Live Longer and Healthier

Run for your life! It is never too late to start running, a new study finds. Running may help you to not only live longer, but also live free of disabilities. The study, performed by Stanford University School of Medicine, studied the benefits of running. The researchers based their study on two groups of people 50 and older, a group of runners and non-runners that were monitored for over two decades. Based on the study, if you aren't running already you may want to start. Running helped to widen the gap between the abilities of those in the running group and the non-running group, researchers found. The initial onset of disabilities, were seen 16 years later in the runners, than seen in the non-runners group. The study's senior author James Fries, MD, was surprised that the gap between runners and non-runners even continued to widen as participants reached their 90's, but felt the results may have been a result of the runners' lean body mass and healthier habits, in comparison to the non-runners.Researchers collected yearly questionnaires from the 538 runners and 423 non-runners that helped to explain their ability to perform daily activities, such as bathing, dressing, and walking. The questionnaire also asked questions in regards to their ability to grip objects and maneuver out of a chair. After nineteen years into the study, when most participants would have been in their 70's, the national death records indicated that only 15 percent of the runners had passed away, but 34 percent of the non-runners had passed away. During the beginning of the study, the runners were averaging around four hours a week running and by the end of the study their time running decreased to only around a quarter of that time. Though their time spent running decreased drastically, researchers still saw benefits from running. The study's senior author James Fries, M.D., stated "The study has a very pro-exercise message. If you had to pick one thing to make people healthier as they age, it would be aerobic exercise." Exercise seems to be very beneficial in promoting healthy living. Many doctors recommend some form of exercise for all ages, but in the elderly it is recommended to help stay mobile and independent, as well as promote a healthy heart, lower stress, help with weight problems, and it may even help with sleep problems. The study not only determined that exercise decreased disabilities as we grow older, but running also reduced deaths caused from cardiovascular problems. Regular running also decreased early deaths from cancer, heath disease, and even Alzheimer's and other neurological diseases, the study found...HealthNews

Prescriptions for Health, the Environmental Kind

In a bright studio at New York University, Natalie Jeremijenko welcomes visitors to her environmental health clinic. She wears a white lab coat with a rotated red cross on the pocket. A clipboard with intake forms hangs by the door. Inside, circuit boards, respirators, light bulbs, bike helmets and books on green design clutter the high shelves. In front of a bamboo consultation desk sits a mock medicine cabinet, which turns out to be filled with power tools. Dr. Jeremijenko, an Australian artist, designer and engineer, invites members of the public to the clinic to discuss personal environmental concerns like air and water quality. Sitting at the consultation desk, she also offers them concrete remedies or “prescriptions” for change, much as a medical clinic might offer prescriptions for drugs. “It’s a widely familiar script,” said Dr. Jeremijenko, 41, who has a doctorate in engineering and is an assistant professor of visual art at N.Y.U. “People know how to ring up and make an appointment at their health clinic. But they don’t really know what to do about toxins in the air and global warming, right? “So the whole thing is how do we translate the tremendous amount of anxiety and interest in addressing major environmental issues into something concrete that people can do whose effect is measurable and significant?” Visitors to the clinic talk about an array of concerns, including contaminated land, polluted indoor air and dirty storm-water runoff. Dr. Jeremijenko typically gives them a primer on local environmental issues, especially the top polluters in their neighborhoods. Then she offers prescriptions that include an eclectic mix of green design, engineering and art — window treatments, maybe, or sunflowers, tadpoles or succulents. “People are frustrated by their inability to cope with environmental problems in their apartments and their neighborhoods,” said George Thurston, a professor of environmental medicine at New York University School of Medicine. Dr. Jeremijenko, he continued, “provides a service that’s needed, educating people about what they’re up against and showing them that they can do something themselves while waiting for larger societal solutions.” Dr. Jeremijenko has worked with scores of individuals and community groups since starting the clinic last fall. “I call them impatients,” she said — meaning that they don’t want to wait for legislative action...NYT

Sorting Out Coffee’s Contradictions

When Howard D. Schultz in 1985 founded the company that would become the wildly successful Starbucks chain, no financial adviser had to tell him that coffee was America’s leading beverage and caffeine its most widely used drug. The millions of customers who flock to Starbucks to order a double espresso, latte or coffee grande attest daily to his assessment of American passions. Although the company might have overestimated consumer willingness to spend up to $4 for a cup of coffee — it recently announced that it would close hundreds of underperforming stores — scores of imitators that now sell coffee, tea and other products laced with caffeine reflect a society determined to run hard on as little sleep as possible. But as with any product used to excess, consumers often wonder about the health consequences. And researchers readily oblige. Hardly a month goes by without a report that hails coffee, tea or caffeine as healthful or damns them as potential killers. Can all these often contradictory reports be right? Yes. Coffee and tea, after all, are complex mixtures of chemicals, several of which may independently affect health. Caffeine Myths Through the years, the public has been buffeted by much misguided information about caffeine and its most common source, coffee. In March the Center for Science in the Public Interest published a comprehensive appraisal of scientific reports in its Nutrition Action Healthletter. Its findings and those of other research reports follow. Hydration. It was long thought that caffeinated beverages were diuretics, but studies reviewed last year found that people who consumed drinks with up to 550 milligrams of caffeine produced no more urine than when drinking fluids free of caffeine. Above 575 milligrams, the drug was a diuretic. So even a Starbucks grande, with 330 milligrams of caffeine, will not send you to a bathroom any sooner than if you drank 16 ounces of pure water. Drinks containing usual doses of caffeine are hydrating and, like water, contribute to the body’s daily water needs...NYT

To Stretch or Not to Stretch? The Answer Is Elastic

They’re like one of my running partners, Claire Brown, a 35-year-old triathlete. “I always feel like, well, athletes should do yoga,” Claire said. “It’s supposed to be really good for running, and when I do it regularly, it does loosen up my hips and make me feel better for running.” Yet she puts off going to yoga. “It shouldn’t feel like an obligation, but it always does,” Claire said. “The good classes are often an hour and a half long, and I’m thinking: ‘I could be running, I could be biking. But here I am, stretching and breathing.’ “Isn’t it funny, though, that something that should be calming can actually cause stress because you think you have to do it?” For the bottom line on stretching, there is an official government review by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published in the March 2004 issue of the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. Its conclusion, that the research to date is inadequate to answer most stretching questions, still holds. The best that Dr. Julie Gilchrist, a medical epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and one of the study’s authors, can offer is a few guidelines and observations about why studies have yet to answer the stretching questions...NYT

Bill Gates: Privacy a 'challenge' as software advances

As software gets more powerful, privacy issues pose an "interesting software challenge," says Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. Recounting a short history of software development, Gates said innovations in natural interaction technology are making technology more pervasive. "When interaction gets more natural, computers can be everywhere to listen to you," he said, adding that "society will have to have more explicit rules" governing privacy boundaries around software as technology develops. Gates was speaking here to mark the 10th anniversary of Microsoft Research Asia, one of the software giant's research arms. Explaining the company's focus on software research and development, he said its $7 billion investment in that direction is necessary to push innovation in a market that is "increasingly software driven." "Even in a field like astronomy, it's not just looking through an eyepiece but testing theories, and software lets you do that," he said. Noting that software is extending beyond PCs, Gates said mobile software is a market that is growing rapidly in importance. He added: "Mobile phones are increasingly becoming software-driven platforms, although they were just for voice before." But it is a hardware innovation that will make mobiles more accessible for high-end functions. Amid developments in phone processors and mobile applications, it is screen technology that holds the key to bridging the divide between mobile devices and PCs, Gates noted. "As we get screens that can roll or fold out to be bigger, or mobile devices that have small screens but can project larger images on walls, that line between what's a PC and a mobile will keep getting grayer," Gates said. Another device that is expected to overlap with PC capabilities is the TV, he noted. "Software innovation will be pervasive; it will happen to other things in our lives, like our cars and our TVs," he said. Microsoft is working to place its R&D efforts in speech recognition technology to make TV watching more interactive, according to Gates. In a demonstration shortly after his address, a Microsoft executive showcased a TV that was pulling a video clip from the Internet. He performed a search through the video content by way of speech recognition. This provides more comprehensive search results beyond current methods of running a text query through a video's title and summary, Beyond these developments, more important for the developing world is in putting computers within reach, he added. "Digital access is almost becoming like literacy...Children in poor countries need to get it too," Gates said...CNET

Intel 'Turbo Memory' tries to speed up Windows

Intel's newest version of Turbo Memory is trying to do what Windows doesn't do: transparently optimize Windows for flash memory storage. At the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, Calif., Intel will be demonstrating its latest version of Turbo Memory based on flash memory to accelerate application performance in Windows. Intel is offering a "dashboard" for Windows that allows the user to choose and control which applications or files are loaded into the Intel Turbo Memory cache (based on flash memory chips) for performance acceleration. Intel calls this "User pinning." Custom pinning profiles can be created to pin applications or files that match the user's activity, according to Intel. Data intensive programs, gaming, digital media editing and productivity software are examples of applications that will see the most benefit, according to Intel. Intel is trying to address a longstanding shortcoming of Windows: its inability to take full advantage of flash storage devices. "There are issues related to taking full advantage of the speed of a (flash drive)," said Troy Winslow, marketing manager for the NAND Products Group at Intel, in an interview at the Flash Memory Summit. Avi Cohen, managing partner at Avian Securities, said he believes this should be an innate part of the operating system. "The more interesting way is to have it built into the operating system," said Cohen. "I don't think it gains much traction because I don't think users want to sit there and start selecting what goes where," he said. "It was a valiant effort by Intel to accelerate the move toward solid state on PC," Cohen added. Winslow, however, said that Intel "has shipped million of units" of Turbo Memory and that he expects some notebook makers to integrate it into high-end lines. Interestingly, Windows Vista does have a feature called "ReadyBoost" that can "use storage space on some removable media devices, such as USB flash drives, to speed up your computer," according to Microsoft documentation. This documentation can also be found in "Windows Help and Support" as part of any copy of Vista...CNET

Olympic Games take the gold in the workplace

Olympic Games in Beijing is proving to be a hit in the workplace. Traffic to Olympics-related Web sites soared Monday, the first full workday after the official opening of the games Friday, according to numbers released Wednesday by Nielsen Online. More than 2 million people visited the video section of NBCOlympics.com, up nearly 140 percent from Sunday when the site had about 858,000 visitors, according to Nielsen. Overall visits to the site increased 40 percent to 4.6 million compared with Sunday's 3.3 million. Traffic to Yahoo's Olympics site also skyrocketed, up 86 percent to 5.2 million visitors compared with Sunday's 2.8 million. Mobile usage also saw a significant boost, increasing from 210,000 on Friday to 476,062 on Monday. NBC, which said it polled users, said it was "stunned" at the number of users who were using mobile video download for the first time. Meanwhile, Nielsen Media Research reported that NBC's TV coverage averaged more than 30 million viewers for the first three days of the games, a 26 percent increase compared with the same period during the Athens Games in 2004. The opening ceremony was last week's most-watched program, attracting nearly 35 million viewers. As well as NBC is doing both on TV and on online, it begs the question of whether NBC's policy of delaying popular events online until they have run on TV in prime time was a wise move or overly restrictive...CNET

China Steps Up Scrutiny of a Minority in Beijing

Every morning at 9 a.m., they are at his door. The police come to the small room the young Uighur cook shares with several other Uighurs to check their papers — and to see if there are new arrivals from his homeland of Xinjiang. He has lived here for six years, peaceably and happily. But in the days preceding the Olympics, things changed. The police had been watching him even before recent violent attacks in Xinjiang but when the Chinese authorities began to warn that a Uighur separatist group was trying to disrupt the Games, the scrutiny intensified. The Olympic opening ceremony contained traditional Uighur song and dance. But most of the several thousand Uighurs who work here have left. The Uighurs are an ethnic group of Turkic-speaking Muslims who live in China’s far west. Most who are in Beijing come to make money for a time and then ride a two-day train back to Xinjiang. Many longtime Uighur residents here own halal kebab restaurants. Seasonal workers sell sweet melons grown in the oasis towns along the western deserts, or peddle fruitcakes from rickshaws. In recent weeks, Uighur assailants have been involved in three separate attacks, with targets including border police officers, government buildings and a Xinjiang checkpoint. Because of the increasing tension, some Uighurs interviewed in recent weeks requested anonymity and others gave only a first name. In a neighborhood of warehouses and foreign textile traders, Muslims come to a small mosque to pray. “The Uighurs all went home,” said Ma Yiqing, 55, a Chinese Muslim from the northwestern province of Gansu, standing in the mosque’s courtyard after evening prayers. “During the Olympics, they are getting squeezed tighter.” A young Uighur from central Xinjiang also works in the neighborhood. He has spent most of his life in Beijing, and, unlike some Uighurs, he has grown accustomed to life among Han Chinese. He has Han Chinese friends. His Mandarin is colloquial. He wants to learn Russian, too, so he can do business with traders in the neighborhood. Beijing is his town. Now he has become a target of surveillance, it appears, because of his ethnic background. “There must be some misunderstanding,” he said. Officers often check his identification. Recently he was detained for several hours because he was not carrying his identification, he said. Because he has a steady job he has been allowed to stay, while Uighur traders have disappeared. “It’s not fair,” he said. “They were here to do business — not to attack the Olympics.” Many Han Chinese support the security measures that have included encouraging migrants to leave town. They say it is China’s duty to protect foreign dignitaries during their stay. China has labeled Uighur separatist groups as the top threat to the Games...NYT

Yahoo - Fire Eagle

Yahoo executive Tom Coates recently went to England and rendezvoused with more than 100 random friends who just happened to be in Old Blighty as well. Coates found them thanks to Fire Eagle, a new database service Yahoo launched Tuesday. Fire Eagle scoops up real-world location information the way Web crawlers swallow Web pages and dishes it out to whatever services an individual selects. It is an open platform that will hook up data providers with application makers all over the world. ''Fire Eagle is designed to make every site on the Web, everything that is connected to the network, 'geoaware,'" Coates said. Right now, Fire Eagle is part of the technology behind just a handful of services, including Dopplr, a social network for frequent travelers, and Pownce, an e-mail substitute. But in the future, it could feed information about where you are and where you have been to everything from Internet search engines to coupon providers to your employer or HMO — if you let it. Geolocation services tend to alarm privacy advocates because they make it trivially easy to track individuals and could endanger people who are vulnerable to abuse, such as women who are trying to escape domestic violence. "For individuals who do not want their location to be known, these services could be harmful," said Beth Givens, director of the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse. Coates, who heads product development at Yahoo's Brickhouse incubator, where Fire Eagle was born, said the service is designed to protect users by giving them control of who can see what information, by allowing them to hide and by making it easy for them to delete their data from Fire Eagle.But critics wonder if users will realize that copies of their data will be stored by virtually every application that connects into Fire Eagle as well, making it extremely difficult for anyone to completely erase their tracks...Mercury

Olympics Are A Waste Of Money

Communist regime has spent billions on lavish sports venues, the world's biggest airport terminal, and a huge security operation. All this while sweatshop conditions are widespread and millions are still homeless after May's deadly earthquake in the region. Of course, the official line is the country’s 1.3 billion people are delighted that the Games have arrived. And the groundswell of pride and nationalist fervour in China is obvious. But privately there is anger from some that the leadership continues to declare that running a successful Games is its "number one priority". Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, some in the capital told Sky News the money would have been better spent on helping the country's poor. A 21-year-old student, gazing out across the futuristic cityscape at the "Bird's Nest" centrepiece, said: "It's terrible the money they wasted. "Millions of people live and work in terrible conditions, but the government doesn't think of them. "They have spent our taxes on buildings – and who does it help? It does nothing for the people of this country." A taxi driver, who has family in the impoverished Guizhou province, said: "It’s all for Beijing – but what about the rest of the country? "What about those who lost their homes in the earthquake? What about the people who try to feed their families and send their children out to work?"...Sky

Social Networking Sees Worldwide Growth

Facebook, MySpace and Friendster are all seeing significant growth in their subscriber base -- just not in the United States. According to a report conducted by comScore, a company that measures online digital growth, world-wide growth of social networks has grown by 25 percent, compared to just nine percent in the United States. The region driving the most growth in adapting social networks like Facebook and MySpace is classified as The Middle East-Africa region. In June 2007, comScore recorded 18,226,000 unique visitors in that region. In June 2008 that number jumped to 30,197,000 unique visitors, a jump of 66 percent from the previous year. While North American social network users may have been early Friendster, MySpace and Facebook adopters, the domestic numbers have leveled off. Compared to the Middle East-Africa region, North American network growth was recorded at nine percent. "While the social networking trend first took off in North America, it is beginning to reach a point of maturity in the region," said Jack Flanagan, comScore executive vice president. "However, the phenomenon is still growing rapidly in other regions around the world -- especially as the established American brands turn their focus to developing markets."...CRN

Beijing Olympics 2008 - Chinese Join World Record Swimming Fun

Before Thursday, the National Aquatic Center was a source of national pride for its unique, bubble-wrap architecture. The exploits were largely by foreigners, chief among them American Michael Phelps, who has treated the pool at the so-called Water Cube as if it sat in his back yard in Maryland. Yet Thursday morning, over the final length of the pool, entire sections of the crowd stood, waving red Chinese flags. One Chinese swimmer, Liu Zige, was under world record pace in the women's 200-meter butterfly. Here came another, Jiao Liuyang. Suddenly, Australian favorite Jessicah Schipper was an afterthought. Suddenly, at the fastest swimming meet in history, the home team finally had its moment -- gold and silver, and another world record. On the only day when Phelps didn't swim for what could be a total of eight medals, Liu's world-record swim of 2 minutes 4.18 seconds -- more than a second better than Schipper's old mark -- injected the competition with a new electricity. The morning was capped with a world record for Australia, and a third gold for Stephanie Rice, in the women's 4x200-meter relay, a race in which the United States team, anchored by Katie Hoff, took bronze behind China's silver...WP

Rice says Russia faces isolation

US secretary of state has warned Russia that it risks isolation abroad if does not observe a ceasefire with Georgia and withdraw its troops. "We expect Russia to meet its commitment to cease all military activities in Georgia," she said. Condoleezza Rice is to visit France for talks with President Nicolas Sarkozy, who currently chairs the EU, before visiting Georgia itself on Friday. The US has begun delivering aid by air to the ex-Soviet republic. Washington is showing unwavering support for Georgia in its conflict with Russia, a BBC correspondent notes. Russian forces briefly moved out of the breakaway Georgian province of South Ossetia on Wednesday to destroy military hardware at an abandoned Georgian military base in the nearby town of Gori. Thousands of Russian troops remain in South Ossetia since they drove out a Georgian force which tried to regain control of the de facto independent province in a surprise attack one week ago. They are also deployed in force in Abkhazia, Georgia's other breakaway province, where separatists ejected Georgia's remaining troops this week. Dispatching Ms Rice to Europe, President George W Bush called on Moscow to withdraw its forces from Georgian territory...BBC

Hollywood tickled by 'Tropic Thunder'

The industry crowd at Monday's "Tropic Thunder" preem proved they can certainly take a joke, even when the joke is on them.New Regency's Hutch Parker said the pic "nails it as an action comedy while also delivering on the highest level as a satire of the movie culture." Tom Sherak said the film was "so well cast, it's scary." One industry lawyer said, "Some of the movie stuff is inside, but it's fun to watch Tom Cruise swear." Another attendee noted Robert Downey Jr.'s Oscar-winning-Aussie-doing-blackface role and said, "I wonder if Russell Crowe will see it?" And while developmental disability activists were picketing outside the Village Theater over the use of the word "retard" in the script, a number of guests joked that it's SAG that should be protesting because if anyone gets ridiculed, it's the thesps. Producer Stuart Cornfeld said he saw industry reaction this way: "Hollywood understands it's walking through the room larger than life and loves to see itself as a backdrop for comedy."... Link