Assessing students, assessing ourselves

It's time we started measuring third level research - The Irish Times - Tue, Feb 26, 2013: "Research is akin to venture capital. We need to do a lot to get a little output. Success is rare and failure the norm.

Acceptance rates (success) in decent journals or in gaining leading research grants are often less than 10 per cent. Research grants can take months to complete with no guarantee of success.

And doing a paper takes time. It takes typically in excess of 100 hours of work to get a paper to a stage where one is happy to put it out for even working-paper review. And then it takes a long time to get it published. The paper is usually under review at symposiums and conferences and further hundreds of hours are spent refining and tweaking.

Typically a paper gets published after a couple of anonymous referees have commented on it. Doing this referee job takes time – typically up to five hours reading and writing per paper. If one does 12 reviews a year, that’s 60 hours, or the best part of two working weeks. Imagine the work of an editor of a journal receiving 300 or more papers a year.

Teaching also takes time beyond the classroom. For every hour spent in the class you need three hours to prepare, review, reflect and redo the work. Even if one has a stack of slides and a good strategy, it’s imperative to do a mock runthrough (that takes about the same time as teaching), noting as one does what is outdated, what is wrong, what doesn’t flow and so on. So a 16-hour class contact in the IoT doesn’t leave a lot of time in teaching term to do any research. There are always evenings and weekends, but any IoT staff who wish to research in a significant sense use the summer breaks to do it – the Christmas and Easter are usually taken up with marking essays.

By all means let’s look at metrics of activity. But let’s recall that these metrics typically measure output, not input, and therefore can’t be used as such for the measurement of efficiency or, still less, effectiveness. That’s not to say we should not measure research output. We should.

We have experience in the UK of several generations of research measurement. Many of us have been involved in these as assessors or as units of measurement. We can and should design a model that builds on these and improves on them, that measures research output, across units and the sector. This will show that there are many who simply do not engage in research (as measured). Every academic knows of people who simply turn up, teach and disappear. This puts an unfair burden on those who do research, and it is they who should be shouting loudest for such a metric.

Until universities, the Department of Education and the Higher Education Authority determine where the balance should lie between research , teaching and other roles we cannot begin to reward or discipline academics for “success” and “failure”.

As it is, we are not measuring research in any manner in Ireland.

Perhaps we should start..."

Consulting firms educating the educational institutions

Schools hire consulting firms for growth push - The Economic Times: "Specifically, schools and colleges are looking for advice on compensation structures to attract better faculty and weave in better incentive plans. Like Corporate India, institutes are asking consulting firms like KPMG, Deloitte, Ernst &Young (E&Y) to draw up performance management plans, curricula that will attract industries and help with understanding ways to generate revenue. For the consulting firms, this spells a fresh opportunity."

"The education sector needs external advisers because for a long time they have not hired quality professionals in non-academic areas," says Narayanan Ramaswamy, partner and national head of education, KPMG. Apart from 300 schools, colleges and vocational training institutes, their clients include IIT Kharagpur, Manipal Group, ISB and Pearson Schools. KPMG also advises international schools that are looking for partners in India. "Schools and colleges have never been evaluated in India, unlike companies, and this is a challenge consulting and advisory firms face."

According to India Ratings, a Fitch Group Company, the education sector grew at a compounded annual growth rate of 15.5% from FY05 to FY12. In the past five years, there has been a 20% growth in private colleges, as per consulting major Ernst and Young's records.

Till recently, benchmarking best practices would mean adopting what counterparts in the West do. "This growth will sustain and so colleges have to hone their USP. Therefore the need for consulting companies," says Amitabh Jhingan, partner, Transaction Advisory Services and national sector leader - Education, Ernst & Young India.

Most consulting forms are tasked with helping schools and colleges structure their goals, work on application-based research to attract recruiters and get more funding. "In the past three years, there has been a flurry of private universities but no focus on grooming talent. One has to distinguish performance and reward correctly and explain to teaching aspirants what one can expect in the job," says Sandeep Chaudhary, partner for talent and reward of Aon Hewitt. The group has worked with global universities and will use the experience to "structure the gap that exists in India," says Chaudhary...

Sharing- ownership and sustainable practices

Investors Demand Climate-Risk Disclosure in 2013 Proxies - Bloomberg: "Bloomberg BNA -- Shareholders are filing resolutions asking companies to disclose physical risks posed by climate change for the first time this proxy season, according to representatives of sustainable investor groups.
Shareholders also are continuing to file an increasing number of sustainability related resolutions asking companies to set greenhouse gas emission reduction goals, publish sustainability reports, pursue energy efficiency, and disclose information about hydraulic fracturing operations.
Although shareholder resolutions on sustainability rarely receive a majority vote, they can still prompt companies to take action to avoid risk to their reputation or address investor concerns, said Jonas Kron, director of shareholder advocacy at Trillium Asset Management. In addition, investors often are engaged in discussions with companies that lead to resolutions being withdrawn before they go up for a vote."

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Fast and Junk- fills and pills

Fight unhealthy food, not fat people | Jill Filipovic | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: ""Nutrient-deficient chemically-processed "food" in increasingly larger sizes is bad for all of our bodies, whether we're fat or thin or somewhere in between. So is the culture in which fast food is able to thrive. Americans work more than ever before; we take fewer vacation days and put in longer hours, especially since the recession hit. The US remains the only industrialized country without national paid parental leave and without mandatory annual vacation time; we also have no federal law requiring paid sick days. Eighty-five percent of American men and 66% of women work more than 40 hours per week (in Norway, for comparison, 23% of men work more than 40-hour weeks, and only 7% of women).

Despite all this work, American income levels remain remarkably polarized, with the richest few controlling nearly all of the wealth. In one of the wealthiest countries on earth, one in seven people rely on federal food aid, with most of the financial benefits going to big food companies who are also able to produce cheap, nutritionally questionable food thanks to agricultural subsidies. The prices of the worst foods are artificially depressed, the big food lobbies have enormous power, and the biggest loser is the American public, especially low-income folks who spend larger proportions of their income on food but face systematic impediments to healthy eating and exercise..."

Sewage to Riches, via methane

Sewage Status Grows as Resource for Utilities to Skiers - Bloomberg: "United Utilities Plc and Severn Trent Plc, Britain’s biggest publicly traded water companies, are increasingly feeding human waste into tanks of bacteria whose methane emissions generate electricity.
Sewage-derived power supplies 22 percent of Severn Trent’s energy, almost double that of 2005. At United Utilities, it’s 14 percent. British utilities are shifting fecal matter to vats of bacteria that consume the waste, releasing biogas that’s burned to drive water treatment. The result is lower energy bills and surplus power sent to the grid that heat more U.K. tea kettles."

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How much profit can be squeezed out of other people's misery?

Big pharma's excuses for the monopolies on medicine won't wash | Dylan Gray | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "Several years ago, I began to learn about what I would come to regard as one of the great crimes in human history, whereby millions of people in Africa and elsewhere were cynically allowed to die of Aids, while western governments and pharmaceutical companies blocked access to available low-cost medication. The outrage I felt as I discovered the details of this story was exceeded only by a deep sense of betrayal mixed with shame for not having known more about it in the first place."

1. Fire In The Blood
2. Production year:2012
3. Country: Rest of the world
4. Runtime: 84 mins
5. Directors: Dylan Mohan Gray
6. More on this film

Today, I find those feelings mirrored in audiences who see my film, Fire in the Blood, which, incredibly, is the first comprehensive account of this horrendous atrocity and how it was eventually halted. As anyone who knows anything about pharmaceuticals will tell you, the name of the game is monopoly. In the case of medicine, monopolies emanate from patents. Typically a patent lasts for 20 years, but drug companies are expert at getting them extended. As long as the monopoly is in place, the company selling the drug can essentially charge whatever they want for it. Pricing is unrelated either to the cost of production (normally a few pennies per pill) or how much was spent in development, but a simple calculation of how to maximise revenue. Though most western countries do have price controls, these typically only keep price levels consistent with other comparable countries, so restraints are minimal.

Why does society accept this? The narrative the industry has been immensely successful in selling is that it spends vast sums of money on research and development, that this R&D is very high risk, and that monopolies and high prices are a "necessary evil" needed to finance innovation of new medicines. These arguments do not hold up under scrutiny.84% of worldwide funding for drug discovery research comes from government and public sources, against just 12% from pharma companies, which on average spend 19 times more on marketing than they do on basic research (paywalled link). When we screened our film at the Sundance festival last month, audiences were dismayed to learn how much of their tax money goes to discover medicines which are then sold back to them at monopoly prices nearly half of all Americans surveyed say they have trouble affording.

In developing countries, where people typically pay for medicines out of pocket, the situation is far worse. Pharmaceutical company representatives have told me that in (relatively prosperous) South Africa, they price their products for the top 5% of the market, while in India their customer base might be just the top 1.5%. The rest of the population is of no interest. At the same time, drug companies are working tooth-and-nail to cut off supplies of lower-cost generic drugs originating in countries such as India, Brazil and Thailand, to make sure that they don't miss out on a single customer who could possibly pay their sky-high prices.

At the industry's behest, governments in the US and Europe use a dizzying variety of trade mechanisms, threats of sanctions and so on to curtail supplies of affordable medicine in the global south. The potential impact of these measures in human terms is nothing less than cataclysmic. As Peter Mugyenyi, director of Africa's largest Aids treatment centre says: "We are on standby awaiting another bloodbath."

To any suggestion that the prevailing system of monopolies on medicine is hugely inefficient, immoral and unsustainable, industry apologists contend that "it's tried and tested", whereas any proposed alternative would represent a massive gamble. This, again, is totally disingenuous. A vital first step is to raise the bar for granting patents: 90% of drug patents have no meaningful clinical advantages for patients, but nonetheless impede access.

More significantly, for 70 years Canada had a system prohibiting monopolies on medicine, where patent holders received a statutory royalty on sales of generic equivalents. This maintained profit incentives for innovation, while ensuring the public was not held to ransom by monopoly pricing (it did not, however, produce the windfall profits to which the industry is addicted – so US trade negotiators had it killed underNafta).

This year may well be a tipping point. Relentless pressure is being applied to poor countries by western governments determined to strangle supplies of lower-cost medication relied upon by the vast majority of the world's people who will never be able to afford branded drugs, and the outlook for access to medicine in the global south grows bleaker by the day. As unthinkable as it may seem, the horror that saw millions of people die unnecessarily of HIV/Aids while being denied safe and effective generic medicines produced at a fraction of the prices brand-name companies were charging, could be a mere taste of things to come.

Domino's Wedding, Haagen Daz'ian Style

MNC food giants like Domino's, Costa Coffee, Haagen-Dazs eye a fast buck at Indian weddings - The Economic Times: "NEW DELHI: The big fat Indian wedding is getting bigger, fatter and now branded, with multinational fast-food chains such as Domino's, Costa Coffee, Haagen-Dazs and Baskin Robbins adorning several marriage parties across big cities.

After introducing limousines and even helicopters to ferry the bride and groom, exotic theme-based decorations, and expensive gifts for guests, branded food and beverage stalls have become a new fad among marriage hosts.

Davindra Kapoor, a Delhi-based caterer, says 15-20% of weddings these days demand branded stalls along with traditional snacks and cuisines. Kapoor's SK Caterers counts Honda, Aditya Birla Group and Escorts Group among its corporate clients.

Fast-food majors see this trend not only as a new business channel, but also as a big fat opportunity to promote their brands.

"A lot of people at weddings are our target customers where they get a chance to sample our pizza," Harneet Singh Rajpal, vice-president of marketing at Domino's, says. "It gives us visibility... and is a fantastic consumer connect," he says."

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Unnecessary Medical Tests, Procedures-Doctors cutting u

Doctors Call Out 90 More Unnecessary Medical Tests, Procedures - Forbes: "The new lists include recommendations that advise medical-care providers:

·         “Don’t use feeding tubes in patients with advanced dementia.”

·         “Don’t perform routine annual Pap tests in women 30 – 65 years of age.”

·        “Don’t automatically use CT scans to evaluate children’s minor head injuries.”

·         “Avoid doing stress tests using echocardiographic images to assess cardiovascular risk in persons who have no symptoms and a low risk of having coronary disease.”

·         “Don’t routinely treat acid reflux in infants with acid suppression therapy.”"

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Moral underpinning: Taoiseach Enda Kenny apologises, P.M. Cameron avoids

Kenny offers emotional apology to Magdalene women - The Irish Times - Wed, Feb 20, 2013: "Taoiseach Enda Kenny apologised “unreservedly” yesterday to those who spent time in the Magdalene laundries and said the Government would establish a fund to assist the women within three months.

Mr Kenny’s voice choked with emotion as he concluded his address to the Dáil when former senator Martin McAleese’s report on the institutions was discussed in a rare non-partisan atmosphere.

“I, as Taoiseach, on behalf of the State, the Government and our citizens, deeply regret and apologise unreservedly to all those women for the hurt that was done to them, and for any stigma they suffered, as a result of the time they spent in a Magdalene laundry.”"


Cameron Stops Short of Apology Over Amritsar Massacre - Bloomberg: "Prime Minister David Cameron will stop short of making an apology for the 1919 killing by the British army of hundreds of unarmed civilians in Amritsar, a massacre that galvanized India’s independence movement.
Cameron will today visit the Golden Temple in the north Indian city, the spiritual home to the world’s 20 million Sikhs, ending a three-day visit to the South Asian nation, his office said. It’s the first time a serving U.K. premier has visited the site of the massacre, Jallianwala Bagh.
“There are ties of history -- both the good and the bad,” Cameron said in New Delhi yesterday. “In Amritsar, I want to take the opportunity to pay my respects at Jallianwala Bagh. This visit to Punjab is what my visit to India is all about -- strengthening and deepening the ties between our two countries.”"

Doctors' Rx- not an easy one to take for the fast food joints and soda purveyors

Doctors demand soft drinks tax and healthier hospital food to tackle obesity | Society | The Guardian: "Britain's 220,000 doctors are demanding a 20% increase in the cost of sugary drinks, fewer fast food outlets near schools and a ban on unhealthy food in hospitals to prevent the country's spiralling obesity crisis becoming unresolvable.

The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges is calling for action by ministers, the NHS, councils and food firms, as well as changes in parental behaviour, to break the cycle of "generation after generation falling victim to obesity-related illnesses and death".

In a report spelling out the problem in stark terms, the academy says doctors are "united in seeing the epidemic of obesity as the greatest public health crisis facing the UK. The consequences of obesity include diabetes, heart disease and cancer and people are dying needlessly from avoidable diseases.""

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Air and Water - challenges for society

Chinese struggle through 'airpocalypse' smog | World news | The Observer:

"A prolonged bout of heavy pollution over the last month, which returned with a vengeance for a day last week – called the "airpocalypse" or "airmageddon" by internet users – has fundamentally changed the way that Chinese people think about their country's toxic air. The event was worthy of its namesake. On one day, pollution levels were 30 times higher than levels deemed safe by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Flights were cancelled. Roads were closed. One hospital in east Beijing reported treating more than 900 children for respiratory issues. Bloomberg found that for most of January, Beijing's air was worse than that of an airport smoking lounge.

The smog's most threatening aspect is its high concentration of PM 2.5 – particulate matter that is small enough to lodge deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream, causing respiratory infections, asthma, lung cancer, cerebrovascular disease, and possibly damaging children's development.

On one day, pollution levels were 30 times higher than levels deemed safe by the World Health Organisation (WHO). Flights were cancelled. Roads were closed. One hospital in east Beijing reported treating more than 900 children for respiratory issues. Bloomberg found that for most of January, Beijing's air was worse than that of an airport smoking lounge.

The smog's most threatening aspect is its high concentration of PM 2.5 – particulate matter that is small enough to lodge deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream, causing respiratory infections, asthma, lung cancer, cerebrovascular disease, and possibly damaging children's development. The WHO has estimated that outdoor air pollution accounts for two million deaths per year, 65% of them in Asia. Yet the smog has become more than a health hazard in China – it has become a symbol of widespread dissatisfaction with the government's growth-first development strategy. Feelings of resigned helplessness have given way to fear, anger, and society-wide pressure to change the status quo.

The Lunar New Year, which came last Sunday, usually coincides with clear blue skies – an estimated 9m cars depart from the capital, and its emissions-spewing factories shut down as workers go on holiday. Yet the smog came back with a vengeance on Wednesday. Environmental authorities sent text messages to Beijing residents urging them to mitigate the pollution by refraining from the long-held holiday tradition of lighting fireworks. According to state media, they took heed. Fireworks sales fell 37% compared with last year.

"PM 2.5 and data measurement issues with regard to air quality have entered into mainstream Chinese life," said Angel Hsu, a doctoral candidate at Yale University. Hsu has tracked usage of the term "PM 2.5" on Sina Weibo, China's most popular microblog, over the last two years. In January 2011, it was mentioned about 200 times. Last month, the number soared above three million.

In China, PM 2.5 has acquired a symbolic weight to parallel its medical gravitas. Young internet users post photos of themselves wearing air filtration face masks. One popular mask is hot pink; another looks like a panda bear. Last spring, Shanghai hosted a PM 2.5-themed rock music festival. A music video called "Beijing, Beijing (Big Fog Version)" went viral on video sharing websites. "Who is searching in the fog? Who is weeping in the fog? Who is living in the fog? Who is dying in the fog," A man croons over images of cars crawling along smog-choked highways.

Experts say that the last month's pollution was probably caused initially by a cold snap, forcing huge use of coal, followed by a rare temperature inversion, which trapped emissions under a blanket of warm air. Others say that it could be related to a prolonged period of high humidity, trapping particulate matter in the air. Pollution levels depend heavily on the force and direction of the wind. A strong north-eastern gust can blow the smog out to sea; a few stagnant hours are enough to make noon look like early evening.

The standard international measurement for air quality – the US Air Quality Index, or AQI – rates air quality on a scale of zero to 500. With experience, it becomes possible to guess the AQI in Beijing without looking at official readings. One hundred correlates to a thin grey gauze hovering above the horizon. When the index hits 200, the sky is visible only in a small patch directly overhead. An AQI reading of 300 blots out the sun, smothering the city in drab uniformity. When the AQI reached 755 on 12 January, the worst day on record, the air felt like industrial smoke – chemical-tasting, eye-watering.

On particularly smoggy days, the toxic cloud is visible in satellite photos. The worst of the last month's pollution stretched 1,100 miles south, closing highways near the south-western city Guiyang. When the smog clears, it doesn't simply vanish, but instead drifts to surrounding countries. January's smog spurred Japanese authorities to release health warnings to people living in the country's western cities. Traces of China's smog have been detected as far afield as California.

The Beijing municipal government has taken steps to curb the pollution, temporarily shutting down factories and ordering government cars off the roads. While propaganda authorities used to quash reports of air pollution for fear that they could spark social unrest, Chinese newspapers were allowed to report freely on the crisis. Shanghai's Environmental Protection Bureau has designed a cartoon accompaniment to its AQI readings – a pigtailed girl with big anime-style eyes, green-haired and smiling when the index reads "excellent" but maroon-haired and weepy when smog rolls in.

"I'm pretty optimistic that this happened at the right time to prompt the most action possible," said Deborah Seligsohn, an expert on China's environment at University of California, San Diego. President Xi Jinping took the reins of the Communist party in November; incoming prime minister Li Keqiang has promised to make environmental protection a focus of his tenure. Beijing authorities hope to wean the city off coal and implement stricter vehicle emissions standards by 2016.

Seligsohn added that changes would take a while. "If Beijing were surrounded by cities that were doing the same thing that Beijing was doing, it would be fine, but it isn't," she said. A short drive from central Beijing, the landscape fans out into sprawling, dusty plains, where farmers burn coal to heat their concrete homes. Small factories there often escape the notice of environmental watchdogs. PM 2.5, she explained, is produced by four airborne pollutants – sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxides, volatile organic compounds, and black carbon – each of which would require its own slew of regulations to curb.

People have begun to take protection into their own hands. "People are starting to treat air purifiers as a necessary appliance like a washing machine or computer," said Bi Xiuyan, a 56-year-old product salesperson for Amway. Bi has sold about 50 air purifiers in the last month, each of which costs £960, about twice the average monthly income for Beijing residents. "Everybody needs to breathe," she said.

Louie Cheng, the president of Shanghai-based Pure Living China, a small company that tests indoor air pollution, said that the current situation boosted the company's web traffic 30-fold. "Literally you can see it – this isn't compared with a year ago, this is compared with a month ago," he said. Cheng said that he helped start the company three years ago when an expat friend with an asthmatic daughter couldn't find a local company to competently test his house for pollutants. His client-base has tripled since January, and now includes more than half of Shanghai and Beijing's international schools. "It's just hard to keep up with the demand," he said.

Awareness of the problem has spread beyond major urban centres. Ma Shiying, who sells moist towelettes in the small coastal city of Weifang, Shandong province, heeded the government's warning and lit fewer fireworks this year. "Over the past few months, the whole world has begun to pay close attention to this problem," he said. "It's become impossible for anyone to ignore."

Yet interpretations of the issue vary. Eva Zhong, the head of exports for a fireworks manufacturer in Hunan province, said that the government's fireworks warnings were misplaced. "Fireworks are very innocent," she said. "Car exhaust is a far greater problem."

Despite the government figures, she added, her company's sales this year have been unscathed.






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Li-ion batteries- on 787, off 350

BBC News - Airbus A350 to avoid Boeing 787-style lithium-ion batteries: "Airbus says it will not use lithium-ion batteries in its forthcoming A350 plane because of problems that have grounded rival Boeing's 787 Dreamliner.

The European planemaker said it would use traditional nickel-cadmium batteries instead, as already used in the A380 and other models.

Investigations are continuing after battery problems came to light on 787s operated by Japan's top two airlines.

Airbus said they remained "unexplained to the best of our knowledge".

The firm said it did not expect any further delays to the launch of the A350. The maiden flight is due to take place later this year, with the first passenger flight expected in the second half of 2014.

In a statement, Airbus said it was "confident" that the lithium-ion battery that it had been developing with French battery-maker Saft was "robust and safe"."

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Continuing the fine tradition of Chicago politicians- J J Jr.

BBC News - Jesse Jackson Jr charged with misusing campaign funds: "A former congressman and son of a prominent civil rights leader has been charged with spending campaign funds on personal expenses.

Jesse Jackson Jr of Illinois is accused of misusing $750,000 (£483,000).

He and his wife Sandi Jackson, who is charged with tax fraud in the matter, intend to plead guilty, media report.

Mr Jackson, a 47-year-old Democrat, resigned in November after acknowledging he was being treated for bipolar disorder.

"I offer no excuses for my conduct and I fully accept my responsibility for the improper decisions and mistakes I have made," Mr Jackson said in a statement."

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Fat-Cat Pay - Not Swiss Cheese

Fat-Cat Pay Makes Swiss So Mad CEO Salaries Facing National Vote - Bloomberg:

"With more than 100,000 Swiss citizens having signed a petition to limit “fat-cat” pay, voters will decide at a March 3 referendum whether top executives should have their compensation set by shareholders. While a poll shows a majority may vote yes, the industry’s lobby group warns that it will drive out tax-paying companies and is campaigning for a softer counter proposal.

“If you have this kind of limitation on executive pay, why should an American company put their European headquarters into Switzerland,” Philip Mosimann, CEO of Bucher Industries AG, a Swiss maker of street sweepers with a market valuation of 2.1 billion francs ($2.3 billion), said in an interview. “They would leave. I’m certain of that.”"



“If you have this kind of limitation on executive pay, why should an American company put their European headquarters into Switzerland,” Philip Mosimann, CEO of Bucher Industries AG, a Swiss maker of street sweepers with a market valuation of 2.1 billion francs ($2.3 billion), said in an interview. “They would leave. I’m certain of that.”





The vote is the brainchild of Thomas Minder, a Swiss lawmaker and managing director of herbal toothpaste business Trybol AG, whose petition blames highly-paid “fat cats” -- “Abzocker” in German -- for the financial crisis. If successful, the proposal will give shareholders an annual ballot on executives’ pay and block big payouts for new hires and for managers when they leave companies.

“Shameless executive payouts have very clearly come from the U.S.,” said Brigitta Moser-Harder, an activist shareholder, who owns shares of the country’s biggest bank UBS AG and largest engineering company ABB Ltd. and regularly speaks on the subject at annual shareholder meetings and on Swiss TV. “People have been outraged about high earners for years.”
Schaffhausen to Fordham

Minder, 53, has led a five-year campaign after collecting the signatures needed for a referendum. The businessman, who has an MBA from New York’s Fordham University and runs his family’s 113-year-old company, grew up near Schaffhausen, a small city bordering Germany that’s home to Swiss companies such as automobile parts-maker Georg Fischer AG.

The former Swiss army company commander wants to curb what he sees as a culture of chiefs who only stay for a short time and are still rewarded with high salaries, according to his campaign website. Minder plans to eliminate sign-on bonuses, as well as severance packages and extra incentives for completing merger transactions. He proposes to punish executives who violate the terms with as long as three years in jail.
Swiss Referendums

A survey conducted in January by researcher gfs.bern showed 65 percent of 1,217 voters supported Minder’s proposal. Switzerland holds regular referendums for issues that are able to draw the required 100,000 signatures. In 1989, an initiative to get rid of the Swiss army was rejected by the Swiss people.

Opposition to excessive executive pay has been building in Switzerland, even though the country has the highest average monthly wage in Europe. Minder and Moser-Harder say payouts such as the 71 million francs of shares that Dougan, Credit Suisse’s CEO, received in 2010 under an incentive program created five years earlier show how executive compensation has become disconnected from average salaries.

At least five of Europe’s 20 highest-paid CEOs work for Swiss companies, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The list includes three Americans, Dougan, Joe Jimenez of Novartis AG and Joe Hogan of ABB, as well as Roche’s Austrian chief Schwan and Nestle’s Bulcke of Belgium.

Jimenez, Switzerland’s highest earning CEO, got 13.2 million Swiss francs in 2012 and Schwan received 12.5 million francs. That compares with an average of about 2.7 million euros (3.3 million francs) for CEOs of companies in Europe’s Stoxx 600 Index which have disclosed 2012 executive salaries, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
Public Support

Minder’s supporters see swollen salaries as an “Americanization” imported by investment bankers in the 1990s. The proposal has broad support among low- and middle-income earners and also among those with vocational training, Susanne Leutenegger Oberholzer, a Social Democratic Party lawmaker, said at a Jan. 31 press conference in Bern.

The plan would result in one of the world’s strictest laws on executive pay, according to Robert Kuipers, a partner in charge of remuneration services in PriceWaterhouseCoopers’ Zurich office. The U.K., by comparison, has instituted a non- binding “say on pay” rules.

Switzerland would become less attractive to foreign multi- nationals such as offshore drilling contractor Transocean Ltd. and oilfield service company Weatherford International Ltd., which relocated because of liberal corporation laws, taxes and infrastructure, said Meinrad Vetter, an official at Economiesuisse, a lobby group for Swiss companies.
Counter Proposal

Economiesuisse has budgeted as much as 8 million francs on a campaign to block the initiative and backs a counter proposal from the government, which would automatically come into force next year if the Swiss people reject Minder’s law.

Switzerland’s largest corporations such as Novartis, Credit Suisse, Syngenta AG and UBS back the counter proposal, which omit Minder’s demands for a binding shareholder vote, prison sentences and a sign-on bonus ban. At the same time, the government plan would allow shareholders of individual companies to decide if they want to introduce a binding vote.

Economiesuisse’s Vetter said it was necessary to address the concerns of enraged voters.

“It’s more a question about social cohesion,” he said. “We need an answer to the Minder initiative and an answer to the anger of Swiss people about executive salaries.”
Economic Index

Switzerland’s ranking as the world’s most competitive country in the World Economic Forum’s annual index won’t be affected by the vote’s outcome, at least in the short term, because executive pay isn’t part of the overall assessment, said Margareta Drzeniek, who is part of the team that covers Switzerland at the WEF. It may even be a positive in the long term, assuming such a change improves social cohesion, she said.

Novartis’s Jimenez has said voters shouldn’t ignore the negative consequences of Minder’s initiative for some of the country’s biggest employers.

“From a competitive standpoint, it’s very difficult for me as a CEO to hire outside talent if any offer I make is contingent on a shareholder vote,” Jimenez said last month. “I think it puts Novartis or any Swiss company at a competitive disadvantage.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Patrick Winters in Zurich at pwinters3@bloomberg.net; Eva von Schaper in Munich at evonschaper@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Simon Thiel at sthiel1@bloomberg.net

Costly for U.S., Easy for India

India bought helicopters Obama rejected as ‘costly’ - The Times of India: "NEW DELHI: US president Barack Obama had found a variant of the AW-101 helicopters too exorbitant to pass muster in 2009. But the Indian government had no such qualms while inking the Rs 3,546-crore deal for 12 plush AW-101 helicopters just a year later in 2010."
The American "Marine One", the call sign of theUS Marine Corps helicopter which ferries the US President, would of course have been much more high-tech and "souped-up" helicopter compared to the Indian variant.

Obama had shot down the Marine One project, under which the US Navy was to have acquired 28 helicopters, after cost escalations had taken the overall cost to over $13 billion in June 2009, as per some estimates. 

Clean Energy Users

Top 15 Users of Clean Energy: Companies, Cities, Universities - Bloomberg: "Companies are taking the lead. Intel, Kohl's, Whole Foods and Staples (to name a few) all use 100 percent green power for their U.S. operations, according to a ranking of top renewable consumers released last week by the EPA.

Click ahead for the EPA's ranking of the top 15 consumers of America's cleanest energy: solar, wind, geothermal, biogas, biomass, and low-impact small hydroelectric sources, ranked by total green-power use. The agency's list, which isn't comprehensive, draws from 1,300 companies, municipalities and universities that belong to its Green Power Partnership."

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100 billion or 1 billion: makes no difference

Aspiration of countrymen to ensure growth: Mukesh Ambani - The Economic Times: "NEW DELHI: Reposing faith in India's vibrant democracy, Reliance Industries' ( RILBSE -0.79 %) Chairman Mukesh Ambani today exuded optimism over the country's long-term growth saying its 100 billion people, each one of whom is a part of the system, will ensure prosperity with their aspirations.

"I am very bullish on India because it is really the aspiration of a billion people and ours is a county where all the billion count. There are some countries in the world where one person counts, there are some where the Politburo or 12 people count. "

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Eco-Challenges

David Miliband to head global fight to prevent eco-disaster in oceans | Environment | The Observer:

An environmental catastrophe with greater economic impact than the global financial crash is occurring on the high seas, according to David Miliband. The former foreign secretary is to lead a new, high-level international effort to end the lawlessness of the oceans, which will be unveiled this week.

The high seas, which lie beyond any national jurisdiction, cover almost half the Earth's surface and decades of over-exploitation have caused trillions of dollars' worth of fish catches to be lost. Pirate fishing, often using slave labour and linked to cocaine and weapons smuggling, is rife and the damage caused to life in the oceans is harming the habitability of the whole planet. Future risks include sea-floor mining and roguegeoengineering.

"The worst of the current system is plunder and pillage on a massive scale," Miliband told the Observer. "It is the ecological equivalent of the financial crisis. The long-term costs of the mismanagement of our oceans are at least as great as long-term costs of the mismanagement of the financial system. We are living as if there are three or four planets instead of one, and you can't get away with that."

Miliband, in an unpaid role, will lead the new Global Ocean Commission, along with Nelson Mandela's former finance minister, Trevor Manuel, and the former president of Costa Rica, José María Figueres. The launch in London on Tuesday will introduce further commissioners, including more former heads of state and senior ministers from leading G20 nations.

"We are coming to a crunch time: 2014 needs to be the year when we reverse the degradation of the high seas," said Miliband, referring to the deadline set at the UN's Earth Summit in 2012 for the first ever laws to protect biodiversity in the open oceans.

Miliband knows from personal experience the difficulty of the task. In 2009, as foreign secretary, he established the world's biggest marine reserve in which no fishing is allowed: more than 640,000 square kilometres around the Chagos archipelago in the Indian ocean. However, last month a bitterly fought legal challenge from Mauritius was allowed to proceed at the international court of arbitration in The Hague.

Professor Callum Roberts, a marine biologist at the University of York, said protection for the open oceans was desperately needed: "The high seas are the last and most neglected of all natural spaces. They are home to some extraordinary species, for example, the leatherback turtle. It comes from a lineage 100m years old, but has declined by 95% in the last 20-30 years due to our depredations. Dolphins and sharks are in freefall.

"The oceans make up 95% of the living space on the planet and what happens there is extremely important for the habitability of our planet, from oxygen production to dealing with carbon dioxide and other pollution. Our impact means the oceans will do that less well, with serious consequences for humanity."

Miliband said: He said the seniority of the people leading the new commission was "really impressive" and pointed to the achievements of an analogous commission in the United States that successfully worked with the federal government to improve protection in American waters.

"We are going to try to fashion practical solutions that are an environmental win and an economic win, and with a commission which is avowedly across north-south, east-west, rich-poor divides."

He noted that the destruction of fisheries by over-exploitation costs $50bn (£32bn) a year in lost catches, according to the World Bank, totalling $1.5tn over the past three decades. This damages the livelihoods of the 200 million people supported by fishing, of whom 90% live in poor, developing countries.

A billion people already rely on fish as their key source of food, but catches are falling. With the global population expected to swell by three billion in coming decades, stocks must be allowed to recover to allow even greater catches to be sustainably harvested in future. Three-quarters of global fish stocks are already overfished or on the brink of being so, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation; not just well-publicised species such as tuna, but also many of the top 10 biggest fisheries, including Pacific anchovy, Alaskan pollock and Atlantic herring.

Pirate fishing is also a major issue, estimated to account for one-fifth of the global total market, worth $10bn-$23bn a year. The UN's Office on Drugs and Crime found that international fishing operators exploited corrupt systems even in nationally controlled waters. It also found that international gangs, often smuggling cocaine and weapons, had plundered valuable fish and often committed human rights abuses. The slave labour they use, sometimes children, are held as de factoprisoners of the sea, and deaths and severe physical and sexual abuse have been reported.

The governance of international waters – via the UN's 30-year-old laws of the seas, drafted to encourage exploitation – is dismissed as a "tragedy" by Miliband: "The current enforcement on the high seas is inadequate at best and worthless at worst." Roberts dubs the laws as "useless" and said that, when they were written in the 1970s, "people thought the resources of the oceans were limitless". Even so, the US has never ratified the treaty, deeply undermining its authority, while territorial disputes over the Arctic and Southern oceans rage on.

"The high seas were protected for thousands of years because people simply could not get there," said Miliband. "Exploitation has increased over 30 years, but the governance framework has not kept up." For example, there is no international mechanism at all for protecting biodiversity in the deep oceans.

New laws will also have to anticipate the growth of deep-sea mining for metals and potentially the dumping of tonnes of iron or minerals in the oceans in a bid to halt climate change – so-called geoengineering, Miliband said. In 2012, a 10,000 sq km geoengineering test took place off Canada without any authorisation.

"But enforcement in the modern world is not going to be a great new navy of ships polluting their way around the high seas," said Miliband. Satellite monitoring could be one solution, while another would be to force fishing vessels to carry location beacons at all times, as many merchant vessels already do.

FISH: BUYERS' GUIDE

Cod

With the exception of stocks from the north-eastern Arctic, Iceland and the eastern Baltic, cod is overfished and inefficiently managed. Certain fisheries' closures have been recommended until stocks recover to safe levels. Choose line-caught where available.

Herring

A resilient species, it is caught using fishing methods that are relatively 'clean' and non-damaging to the seabed. It generally makes for a good sustainable choice. Best choices are from Norwegian, North Sea and Icelandic fisheries.

Haddock

Stocks are at healthy levels but avoid during the breeding season (Feb-June). line-caught fish.

Tuna

World catches have doubled in the last decade and all seven fished species of tuna are under pressure. For the most sustainable option, choose skipjack, yellowfin or albacore. Avoid eating bluefin tuna, which is a threatened species.

Anchovy

It can sustain high levels of fishing pressure, but has an important role near the base of the food chain and the impact of its large-scale removal from the marine ecosystem is poorly understood.

Ireland: making tough choices

Kenny says ECB deal could cut borrowing by €20 billion - The Irish Times - Thu, Feb 07, 2013: "A debt deal to cut the cost of Ireland’s toxic bank rescue could slash €1 billion from tax hikes and spending cuts in upcoming budgets, the Government has claimed.

Taoiseach Enda Kenny said the agreement was not a silver bullet but declared that it would reduce state borrowing by €20 billion over the next decade.

“Step-by-step, this Government is undoing the disastrous banking policies that brought this state to the brink of national bankruptcy,” the Taoiseach said.

“The agreement has reduced Ireland’s vulnerability from the huge debts taken on by Irish taxpayers as a result of the cost of rescuing failed private banks.”

The Government did not ask for a write-down on the Anglo debt during negotiations with the European Central Bank (ECB).

“We always said that we were not looking for any write downs. Anybody who knows the European situation knows that the ECB does not do write downs,” Minister for Finance Michael Noonan said."

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Indian weddings- conspicuous examples of visible consumption

Thailand Corners the Big Fat Indian Wedding Market - Bloomberg:

"The Greeks can say what they like -- nobody does the big fat wedding the way Indians do. The Indian nuptials' long parade of rituals and feasts lasts several days and, even at its smallest, involves a few hundred guests and often just as many staff members.

Indians never spend so lavishly on anything as they do on weddings -- and they've never spent as much on weddings as they do today, two decades after the liberalization of the economy and the revolution in consumer consciousness that followed it. The Indian wedding industry is now worth more than $25 billion a year -- and it's growing at an estimated 20 percent a year. If marrying was the central activity of the Indian economy, we'd knock out China in a few years."

Marriage in India has always involved a kind of economic explosion in the life of the family. During the long decades of socialism after India became independent in 1947, the economy grew at a dismal rate every year; jobs were scarce, consumer goods were of poor quality and in short supply, and the first instinct of the middle class and poor was to save. But even then, families, whether urban or rural, could always be relied on to spend well in excess of their resources for weddings. This was as much for reasons of social prestige as out of a desire to include everybody in the family's networks of blood, friendship and business. (Also, there was the pressure of the old Indian marriage custom, which often has a dark side, of dowry.)

But now, two decades of India's sometimes incoherent experiment with capitalism have created so much new money that big weddings have to be bigger and better than every other wedding. (And there are always thousands of weddings -- on one particularly auspicious day in the Hindu calendar last November, there were more than 30,000 in the capital, New Delhi.) In a recent piece in the Hindustan Times, the writer Ira Trivedi reported on going to 32 weddings on the same night in Delhi:

The speed of economic growth in India, which is responsible for the creation of overnight fortunes, is also creating a conspicuous, yet almost desperate type of consumption at weddings. The average budget for an Indian wedding ceremony in the middle class is estimated to be US$ 34,000… The upper-middle and rich classes are estimated to spend upward of US$ 1 million… This doesn’t include cash and valuables given as part of a dowry.

Today, Indians travel far more frequently for business, study, employment and pleasure. After decades of being sequestered within their own country by bad economics and red tape, the country's middle and upper classes have come to appreciate the prospects and opportunities available in a globalized world. And as costs for weddings have increased at home, more affluent Indians are looking at other South Asian countries not as honeymoon destinations but as wedding venues.

Top of this list is Thailand, which is the world's favorite destination for foreign weddings and is only a four-hour flight from Delhi and Mumbai. To Indian families, it offers the twin advantages of a foreign jaunt in a beautiful locale as well as cheaper prices. As one Thai wedding site explains on a page called "Why Thailand?":

The value of the Thai currency (the baht) is similar to the Indian rupee, but the prices of hotels in Thailand are 30-60 percent cheaper overall when comparing similar categories. The quality of hotels is among the best in the world. Food and beverage are also 30-60 percent cheaper in general, and flights to Bangkok are only slightly more expensive than domestic flights in India and in some cases, just the same price. These means you get a "bigger bang" for your bucks in Thailand.

Thai business has been extremely enterprising in positioning the country as an attractive destination for Indian families of means. Many big Thai hotels now have web pagesdesigned exclusively for Indian customers, and a host of wedding management companies in the country (including Indians based in Thailand) have set up websites. The Tourism Authority of Thailand, or TAT, offers many incentives and arguments to Indians for weddings(not the least of them is a book called "Fall in Love in India and Get Married in Thailand"). In a piece called "Thai The Knot" in the February issue of the Thai Airlines inflight magazineSawasdee, Chami Jotsalikorn writes:

TAT reports that the average spend for an Indian wedding in Thailand is 10 million baht (about $340,000), with an average of 200 to 500 guests. The average duration of each wedding is three to five nights, with approximately 600 rooms booked. It still costs two to three times more to host a wedding in India than in Thailand, says Satish Sehgal, president of the Thai-Indian Business Association. Indian wedding expenses include airfares, hotel accommodation, food, transportation, hired yachts and the actual wedding ceremony expenses for around 200 guests from overseas, plus priests and Indian chefs from India.

Yes, it seems Indians want to serve Indian food at a Thai wedding -- and fair enough, too, as so many Indian weddings at home today feature, after all, food that Indians think of as Chinese. (This, as the food writer Sourish Bhattacharyya wrote recently, should now be accepted as India's contribution to the globalization of Chinese cuisine.)

Once upon a time, well-off Indians married at home and perhaps put some money aside for what was perceived as a splurge on a honeymoon abroad. But as India enters the mainstream of globalization's currents, the big fat Indian wedding increasingly looks east for lower prices and more exotic pictures for the wedding album.

CHinese pollution- world's outsourcing of manufacturing and social responsibility

Eye-Stinging Beijing Air Risks Lifelong Harm to Babies - Bloomberg: "As doctors tended the patients snaking through the ground floor of Beijing Children’s Hospital last week, it wasn’t the raspy throats and watery eyes caused by the city’s acrid air that concerned Li Pu most. It was the potential for lifelong lung damage and behavioral changes.
Li, a pediatrician focusing on early childhood development, is finding evidence of the cumulative toxic effect that pollution is having on children. It suggests that the acute sickness triggered this year by some of Beijing’s worst smog- cloaked days may be a prelude of chronic illnesses, such as heart disease, decades later.
“Even if children are being exposed for a short period, it may still have a cumulative effect on them in the future,” Li said in an interview. “Beijing has seen a lot more days with serious smog since the start of January.”"

Urban air pollution is a global problem. Researchers at Columbia University studying clogged air and pregnancy in New York found pollution reduced intelligence and increased the risk of behavioral problems when babies reached school-age. Still, Beijing is among the worst offenders. Air quality in the Chinese capital deteriorated beyond World Health Organizationsafe limits every day last month as smoke from coal-powered generators, factory emissions, car fumes, and dust amassed over the city of 20 million people.

The World Bank estimates China has 16 of the world’s 20 most-polluted cities. A U.S. Embassy pollution monitor showed air quality in Beijing reached hazardous levels for 20 days last month.

‘Frightening’ Levels

“Levels of the past few weeks are frightening,” said Susan Mango, a Harvard University microbiology professor, who has been debating whether to travel to China with her teenage son. “I worry about the damage the pollution could do to a child.”

Pollutants are especially dangerous for infants and children younger than 3 years as their organs are still developing, said Li, who is a senior consultant at New Century International Children’s Hospital, the private arm of Beijing Children’s Hospital. Admissions increase during days of serious air pollution, she said, adding that hospitalization rates for 2013 haven’t been released yet.

At Beijing Children’s Hospital, sick children and their parents began queuing before 6 a.m. on Jan. 31 after pollution reached “hazardous” levels for a fifth straight day. Within 30 minutes of the 8 a.m. opening of the hospital’s respiratory and ear, nose and throat clinics, 80 percent of the 137 consultation available were taken.

“I brought my son into the city center for only half a day and his face swelled up and he’s been feeling sick for the last three days,” said Wang Shuzhi, 34, who lives on the city’s outskirts, as she cradled her 3-year-old son. “Not enough is being done to cut the pollution.”

$112 Billion Cost

Foul air hastened the deaths of more than 8,000 people in Beijing, Shanghai and two other major Chinese cities last year, a report by Greenpeace and Peking University found. Labor and health-related losses linked to pollution cost the Chinese economy $112 billion in 2005, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology estimates.

Companies across Beijing have sought to protect the health of their current employees while facing the prospect of increasing difficulties in enticing staff to a city grappling with pollution levels that Li Keqiang, set to become China’s next premier, has said will take time to reduce.

Apple Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda Motor Co. gave employees face masks, offered health tips and added oxygen-producing office plants last month.

Smoking Lounges

Official measurements of PM2.5, fine airborne particulates that pose the largest health risks, rose as high as 993 micrograms per cubic meter in Beijing on Jan. 12, compared with WHOguidelines of no more than 25.

The daily average for January was 196 micrograms per cubic meter, compared with an average of 166.6 measured last year in 16 U.S. airport smoking lounges by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

“The high levels of air pollution that we are seeing in Beijing may be similar, in terms of excess risk, to smoking a cigarette or two per day,” said C. Arden Pope III, a professor at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, who studies the health effects of air pollution. There are “significant adverse health implications of having an entire population, including children, elderly, asthmatics” exposed to that level of pollution, he said in an e-mail.

Death Risk

Exposure to extreme levels of pollution “might cause more airway injury and inflammation,” said John Balmes, Professor of Medicine at the University of California in San Francisco. “If you have underlying heart or lung disease you have a particular risk of dying at those levels.”

Conversely, cleaner air added about five months to life expectancy in the U.S. over two decades, according to a study that Pope led in 2009.

Pregnant women who breath polluted air could produce children with reduced intelligence and behavioral problems such as anxiety, depression and a lack of attention in children assessed at the ages of 6 and 7, according to research by the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health that followed 253 mothers and their offspring in New York City.

The group also studied the benefits of reducing exposure to coal-burning emissions in Chinese children living in a county in the western municipality of Chongqing. The center had followed children born before and after 2004, the year the local government shut down its sole coal-fired power plant to comply with emissions standards.

Less Intelligent

Children born when the plant was operating had more pollutant-related disruptions to DNA in their cord blood, smaller head sizes, and were less intelligent, according to results from the ongoing study that were published in the journal Pediatrics in 2008.

“That is a good news story illustrating the benefit of a policy to reduce pollutant emissions and improve air quality,” said Frederica Perera, the center’s director and a professor of public health at Columbia University, in an e-mail. Pollutants cause genetic mutations by damaging DNA.

Zhong Nanshan, director of the Guangzhou Institute of Respiratory Diseases, was the government’s official specialist on severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, during the deadly 2003 viral outbreak. Air pollution poses a greater health threat, he said in a Jan. 30 TV interview with official broadcaster CCTV.

“You can isolate SARS patients, but nobody can escape air pollution,” Zhong said. “The biggest harm to the body will come later.”

To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Daryl Loo in Beijing at dloo7@bloomberg.net; Natasha Khan in Hong Kong at nkhan51@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jason Gale at j.gale@bloomberg.net