The new age of discipline | Life and style | The Guardian

The new age of discipline | Life and style | The Guardian: "We have reached the end game of have-it-all culture. Because I'm Worth It has had its day, and discipline is the new decadence. The Nike Fuel Band, which tracks your calorie expenditure and praises you for an active lifestyle, has more smug-factor than a Rolex right now. The dominant meme of annoying Facebook behaviour has segued from the posting of party photos to "inspirational" quotes (American men – Henry Ford, Albert Einstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson – are especially hot right now). Meanwhile, the narrative of reality TV has changed: bad behaviour in the hot tub, à la early Big Brother, has been replaced, from The Voice to The Apprentice, by Saturday-night preaching of the age-old Sunday-morning mantras that hard work will be rewarded, that mentors must be respected and listened to. Even family life has taken on a new set of values. With every issue of Goop, the cosy, cupcake-baking ideal of motherhood cedes territory to the Tiger Mothers (whose children will be more successful than yours) and the Gwyneth Paltrow-esque mothers (whose children will be slimmer and healthier, ergo more successful, than yours.)"

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Americans hate their jobs and even perks don't help - TODAY.com

Americans hate their jobs and even perks don't help - TODAY.com: "If you hate your job, you're not alone. And having in-office access to catered meals, a pingpong table or free massages may not make you any happier at work.

Just 30 percent of employees are engaged and inspired at work, according to Gallup's 2013 State of the American Workplace Report, which surveyed more than 150,000 full- and part-time workers during 2012. That's up from 28 percent in 2010. The rest … not so much. A little more than half of workers (52 percent) have a perpetual case of the Mondays—they're present, but not particularly excited about their job.

The remaining 18 percent are actively disengaged or, as Gallup CEO Jim Clifton put it in the report, "roam the halls spreading discontent." Worse, Gallup reports, those actively disengaged employees cost the U.S. up to $550 billion annually in lost productivity."

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Brazil can't kick this away

I supported Brazil's World Cup bid, but even I am against it now | Romario | Comment is free | The Guardian: "These protests will strengthen our democratic culture. It is the voice from the streets, for one, that will lead to the strengthening of our judiciary. And it couldn't come at a more timely moment: with the legislation currently weak, corruption is rife – and those who steal from the public are let off the hook. As a congressman for the Brazilian Socialist party (PSB), I am comfortable being so critical of the state of the law in my country, because for a long time I have not shied away from pointing out the abuses that take place around here.

When Brazil won the bid to host the World Cup, other politicians were in charge of the country, and our political reality was different. I supported the bid because it promised to generate employment and income, promote tourism and strengthen the country's image."

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Tough challenge in Brazil

Protests Sink Rousseff Bid to Buff Brazil Image With Soccer - Bloomberg: "“I have both the obligation to hear the voice of the streets and to dialog with all segments within the confines of law and order,” Rousseff, 65, said. “If we let violence take us off our path, we will not only be wasting a big historic opportunity, but also will be running the risk of losing a lot.”
Lower Approval
While 40 million Brazilians emerged from poverty in the past decade, faster inflation and inadequate public services have eroded Rousseff’s approval rating for the first time since taking office in January 2011.
Protesters this weekend fielded a range of grievances, from teachers marching for better pay to gay rights activists last night opposing a bill to let psychologists recommend medical treatment for homosexuality. Protesters in Rio de Janeiro today lined up hundreds of soccer balls on the beach to represent the country’s murder victims."

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This ice cream has melted...

The Decline of an All-American Treat | Daily Ticker - Yahoo! Finance: "Traditional ice cream sales have been slowly declining and seem poised to hit their lowest levels this year since the mid 1990s. Production of regular ice cream peaked in 2002 at about 14 quarts per person each year, according to government figures. That has fallen to 11.6 quarts per person, a 13% drop. Seven of the 10 biggest ice cream chains had fewer stores in 2012 than they had in 2011, according to research firm Technomic. Cold Stone Creamery has shuttered more than 100 stores since 2009. At Baskin-Robbins, revenue and store count have fallen every year since 2008.
Health concerns are one obvious reason why Americans are consuming less full-fat ice cream. But the ice cream man has also fallen behind on innovation, or at least on gimmicky offerings that keep customers lining up at the counter. As dessert outlets have evolved from traditional parlors into buzzier chains constantly seeking a marketing edge, ice cream somehow became a bit stodgy, while frozen yogurt and other types of dessert did a better job of capturing the foodie vibe."

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Lessons from the Brazilians

Brazil is saying what we could not: we don't want these costly extravaganzas | Simon Jenkins | Comment is free | The Guardian: "Here we go again. Brazil has been bamboozled into blowing $13bn on next year's football World Cup, and then on a similar sum to be later extorted by the International Olympic Committee to host the 2016 Games. Brazil's leftwing leader, Dilma Rousseff, was bequeathed the games by her populist predecessor, Lula da Silva. She has desperately tried to side with the protesters, but she is trapped by the oligarchs of Fifa and the IOC.

Brazil's citizens are being hit with higher bus fares and massive claims on health and welfare budgets. Up to half a million people may take to the streets this weekend to complain of "first world stadiums, third world schools". What is impressive about the demonstrators is that they appear not to be against sport as such, but against the extravagance of their staging. They are talking the language of priorities."

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The other guy was bad...

Barack Obama: NSA is not rifling through ordinary people's emails | World news | The Guardian: ""I was a critic of the previous administration for those occasions in which I felt they had violated our values and I came in [to office] with a healthy scepticism about how our various programmes were structured," Obama told the press conference in Berlin's chancellery. But, he added, having examined how the US intelligence services were operating: "I'm confident that at this point we have struck the appropriate balance".

Obama's remarks on the NSA dominated the 45-minute press conference, which also covered Syria, the global economic crisis and Guantánamo, with observers suggesting he had used the occasion as an opportunity to confront European scepticism over the US government's attempts to justify their surveillance operations, which have triggered deep concerns both at home and abroad."

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Putting high energy drinks on the doctor's table

Doctors Call for Halt to Energy Drink Ads to U.S. Youths - Bloomberg: "A group representing 225,000 U.S. doctors called for a ban on marketing energy drinks, such as those from Red Bull GmbH and Monster Beverage Corp. (MNST), to youths.

The American Medical Association, in a vote at its annual policy meeting in Chicago, today endorsed a policy that called for limiting how the caffeinated beverages are sold to those younger than 18. The group cited studies that link the drinks to heart problems and reports about emergency room visits by children after consuming the drinks.

“Energy drinks contain massive and excessive amounts of caffeine that may lead to a host of health problems in young people, including heart problems,” Alexander Ding, a physician and AMA board member, said in an e-mailed statement. “Banning companies from marketing these products to adolescents is a common sense action that we can take to protect the health of American kids.”"

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Junk food + slick marketing = somebody else's health problems

Junk food still marketed to children as companies bypass rules | Life and style | The Guardian: "Food companies are accused on Tuesday by the World Health Organisation, the public health arm of the UN, of finding ways to bypass the rules on advertising unhealthy products to children and fuelling the obesity epidemic.

Attempts by the authorities in Britain to clamp down on marketing to children through television advertising are not enough to protect them, a major report by the WHO says. There are tough rules on advertising during children's TV programmes but not on shows such as ITV1's Britain's Got Talent and The X Factor, which research shows are widely watched by younger viewers.

Increasingly, food companies are also targeting children through computer games, mobile phones and social networks such as Facebook.

The WHO report calls for tighter regulation across the whole of Europe of the marketing to children of foods high in fat, salt and sugar."

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Watching out at G20

GCHQ intercepted foreign politicians' communications at G20 summits | UK news | The Guardian: "Foreign politicians and officials who took part in two G20 summit meetings in London in 2009 had their computers monitored and their phone calls intercepted on the instructions of their British government hosts, according to documents seen by the Guardian. Some delegates were tricked into using internet cafes which had been set up by British intelligence agencies to read their email traffic.

The revelation comes as Britain prepares to host another summit on Monday – for the G8 nations, all of whom attended the 2009 meetings which were the object of the systematic spying. It is likely to lead to some tension among visiting delegates who will want the prime minister to explain whether they were targets in 2009 and whether the exercise is to be repeated this week."

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Top 10 sexist moments in politics: the best of the worst of misogyny

Top 10 sexist moments in politics: Julia Gillard, Hillary Clinton and more | Politics | The Guardian: "Top 10 sexist moments in politics: Julia Gillard, Hillary Clinton and more
The 'Julia Gillard Kentucky Fried Quail' menu is the latest sexist attack on the Australian PM. But it's the same for women in politics everywhere. Here are 10 of the worst examples"

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Spy novelist on spying

The influence of spies has become too much. It's time politicians said no | John le Carré | World news | The Guardian: "In my recent novel A Delicate Truth, a retired and patently decent British foreign servant accuses his old employers of being party to a Whitehall coverup, and for his pains is promptly threatened with the secret courts. Yet amid all the comment that my novel briefly provoked, this particular episode attracted no attention.

What are secret courts? Why do we need them? To protect Britain's special relationship with the United States, we are officially told; to protect the credibility and integrity of our intelligence services. Never mind that for decades we have handled security-sensitive cases by clearing the court whenever necessary, and allowing our secret servants to withhold their names and testify from behind screens, real or virtual: now, all of a sudden, the credibility and integrity of our intelligence services are at stake, and need urgent and draconian protection."

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Airbus A350 completes maiden flight - Yahoo! Finance

Airbus A350 completes maiden flight - Yahoo! Finance: "TOULOUSE, France (Reuters) - Europe's newest jetliner, the Airbus A350, successfully completed its maiden flight on Friday, stepping up the battle with arch-rival Boeing for sales of a new generation of sleek, lightweight passenger aircraft.
Watched by more than 10,000 staff and spectators, the aircraft's curled wingtips sliced into clouds above the Airbus factory in southwestern France and flew over the Pyrenees mountains, with a crew of six wearing orange jumpsuits and parachutes.
The flight, with two former fighter pilots at the controls, lasted about four hours and capped eight years of development estimated to have cost $15 billion."

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350 and $15 B

REFILE-UPDATE 1-Airbus sets A350 maiden flight for Friday | Reuters: "New jet to fly from Toulouse at 0800 GMT on Friday

* Jet billed as Europe's answer to Boeing Dreamliner

* Seven years of development worth some $15 billion

PARIS, June 11 (Reuters) - Airbus has chosen Friday for the maiden flight of its newest jet, the A350, the European planemaker said.

The flight will take place at 10:00 am local time (0800 GMT) from the EADS subsidiary's Toulouse headquarters in southwest France.

The first sortie of Europe's newest passenger plane follows seven years of development costing an estimated $15 billion."

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Trust- easy to lose, hard to gain

Internet's big names in battle to salvage reputations after NSA revelations | Technology | The Guardian: "Google. Apple. Facebook. Microsoft: they are the brands that want the world to trust them with personal information, emails, photos, documents – yet they are now facing a battle to maintain that trust after disclosures that the US government was given access to their customers' data online via the Prism programme operated by the NSA.

The companies involved – Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple – vigorously deny giving the Obama administration backdoor access to users' internet information, but the potential damage to their brand reputation has left the companies floundering for a way to respond.

Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, believes there could be serious consequences for the collective reputations of all internet companies who have meticulously built their trade on trust."

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CNBC Maths: 1% of $30 Billion

3M CEO: Research Is 'Driving This Company' - Yahoo! Finance: ""I believe that what is driving this company in terms of return for us is the investment in research and development, and every time we do it we know that we have a competitive advantage," says CEO Inge Thulin, who took over the company in early 2012.
 Historically the company spent 5 percent of revenue on R&D, but Thulin intends to spend 6 percent of revenue by 2017. That 1 percent increase may not sound like a lot, but when annual revenue comes in at a whopping $30 billion, it's a significant amount of money: $30 million.
The goal: to increase the number of new products the company creates and, just as importantly, gets onto store shelves.
Generating revenue from ground-breaking science isn't a foregone conclusion.
 3M is so singularly focused on making sure science moves from invention to mass production, that the company has an internal measure called the "NPVI," or New Product Vitality Index. The NPVI is the percentage of revenue the company generates from products that didn't exist five years earlier.
In 2008, 25 percent of the company's revenue came from products created in the last five years. Today, that number is 34 percent."

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Yoga > Exercise

Yoga is better for your brain than exercise, researchers say | National Monitor: "oga devotees may have a new reason to get out their mats.  A new study in the Journal of Physical Activity and Health says yoga may be a good work out for your brain.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign recruited 30 undergraduate women to participate in a 20-minute Hatha yoga session. The participants engaged in three types of poses: seated, standing and supine.  The session concluded with meditation and deep breathing.

The subjects were also asked to complete a 20-minute session of aerobic exercise by either walking or running on a treadmill.  The speed and inclination were adjusted so that each participant reached 60 to 70 percent of maximum heart rate throughout the session."

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Statistics and Big Data

Everyday risks: when statistics can't predict the future | Science | The Observer: "But – a big but – we're certainly not calculating machines. In fact, if there were such a thing as a risk-calculating machine that claimed to give you objective odds on danger, we'd be the first to warn of malfunctions. That's partly because although we think the numbers matter, they can never be the final word: the stories people tell are big influences on their sense of where danger lies – and why shouldn't they be? – since neither source of evidence, neither numbers nor stories is perfect. Each has strengths and weaknesses.

This is a perhaps surprising conclusion from writers at times almost geeky enough to have two hoods on our anoraks; that we think risk is seldom objective, nor solely a property of the world out there, but intimately bound up with our own perspectives, and so personal perspectives on danger are, usually, perfectly reasonable. "

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Intelligence?

Boundless Informant: the NSA's secret tool to track global surveillance data | World news | guardian.co.uk: "The National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.

The Guardian has acquired top-secret documents about the NSA datamining tool, called Boundless Informant, that details and even maps by country the voluminous amount of information it collects from computer and telephone networks.

The focus of the internal NSA tool is on counting and categorizing the records of communications, known as metadata, rather than the content of an email or instant message"

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The Tax Man or Woman is not calling---on Vodaphone

Vodafone paid no corporation tax in Britain last year | Business | The Guardian: "Vodafone, the world's second largest mobile phone company by revenue, paid no corporation tax in Britain last year. The blue chip company has distributed £4.8bn in cash dividends to shareholders in the last 12 months – more than any other British business – but generous tax breaks mean it was able to reduce its corporation tax bill to zero for the second consecutive year.

Vodafone's annual report, published on Friday, also showed the chief executive, Vittorio Colao, collected £11m in pay last financial year. The total included salary, fees, a cash bonus, stock options, cash paid in lieu of a contribution to the company pension scheme and £30,000 in benefits, such as private healthcare and car allowance.

Tough trading in southern Europe, which is bearing the brunt of the economic crisis in the eurozone andwhere Vodafone's businesses' operating profits have contracted by 28%, meant Colao missed some of his performance targets and will take home less than the £15.7m he earned in 2011-12."

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Not shy about flaunting wealth

Saudi prince launches libel action against Forbes magazine over Rich List | Media | guardian.co.uk: "Saudi Arabia's Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, one of the world's wealthiest businessmen who owns assets including London's Savoy hotel, has launched a libel action against the business magazine Forbes over claims it underestimated his fortune by $9.6bn.

Alwaleed, who is often described as the most influential businessman in the Middle East, vowed to sever ties with Forbes in March when its coveted annual Rich List valued him at $20bn – placing him as the 26th most wealthy billionaire on the planet.

The prince insisted he was worth closer to $30bn and accused the respected US magazine of being "demonstrably biased" against Saudi Arabian firms."

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PRISM- refraction of light, optics by the government

NSA has direct access to tech giants' systems for user data, secret files reveal | World news | The Guardian: "The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers.

Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied knowledge of any such program."

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Waste but not wasted

Superuse: meet the Dutch architects transforming the world with waste | Art and design | guardian.co.uk: "The slender aluminium trolleys – some of 5,000 made redundant by KLM when they recently updated their design – house a wunderkammer of case study projects, drawn from Superuse's work, as well as projects produced by students at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, where the architects also teach. In the words of Jongert, the projects are about "identifying and connecting available flows in the urban ecosystem". He sees production as an organic cycle of streams, which are too often separated. By bringing together mutual inefficiencies – aligning surplus with demand, waste with need – the work looks to develop a more integrated world of products and services."
One trolley tells the story of GRO Holland, an initiative that recycles coffee grounds as a growth substrate for mushrooms. "98.8 percent of coffee is wasted in the process of making it," says Jongert, explaining how waste grounds are now collected from a network of cafes, mixed with oyster mushroom spores and packed into perforated plastic bags, then hung in a humid warehouse. The harvested fungi are sold back to the cafes, and the waste substrate passed on to nearby tulip farmers to reuse.

Internet- Cabled and Squeezed

Price-gouging cable companies are our latter-day robber barons | Heidi Moore | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "Competition drives down prices, and the world of cable and internet access has largely done away with the threat of competition. At home, if you don't like Time Warner's prices, you can't turn around and get Comcast; you'll have to spring for satellite service or hope Verizon FiOS serves your area. And once you have those, there's no guarantee they'll suit you or that their billing will be any better."

The result is that Americans are being willingly pick-pocketed. Internet service is costly because internet providers refuse to compete with each other, ensuring they can charge high prices. They rationalize it like this: even though the cable companies have a gross profit margin of around 97% – meaning 97 cents of every dollar they make is pure profit – they still have to pay to service cell towers and invest in broadband. They have expensive equipment to maintain, see? That's not monopoly pricing power. That's just basic subsistence.

Unfortunately, their arguments fail for two reasons: the first is that those companies are not actually investing in equipment as much as they would like you to think. There is a cable graveyard littered with "overbuilders" that tried to create fast, wide internet access networks to compete with the giant incumbents like Time Warner and Comcast.Those overbuilders failed.

Another problem with the argument is that "recovering fixed costs" is not a problem; the cable companies' networks are already bought and paid for, many times over. The cable companies have such incredibly high profit margins – "comically high" in the words of one Sanford C Bernstein analyst – that they don't have any problem covering their costs. The Open Technology Institute noted in a recent report, "cable companies invested over $185bn in capital expenditures between 1996 and 2011. But these networks generated close to $1tn in revenue in the same time period."

The lack of either existent or upcoming competition taught the larger cable companies that it pays, literally, to get lazy and complacent: not only would they refuse to compete with each other, but there was also nothing to fear from any aggressive startups."

10 great vegetarian recipes | Life and style | The Guardian

10 great vegetarian recipes | Life and style | The Guardian: "Did you get the message that it's a good idea to eat less meat, for environmental reasons? Because it's probably better for our health? Or perhaps you've been turned off the animal products because of the various problems with sourcing. If not, then have a look at the latest missive, from a group of MPs, saying that we should cut down on meat to help ease food crises in the developing world. And if you feel inspired to embrace vegetarianism, at least once or twice a week, we're here to help with a selection of recipes from good old British scotch egg alternatives, to spicy Sichuanese ways with tofu. Just don't go stampeding for the quinoa, eh?"

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less killing- live longer

Vegetarian diet tied to fewer deaths over time | ABS-CBN News: "EW YORK - People who limit how much meat they eat and stick to mostly fruits and vegetables are less likely to die over any particular period of time, according to a new study.

"I think this adds to the evidence showing the possible beneficial effect of vegetarian diets in the prevention of chronic diseases and the improvement of longevity," said Dr. Michael Orlich, the study's lead author from Loma Linda University in California.

In 2012, a Gallup poll found about 5% of Americans reported to be vegetarians.

Previous research has found that people who eat mostly fruits and vegetables are less likely to die of heart disease or any other cause over certain periods of time.

Another study from Europe, however, found British vegetarians were just as likely to die at any point as meat eaters, so it's still an "open question," Orlich said.

For the new study, he and his colleagues used data from 73,308 people recruited at US and Canadian Seventh-day Adventist churches between 2002 and 2007."

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This land is Mayan in spirit, but is bio-fuel for the world

Video: This land is Mayan - Life & Style | Trends, Tips, News & Advice | The Irish Times - Sat, Jun 01, 2013: "To understand what happened to the Rio Frio community, you have to understand that the Mayan people’s relationship with the land is a mystical thing. It is central to their lives and identity. They treat it with great respect and not as a commodity that can or should be bought or owned. So when a force of about 1,000 police, army and private security guards show up and wreck the place, it’s soul destroying, and on the part of the aggressors, that’s precisely the idea.
Juana has seen it all, from the 1978 massacre of up to 100 peasants protesting over land rights and abysmal working conditions in the nearby town of Panzos, to the death squads that roamed the country wiping out indigenous communities as part of a “scorched earth” policy, designed to eliminate support for Marxist rebels in the 1980s"

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A Fox in the Dark Ages- with neanderthals reporting

It's been a bad week for women | Heather Long | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: "Let's start with Fox News:

"When you look at biology, when you look at the natural world – the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it's not antithesis, or it's not competing, it's a complementary role."

That was how Fox News commentator Erick Erickson interpreted new data released this week indicating that women are now the main breadwinners in 40% of American homes. He defended himself by adding:

"I'm so used to liberals telling conservatives that they're anti-science. But liberals who defend this and say it is not a bad thing are very anti-science.""

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