Japan to buy Europe bonds to soothe debt crisis

TOKYO: Japan's new finance minister said that Tokyo would buy bonds issued by Europe's permanent bailout fund to help soothe the eurozone's debt problems and stabilise the yen.

Taro Aso told reporters the new government would tap foreign exchange reserves to pay for the bonds, but declined to say how much it planned to buy.

A finance ministry told AFP the bond buying could start as early as Tuesday, when the European Stability Mechanism (ESM) begins selling the paper, adding that Japan "will make a purchasing decision after seeing the terms of the issuance".

Japan, which counts Europe as a major export market, previously purchased billions of dollars in bonds issued by the ESM's predecessor, the European Financial Stability Facility.

"Stabilising Europe's financial crisis will eventually contribute to the stability of currency (prices) including the yen, and so we plan to keep purchasing ESM bonds using foreign reserves," Aso said Tuesday.

Europe's debt crisis has seen four countries ask for bailout cash to help pay their bills, while there were fears that others including Italy and Spain would follow suit as their borrowing costs surged.

However, those concerns have eased since September, when the European Central Bank promised to buy the bonds of struggling nations to keep rates down.

Also Tuesday, Japanese media reported that Tokyo was considering an extra budget worth about $150 billion to boost the limp economy, with about 40 percent of that figure directed toward public works projects.

The yen hit record highs around 75 against the dollar in late 2011, sparking panic among Japanese exporters whose goods are made more expensive by a strong currency.

However, the unit has since weakened and has seen a steep decline in recent weeks as the new government of Shinzo Abe, which took office last month after a landslide election win, vows to press the Bank of Japan for more aggressive monetary easing.

Reports Tuesday quoted Japanese executives expressing concern about the yen's recent tumble, saying the quick decline could pose a danger to the Japanese economy.

The business community, which had pressed officials for months to tame the surging yen, say a further plunge in the currency could shake investor confidence.

A weaker currency also makes fuel imports, which have risen steeply in the wake of Japan shutting down its nuclear plants, more expensive.

In Tokyo forex trading on Tuesday afternoon, the euro was up at 115.00 yen from 114.75 yen before Aso's comments, while the dollar bought 87.66 yen from 87.48 yen in morning deals.

Europe's permanent bailout fund was initially supposed to come online in July but only became operational in October after it was delayed by a challenge at the German Constitutional Court.

- AFP/de

Read More..

Freaky-awesome massage vest rubs you up with your own tunes

CNET Crave blogger Amanda Kooser gets a "Gangnam Style" massage.

(Credit:
Amanda Kooser/CNET)

LAS VEGAS--If you ever wanted to know what it would feel like to have Mick Jagger massage out the knots in your back muscles while you listen to "Tumbling Dice," then I have the perfect gadget for you. The iMusic BodyRhythm massage vest sits over your shoulders and upper back. Plug it into your iPhone, fire up the app, and enjoy a rub down to the beat of your favorite song.

I got to try out a fully-functioning prototype of the vest at
CES 2013. The vest's creator Uwe Diegel hooked me up with some "Gangnam Style" massage action. I could see going for the full-album experience and having an extended session with "Exile on Main Street." It would be a very different way of experiencing the music.

The app doesn't just mine the massage possibilities of your music collection. It can also be used like a personal drum machine where you trigger your own massage beats. If you really want to get crazy with it, then you can set it to react to shaking the iPhone. I tried out this mode and it feels like having half a dozen cats dancing on your back.

Diegel says that the vest isn't a medical device so much as a fun way to relax while enjoying your favorite music. He sounds a bit bemused that he has spent a considerable amount of time designing medical devices, but this oddball creation is getting all the attention. Diegel has gotten enough encouragement for the concept to launch a Kickstarter project.

A $69 super-early-bird pledge will get you a vest of your own should the Kickstarter project reach its $50,000 goal. The regular pre-order price is $149.

There is something both surreal and comforting about this vest. Even though I wore it in public at CES, I can't really see wearing it in public. Still, in the privacy of my own home, with avglass of champagne and some Nick Lowe, this might be just the ticket for a relaxing evening in.

Read More..

Primitive and Peculiar Mammal May Be Hiding Out in Australia

It’d be hard to think of a mammal that’s weirder than the long-beaked, egg-laying echidna. Or harder to find.

Scientists long thought the animal, which has a spine-covered body, a four-headed penis, and a single hole for reproducing, laying eggs, and excreting waste, lived only in New Guinea. The population of about 10,000 is critically endangered. Now there is tantalizing evidence that the echidna, thought to have gone extinct in Australia some 10,000 years ago, lived and reproduced there as recently as the early 1900s and may still be alive on Aussie soil.

The new echidna information comes from zoologist Kristofer Helgen, a National Geographic emerging explorer and curator of mammals at the Smithsonian Institution. Helgen has published a key finding in ZooKeys confirming that a skin and skull collected in 1901 by naturalist John T. Tunney in Australia is in fact the western long-beaked echidna, Zaglossus bruijnii. The specimen, found in the West Kimberley region of Western Australia, was misidentified for many years.

(More about echidnas: Get to know this living link between mammals and reptiles.)

Helgen has long been fascinated by echidnas. He has seen only three in the wild. “Long-beaked echidnas are hard to get your hands on, period,” he said. “They are shy and secretive by nature. You’re lucky if you can find one. And if you do, it will be by chance.” Indeed, chance played a role in his identification of the Australian specimen. In 2009, he visited the Natural History Museum of London, where he wanted to see all of the echidnas he could. He took a good look in the bottom drawer of the echidna cabinet, where the specimens with less identifying information are often stored. From among about a dozen specimens squeezed into the drawer, he grabbed the one at the very bottom.

(Related from National Geographic magazine: “Discovery in the Foja Mountains.”)

“As I pulled it out, I saw a tag that I had seen before,” Helgen said. “I was immediately excited about this label. As a zoologist working in museums you get used to certain tags: It’s a collector’s calling card. I instantly recognized John Tunney’s tag and his handwriting.”

John Tunney was a well-known naturalist in the early 20th century who went on collecting expeditions for museums. During an Australian expedition in 1901 for Lord L. Walter Rothschild’s private museum collection, he found the long-beaked echidna specimen. Though he reported the locality on his tag as “Mt Anderson (W Kimberley)” and marked it as “Rare,” Tunney left the species identification field blank. When he returned home, the specimen was sent to the museum in Perth for identification. It came back to Rothschild’s museum identified as a short-beaked echidna.

With the specimen’s long snout, large size, and three-clawed feet, Helgen knew that it must be a long-beaked echidna. The short-beaked echidna, still alive and thriving in Australia today, has five claws, a smaller beak, and is half the size of the long-beaked echidna, which can weigh up to 36 pounds (16 kilograms).

As Helgen began tracing the history and journey of the specimen over the last century, he crossed the path of another fascinating mind who had also encountered the specimen. Oldfield Thomas was arguably the most brilliant mammalogical taxonomist ever. He named approximately one out of every six mammals known today.

Thomas was working at the Natural History Museum in London when the Tunney echidna specimen arrived, still misidentified as a short-beaked echidna. Thomas realized the specimen was actually a long-beaked echidna and removed the skull and some of the leg bones from the skin to prove that it was an Australian record of a long-beaked echidna, something just as unexpected then as it is now.

No one knows why Thomas did not publish that information. And the echidna went back into the drawer until Helgen came along 80 years later.

As Helgen became convinced that Tunney’s long-beaked echidna specimen indeed came from Australia, he confided in fellow scientist Mark Eldridge of the Australian Museum about the possibility. Eldridge replied, “You’re not the first person who’s told me that there might be long-beaked echidnas in the Kimberley.” (That’s the Kimberley region of northern Australia.) Scientist James Kohen, a co-author on Helgen’s ZooKeys paper, had been conducting fieldwork in the area in 2001 and spoke to an Aboriginal woman who told him how “her grandmothers used to hunt” large echidnas.

This is “the first evidence of the survival into modern times of any long-beaked echidna in Australia,” said Tim Flannery, professor at Macquarie University in Sydney. “This is a truly significant finding that should spark a re-evaluation of echidna identifications from across northern Australia.”

Helgen has “a small optimism” about finding a long-beaked echidna in the wild in Australia and hopes to undertake an expedition and to interview Aboriginal communities, with their intimate knowledge of the Australian bush.

Though the chances may be small, Helgen says, finding one in the wild “would be the beautiful end to the story.”

Read More..

West vs Asia education rankings are misleading

Western schoolchildren are routinely outperformed by their Asian peers, but worrying about it is pointless

MATHEMATICS and science are as essential to modern economies as coal was to the industrial revolution. So when the results of international tests show Western schoolchildren lagging behind their peers in countries like Singapore and Japan, alarm bells start ringing.

The latest results to cause consternation are from a comparison of mathematical and scientific knowledge called TIMSS, or Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study. This is given every four years to 9-10-year-olds and 13-14-year-olds from more than 50 countries.

The results, released last month, show that students from the UK, US and Australia continue to perform disappointingly. In maths, for example, English, American and Australian 13-year-olds were outperformed by their peers in South Korea, Singapore, Chinese Taipei, Hong Kong, Japan and Russia. It was a similar story in science.

Cue much wailing and gnashing of teeth. US secretary of education Arne Duncan lamented that "a number of nations are out-educating us today... If we as a nation don't turn that around, those nations will soon be outcompeting us in a knowledge-based, global economy."

Australia's Education Standards Institute director Kevin Donnelly said the results proved that the country's education system had gone "pear-shaped".

However, there are reasons to think that such worries are misplaced.

First of all, although the results are not world-beating, they are far from terrible. All were above average, and better than many other developed nations. For the US at least, they continue a trend of long-term improvement. In the first international mathematics survey, conducted in 1964, the US finished second from bottom.

Second, the common-sense connection between test scores and future economic success doesn't necessarily hold up. For developed nations, there is scant evidence that TIMSS rankings correlate with measures of prosperity or future success. The same holds for a similar test, the Program for International Student Achievement (PISA).

In 2008, Christopher Tienken, then at Rutgers University in New Jersey, compared 1995 TIMSS scores with the 2006 Growth Competitiveness Index. This index was devised by the World Economic Forum to measure a nation's future economic health. Tienken found that for developed countries there was no statistically significant relationship (International Journal of Education Policy & Leadership, vol 3, no 4).

Tienken, now at Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey, has since done a similar analysis of the 2003 PISA mathematics rankings and two measures of economic success: per-capita GDP in 2010, and the 2010-2011 Growth Competitiveness Index. The study, to be published in April, again found no statistically significant relationship.

These findings make TIMSS and PISA rankings seem irrelevant. But it could be worse than that. In many cases, high test scores correlate with economic failure.

Japanese students, for example, have always been near the top of the TIMSS. You might expect those high-flying students to be driving a high-flying economy. Yet the Japanese economy stagnated throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

There may be no causal connection, but the same negative correlation is seen elsewhere.

In 2007, Keith Baker of the US Department of Education made a rough comparison of long-term correlations between the 1964 mathematics scores and several measures of national success decades later.

Baker found negative relationships between mathematics rankings and numerous measures of prosperity and well-being: 2002 per-capita wealth, economic growth from 1992 to 2002 and the UN's Quality of Life Index. Countries scoring well on the tests were also less democratic. Baker concluded that league tables of international success are "worthless" (Phi Delta Kappan, vol 89, p 101).

A more recent analysis of 23 countries found a significant negative relationship between 2009 PISA scores and ranking on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor's measure of perceived entrepreneurial capabilities. This counts the percentage of people in a country who feel confident that they could start a business.

With so many indicators showing a negative relationship, perhaps we need to reconsider how we interpret success - or failure - on international education scores. "If we believe that these tests actually tell us how well a kid or a country is doing, and then we hold people accountable for that, those people are going to focus on what's most likely to be tested, and they're going to cut out everything else," says Tienken.

This is especially relevant to the UK, where the education secretary Michael Gove has justified some of his controversial reforms by referring to the country's performance on the international educational stage.

We might instead consider that in a global economy, where the answers to almost any standard question are a few smartphone taps away, skills like creativity and initiative will be the true drivers of prosperity. None of these traits can be measured easily by tests. When testing consumes precious educational time, focus and money, they get squeezed out.

"Standardised tests reward the ability to find answers to pre-existing questions, but finding the question is more important," says Yong Zhao, an education researcher at the University of Oregon in Eugene who found the negative relationship between PISA scores and entrepreneurship.

We must, of course, continue to promote the importance of mathematics and science, but fixating on international tests as a way to achieve this could prove counterproductive.

MacGregor Campbell is a New Scientist consultant based in Portland, Oregon, and a former teacher

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.

Read More..

Karzai leaves Afghanistan for US talks

KABUL: President Hamid Karzai on Monday left Afghanistan for talks with Barack Obama in Washington to focus on security in his war-torn country after NATO combat troops withdraw in 2014, his office said.

During his three-day official visit, a decision could be made on how many US troops will stay in Afghanistan after 2014, officials have said.

"President Karzai will hold separate meetings with President Barack Obama and other high-ranking US officials to discuss various key issues," Karzai's office said after his departure.

Talks will focus on security, economic and political transition, equipping and strengthening Afghan forces, efforts to negotiate peace with Taliban-led insurgents and a security agreement with the United States, it said.

Karzai has expressed support for keeping US troops in Afghanistan but sensitive details -- including immunity for American soldiers and the transfer of detainees into Afghan custody -- are still under negotiation.

The US Defense Department has reportedly prepared plans to leave roughly 3,000, 6,000 or 9,000 US troops in Afghanistan.

General John Allen, commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, had earlier suggested leaving 6,000 to 20,000 US troops, US media reported.

US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta has said the force would focus on preventing Al-Qaeda, which was sheltered by the 1996-2001 Taliban government, from regaining a foothold in Afghanistan.

According to The Wall Street Journal, a smaller US troop presence would force the State Department to cut plans for large-scale diplomatic outposts across Afghanistan.

-AFP/ac

Read More..

Delphi and Verizon partner on car tracking, remote unlocking

Connecting to a car's OBD2 port, this device enables remote functions and car tracking through a smartphone app.

(Credit:
Delphi)

With a black box the size of a pack of playing cards plugged into a car's OBD2 port, Delphi gives owners a variety of control and information features, from tracking to remotely locking and unlocking the doors. Delphi partnered with Verizon to offer the Connected Car device, which emulates many of the features available from modern telematics services.

After plugging the Delphi Connected
Car into a car's OBD2 port, which is usually located under the dashboard, a car owner will be able to download an app or use a Web portal, giving him a wide variety of control and information features.

The device includes a CDMA data connection to Verizon's cell network, along with Bluetooth. Connected to the OBD2 port, a standardized feature of any car built in 1996 or after, it reads vehicle codes and supports some control features. The device also contains a GPS chip, so can report its location through the Verizon data connection.

Features on the associated smartphone app that owners will find immediately useful read and interpret any error codes, things that might lead to a check engine warning light. The app can show the car's current fuel level, if the car supports that functionality, and other vehicle data, such as engine temperature.

Making use of the devices GPS chip and subsequent car location information, parents can get a warning when the car exceeds certain speeds or the engine rpms go over a certain level. Likewise, car owners can indicate geographical boundaries for the car, and get notified if someone drives the car beyond the approved range.

Particularly cautious parents can also initiate real-time tracking of the car, and view its progress on a map. That feature can also be used for stolen vehicle recovery. The app includes a 911 speed dial, so owners can alert police to the location of a stolen vehicle.

As a convenience feature, the app emulates the functions of an owner's key fob, such as remove lock and unlock, and car start. But unlike the fob, the connected nature of the device lets owners use these features from almost anywhere in the world. And when the car is deep in a parking garage, away from data connectivity, the Bluetooth connection allows the remote door unlock to work from short distances.

Verizon and Delphi partnered to build the Connected Car device, with Verizon building the hardware and Delphi maintaining the online vehicle services. The price has not been disclosed as of yet, but it will come with two years of data connectivity.

Read More..

Best Pictures: 2012 Nat Geo Photo Contest Winners

• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Winner: Places

  Photograph by Nenad Saljic

  A full moon illuminates the Matterhorn peak near Zermatt, Switzerland, in the winning image in the contest's Places category.

  Full moons occur every 29.5 days or so as the moon moves to the side of Earth directly opposite the sun, reflecting the sun's rays off its full face and appearing as a brilliant, perfectly circular disk.

  (Read more about full moons.)

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Winner: People

  Photograph by Micah Albert

  A picture of women scavenging refuse from a landfill in Dandora, Kenya, is the winning image in the People category of the National Geographic Photo Contest.

  The Dandora landfill, located in eastern Nairobi, is one of the largest in Africa.

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  











• 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  Photograph by Jason Ching

  Published January 4, 2013

  
  

');

---

 $'+ doc.ngstore_price_t +'';
html += ' $'+ doc.ngstore_saleprice_t +'';
} else {
html += ' $'+ doc.ngstore_price_t +'';
}
html += '

';

$("#ecom_43331 ul.ecommerce_all_img").append(html);




o.totItems++;

}// end for loop
} // end if data.response.numFound != 0

if(o.totItems != o.maxItems){
if(o.defaultItems.length > 0){
o.getItemByID(o.defaultItems.shift());
} else if(o.isSearchPage && !o.searchComplete){
o.doSearchPage();
} else if(!o.searchComplete) {
o.byID = false;
o.doSearch();
}
}// end if
}// end parseResults function

o.trim = function(str) {
return str.replace(/^\s\s*/, '').replace(/\s\s*$/, '');
}

o.doSearchPage = function(){
o.byID = false;

var tempSearch = window.location.search;
var searchTerms ="default";
var temp;

if( tempSearch.substr(0,7) == "?search"){
temp = tempSearch.substr(7).split("&");
searchTerms = temp[0];
} else {
temp = tempSearch.split("&");
for(var j=0;j 0){
o.getItemByID(o.defaultItems.shift());
} else if(o.isSearchPage){
o.doSearchPage();
} else {
o.doSearch();
}

}// end init function

}// end ecommerce object

var store_43331 = new ecommerce_43331();





store_43331.init();

Read More..

Pastor Accused of Killing Wives Faces Trial

Jury selection is scheduled to begin Monday for Pastor Arthur Schirmer, who is accused of killing his second wife and then staging a car accident to hide it.

Schirmer, 64, also faces a second trial at a later date for the death of his first wife. He has said he is innocent of all charges.

In 2008, the pastor and his wife, Betty, were involved in what appeared at the time to be a car crash. Schirmer told police at the time that he had been driving 55 mph and swerved to miss a deer, causing him to drive off the road, according to a police affidavit obtained by ABC News.

Schirmer also said at the time that his wife's head had come forward and struck the windshield, according to the affidavit. Betty died a day later and her body was cremated at the request of Schirmer.

It wasn't until a grisly suicide in 2010 inside Schirmer's office that authorities decided to revisit the case of Betty Schirmer's death and arrest the pastor.

The man who broke in and shot himself at the desk in Schirmer's office at the Reeders United Methodist Church, Joseph Mustante, was the husband of the pastor's secretary, Cynthia Mustante, Poconos Township Police Detective James Wagner said.

Pocono Record, David Kidwell/AP Photo

Mustante's suicide was prompted by the discovery that his wife and the pastor had apparently been having an affair, Wagner said. He was alone at the time of his death.

Investigators looking into the suicide say that several church parishioners had concerns about the deaths of Schirmer's two wives.

"That suicide eventually exposed the affair publicly and subsequent to that, questions arose about the loss of [Schirmer's] wives and his character became questionable," Wagner said.

Relaunching the investigation into the two deaths, Wagner said he quickly suspected that "foul play existed, and the car crash was staged," allegedly, by Schirmer. Wagner said investigators also believed there was something "suspicious" about the first wife's death, a marriage that investigators had not known about prior to the suicide.

Investigators Look Into Deaths of Rev. Arthur Schirmer's Wives

Schirmer's first wife, Jewel, died in April 1999 from a traumatic brain injury after she purportedly fell down a flight of stairs in Lebanon, Pa., Wagner said.

Lebanon is about 100 miles southwest of Reeders, where Schrimer later moved with his second wife.

At the time of Jewel's death, Wagner said, a relative told police that he suspected Schirmer may have had a hand in his wife's death but that the investigation was "never completed."

On Dec. 11, 2012 -- more than 13 years after Jewel died, a Lebanon County judge ruled Schirmer would be tried for her murder.

When investigators looked at the death of Betty Schirmer, they saw inconsistencies, Wagner said.

"There was no airbag deployment and it simply looked like a car that had driven off the road at a very low speed," Wagner said. "It didn't match the injuries to [Betty's head].

"I know there are people out there who probably know him and feel like there is absolutely no way he would be capable of doing this," Wagner of Schirmer. "But they clearly don't know him."

Read More..

Suu Kyi says any peace bid is up to Myanmar govt

YANGON: Myanmar democracy campaigner Aung San Suu Kyi on Sunday said she would not step in to help end worsening conflict between the army and ethnic Kachin rebels without government approval.

"It is up to the government. This case is being handled by the government at the moment," Suu Kyi told AFP when asked if she would get involved in efforts to resolve the fighting, after the army's use of air strikes drew international concern.

The Nobel laureate said she would need an official invitation to join peace negotiations aimed at quelling the raging civil war, which has overshadowed Myanmar's widely-praised political reforms.

Tens of thousands of people have been displaced by the conflict in the far north since June 2011, when a 17-year ceasefire between the government and the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) broke down.

Myanmar's quasi-civilian regime, which took power in 2011 at the end of junta rule, has reached tentative peace deals with other major ethnic rebel groups, but an agreement with the Kachin has proved elusive.

President Thein Sein, a former general, in December 2011 ordered an end to military offensives against the rebels and continued hostilities have led to doubts over his ability to control the powerful armed forces.

According to the English language state-run New Light of Myanmar newspaper on Sunday, the Myanmar leader has instructed the military not to attack unless in "self-defence".

The report said Thein Sein urged "mutual trust" and "continued dialogue" in order to bring about peace.

Civil war has plagued parts of the country formerly known as Burma since it won independence from Britain in 1948.

Yup Zaw Hkaung, a local businessman and peace negotiator in the Kachin state capital Myitkyina, on Saturday appealed for Suu Kyi's involvement in ending the fighting, which has intensified in recent weeks.

He said the democracy activist had a "responsibility" to work for ethnic peace.

Suu Kyi, a former political prisoner turned lawmaker, used her maiden speech to parliament in July last year to call for greater protection of ethnic minority rights.

But the veteran activist has disappointed rights campaigners by not speaking out more vocally in support of another minority group, the Rohingya, in the violence-torn western state of Rakhine.

- AFP/fa

Read More..

Nvidia at 2013 CES: Join us Sunday, 8 p.m. PT (live blog)

Nvidia starts the 2013 International CES early with a press conference at 8 p.m. PT (11 p.m. ET) on Sunday, Jan. 6, and CNET will be there to cover it live. We'll have a live video stream, along with a blog full of news and analysis, as it happens.

You can tune into the blog and video stream here:

CNET's live coverage of Nvidia's 2013 CES press conference

Nvidia has been pretty quiet about any possible announcements at
CES, but the graphics chipmaker is likely to talk up Tegra, its processor for mobile devices. The company has had some success getting the chip into
tablets over the past year, but it continues to struggle in smartphones. Nvidia is counting on its new integrated processor, which combines the apps processor with the wireless connectivity on the same piece of silicon, to change that.

An alleged leak about Nvidia's Tegra 4 from last month showed 72 graphics cores, six times as many as those found in the current-generation Tegra 3. That many cores would mean substantially improved performance for smartphones, tablets, and other devices.

Read More..