Friday, September 30, 2011

Never ever





Go through life saying "I should have"
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If you want to do something then do it!
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As a life philosophy this concept is powerful.
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If you go through life never daring to do what you want to do.
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Then you miss so much.
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Psychologically you deny yourself the chance to grow.
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To dare to explore.
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To fully engage with life.
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To just do what feels right
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Life is for living, not just for grazing your way through.
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Not just numbly going through doing as you are told by faceless bureaucrats .
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What's the picture?
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The biggest boat rescue in history.
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During 9/11 people went to the bottom of Manhattan to get away from the disaster of the falling towers
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Most panicked, shocked, numb, just trying to get away.
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Their problem?
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No escape, nowhere to go just the water.
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Boats from all over the area converged on the piers to help people get away.
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To take them to safety.
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Over 500,000 people in nine hours.
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All volunteered, none questioned but the need to help their fellow man.
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All dropped whatever they were doing, some ferry operators, others private boat owners, tug boats, coastguard all came to help.
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Quite something, the biggest sea rescue in history.
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Not talked about much, but these people were truly awesome in their readiness to do what felt right
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No "I should have" for them
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They did what felt right.
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Let's remember that at the time no one knew what was going on.
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Whether or not there would be more attacks
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A boat would be pretty vulnerable if that had been the case.
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No "should have" for these people.
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They just did what seemed the right thing to do, acting upon their highest human values.
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Do the same please in your life.
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One day somewhere, sometime your time will come.
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What choice will you make?

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Chickens

Stupidity is the devil. Look in the eye of a chicken and you’ll know. 
It’s the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creature in this world. 
Werner Herzog
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Thai chickens
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The original chicken was a species of pheasant from Thailand. 
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Although the red junglefowl is now widespread across all southern Asia, genetic analysis of one subspecies only found in Thailand – Gallus gallus gallus – has confirmed it as the progenitor of all domesticated species
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No one knows how or when chickens arrived in Britain. 
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There is a legend that Phoenician tradesmen introduced them but it seems likely they were carried here by Iron Age tribes migrating from the East
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In 54BC, Julius Caesar was impressed that the ancient Britons bred birds for fighting, rather than meat.
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Big chickens
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In 2003, in the United States’ Rockies, the 68 million-year-old fossilised femur bone of a Tyrannosaurus rex was found to still contain flexible collagen. 
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When the DNA of this protein was sequenced, its closest match was found to be that of the chicken, further bolstering the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs, rather than other branches of the reptile family.
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This has also led to speculation as to how dinosaurs reproduced. 
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Did they, like chickens and most birds, use the “cloacal kiss” (pressing their bottoms together)? 
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Or, like snakes and lizards, or did they have phalluses that everted (popped out)? 
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Because soft tissue doesn’t survive in the fossil record, it is unlikely we will ever know for sure.
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Common chickens
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The chicken is the world’s most populous bird. 
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Precise estimates of the global population are difficult but it is unlikely to be fewer than 20 billion, a fifth of which live in China.
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Britain’s chicken population in 2005 was 174 million, two thirds of which were “broilers”, i.e. raised for meat not eggs. 
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Despite this, we manage to eat 10 billion eggs a year (or 28 million a day).
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Tasty chickens
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Mass-production of chickens and eggs started in about 1800. 
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Eating chicken began as a by-product of egg production.
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Only chickens too old to produce enough eggs were killed and sold for meat.
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In the early Sixties, chicken meat was a luxury. 
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It wasn’t until the Seventies that it became the meat of choice for most families.
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Today it accounts for almost half of all meat eaten in Britain. 
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We eat 23kg per head per year – the equivalent in weight to a seven-year-old child.
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As a result of selective breeding and hormone treatment, the average broiler now takes 43 days to reach maturity, which is twice as fast as allowing nature to take its course. 
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Ninety-eight per cent of all chickens raised anywhere in the world – even organic ones – come from breeds developed by three American companies. 
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More than half are Cobb 500s, developed in the Seventies by the Cobb Breeding Co. 
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Seventy per cent of Britain’s broilers are processed by just four companies. 
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The largest, Moy Park, based in Craigavon near Belfast, is part of the Brazilian food giant Marfrig, which supplies most of the meat used by McDonald’s. 
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Marfrig “processes” an estimated 3.7 million chickens a day.
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Colour-coded chickens
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Most chicken owners will tell you that hens with red/brown earlobes lay brown eggs and those with white earlobes produce white eggs. 
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This is a useful rule of thumb but there are exceptions. 
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The penedesenca from Spain has white earlobes and lays a dark-brown egg. Silkies have dark-blue earlobes but lay pale-brown eggs, and the South American araucana has red earlobes but lays a blue egg.
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Vicious chickens
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Until it was banned in 1835, cockfighting was Britain’s national sport, with every village boasting at least one cockpit. 
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Everyone joined in: there were cockpits in the palace of Westminster and on Downing Street.
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A good gamecock will fight to the death with no special encouragement. 
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Some bloodlines were legendary: the White Piles bred by Dr Bellsye near Chester in the late 18th century were famous for the “Cheshire drop”, a burst of murderous violence just when the cock looked finished
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Noisy chickens
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Danish chickens go gok-gok; German chickens go gak gak; Thai chickens go gook gook; Dutch chickens go tok tok; Finnish and Hungarian chickens go kot kot. 
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The rather superior French hen goes cotcotcodet.
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Molly Oldfield & John Mitchinson

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

London global capital




If global panjandrums were to pick the world’s largest city, as they did in 1946, the choice would fall on Tokyo, which overtook New York in the pecking order soon after the UN settled there, and now has a population over 30m. 
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But size, as they say, isn’t everything. 
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Power, economic connections, culture, education—all these things matter, too. 
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Throughout history, the world’s largest cities have been dominant not just because of their numbers but because they were capitals of international empires. 
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This was true of Rome in the first century, which as far as we know today, was the first city to reach a million people.
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Of Constantinople, now Istanbul in the fifth century. 
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Of Chang’an, now called  Xi’an, China’s capital in the seventh century. 
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Of Baghdad in the tenth century.
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Of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, at the end of the 15th century. 
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And of 19th-century London, which was the first city to reach 5m. 
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Huge though it is, Tokyo is not in the same category. 
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It is not very international and is home to comparatively few foreign residents for a city of its size.  
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Power is important, but the capitals of the world’s two most powerful countries.
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The nearest things to imperial cities today, do not quite fit the bill either. 
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Beijing is a non-starter as a global city and will continue to be so as long as the Communist Party maintains its iron grip. 
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In New York and London, between a quarter and a third of residents were born abroad. 
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In Beijing the share is below 1%.
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Outsiders have to have a stake in a city if it is to get global status.
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Washington, DC, looks a more plausible candidate for that. 
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It contains more people who take the rest of the world seriously than any other place. 
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The IMF and World Bank, the two prime international financial institutions, are based there. 
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Washington takes itself seriously too, but so it should: as in 19th-century London 
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Decisions made there matter more to the rest of the world than those taken elsewhere. 
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Powertown has the capacity to make and unmake wars, to rescue or cripple economies. 
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Yet there is more to being a dominant city than political authority or a multitude of think-tanks. 
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Washington, a city of “northern charm and southern efficiency”, as John F. Kennedy said.
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Has little going for it except the authority of the United States, and that is slipping. 
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It is international without being cosmopolitan; 
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It inspires respect but not imitation.
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It has political power. 
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But not the power of example.
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In 1957, five years after the UN moved into its headquarters on East 42nd Street, Jack Kerouac was finishing his book “On the Road” a few blocks away in Times Square. 
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After returning from a trip round America, he found himself at rush hour amid “the absolute madness and fantastic hot-air of New York with its millions and millions hustling forever for a buck amongst themselves, 
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The mad dream—grabbing, taking, giving, sighing, dying.” Kerouac was criticising 1950s consumerism, of course. 
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But his description captures what makes a city thrive: millions hustling for a buck. 
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And the more things people have to hustle over.
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The more occasions they have for grabbing, taking and giving—
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The more their city becomes truly international. 
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Cities are products of trade.
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Market towns trade crops
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Second cities trade manufactures.
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International cities design and trade everything, especially services
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And global cities
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A category comprising only New York, London and Tokyo
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Specialise in international financial services.
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Over the past 50 years, the world has seen a trading revolution.
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Cities used to send each other finished goods, cars, say, or computers.
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Now they trade services and parts as well as spark plugs, or recording heads for hard drives.
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Every step in the production process is broken down
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Parts are made separately and shipped for assembly.
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The result is that trade around the world has boomed.
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The number of international cities has boomed with it.
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And more are vying to join this select global club. 
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Hence any short list of potential capitals of the world ought to include not just the established trio, plus Washington, but the fast-growing metropolises of the fastest-growing economies:
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Shanghai and Beijing, Mumbai and Delhi,
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São Paulo, Mexico City.
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This means excluding places which are great cities in their own right
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Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles—but do not quite fit our definition. Sorry, continental Europe.
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Of those that do, all except London and Washington have populations of 15m or more.
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Unless you want your global capital to trade exclusively in government services
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To be a glorified Canberra, in short, then this emerges as a threshold of sorts
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But, as with population, so with economics and trade
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Size still isn’t everything.
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Over the centuries, cities such as Baghdad and Constantinople waxed great upon their reputation for learning, the fame of their educational establishments.
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Their openness to new ideas and their ability to attract the best minds to teach and think in their schools and courts
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Some of these attributes can be measured, by looking at how many universities a city has
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How many of its residents were born abroad, how many languages are spoken there. 
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So Intelligent Life has subjected the contenders to a scoring system that rates them on five attributes (see table below).
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These are: 
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Power and influence (mostly political)
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Income and wealth.
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Educational standards (universities and graduates)
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Cultural life (theatre, publishing, an art scene).
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And global connections (foreign residents, airports, tourists.
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Foreign languages taught at school, phone calls, internet connections and so on.
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We have tried to make the scores impartial but some, such as those for power and culture, are inevitably subjective.  
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The results suggest the dominant cities are still those of the rich world.
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Not yet the up-and-coming one.
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On our list, four cities are in industrialised countries, five in emerging markets. 
























It turns into a two-horse race, with London and New York well in front, scoring highly on almost every measure.
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The rich-country four take all the top four places.

Perhaps reflecting the weight the marking system gives to education and connections
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We have given each measure equal weight.
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Giving more to, say, power and influence and less to education, would change the results and benefit emerging-market capitals accordingly.  
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So London is our unofficial global capital, the second new New York.
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And if you think that conclusion wrong, your scepticism has a distinguished lineage.
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New York may seem the obvious choice for the UN headquarters now, but it did not look that way to everyone at the time: among those voting against it were Britain, France and the Netherlands. 





If you don't agree that London is the capital of the world, you're in good company. 
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It does though make an interesting starting point for what makes a place great.
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John Parker  The Economist.
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Oh and those riots what do they portend for London?




Monday, September 26, 2011

Smart strategy




Blainville's beaked whales, which are among the world's most enigmatic cetacea, go silent in shallow waters.
Researchers have discovered that the whales refuse to communicate with each other near the surface.
By becoming silent, the whales enter a stealth mode that prevents them being detected by predatory killer whales.
The study, one of the first to record how beaked whales communicate, also recorded sounds made at the deepest recorded depth by any mammal.
Beaked whales are deep-diving, toothed whales.
Little is known about them, in part because they spend so much of their time in the ocean depths.
Some species have been barely sighted, and scientists suspect there may be more species of beaked whale awaiting discovery.

Start Quote



Also, very little is known about how beaked whales communicate or avoid predators.
So Natacha Aguilar of La Laguna University in Tenerife, Spain and colleagues at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, US and Aarhus University, Denmark, conducted the first study into how beaked whales communicate when diving.
Using suction cups, the researchers attached electronic listening devices to eight Blainville's beaked whales, recording them for 102 hours in total.
They recorded the sounds made by the whales though the water column, as they came up to breathe and swim near the water surface, and also as they dived to depths of 900m.
The results, published in the journal Marine Mammal Science, revealed that Blainville's beaked whales fell silent once they entered waters that are shallower than 170m.
Above this depth, the whales did not communicate with one another at all, while they were also silent when ascending from dives: a climb through the water that could take an average of 19 minutes.
That is despite the fact that these whales spend 60% of the lives swimming in waters shallower than 170m, and would be expected to communicate with one another to maintain social ties, particularly as they swim and dive in close knit groups.
When the whales swam in deeper waters, they did sound off.
Orca (image: Brandon Cole / NPL)Orcas swim and hunt close to the surface
At depths below 450m, the whales made a series of echolocation clicks, interspersed with so-called buzzes, tonal whistles and short bouts of repeated clicks.
The whales likely make the echolocation clicks to navigate and hunt prey.
But the whistles and repeated clicks, which the researchers dubbed "rasps", had never been recorded before.
These could serve to help the whales co-ordinate their movements as they disperse at the bottom of a dive to hunt.
The researchers believe that entering a stealth mode when swimming in shallow waters is an anti-predator strategy.
Killer whales, more appropriately known as orcas, are shallow divers that prey on many whale species in shallower waters.
By swimming in stealth mode, the beaked whales avoid broadcasting their location to orcas.
Hiding in the oceans this way may be an effective avoidance strategy, as beaked whales cannot out-swim orcas and have few other defences against them.
For Blainville's beaked whales that live in cohesive associations and co-ordinate their activities, keeping silent near the surface is an unexpected behaviour and strikingly in contrast with that of other toothed whales," the researchers write in the journal.

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Flu shot mythology



The CDC (Centre Disease Control) and the vaccine industry are fronting a similar bit of contradictory logic. 
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Our vaccines work so well that they offer almost total immunity from the flu, they claim. 
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And yet somehow they also work so poorly that they "wear off" after a year and require you to be re-vaccinated annually.
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This is The Great Big Lie of the vaccine industry: 
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The lie that says you have be re-vaccinated each and every year, often with the exact same strains you were vaccinated with the previous year. 
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The coming winter flu vaccines for 2012, for example, are being manufactured with the same strains as the 2010 - 2011 flu vaccines.
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But if vaccines work so amazingly well as the CDC and the vaccine industry (fraudulently) suggests, then why do you need the same shot year after year?
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Well, according to the CDC, "Vaccines wear off."
Vaccines wear off, they say
Yep, that's their cover story. 
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The vaccines "wear off."
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But hold on a minute. 
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There's something funny about this. 
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Because human antibodies normally last a lifetime, remember? 
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That's why you don't get the chicken pox over and over again; because the first time you got the chicken pox as a kid, your body created chicken pox antibodies and those antibodies last a lifetime.
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Thus, your immune system offers you lifetime immunity from the chicken pox.
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The vaccine industry falsely tries to claim its vaccines work exactly the same way: 
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They cause the body to produce antibodies against a certain viral strain. 
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But there's something you're not being told about vaccines.
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They don't really produce the same quality and strength of antibodies that your own body would produce from a natural infection and recovery. 
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That's why the vaccines "wear off" and leave you with zero protection from the very strains they inoculate you against.
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In other words,vaccines don't work as advertised. 
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And that's why the vaccine industry has to keep pushing the same vaccine strains year after year. 
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Because, think about it
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If vaccines actually worked as intended, they would give you lifetime immunity against whatever strains you were injected with, right? 
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And yet the CDC now openly admits vaccines don't offer that at all.
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This year's flu shot will be a duplicate of last year's because the same flu strains are still circulating, reports the Associated Press in an article about the CDC. 
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Government health officials are urging nearly everyone to get this fall's flu shot. 
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They say a vaccine's protection can fade significantly after several months.
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Vaccine protection fades after a few months?
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Well then, vaccines must not actually cause the body to react with producing its own antibodies, because those antibodies, we're told, offer lifetime immunity.
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Another way you can confirm this yourself is by remembering your own personal history.
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Remember when the Europeans came to America centuries ago and killed off masses of American Indians by accidentally giving them smallpox
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Well, if the Indians died of smallpox, why didn't the Europeans die of smallpox? 
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There were no vaccines in the 1600's and 1700's. 
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The answer is because the Europeans had already been exposed and built up lifetime immunity to the disease.
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Thus, the reason the European invaders of North America did not die from smallpox wasn't because they were vaccinated.
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It was because they had already been exposed to the disease and had built up active immunity against it (by producing their own antibodies which last a lifetime). 
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Thus, the Europeans could be exposed to smallpox over and over again with no symptoms of infection. 
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They were effectively "immune" to smallpox, in exactly the same way a human being living today becomes immune to a winter flu strain by first being exposed to the full strength strain (in the wild) and then building up their own antibodies in an automatic adaptive response.
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But don't expect the vaccine industry to educate anyone on how infectious disease and antibodies really work. 
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They're too busy selling annual flu shots to bother with scientific facts.
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Natural News