Waiting to blow

Estimates from local and foreign watchdogs show corruption now swallowing between a third and half of Russia's gross domestic product and state spending rising on inefficient projects.

Rapid growth in spending has already widened Russia's non-oil and gas fiscal deficit to 10 percent of GDP.
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It has also pushed up the fiscal break even oil price to around $117 per barrel for 2012
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Economists worry that things may grow even more troublesome if Putin keeps his promise and spends around $170 billion on a six-year social programme he touted during his election campaign.
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Some estimate that these added costs would push the oil price that Russia needs to break even as high as $130.
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While things might remain stable for a while yet, corruption is now totally endemic.
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Many Russian bureaucrats actually believe it is their right to steal money.
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And in a recent research survey said that they saw nothing wrong in so doing.
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When corruption becomes endemic social unrest increases.
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To tackle endemic corruption requires agreement of the countries leaders.
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This cannot be achieved when many of these are also involved.
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Catch 22 for Putin.
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One thing can be said with certainty.
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The situation will not continue without further unrest at some point.
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At what point?
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Probably through an event that is not foreseeable today.
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A black swan.
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Russia is not the same place it was ten years ago.
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Not sure that the leaders 'get it'.
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Not sure they care either.
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However events are likely to change this attitude.
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Sadly it remains a dream that Russia will one day have the rule of law
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That one day it will have an independent media and judicial system.
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However without these three legs of government, media and the judicial system being autonomous and acting as a check and balance on each other nothing much can change. 

Sir James Dyson award

The Namib beetle inspires a revolutionary irrigation system.

An Australian product engineer has won the 2011 Sir James Dyson design award for his Airdrop irrigation system

An Australian engineer who has borrowed the Namib beetle’s survival trick and applied it to a device that extracts water from even the driest desert air has won the 2011 James Dyson Award.

Edward Linacre’s self-powered Airdrop pump and underpipes system has the potential to deliver water to the roots of crops in the most arid places on the planet.

The young Swinburne University of Technology graduate studied the Namib beetle’s ability to survive by consuming the dew it collects on the hydrophilic skin of its back in the early mornings.

The Airdrop, developed in his mother’s garden, mimics this survival system by pumping air through a network of underground pipes to cool it to the point at which the water condenses. 

The water is then distributed to plants.

Sir James Dyson said: “Biomimicry is a powerful weapon in an engineer’s armoury.

Airdrop shows how simple, natural principles like the condensation of water, can be applied to good effect through skilled design and robust engineering.

“Young designers and engineers like Edward will develop the simple, effective technology of the future – they will tackle the world’s biggest problems and improve lives in the process.”

Mr Linacre’s research suggests that 11.5 millilitres of water can be harvested from every cubic meter of air in the driest of deserts and he believes the £10,000 cash prize will help fund an improved prototype that will increase the yield further.

“I’ve had quite a bit of international interest in Airdrop [from] the US, Hong Kong, Middle East and Hungary,” he said. “

I’m in negotiations with a few organisations at the moment. 

Some want to buy the unit itself, but a couple want to look whether the design concept can be integrated into their existing irrigation infrastructure.”

He said he would use the industrial prototype to win over financial backers, who were typically reluctant to invest before they could see the technology worked on a meaningful scale.

One of the two runners up this year was Kwick Screen from the UK – a portable, retractable room divider developed by Michael Korn, a student at the Royal College of Art in London. 

The other was Blindspot from Singapore – an aide for the visually handicapped, helping them travel around unfamiliar surroundings, developed by Se Lui Chew from the National University of Singapore

The judging panel led by Sir James also highly commended the Amo Arm from Canada. 

This device aims to overcome the invasive muscle re-innervation surgery required for amputees and can be trapped on and is controlled using brain signals. 

It was developed by Michal Prywata from Ryerson University.

The competition runs across 18 countries including Japan, Singapore, the US and Germany.

Relational thoughts

If they could fall apart, then any of them could was the remark that made me think.

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A remark about the separation of a famous couple.

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Why do relationships work?

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Then cease to work.

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For a million different reasons that's clear. 

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But I'm inclined to believe that relationship breakdowns aren't infectious. 

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What we see of others’ relationships is just that, only what we see. 

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Inside, the workings are as complex and mysterious as those of a modern computer.

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When an apparently strong relationship breaks down.

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We wonder when did they stop loving each other? 

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Was it recently?

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Or much further back?”

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We just don't know but probably while they still appeared to be happy with each other. 

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Meaning that things were already in motion before any one outside knew anything was wrong.

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We often tend to assume that others have the same expectations and needs as ourselves.

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But people want very different things from marriage or longer term relationships.

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Wealth and status matter far more to some than fidelity.

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Some need humour while others need constant stroking.

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People marry for a million reasons. 

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And they bring so much baggage with them up the aisle that no relationship can be viewed without its owner’s previous history. 

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And no marriage is an island either.

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This is so often not seen until too late.

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For example a man left his wife because her parents, treated him as an on-call free handyman. 

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Given different in-laws the relationship might still be working.

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So often parents will not let their offspring get on with their relationships.

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They just have to interfere.

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And a million other reasons why they fail.

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So what can we do to ward off disaster? 

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To most it is clear that routine does take the gloss off, so don’t get in a rut.

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Of course, if you’re both doing high powered jobs and travelling the world all the time, you might need some simple private time together.

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Don’t have any secrets from each other is probably one of the most simple yet ignored pieces of advice.

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Unfortunately some marriages run for decades on pure denial.

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Another is where couples argue, often, but are never bored.

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Have realistic expectations is an obvious but frequently ignored concept.

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Desiring your other half to accompany you to a boring family occasion is reasonable; demanding they bail out your useless sister for the umpteenth  time is not.

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Small gestures can produce big dividends: bring them back their favourite snack or brand of chocolate from the shops and watch their happiness.

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Being prepared to negotiate sounds hard but it can get you out of an impasse where something is just festering. 

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Try not to criticise their dull anecdotes.

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Put up with those nasty little habits, we all have some. 

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Remember a humiliated spouse can be very resentful.

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Spouses are not telepathic because you live together. 

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If you don’t want to go on holiday with her friends and their unpleasant children again, say so.

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Don’t let them become part of the furniture, try to find areas of interest in each other. 

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Pay attention you might miss something that is more fun shared with each other.

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Pay a compliment now and then in fact more than now and then is even better. 

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And the obvious one listen.

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Check that you love each other.

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Do you really truly love her?

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Do you sincerely love him?

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If yes then recognise that all the rest are details that can be worked on.

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If no then see clearly why not and act to change this or move on.

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Oh and so many more but if even one resonates with you then that's cool.

Slowly quietly

The world is being driven towards the hitherto unthinkable scenario of untreatable infections.
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Because of the growth of superbugs resistant to all antibiotics and the dwindling interest in developing new drugs to combat them.
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Reports are increasing across Europe of patients with infections that are nearly impossible to treat. 
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The European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC) said that in some countries up to 50 per cent of cases of blood poisoning caused by one bug – K. pneumoniae, a common cause of urinary and respiratory conditions – were resistant to carbapenems, the most powerful class of antibiotics.
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Across Europe, the percentage of carbapenem-resistant K. pneumoniae has doubled from 7 per cent to 15 per cent. 
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The ECDC said it is "particularly worrying" because carbapenems are the last-line antibiotics for treatment of multi-drug-resistant infections.
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Marc Sprenger, the director, said: The situation is critical. 
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We need to declare a war against these bacteria.
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In 2009, carbapenem-resistant K. pneumoniae was established only in Greece, but by 2010, it had extended to Italy, Austria, Cyprus and Hungary. 
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The bacterium is present in the intestinal tract and is transmitted by touch.
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Resistant strains of E.coli also increased in 2011. 
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Between 25 and 50 per cent of E.coli infections in Italy and Spain were resistant to fluoroquinolones in 2010-2011, one of the most important antibiotics for treating the bacterium.
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In the UK, 70 patients have been identified carrying NDM-1-containing bacteria, an enzyme that destroys carbapenems. 
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Separate research has shown that more than 80 per cent of travellers returning from India to Europe carried the NDM gene in their gut.
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Researchers speak of a "nightmare scenario" if the gene for NDM-1 production is spread more widely.
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The UK Health Protection Agency warned doctors last month to abandon a drug usually used to treat a common sexually transmitted disease because it was no longer effective. 
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The agency said that gonorrhoea – which caused 17,000 infections in 2009 and even more in 2010 - 2011 – should be treated with two drugs instead of one and warned of a very real threat of untreatable gonorrhoea in the future.
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Discovering new medicines to treat resistant superbugs has proved increasingly difficult and costly – they are taken only for a short period and the commercial returns are low. 
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The European Commission yesterday launched a plan to boost research into new antibiotics, by promising accelerated approval for new drugs and funding for development through the the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a public-private collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry.
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An estimated 25,000 people die each year in the European Union from antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections. 
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Countries with the highest rates of resistant infections, such as Greece, Cyprus, Italy, Hungary and Bulgaria, also tended to be the ones with the highest use of antibiotics.
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World Health Organisation scientists warned two years ago that overuse of antibiotics risked returning the world to a pre-antibiotic era in which infections did not respond to treatment. 
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The warnings have been ignored.
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Professor Laura Piddock, president of the British Society of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, said politicians and the public had been slow to appreciate the urgency of the situation. 
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In The Lancet, she writes: Antibiotics are not perceived as essential to health, despite such agents saving lives.
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Global action to develop new antibiotics is required, she says.
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The Department of Health published guidance aimed at curbing the overuse of antibiotics in hospitals, by avoiding long treatment and replacing broad-spectrum antibiotics with those targeted at the specific infection. 
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Professor Dame Sally Davies, Chief Medical Officer, said: Many antibiotics are prescribed when they don't need to be.
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Jeremy Laurance
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Not wanting to notice is one thing.

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Not taking action is another.

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Meaning that we have yet again to accept that we are powerless in the face of some very unpleasant probabilities in the near future.

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Repetition of stupidity seems such a human trait.

The folly of fools

Deceiving others has its advantages. 
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Camouflage in nature is useful to the hunter and the hunted. 
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The smarter the animal, the more likely it is to use and detect deception to its benefit. 
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Humans are particularly good at exploiting trickery to get ahead.
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For more money.
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More power.
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Or a desired mate. 
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Yet deception is difficult, regardless of intelligence. 
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Lying often leaves us nervous and twitchy, and complicated fictions can lead to depression and poor immune function. 
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And then there are the ethical implications. 
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Some deception is intuitive. 
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The grey squirrel, for example, cleverly builds false caches to discourage others from raiding its acorns. 
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Placebos are sometimes as effective as medication without the nasty side effects. 
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Other illustrations require more head-scratching. 
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Competition between our maternal and paternal genes can create “split selves”, which try to fool each other on a biological level. 
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Human memory often involves an unconscious process of selection and distortion.
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The better to believe the stories we tell others.
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Most effectively devious people are often unaware of their deceit. 
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Self-deception makes it easier to manipulate others to get ahead. 
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Particularly intelligent people can be especially good at deceiving themselves.
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All of this deceit comes at a price. 
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Most cunning people whether conscious liars or not tend to benefit at the expense of everyone else. 
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Overconfident Wall Street and City of London traders may hurt investors and taxpayers at little personal risk. 
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Then there are politicians who spin stories of national greatness to bolster support for costly wars in which they will not be fighting.

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There is certainly no shortage of human folly to consider. 

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Robert Trivers.

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And today we are coming to an interesting point where even the dullest are seeing through the lies.

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Politicians lies enabled by endless borrowing, bringing about financial crisis after financial crisis.

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Endless deceit.

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Endless manipulation of the truth

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Will we have the courage to become personally involved in the issues confronting us?

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Time will show.

Men and grooming

Men spend more time getting ready than women, research shows.

Men spend more time getting ready to go out than women, according to research.

On average men spend 81 minutes a day on personal grooming, including cleansing, toning and moisturising, shaving, styling hair and choosing clothes, the study found.

Women have their beauty regime down to a fine art and get hair, clothes and make-up done in just 75 minutes.

The research, carried out for Travelodge, found that on an average morning men spend 23 minutes in the shower, compared to 22 minutes for women.

Men then take 18 minutes on their shaving regime, compared to 14 minutes for women despite them having to trim legs, armpits and bikini line.

Men take a minute longer - 10 minutes - on cleansing, toning and moisturising.

Choosing an outfit is also a time-consuming operation for men who want to look their best - taking 13 minutes compared to 10 minutes for women.

The study also found that the average British person does not have a clue regarding the true value of their toiletry bag.

When quizzed, the average adult estimated their wash bag with contents to be worth £52.23 when in reality the bag of essentials is worth nearly three times more at £156.69.

A spokeswoman for Travelodge said they had seen a rise in the number of toiletry bags being left behind in their 487 hotels.

In the last 12 months, hotel staff have spent hundreds of hours uniting 10,000 wash bags with their owners.

In one case a customer paid more than £100 for a courier to pick up her toiletry bag, which she had left behind in a London hotel - the designer wash bag had nearly £1,000 worth of toiletry items.

The truth of how it is

The Secret Doctrine is the accumulated wisdom of the ages, and its cosmogony alone is the most stupendous and elaborate system .
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But modern science believes not in the “soul of things,” and hence will reject the whole system of ancient cosmogony.
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It is useless to say that the system in question is no fancy of one or several isolated individuals.
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That it is the uninterrupted record covering thousands of generations of seers whose respective experiences were made to test and to verify the traditions passed orally by one early race to another, of the teachings of higher and exalted beings, who watched over the childhood of humanity.
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That for long ages, the “wise men” of the fifth race ... had passed their lives in learning, not teaching.
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How did they do so?
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It is answered: by checking, testing, and verifying in every department of nature the traditions of old by the independent visions of great adepts;
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i.e., men who have developed and perfected their physical, mental, psychic, and spiritual organisations to the utmost possible degree.
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No vision of one adept was accepted till it was checked and confirmed by the visions – so obtained as to stand as independent evidence – of other adepts, and by centuries of experiences.’ (SD 1:272-3)

‘
For thousands of years, one initiate after another, one great hierophant succeeded by other hierophants, has explored and re-explored the invisible universe, the worlds of the interplanetary regions, during long periods when his conscious soul, united to the spiritual soul and to the ALL, free and almost omnipotent, left his body.
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The mysteries of life as well as of death, of the visible and invisible worlds, have been fathomed and observed by initiated adepts in all epochs and in all nations.
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They have studied these during the solemn moments of union of their divine monad with the universal Spirit, and they have recorded their experiences.
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A definite science, based on personal observation and experience, corroborated by continuous demonstrations, containing irrefutable proofs, for those who study it, has thus been established.’ (BCW 5:50-1)
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And for those of you who wish to know for yourself then read it even if the terms used are unfamiliar.
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It is our history.
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And yes it is really how it is, the truth about us, where we came from, how we got here, and what is coming.

3 to watch

In some parts of the new digital world, it is obvious who is in charge. 
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Google rules in search; Facebook in social networking; Amazon in retail. 
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These territories are still being fought over: 
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Microsoft’s Bing is attacking Google in search.
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Google is attacking Facebook in social, and so forth. 
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But these are all large, relatively mature fields. 
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During 2012 the more interesting battles will be those taking place on the smaller, lesser-known territories on the fringes of the technology world, in areas such as mobile payments, location and augmented reality.
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They may seem marginal fields now, but it is worth remembering that social networking went from obscurity a decade ago to being used by hundreds of millions of people today.
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Accounting for more time online than any other activity, according to a survey of American internet users by Nielsen, a market-research firm. 
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Like search, social and online retail, these promising new territories have the potential to transform people’s lives, but have yet to be conquered. 
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So who has designs on them?
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Start with mobile payments. 
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One of the oddities of technological progress is that it is easier to use your mobile phone to pay for a taxi in Nairobi than in New York. 
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That is because Kenya is a world leader in mobile-payment systems, which have proved particularly popular in the developing world as an alternative to conventional banking and payment methods. 
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In the developed world, efforts to replace wallets and credit cards with mobile phones have been held up by bickering between banks and mobile operators over who will “own” the customer, and who will pay to upgrade the point-of-sale equipment used by millions of retailers.
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The other company to watch is Apple, under its new boss Tim Cook. So keep an eye on two companies that could break the logjam in 2012. 
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The first is Square, a start-up founded by Jack Dorsey, who also co-founded Twitter. 
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His firm makes a small, square device that plugs into an Apple iPhone or Android-based smartphone and turns it into a mobile till that can take credit-card payments. 
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Visit a farmers’ market in San Francisco and you will probably see one in action. 
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The next iteration of the technology allows customers who have bought something in this way to use their iPhones instead of their credit cards for subsequent purchases. 
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This is a nifty bottom-up way of doing what years of top-down planning have failed to achieve.
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The firm has repeatedly taken a half-finished idea (digital music player, smartphone, tablet computer) and shown the industry how it should be done. 
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Expect it to attempt this again in 2012 with mobile payments, by embedding a wireless chip into a new version of the iPhone. 
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Apple could thus enable every iPhone to make and receive payments, linking the whole system to the credit cards of more than 200m people who already use its iTunes service. 
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If anyone can create a mobile-payments infrastructure overnight, spawning copycat moves from others and opening up an entirely new market, it is Apple. 
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To provide compatibility with older iPhones and with Android devices, Apple might then become the logical buyer of Square. 
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Also active in this area are PayPal, which dominates payments on the desktop internet, and Google, which launched a mobile-wallet service in 2011.
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Location-based services are another field that has yet to take off. 

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Mobile operators have been pushing location-specific advertisements and coupons for years. 
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More recently start-ups such as Foursquare and Gowalla have tried to give smartphone users incentives to share their locations, with a view to commercialising this information. 
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But location information is most useful when tied to other things—such as the photos, status updates and recommendations shared on social networks. 
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Plenty of action is likely in 2012 as the location start-ups both compete and co-operate with the big social networks (Facebook, Twitter and Google+), which will continue to integrate location information into their services.

A similar situation pertains in the field of augmented reality (AR), the sci-fi trick of overlaying information from the internet onto a real-time view of the real world. 

At the moment this is a party trick that can be performed with a handful of smartphone apps (such as Layar, Wikitude and Google Goggles) and on some games consoles (such as the Nintendo 3DS). 
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But as location and social-network information are knitted together, AR becomes the logical way to display the results: 
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Highlighting your friends in a crowd at a festival, for example, and eventually enabling your glasses to remind you of the name of the person you are talking to at a conference, together with their most recent postings on social networks. 
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Once again this is enticing new territory that both start-ups and the big social networks have in their sights, along with search engines and hardware vendors. 
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At the moment Apple is the company to beat when it comes to packaging cutting-edge technology in an elegant, easy-to-use form. 
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Will Apple some day launch a set of augmented-reality goggles—iGlasses, perhaps? 

The Olympics approach

Michael Phelps, looking more like Spiderman than the world's fastest swimmer, has unveiled the high-tech swimsuit he plans to wear at next year's London Olympics.
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Team-mates, including Ryan Lochte and Natalie Coughlin, Phelps strutted the catwalk in Manhattan to launch the latest range of skin-tight suits that the makers Speedo say will give their swimmers a massive edge over their rivals.
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Knowing that I'm in the best suit has always been something that I thought was a cool gift, said Phelps.
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Speedo claimed the Fastskin3 suits, which are part of a revolutionary new 'system' that includes space-age caps and wider goggles, would significantly improve the performances of swimmers and trigger a flood of world records in London.
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These are the fastest suits ever made," Speedo scientist doctor Tom Waller said.
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We hope that means records will be broken but that still comes down to the swimmers.
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What we have created is a system where all the technologies work in harmony with the swimmers' natural talent to give them the chance to maximise their potential.
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Waller said the suits had taken four years to develop but would improve oxygen economy by 11 per cent and reduce drag by 16.6 per cent underwater and 5.2 per cent on the surface.
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In a sport where gold medals are decided by hundredths of a second, that's a huge advantage, said Phelps's coach Bob Bowman, who helped develop the suits.
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Bowman and Phelps were outspoken critics of the full-body polyurethane suits that reduced the 2009 world championships in Rome to farce and were later banned because they aided buoyancy.
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But both said they were comfortable with the new suits, which Speedo said had been approved by the sport's world governing body FINA.
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I think the difference between this and what happened before is that we're giving them an edge but we're doing it in three ways: cap, suit and goggles.
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It's also done in a way that each swimmer can benefit the same from the suit. 
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I don't think one swimmer will have a decided advantage over the competition because of the way the suit is put together and it's clearly within the FINA guidelines.
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Lochte, one of just two swimmers to have already broken world records that were set in Rome, conceded that the suits may create an uneven playing field but it was up to every competitor to choose their own swimwear.
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When I put it on I feel superhuman, I feel like I can beat anyone. 
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When I get on the blocks I'm like an action figure, he said.
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It's out there for everyone, it's not like it's only available for Speedo athletes. 
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It's out there for any swimmer who wants to wear it so it's their disadvantage if they don't want to wear it.
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Coughlin said the biggest benefit to her were the new goggles that are fitted with hydroscopic lens and 180 degree peripheral vision, making them look like spider's eyes.
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Well, I'm a backstroker so I can't afford to take a look around and see where my competitors are but with these I can see everything without moving my head.

Reuters
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Maybe they should all swim naked with no goggles to make it fairer then?