The Cost of SuccessLife in Beijing's Cellars

As speculators and increasing demand drive up Beijing's real estate prices, those who cannot afford the rent are going underground -- literally. Hundreds of cellars and air-raid shelters are being rented out as living spaces in the Chinese capital.

For 27-year-old Dong Ying, Beijing is a city of dreams. Two years ago, the sports teacher relocated from a small city in the north-eastern province of Heilongjiang to the Chinese metropolis. Here, she hoped, her wishes for a more interesting life would be fulfilled.

Since then she goes from fitness club to fitness club every day, working as a trainer. She pedals, she bends and straightens and basically ensures that the affluent city residents stay in shape. To reach her students, she spends four hours each day travelling on the city's subway.

She earns around 3,000 yuan (around €350 or $450) per month, a sum she would never have earned doing similar work in her hometown. And here she can enjoy the big city. "I am happy," says the young woman, who is wearing a pink Nike sports shirt. "I love my work, and I feel free."

Going Underground

But there is a severe flaw in her Beijing lifestyle. Dong Ying lives, literally, underground. The only accommodation she can afford is a tiny room in the cellar of an apartment building. Every month she pays the equivalent of €52 ($68) for the room, around 15 percent of her income. Other tenants must live even further down, on the cellar's second level, where the rent is even cheaper.

A bed, a small cupboard and a desk just fit into Dong Ying's barren room. A communal toilet and bathroom are at the end of the hallway. Anyone living here must eat out every day because any kind of kitchen is prohibited for safety reasons. Still, Dong Ying can find something positive to say about her home: "The house management is OK. The corridor is clean."

Dong Ying is one of hundreds of thousands of Chinese sentenced to a life underground -- migrant workers, job seekers, street vendors. All those who can't afford life above ground in Beijing are forced to look below.

Dong Ying's room is one of around a hundred similar dwellings under a modern apartment block on the outskirts of the Beijing district of Chaoyang. While the wealthier residents enter the building, then go right or left to an elevator, the underground dwellers head past a cellar for bicycle storage, and then downstairs. There's no emergency exit.

Running Out of Options

Generally it's not the people living in the apartments above who rent out their cellar spaces: It tends to be apartment managers who put the unused spaces to work. In doing so, they tread close to breaking rental laws. Some even rent out official air-raid shelters -- which is actually totally prohibited.

The demand for underground accommodation may even rise in the near future. The Beijing city administration recently gave permission to level dozens of outlying villages in order to make room for new living and business areas.

Thousands of migrant workers live in those villages, often in primitive conditions. The citizens of Beijing call them the "ant people" because of the way they live on top of one another. Demolishing the villages will leave them with few options. They will either find accommodation farther outside the city, or, if they want to live close to their workplaces, they will have to go underground.

Beijing's officials pride themselves on the fact that the city has no slums like those in, say, Nairobi or Bangkok. The areas of brick hovels without so much as a toilet, which used to shape the cityscape in many districts, have begun to vanish. What the city fathers don't admit, though, is a still-unresolved problem -- that many millions cannot afford a normal apartment in Beijing. The city's housing market in some ways symbolizes the new communist China -- a society in which the gap between rich and poor continues to widen.

On average, apartments in Beijing rent for the equivalent of €350 per month, about as much as Dong Ying earns. And prices are rising. At the start of the year, tenants paid around €314. A year earlier, it was €266.

Speculating on Real Estate

One reason for the high prices is that demand outstrips supply. There are relatively few apartments available for rent in Beijing. Over two-thirds are privately owned, of which a large share were in the past sold cheaply by authorities or factories to their employees.

Social housing, moveover, has only begun to develop. Last year 8,000 rental properties were built for those on minimal incomes, and this year there should be 10,000 -- a mere drop in the ocean for Beijing.

Even those with enough money to buy their own homes are not necessarily fortunate. New housing developments keep springing up, and the amount of new property available is growing, but prices have also shot sky-high in the past few months. Buyers are currently paying €2,546 per square meter on average.

For rich Chinese, like the wealthy coal barons from the Shanxi province, Beijing apartments are investments worthy of speculation, like stock market shares or gold. These speculators don't think about renting the apartments out. They simply aim for properties with rising prices, so they can sell them on and turn a profit.

Recently experts have talked about a real estate bubble which threatens to burst. As discontentment grows among those citizens who earn good money but still can't afford their own apartments, the Chinese government wants to curb speculation with new taxes and rules.

'We Can All Live Together as a Family'

Wang Xueping, 30, is light-years away from owning her own apartment. At the moment she's trying to push her baby carriage out of the basement of Building 9 in the Jiqing Li residential complex in central Beijing. Two months ago, she and the child moved from Jilin province in northeastern China to join her husband, who's been driving cabs in Beijing for three years.

Now all three of them live in a cellar room that is 10 square meters (108 square feet) in size. "The main thing is that we can all live together, as a family," Wang Xueping says.

Meanwhile, fitness trainer Dong Ying has had good luck. She's moved cellars, into a room with a small shaft that allows a little daylight in. And she has a new boyfriend, who has just bought himself a new apartment. If they get married, Dong Ying's days underground will end.

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Water purification made simpler

Filtration systems used in homes in the developing world, says Kristen Jellison, can be made smaller and less expensive.

University of Phoenix? - Official Site. Online Programs. Flexible Classes. Get Info Today. - Phoenix.edu

 

Inside a growing number of homes in the developing world, sand and biological organisms are collaborating to decontaminate drinking water.

Arranged in barrels of concrete or plastic, these biosand water filtration systems (BSFs) remove 95 to 99 percent of the bacteria, viruses, worms and particles contained in rain or surface water. A layer of microorganisms at the top of the sand bed consumes biological and other organic contaminants, while the sand below removes contaminants that cause cloudiness and odor.

A BSF can produce several dozen liters of clean water in an hour. But it can weigh several hundred pounds and cost up to $30, an expense some families in developing countries cannot afford.

Kristen Jellison and her students are trying to build a BSF that is smaller than the standard system, but just as effective.

"Smaller, lighter BSFs," says Jellison, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, "would be cheaper, easier to transport and available to a broader global market. Preliminary research has shown the potential for smaller systems to remove most disease-causing organisms, except possibly viruses."

Jellison, who is affiliated with the university's STEPS (Science, Technology, Environment, Policy and Society) initiative, has devoted most of her career to improving drinking water. As a co-adviser to Lehigh's chapter of Engineers Without Borders, she helped lead efforts to design and build a 20,000-gallon water-storage tank and chlorination system in Pueblo Nuevo, Honduras.

With support from NSF and the Philadelphia Water Department, she has spent five years studying the parasite Cryptosporidium parvum and its transport and fate in water bodies. The parasite is found in multiple hosts, is difficult to eradicate, and can be deadly to people with compromised immune systems.

In an effort to identify possible sources of Cryptosporidium contamination in the Philadelphia watershed, Jellison studies the DNA of various species using a technique called polymerase chain reaction (PCR). She also studies the impact on Cryptosporidium of biofilms, the slimy layers of microorganisms that form on rocks, pipes and other surfaces in water.

Jellison's group is conducting experiments on BSFs of various sizes, including systems that fit inside two- and five-gallon plastic pails. (The typical BSF is 3 feet high.) The group will change the depth of the sand column, add rusty nails to several pails (in an effort to increase virus removal), and alter other parameters.

"BSFs were developed in the 1980s," says Jellison. "This is the most comprehensive study to date to characterize the efficiency of different filter types."

Provided by Lehigh University

Are we becoming more stupid? Human brain has been 'shrinking for the last 20,000 years'

It's not something we'd like to admit, but it seems the human race may actually be becoming increasingly dumb.

Man's brain has been gradually shrinking over the last 20,000 years, according to a new report.

This decrease in size follows two million years during which the human cranium steadily grew in size, and it's happened all over the world, to both sexes and every race.

Old big head: A 3D image replica of a 28,000-year-old skull found in France shows it was 20 per cent larger than ours

'Over the past 20,000 years, the average volume of the human male brain has decreased from 1,500 cubic centimetres to 1,350 cubic centimetres, losing a chunk the size of a tennis ball,' Kathleen McAuliffe writes in Discover magazine.

'The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion.'

She was reporting on comments made by Dr John Hawks, an anthropologist from the University of Wisconsin, who argues that the fact the size of the human brain is decreasing doesn't necessarily mean our intelligence is in decline as well.

Some paleontologists agree with this diagnosis, that our brains may have become smaller in size, but increasingly efficient.

But others believe that man has indeed become steadily more stupid as he has evolved.

Several theories have been advanced to explain the mystery of the shrinking brain. One is that big heads were necessary to survive Upper Paleolithic life, which involved cold, outdoor activities.

A second theory is that skulls developed to cope with a chewy diet of rabbits, reindeer, foxes and horses.

As our food has become easier to eat, so our heads have stopped growing, according to supporters of this theory.

Other experts say that with high infant mortality, only the toughest survived - and the toughest tended to have big heads. Therefore a gradually decreasing infant mortality rate has led to a proportionate decrease in the size of our brains.

A recent study conducted by David Geary and Drew Bailey, cognitive scientists at the University of Missouri, explored how cranial size changed as humans adapted to an increasingly complex social environment between 1.9million and 10,000 years ago.

They found that when population density was low, such as during the majority of our evolution, the cranium increased in size. But when a certain area's population changed from sparse to dense, our cranium size decreased.

They concluded that as increasingly complex societies emerged, the brain grew smaller because people didn't have to be as smart to stay alive.

But Dr Geary warns against stereotyping our ancestors as being more intelligent than us.

He said: 'Practically speaking, our ancestors were not our intellectual or creative equals because they lacked the same kind of cultural support.

'The rise of agriculture and modern cities based on economic specialisation has allowed the very brightest people to focus their efforts on the sciences, the arts and other fields.

'Their ancient counterparts didn't have that infrastructure to support them. It took all their efforts just to get through life.'

Dr Hawks, on the other hand, believes that the decrease in the size of our brains may actually show we are getting more intelligent.

The brain, he says, uses up to 20 per cent of all the fuel we consume. Therefore a bigger brain will require more energy and take longer to develop.

Dr Hawks notes that a boom in the human population between 20,000 and 10,000 years ago led to an unusual advantageous mutation to take place. 

He believes this could have resulted in the brain becoming more streamlined, our neurochemistry shifting to boost the capacity of our brains.

But it seems the size of our brains could be on the increase again.

A recent study by anthropologist Richard Jantz of the University of Tennessee found that our brain size is on the increase again.

He measured and compared the craniums of Americans of African and European descent from late colonial times to the 20th century and found that our brain size is on the move again.

The smartphones that are too clever for their owners

With hundreds of thousands of 'apps' available, smartphones allow users to do anything from checking their bank balance to booking a flight.

But 71 per cent of owners use them simply to make a call, text or check Facebook, research shows.

In fact, the study revealed that a typical person exploits only 10 per cent of their phone's functions.

Too many apps: Research reveals that people still mainly use their phones for making calls or texting, despite thousands of apps

The survey – of 2,000 users – also found more than half had felt ­pressured to get the latest or most ­popular smartphone, such as Apple's iPhone4 or a BlackBerry.

The devices, which will be the top gadget on Christmas lists this year, are really pocket computers. As well as the capacity for the downloadable programs known as 'apps', they can browse the internet and send and receive emails.

The research by Envirofone, which recycles mobiles, estimates there are 11million smartphones in the UK.

While there are many useful apps offering train information or sat-nav functions, others are bizarre.

A Zippo lighter app displays an animated picture to wave at concerts, while Annoy-a-teen plays a high-pitched sound that only teenagers are ­supposed to be able to hear.

Jon Butler, of Envirofone, said: 'The latest phones have become status symbols which look flash but aren't fully utilised.

Facebook worldwide friendships mapped

As we all know, people all over the world use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family. You meet someone. You friend him or her on Facebook to keep in touch. These friendships began within universities, but today there are friendships that connect countries. Facebook engineering intern Paul Butler visualizes these connections:

I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line's color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.

In other words, for each pair of countries with a friend in one country and a friend in the other, a line was drawn. The more friends and distance between two countries, the brighter the lines on a black-blue-white color scale. The "stronger" connections were drawn on top, so they are more visually prominent.

It might remind you of Chris Harrison's maps that show interconnectedness via router configurations.

In areas of high density it looks more or less like population density. Or even more interesting, you can compare the above section to Ben Fry's All Streets, which maps all the roads in the United States. Physical connections look a lot like digital connections.

Most interesting though, I think, are not the places that are lit up, but the relatively dark ones, where Facebook has yet to reach. There are still huge sections of complete black:

Check out the high-resolution version and more details on the process here. One interesting note for the R fanboys. This was done in your favorite open-source stat software for computing and graphics.

Estonia's Entry Expands Euro Into Former Soviet Union

Estonia entered the euro area with "no glitches" in banking and retail, shrugging off the sovereign debt crisis rippling through Europe to extend the currency block into the former Soviet Union.

Wedged between Russia and Latvia on the Baltic Sea, Estonia is the 17th country to switch to the currency. Gross domestic product of 14 billion euros ($19 billion) makes it the second- smallest euro economy after Malta.

"The New Year came exactly like the Estonian central bank and its partners had planned," deputy central bank Governor Rein Minka told a news conference in Tallinn, the capital, today. "There were no glitches with adopting the euro or with technical systems. The new money reached all the places it was supposed to."

As Europe grapples with the financial crisis, Estonia may be the last addition to the euro club for several years. Lithuania and Latvia, the next in line, aim to adopt the currency in 2014, while bigger eastern countries have shied away from setting target dates.

"For Estonia, the choice is to be inside the club, among the decision makers, or stay outside of the club," Prime Minister Andrus Ansip told reporters yesterday in Tallinn, the nation's capital. "We prefer to act as club members."

'Successfully Introduced'

The euro "has been successfully introduced in Estonia," the European Central Bank said in a statement on its website today.

Automated teller machines and card payments at Estonia's four largest banks, which account for more than 90 percent of the market, are working "smoothly", the Estonian central bank and Finance Ministry said in a statement distributed before news conference at 1 p.m. local time.

"It seems the Estonian society is taking to currency changeover calmly," Riho Unt, the head of the Estonian Banking Association and the chief executive officer of the Estonian unit of Stockholm-based SEB AB, said at the news conference. "There were no queues when we opened offices today. Only about 10,000 transactions have been made at the ATM's, which is very little, and less than 0.5 percent of euro cash has been withdrawn from teller machines."

Estonia, with debt estimated by the European Union at 8 percent of GDP for 2010, will be the nation with the most sound fiscal position in a currency bloc plagued by budget woes that forced Greece and Ireland to seek European and International Monetary Fund aid.

'Difficult Times'

"I hope other countries will notice that we met the euro- entry terms despite difficult times and this will improve Estonia's reputation," student Kaspar Nuut, 24, said yesterday in central Tallinn, as crowds gathered for the celebrations featuring a midnight fireworks display. "We would have had to adopt the euro anyway, so better sooner rather than later."

Estonia's central bank chief, Andres Lipstok, 53, will join the European Central Bank's policy-setting council, taking part in his first interest-rate vote on Jan. 13 in Frankfurt.

Some 85 million euro coins featuring a map of Estonia and 12 million bank notes went into circulation today, according to the central bank, starting a two-week phasing out of the national currency, the kroon. One euro buys 15.6466 krooni.

"I definitely support euro adoption as it will make traveling easier when all of Europe has the same currency," Ivi Normet, a 45-year-old civil servant, said. "I hope it will also benefit other aspects of life in Estonia."

Western Anchor

The 1.3 million Estonians have little experience of monetary autonomy. In June 1992, less than a year after gaining independence from the Soviet Union, Estonia shifted from the Russian ruble to a national currency that it immediately pegged to the German mark. The exchange rate was locked to the euro when the first 11 countries began using it in 1999.

Estonia in 2004 was in the initial wave of eastern European countries to join the EU, seeking a western anchor as an insurance policy against Russia.

"Estonia's entry means that over 330 million Europeans now carry euro notes and coins in their pockets," European Commission President Jose Barroso said yesterday in a statement. "It is a strong signal of the attraction and stability that the euro brings."

Economic growth averaged 7.2 percent between 1995 and the onset of the global financial crisis in 2007. Reliant on foreign investment, Estonia was hit harder than most in the global slump, with the economy shrinking 5.1 percent in 2008 and 13.9 percent in 2009, the sharpest contraction since its transition to a market economy at the beginning of 1990s.

Targets

Estonia's path to adopting the currency was marred by high inflation. Consumer prices soared 10.6 percent in 2008, missing one of the five economic tests for euro entry. The other targets are for deficits, debt, long-term interest rates and exchange- rate stability.

While the deficit, at 2.8 percent of GDP in 2008, was under the euro's 3 percent limit, the government kept up the austerity drive. Tax increases, spending cuts and higher dividend collection from state-owned companies whittled the shortfall to an estimated 1 percent in 2010.

Unlike in Latvia or Lithuania, Estonia's neighbors along the Baltic coast, the belt-tightening didn't provoke public unrest. Growth rebounded to 2.4 percent in 2010 and will reach 4.4 percent next year, the EU predicts.

Euro Support

"The Estonian government early in the crisis realized that it provides a great window of opportunity," said Andres Kasekamp, a politics professor at Tartu University. "The austerity and cuts in the public sector were necessary anyhow, but to make it more palatable, the government created a vision that these cuts are in the name of joining the euro."

Backing for the euro ebbed to 52 percent in December from a record 54 percent in November, according to a government- sponsored poll of 501 people with a margin of error of 4 percent. The decline, stemming from concerns over sovereign debt crisis and nostalgia for the soon-to-be abolished kroon, was still "surprisingly small," Tea Varrak, the chancellor of the Finance Ministry, said at the news conference today.

By contrast, support for the single currency is plunging in Germany, which designed the euro as the successor to the deutsche mark. Some 49 percent of Germans want to bring back the mark and 41 percent want to keep the euro, according to a Bild newspaper poll last month.

"This really is a coin with two sides," said Tiiu Braman, a 65-year-old pensioner in Tallinn. "Of course the kroon is very important to us historically and beautiful and so on, but we probably can't make it without the euro. Still, everyday life will be a bit more complicated for a while."

To contact the reporter on this story: Ott Ummelas in Tallinn at oummelas@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Willy Morris at wmorris@bloomberg.net

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US most vulnerable to climate change among world's wealthy nations

Jeremy Hance

While the US has done little to mitigate climate change, a new report by humanitarian research organization DARA and the Climate Vulnerable Forum states that of all industrialized nations the US will face the most harm from a warming world. Together with Spain, the US's vulnerability to climate change has been listed as High by the newly releasedClimate Vulnerability Monitor. 

"Whilst it is the poorest, most vulnerable nations on earth that will bear the brunt of the climate crisis, the industrialized world is not immune from its impact either. Countries such as the United States will suffer the greatest economic losses from climate change so it is clearly in their own interest to act now to address these impacts, and to mitigate climate change," said DARA Trustee and adviser to the report, José María Figueres, in a press release. Figueres is also a former President of Costa Rica. 

According to the report, climate change impacts will cost the US around 40 billion dollars a year by 2030, more than any other nation in the world. 

The US is particularly sensitive to desertification, rising sea levels, and extreme weather. (via)

America's health reform A waste of breath

IT IS tempting to dismiss the bipartisan health-reform summit convened by Barack Obama on Thursday February 25th as a colossal waste of time. After all, the gabfest involving senior Congressional leaders from both parties lasted well over six hours, with no tangible results. Neither side moved one jot on any issue of substance and not one vote is likely to have changed on either side as a result of the summit.
And yet, the televised gathering was not pointless. For one thing, the sight of America's leading politicians sitting together amiably for an entire day to discuss a matter as inflammatory as health reform (think "death panels") was itself heartening. Surprisingly, given the bitter partisan wrangling of late, they did so in a manner that was mostly civil and substantive. Towards the end of the long day, Joe Barton, a House Republican from Texas, even declared that he had never seen "so many members of the House and Senate behave so well for so long before so many television cameras."
From the Republican point of view, the event accomplished two important things. First, Mr Obama was unable to outwit and outcharm them on camera, as he had done brilliantly during a televised exchange with House Republicans in late January. Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, their stridently partisan leaders in the Senate and the House, wisely allowed other Republicans —more charismatic and competent, it must be noted—to do most of the talking. That allowed them to say no to Mr Obama's plans without appearing, as is often the accusation with Republicans, merely the "Party of No". Mr McConnell even admitted afterwards that "I would not call it a waste of time."

The event went less well for Mr Obama. After a year of dithering, he unveiled his own grand plan for reforming health care on the eve of the summit. This scheme closely resembles a health-reform bill passed by the Senate just before Christmas (the House passed a substantially different version earlier, and the two bills now need to be reconciled into a final health law). The big question before the summit was whether Mr Obama would really be open to modifying his plan to embrace Republican ideas, or whether the event was merely a sham.
In the event, Mr Obama appeared to make some progress on bipartisanship. He listened intently to Republican ideas—except the oft-repeated one to scrap Democratic efforts and just "start over"—and was often seen scribbling notes. At the end of the summit, he reviewed a number of areas where he believed the two parties had similar goals, and he asked the Republicans to think of ways to bridge the divide on them. Among those ripe for co-operation, he declared, were tort reform, inter-state competition in health insurance, the creation of insurance exchanges and tackling fraud in Medicare (a government health scheme for the elderly).
This is not likely to herald the start of a new, incremental and heart-warmingly bipartisan approach to health reform, however. For one thing, Republicans made it clear that they are not willing to do anything to help Mr Obama pass health reform quickly. Mr Obama, for his part, made plain that he was willing to entertain Republican notions only as add-ons to his existing bill, not as an entirely new approach.
Rumours swirled during the summit that if Mr Obama's big plan (which aims to extend health insurance to some 30m uninsured punters) fails to pass, he may then put forward a less ambitious scheme covering only half that number. But Kathleen Sebelius, the administration's health secretary, denied this after the summit. Mr Obama himself rejected the incremental approach. He insisted, with some justification, that "baby steps" will not work because the pieces of the health-reform puzzle are tightly interlinked.
If so, that leaves Mr Obama with only one course of action: to push through some version of his health plan without Republican votes. It will be very difficult with only Democratic votes, given that moderates and progressives in his own caucus have misgivings. Ramming a sweeping health law through Congress on a highly partisan basis using procedural wheezes, Republicans repeatedly warned, will prove unpopular. Despite those obstacles, though, Mr Obama now seems ready for battle.
That points to the biggest reason to think the summit was not a waste of time: it made clear that Mr Obama, after months of sitting on the sidelines, now has steel in his spine. If Republicans do not come up with a reasonable set of compromise measures over the next few weeks to add to his plan, he says that he intends to forge ahead anyway. The final verdict, he insisted, will come from the voters: "We've got to go ahead and make some decisions, and then that's what elections are for."