Educational Gaps Limit Brazil’s Reach
André Vieira for The New York Times

A school in Caetés, Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s hometown.
By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
Published: September 4, 2010
CAETÉS, Brazil — When Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sworn in as Brazil’s president in early 2003, he emotionally declared that he had finally earned his “first diploma” by becoming president of the country.
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André Vieira for The New York Times

Maria and José Bezerra da Silva live with their seven children in Caetés. Unable to read, they cannot help with schoolwork.

One of Brazil’s least educated presidents — Mr. da Silva completed only the fourth grade — soon became one of its most beloved, lifting millions out of extreme poverty, stabilizing Brazil’s economy and earning near-legendary status both at home and abroad.

But while Mr. da Silva has overcome his humble beginnings, his country is still grappling with its own. Perhaps more than any other challenge facing Brazil today, education is a stumbling block in its bid to accelerate its economy and establish itself as one of the world’s most powerful nations, exposing a major weakness in its newfound armor.

“Unfortunately, in an era of global competition, the current state of education in Brazil means it is likely to fall behind other developing economies in the search for new investment and economic growth opportunities,” the World Bank concluded in a 2008 report.

Over the past decade, Brazil’s students have scored among the lowest of any country’s students taking international exams for basic skills like reading, mathematics and science, trailing fellow Latin American nations like Chile, Uruguay and Mexico.

Brazilian 15-year-olds tied for 49th out of 56 countries on the reading exam of the Program for International Student Assessment, with more than half scoring in the test’s bottom reading level in 2006, the most recent year available. In math and science, they fared even worse.

“We should be ashamed of ourselves,” said Ilona Becskeházy, executive director of the Lemann Foundation, an organization based in São Paulo devoted to improving Brazilian education. “This means that 15-year-olds in Brazil are mastering more or less the same skills as 9-year-olds or 10-year-olds in countries such as Denmark or Finland.”

The task confronting the nation — and Mr. da Silva’s legacy — is daunting. Here in this dirt-poor northeastern town, where Mr. da Silva lived his first seven years, about 30 percent of the population is still illiterate, a figure three times higher than the national rate.

When Mr. da Silva was a boy here, his father used to beat some of his older siblings when they went to school instead of working, said Denise Paraná, the author of a biography of the president.

Today, teachers say that many parents send their children to school only because school attendance is a requirement of the Bolsa Familia subsidy program that Mr. da Silva has greatly expanded under his watch, which provides up to about $115 a month per family.

But even with the added incentive, reading levels vary so greatly here that in one eighth-grade classroom, students from 13 to 17 all read aloud from the same text.

“A lot of parents say, ‘Why should they study if there are no opportunities?’ ” said Ana Carla Pereira, a teacher at another rural school here.

As president, Mr. da Silva’s own education policies got off to a slow start; he dismissed two education ministers before settling on one in 2005. Then the government’s educational program did not start until 2007 — four years after Mr. da Silva took office.

Now in his last year in office and talking about his place in history, Mr. da Silva has an “obsession” with the issue, his education minister, Fernando Haddad, said, which was plain to see when he recently returned here to his childhood town.

“I want every child to study much more than I could, much more,” he said while announcing a program to give laptops to students. “And for all of them to get a university diploma, for all of them to have a vocational diploma.”

The urgency could hardly be clearer. Brazil has already established itself as a global force, riding a commodity and domestic consumption boom to become one of the largest economies in the world. With huge new oil discoveries and an increasingly important role in providing food and raw materials to China, the country is poised to surge even more.

But the nation’s educational shortcomings are leaving many Brazilians on the sidelines. More than 22 percent of the roughly 25 million workers available to join Brazil’s work force this year were not considered qualified to meet the demands of the labor market, according to a government report in March.
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“In certain cities and states we have a problem hiring workers, even though we do have employment,” said Márcio Pochmann, president of the Institute for Applied Economic Research, the government agency that produced the March report. Earlier estimates showed that tens of thousands of jobs went unclaimed because there were not enough qualified professionals to fill them.

Unless that gap is filled soon, Brazil may miss its “demographic window” over the next two decades in which “the economically active population is at its peak,” the World Bank said.

Dr. Haddad, the education minister, said that while Brazil still performed poorly compared with other countries, it was improving faster than many competitors.

To be continued

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/world/americas/05brazil.html

Chicken or egg? Solve the enigma!

Scientists solve chicken and egg riddle*
By Hilary Whiteman, CNN
July 15, 2010 -- Updated 1916 GMT (0316 HKT)
London, England (CNN) -- Researchers in Britain have been credited with cracking the age-old conundrum about the chicken and the egg. But are they right? After the publication of the rather dry-sounding scientific paper, "Structural Control of Crystal Nuclei by an Eggshell Protein," press headlines proclaimed the answer was... the chicken. However, one of the paper's lead authors, Colin Freeman, from the University of Sheffield in northern England, told CNN that the result was not as conclusive as it seemed. "I would argue that the concept of an eggshell came about way before the chicken, it's dinosaur or even pre-dinosaur thing. That's something to talk to an evolutionary biologist about probably," he said. So how did a paper about "crystal nuclei" become proof that the chicken pre-dated the egg? Freeman and his team, which included colleagues from the University of Warwick, were researching a protein found in eggshells called ovocledidin-17. It is also found in chickens' ovaries, but until the team's research its purpose was not clear. Using Britain's national supercomputer, a machine dubbed HECToR based in Edinburgh, Scotland, they were able to simulate the process of biomineralization, or the production of minerals or solid materials inside organisms.
It was a world first and revealed that one potential purpose of the protein ovocledidin-17 is to speed up the production of eggshell within the chicken so that in 24 hours an egg is ready to be laid. "What we have really identified is that the protein seems to accelerate the crystallization process so it can make that eggshell appear far quicker. In simple terms it accelerates calcite formation," Freeman said. They also found that the egg can't be produced without the protein ovocledidin-17 in the chickens' ovaries, so that means that the chicken must have come first. Right? "Obviously, it's not really what we were trying to get out of our simulations, but it's an interesting question isn't it?" Freeman said. Rather than putting an end to bickering over the true order of the egg, the researchers were trying to understand more about how shell is formed so that they can apply their findings in other disciplines, including medicine. "The quote my colleague John Harding always says is, 'could we ever be as clever as algae?'" Freeman said. "They produce these wonderful shells that protect them in the North Sea. That crystal structure is far in advance of anything that we as humans can create in the lab," Freeman said, adding, "We can't make a human skeleton in the lab..." Perhaps one day they will be able to. And perhaps one day someone will conclusively put an end to the argument -- was it the chicken or the egg?
Editor's Note: *Maybe
http://edition.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/europe/07/14/england.chicken.egg.riddle/index.html#fbid=794ya1hnMP6

are you ready to be a vegetarian?

What's a vegetarianism?

Vegetarianism is a popular choice for many individuals and families. But parents may wonder if kids can safely follow a vegetarian diet and still get all necessary nutrients. Most dietary and medical experts agree that a well-planned vegetarian diet can actually be a very healthy way to eat.

But special care must be taken when serving kids and teens a vegetarian diet, especially if it doesn't include dairy and egg products. And as with any diet, you'll need to understand that the nutritional needs of kids change as they grow.

Types of Vegetarian Diets

Before your child or family switches to a vegetarian diet, it's important to note that all vegetarian diets are not alike. Major vegetarian categories include:

• ovo-vegetarian: eats eggs; no meat
• lacto-ovo vegetarian: eats dairy and egg products; no meat
• lacto-vegetarian: eats dairy products; no eggs or meat
• vegan: eats only food from plant sources

And many other people are semi-vegetarians who have eliminated red meat, but may eat poultry or fish.

The Choice of Vegetarianism

Kids or families may follow a vegetarian diet for a variety of reasons. Younger vegetarians are usually part of a family that eats vegetarian meals for health, cultural, or other reasons. Older kids may decide to become vegetarians because of concern for animals, the environment, or their own health.

In most cases, you shouldn't be alarmed if your child chooses vegetarianism. Discuss what it means and how to implement it, ensuring your child makes healthy and nutritious food choices.

more information at: http://kidshealth.org/parent/nutrition_fit/nutrition/vegetarianism.html#

Paul the psychic octopus predicts World Cup winners

His first two World Cup game winning predictions could have been a fluke but Paul the psychic octopus has proven himself to be a reliable source.
The eight-armed soothsayer, who lives at Sea Life Aquarium in Oberhausen, Germany, has correctly forecast all six of Germany's World Cup games, including Wednesday's loss to Spain in the semi-finals.
Paul started using his nine brains to "predict" the outcome of soccer games two years ago during the European Championships.
Now, the mollusk medium is slated to predict on Friday who will earn the third-place in the match between Germany and Uruguay, a spokesman for his aquarium told Agence France-Presse.
And if the 2 1/2-year-old is not too tired -- or full -- he'll also attempt to soothsay Sunday's final between Spain and the Netherlands.
"We do not want to overburden him," the spokesman said.
There's no crystal ball required for Paul's predictive powers. Rather each time, his handlers dip two, clear square boxes containing a mussel each into Paul's aquarium.
The boxes are decorated with the either the German flag or that of the opposition. Whichever box Paul opens is deemed the likely winner.
Paul's most recent prediction about Germany's 1-0 loss to Spain drew ire from his home-country.
Despondent crowds insulted both Paul and his mother in Berlin. Other soccer fans have posted octopus recipes on the Internet in not-so-veiled threats to Paul's wellbeing.
But the Spanish government has come to his defense: "I am concerned for the octopus ... I am thinking of sending him a protective team," joked Spain's Prime Minister Jose Luiz Rodriguez Zapatero on Radio Cadena Ser.
Environment and Fisheries Minister Elena Espinosa also expressed worries, the AFP reported: "On Monday, I shall be at the European Council of Ministers and I shall be asking for a (fishing) ban on Paul the octopus so the Germans do not eat him!"

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/pets/2010/07/08/2010-07-08_paul_the_psychic_octopus_predicts_world_cup_winners.html#ixzz0tConhp4u

Do you think Clearly this octopus is a clairvoyant. This is bogus, it's only conincidence?

I want your opinion about it.

Is McDonald's Breaking the Law by Putting Toys in Happy Meals?

Millions of parents know the drill. Stevie wants to go to McDonald's for a Happy Meal, because along with his burger and fries comes the ultimate little kid payoff: a toy. It's a cheap little thing, and he'll get sick of it in three hours. Still, it's a toy. Go ahead — you just try denying little Stevie his wishes.
If one health advocacy group has its way, parents will never have to face this common dilemma again. The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has sent a demand letter to McDonald's that threatens to sue the company unless it stops using toys to market Happy Meals to young children. "By advertising that Happy Meals include toys, McDonald's unfairly and deceptively markets directly to children," the CSPI writes in the letter. The Center claims that since marketing to children under 8 is "inherently deceptive," the company is violating consumer-protection laws in states like Massachusetts, Texas, California and New Jersey. "These children are not cognitively developed enough to know they're getting anything but a free toy," says Stephen Gardner, litigation director for CSPI.
The inclusion of toys in Happy Meals prevents kids from choosing healthier options, argues CSPI, and contributes to childhood obesity. McDonald's points out that it only uses its healthier Happy Meal options — white-meat Chicken McNuggets, milk and Apple Dippers, which are apple slices that come with a low-fat caramel sauce — in its advertising promoting the food and the toys. But since the toy also comes with the less healthy stuff — burgers, fries and a soda — this approach is still duplicitous, CSPI says.
Plus, CSPI argues that since most Happy Meal combinations contain more than the recommended 430-calorie maximum for a young child's lunch, McDonald's isn't promoting public health. And CSPI research shows that when consumers failed to specify the side order they wanted with their Happy Meal, McDonald's servers put fries in the package 93% of the time. "When it comes to the Happy Meal, the only choices you have are junk and junkier," says Gardner. "Even the apples come with a sugary caramel sauce, so the company is sending a dangerous message that the only way to digest fruit is with candy. You might as well take kids to the state fair."
This type of rhetoric, and some of the language in the CSPI letter, isn't sitting well with McDonald's. While the company says it hasn't ruled out acting on CSPI's demands, McDonald's is clearly irked. "The tone of the letter is completely unprofessional and destroys their credibility," says Walt Riker, vice president of corporate communications for McDonald's. "The characterizations are completely out of bounds and don't come close to representing the truth." Riker wouldn't point to specific passages, but it's safe to assume calling McDonald's "duplicitous" and its marketing practices "predatory" failed to ingratiate CSPI with the company.
Then there's this gem: "In short, McDonald's is deliberately marketing directly to unsuspecting little children by offering appealing toys — usually ones related to popular movies or television shows. McDonald's marketing has the effect of conscripting America's children into an unpaid drone army of word-of-mouth marketers, causing them to nag their parents to bring them to McDonald's."
Semantics aside, will a potential suit go anywhere? California's Santa Clara County, home of Silicon Valley, recently passed a measure banning restaurants like McDonald's from including toys with kids' meals. So the antitoy movement has some momentum. CSPI employed a similar strategy against Kellogg's, and in June of 2007 the cereal company agreed to set stricter nutrition standards in its advertising. For example, the company said it would no longer market cereal products over 200 calories to children. "The law prohibits unfair and deceptive advertising," says Angela Campbell, a Georgetown University law professor who directs that school's Institute for Public Representation. "This has to be interpreted. These toys have a tremendous amount of influence, they are friends, they are real to these kids. Children can't process things like adults can. You can take terrible advantage of kids."
Still, it may be hard to prove that McDonald's is doing anything illegal by offering kids an item that, at the end of the day, brings them joy. "There's no law that precludes companies from selling toys to children," says J. Justin Wilson, a senior research analyst at the Center for Consumer Freedom, a food-industry advocacy group. Plus, for many stressed out parents, the Happy Meal is a blessing, a cheap meal you can grab on the go.
The whole issue will probably boil down to parental responsibility. After all, 5-year-old kids aren't driving themselves to the McDonald's pick-up window. Little Stevie and the "unpaid drone army of word-of-mouth marketers" are a powerful force, but should McDonald's be liable for their pestering ways? "The solution is not a lawsuit," says Wilson. "The solution is a two-letter word: no."

do you buy the happy meal only because of the toy? or do you like to go at McDonald's because of the food?

source: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,2000973,00.html

US warns over recession risks as G20 meeting starts

The US has said the world's largest economies should focus on maintaining growth to avoid a double-dip recession.
As the G20 summit begins in Canada, US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said Europe and Japan should boost domestic demand instead of cutting spending.
European leaders have said reducing government deficits is key to setting long-term growth on track.
But Brazil warned that steep budget cuts could harm emerging economies.
Speaking in Toronto, scene of the summit, Mr Geithner said the global economy was still emerging from its crisis and "the scars of this crisis are still with us".
He said: "This summit must be fundamentally about growth."

Cut or spend?
Emergency assistance that G20 leaders agreed on at previous summits at the height of the economic crisis must not be withdrawn too soon, he said.
"We're going to avoid that mistake by making sure that we recognize that it's only been a year since the world economy stopped collapsing," he said.
Europe and Japan should do more to stimulate domestic demand to make it easier for other countries to export to them.
With countries emerging from the global downturn at different speeds, splits have emerged in how to proceed.
Spooked by attacks on the euro currency prompted by Greece's debt crisis, European governments have focused on cutting spending to reduce their deficits.
A draft version of the summit's communique suggested the Group of 20 richest and emerging economies was nearing a compromise, Reuters news agency said.
This would see an agreement to halve budget deficits by three years and toughen banking regulations.
Brazil said the focus on cutting deficits could harm emerging economies.
"If the cuts take place in advanced countries it is worse," said Brazilian Finance Minister Guido Mantega.
"Because instead of stimulating growth they pay more attention to fiscal adjustments, and if they are exporters they will be reforming at our cost."

North Korea warming

Thousands of demonstrators marched on the G20 summit on Saturday in what is being reported to have been a largely peacefully rally that saw outbreaks of violence on its edges. These saw groups of young men scuffle with riot police and set fire to at least two patrol cars.
The G20 meeting follows the summit of the G8 group of industrialised nations, which met at a lakeside resort outside Toronto.
They condemned North Korea for the sinking of a South Korean warship in March.
The G8 leaders also criticised North Korea - and Iran - over their nuclear activities, and they described the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip as "not sustainable".
And they admitted that the global financial crisis had compromised efforts to meet UN targets for reducing world poverty.
On Friday, they agreed to donate $5bn (£3.3bn) over five years towards improving the health of mothers and young children in the developing world.

source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/us_and_canada/10426747.stm

Where Gulf Spill Might Place on the Roll of Disasters

From the Oval Office the other night, President Obama called the oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico “the worst environmental disaster America has ever faced.” Senior people in the government have echoed that language.

The motive seems clear. The words signal sympathy for the people of the Gulf Coast, an acknowledgment of the magnitude of their struggle. And if this is really the worst environmental disaster, the wording seems to suggest, maybe people need to cut the government some slack for failing to get it under control right away.
But is the description accurate?
Scholars of environmental history, while expressing sympathy for the people of the gulf, say the assertion is debatable. They offer an intimidating list of disasters to consider: floods caused by human negligence, the destruction of forests across the entire continent and the near-extermination of the American bison.
“The White House is ignoring all the shades and complexities here to make a dramatic point,” said Donald E. Worster, an environmental historian at the University of Kansas and a visiting scholar at Yale.
The professors also note the impossibility of ranking such a varied list of catastrophes. Perhaps the worst disaster, they say, is always the one people are living through now.
Still, for sheer disruption to human lives, several of them could think of no environmental problem in American history quite equaling the calamity known as the Dust Bowl.
“The Dust Bowl is arguably one of the worst ecological blunders in world history,” said Ted Steinberg, a historian at Case Western Reserve University.
Across the High Plains, stretching from the Texas Panhandle to the Dakotas, poor farming practices in the early part of the 20th century stripped away the native grasses that held moisture and soil in place. A drought that began in 1930 exposed the folly.
Boiling clouds of dust whipped up by harsh winds buried homes and cars, destroyed crops, choked farm animals to death and sent children to the hospital with pneumonia. At first the crisis was ignored in Washington, but then the apocalyptic clouds began to blow all the way to New York, Buffalo and Chicago. A hearing in Congress on the disaster was interrupted by the arrival of a dust storm.
By the mid-1930s, people started to give up on the region in droves. The Dust Bowl refugees joined a larger stream of migrants displaced by agricultural mechanization, and by 1940 more than two million people had left the Great Plains States.
However, the Dust Bowl lasted a decade, and that raises an issue. What exactly should be defined as an environmental disaster? How long should an event take to play out, and how many people have to be harmed before it deserves that epithet?
Among sudden events, the Johnstown Flood might be a candidate for worst environmental disaster. On May 31, 1889, heavy rains caused a poorly maintained dam to burst in southwestern Pennsylvania, sending a wall of water 14 miles downriver to the town of Johnstown. About 2,200 people were killed in one of the worst tolls in the nation’s history.
At the time it happened, that event was understood as a failure of engineering and maintenance, and that is how it has come down in history. Perhaps a one-day flood is simply too short-term to count as an environmental disaster.
On the other hand, if events that played out over many decades are included, the field of candidates expands sharply.
Perhaps the destruction of the native forests of North America, which took hundreds of years, should be counted as the nation’s largest environmental calamity. The slaughtering of millions of bison on the Great Plains might qualify.
Craig E. Colten, a geographer at Louisiana State University, nominates “the human overhaul of the Mississippi River Valley,” which destroyed many thousands of acres of wetlands and made the region more vulnerable to later events like Hurricane Katrina.
However, those activities were not seen as disasters at the time, at least by the people who carried them out. They were viewed as desirable alterations of the landscape. It is only in retrospect that people have come to understand what was lost, so maybe those do not belong on a disaster list.
Oil spills, too, seem to be judged more by their effect on people than on the environment. Consider the Lakeview Gusher, which was almost certainly a worse oil spill, by volume, than the one continuing in the gulf.
In the southern end of California’s San Joaquin Valley, an oil rush was on in the early decades of the 20th century. On March 14, 1910, a well halfway between the towns of Taft and Maricopa, in Kern County, blew out with a mighty roar.
It continued spewing huge quantities of oil for 18 months. The version of events accepted by the State of California puts the flow rate near 100,000 barrels a day at times. “It’s the granddaddy of all gushers,” said Pete Gianopulos, an amateur historian in the area.
The ultimate volume spilled was calculated at 9 million barrels, or 378 million gallons. According to the highest government estimates, the Deepwater Horizon spill is not yet half that size.
The Lakeview oil was penned in immense pools by sandbags and earthen berms, and nearly half was recovered and refined by the Union Oil Company. The rest soaked into the ground or evaporated. Today, little evidence of the spill remains, and outside Kern County, it has been largely forgotten. That is surely because the area is desert scrubland, and few people were inconvenienced by the spill.
That sets it apart from the Deepwater Horizon leak. The environmental effects of the gulf spill remain largely unknown. But the number of lives disrupted is certainly in the thousands, if not the tens of thousands; the paychecks lost in industries like fishing add up to millions; and the ultimate cost will be counted in billions.
Even with all that pain, can it yet be called the nation’s worst environmental disaster?
“My take,” said William W. Savage Jr., a professor of history at the University of Oklahoma, “is that we’re not going to be able to tell until it’s over.”

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/science/earth/19enviro.html?hpw