Archive for the ‘united states’ Category
- In: Answer | Boy | Britain. | Depend | Eating | girl | Habits | Mom | united states
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How much a mother eats at the time of conception may influence whether she gives birth to a boy or a girl, a new report shows.
The sex of a child may depend on a mother’s eating habits. (Paul Hilton for The New York Times)
The report, from researchers at Oxford and the University of Exeter in England, is said to be the first evidence that a child’s sex is associated with a mother’s diet. Although sex is genetically determined by whether sperm from the father supplies an X or Y chromosome, it appears that a mother’s body can favor the successful development of a male or female embryo.
The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, shows a link between higher energy intake around the time of conception and the birth of sons. The difference is not huge, but it may be enough to help explain the falling birthrate of boys in industrialized countries, including the United States and Britain.
The reason food intake may influence the development of one sex of infant rather than another isn’t fully understood. However, in vitro fertilization studies show that high levels of glucose encourage the growth of male embryos while inhibiting female embryos.
It may be that male embryos are less viable in women who regularly limit food intake, such as skipping breakfast, which is known to depress glucose levels. A low glucose level may be interpreted by the body as indicating poor environmental conditions and low food availability, the researchers said.
The data is based on a study of 740 first-time pregnant mothers in Britain who didn’t know the sex of their fetus. They provided records of their eating habits before and during the early stages of pregnancy, and researchers analyzed the data based on estimated calorie intake at the time of conception. Among women who ate the most, 56 percent had sons, compared with 45 percent among women who ate the least. As well as consuming more calories, women who had sons were more likely to have eaten a higher quantity and wider range of nutrients, including potassium, calcium and vitamins C, E and B12. There was also a strong correlation between women eating breakfast cereals and producing sons.
Sweden’s credit crunch lessons
Posted on: April 14, 2008
- In: Bear Stearns | credit | crunch | economy | JP Morgan | lessons | shareholders | Sweden | united states | World
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It is recognised as one of the oldest central banks in the world.
Yet it seems that Sweden’s Riksbank could even teach America’s Federal Reserve a thing or two about recovering from the current debt crisis.
As the IMF becomes the latest body to call on governments for concerted global action to calm troubled markets, policymakers are studying how Sweden managed to rescue four of its biggest banks when its own credit boom turned to bust in the early 1990s.
House prices had slumped, the currency was out of control, and unemployment and bankruptcies were rising rapidly.
Rescue plan
If the Riksbank had failed to act rapidly and chosen not to inject capital into its major banks, the entire financial system of the country may well have collapsed.
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 You do have to act swiftly. You can’t say this is a banks’ problem, because it is also your problem  Lars Heikensten, former governor, Swedish Riksbank
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At a cost of some $11bn (£5.5bn), Sweden guaranteed repayment of depositors and creditors at all of its stricken banks.
But the state aid was skilfully targeted, so none of the cash went to the bank’s shareholders.
Indeed, most of the money was regained by the Swedish government as the national economy recovered.
Moral hazard
Sweden’s affluent economy could have been threatened
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Perhaps without even fully realising it at the time, the Swedes had identified what was to become known as ‘moral hazard’ – the risk that the state might bail out private investors who risked their money on the stock market.
One man with a ringside seat at the time of the Swedish crisis was the Riksbank’s Lars Heikensten, who subsequently served a term as central bank governor.
“One of the questions we had to ask was quite simple. Will this bank be solvent or not?
“If the government was to step in with taxpayers money to deal with solvency problems, it was made clear that the owners would have to give up all their rights. That was important for political reasons – and for moral hazard reasons.”
- In: Around | bubble | EU | Globe | Housing | IMF | iPhone 2.0 Unlocked | London | Mumbai | New Delhi | Spread | U.S | united states | Woes
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Emma Linnane in her apartment in Dublin. Its value has declined by $100,000.
The collapse of the housing bubble in the United States is mutating into a global phenomenon, with real estate prices swooning from the Irish countryside and the Spanish coast to Baltic seaports and even parts of northern India.
Multimedia
This synchronized global slowdown, which has become increasingly stark in recent months, is hobbling economic growth worldwide, affecting not just homes but jobs as well.
In Ireland, Spain, Britain and elsewhere, housing markets that soared over the last decade are falling back to earth. Property analysts predict that some countries, like this one, will face an even more wrenching adjustment than that of the United States, including the possibility that the downturn could become a wholesale collapse.
To some extent, the world’s problems are a result of American contagion. As home financing and credit tightens in response to the crisis that began in the subprime mortgage market, analysts worry that other countries could suffer the mortgage defaults and foreclosures that have afflicted California, Florida and other states.
Citing the reverberations of the American housing bust and credit squeeze, the International Monetary Fund last Wednesday cut its forecast for global economic growth this year and warned that the malaise could extend into 2009.
“The problems in the U.S. are being transmitted to Europe,” said Michael Ball, professor of urban and property economics at the University of Reading in Britain, who studies housing prices. “What’s happening now is an awful lot more grief than we expected.”
For countries like Ireland, where prices were even more inflated than in the United States, it has been a painful education, as homeowners learn the American vocabulary of misery.
“We know we’re already in negative equity,” said Emma Linnane, a 31-year-old university administrator.
She bought a cozy, one-bedroom apartment in the Dublin suburbs with her fiancé, Paul Colgan, in May 2006, at the peak of the market. They paid $575,000 — at least $100,000 more than it would fetch today. “I sometimes get shivers thinking about it,” Ms. Linnane said, “but I’ll let the reality hit me when I go to sell it.”
That reality is spreading. Once-sizzling housing markets in Eastern Europe and the Baltic states are cooling rapidly, as nervous Western Europeans stop buying investment properties in Warsaw, Tallinn, Estonia and other real estate Klondikes.
Further east, in India and southern China, prices are no longer surging. With stock markets down sharply after reaching heady levels, people do not have as much cash to buy property. Sales of apartments in Hong Kong, a normally hyperactive market, have slowed recently, with prices for mass-market flats starting to drop.
In New Delhi and other parts of northern India, prices have fallen 20 percent over the last year. Sanjay Dutt, an executive director in the Mumbai office of Cushman & Wakefield, the real estate firm, describes it as an erosion of confidence.
Much of the retrenchment seems to be following the basic law of gravity: what goes up must come down. With low interest rates helping to inflate housing bubbles in many countries, economists said the confluence of falling prices was predictable, if unsettling.
This is not the first housing downturn to cross borders, but its reverberations have been amplified by the integration of financial markets. When faulty American mortgages end up on the books of European banks, the problems of the United States aggravate the world’s problems.
Consider Britain, which had one of Europe’s most robust housing markets, with less of an oversupply than in Ireland or Spain. Then last summer came the subprime crisis across the Atlantic.
Within two months, mortgage approvals dropped 31 percent, compared with the previous year. And by March, average housing prices had fallen 2.5 percent, the largest monthly decline since 1992.
“The boom in house prices was actually much bigger here than in the U.S.,” said Kelvin Davidson, an economist at Capital Economics in London. “If anything, people should be more worried than in the U.S.”
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- In: California | Company | dead | Fremont | Google | GrandCentral | Offline | Phone | united states
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GrandCentral, Google’s $50 million phone company, has been down all morning (see overview of service here). And that means every single user who has started using their GrandCentral phone number isn’t able to receive any calls. Users are complaining on Twitter, and I’ve confirmed this as well by simply calling friends who use the service. Calls will not go through.
We’ve noted problems with the service in the past, but never a general outage. The site is down. The service is down. Everything appears to be offline.
If you want to be a phone company, and get your users to rely on you to manage all of your incoming calls, this simply cannot happen. There are undoubtedly going to be a lot of very upset homeless people this morning, as well as GrandCentral’s other users.
GrandCentral’s blog is offline as well. If Google wants users to take the service seriously in the future, they should make some kind of announcement on their main blog letting users know what happened and when they can expect the service to be back.
Update: service is back online sometime before noon PST. Still no word from them on the cause of the outage.
Update 2: Cofounder Craig Walker posts the following on the GrandCentral blog:
I wanted to write a quick note to all the GC users and apologize for the service interruption this morning. We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours. Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service.
Thanks for your patience with us and we’ll continue to work to make the service better by the day. – Craig Walker
| Website: | grandcentral.com |
| Location: | Fremont, California, United States |
| Founded: | April 1, 2006 |
| Acquired: | July 1, 2007 by Google |
The basic idea around GrandCentral is one phone number for all your phones, for life. As we change jobs, homes and cell phones, there are a lot of phone numbers to keep track of, and keeping everyone up to date with your most recent phone numbers is… Learn More
- In: 2010 | 50 Mbps | Broadband | Comcast | Internet | Roll Out | Speeds | united states | Verizon
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Internet
The Twin Cities are the lucky guinea pigs for Comcast’s new high-speed internet
Verizon’s FiOS fiber broadband connection is currently the only option for United States Internet surfers to wander about the world wide web while downloading content at up to 50 Mbps and uploading data at up to 20 Mbps. However, Verizon’s FiOS service is limited to a few areas at this time, even though roll-out is being performed slowly but surely.
Recently, Comcast also announced plans to increase the maximum bandwidth of its broadband service to 50 Mbps download and 5 Mbps upload bandwidth to compete with Verizon.
Currently, Comcast is running its broadband service aalong the DOCSIS 2.0 protocol, or the second generation of the Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications. This protocol tops out with a maximum downstream bandwidth of 42.88 Mbps while the maximum upstream bandwidth tops out at 30.72 Mbps.
For Comcast to increase its bandwidth, it will have to begin using DOCSIS 3.0 compliant hardware. The initial DOCSIS 3.0 specs will utilize four channels over cable; which allows the compatible hardware to serve twice the amount of data per second than DOCSIS 2.0’s dual channel design.
Through the 4-channel design, DOCSIS 3.0 compliant hardware will allow a maximum of 170 Mbps and 123 Mbps downstream and upstream bandwidth respectively. To achieve this higher bandwidth, Comcast must upgrade its back-end infrastructure to to hardware complaint with DOCSIS 3.0 and must also provide upgrades to customers’ leased modems or offer new hardware that is capable of supporting DOCSIS 3.0.
The high-bandwidth options from Comcast are in trial in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota but Comcast states it will begin mass rollout once the design has been finalized and ready for use over its nationwide infrastructure, which Comcast’s president of marketing and product development states may be by 2010.
Meanwhile, Verizon has brought its fiber-based broadband connection to a number of markets in the U.S. If Comcast goes through with these speed increases, we may hopefully see some long-awaited price wars in the broadband industry.
Pricing for the 50/20 Mbps download/upload package is stated around $150 and is only planned for the residential market. Business owners may have the option for a higher-bandwidth package in the future, however, no pricing information has been made available at this time.
Gaddafi condemns Arab leaders
Posted on: March 29, 2008
- In: Arab | Arab summit | condemns | Gaddafi | leaders | Libyan | Muammar Gaddafi | President | Saddam Hussein | united states | usa
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