American GDP is growing again. After four consecutive quarters of GDP decline, the US Economy grew in the third quarter by 3.5%. This ends the longest contraction in the US economy since the Great Depression. The 3.5 per cent growth figures were stronger than expected by some analysts, including Goldman Sachs, who had forecast only 2.7 per cent growth. Simultaneously, the IMF has doubled its forecast for Asian economic growth in 2010. The region’s prospects have improved dramatically over the past 6 months due to the concerted efforts of Asian Governments to nurse their economies back to health. China, South Korea, India, and Japan have taken the lead in this regard. The International Monetary Fund has forecast GDP growth of 2.8 per cent for 2009, and 5.8 per cent in 2010 for the region. The “Great Recession”, as it has come to be known, may be technically over according to the Economists, but it's been replaced by fears that this may only be a statistical recovery. The manifest growth in the US is literally underwritten by billions of dollars in US Federal government spending. Some economists posit that all of the government money in the US system will lead to an artificial and jobless recovery in America. Last month's US jobless rate was 9.8 per cent, its highest rate in 26 years. Nonetheless, third quarter figures indicate that 2010 will be a year of growth in the American economy, which is certainly reassuring news for the Global economy, as the US Economy is currently underperforming globally.
November 21, 2009
US and Asian GDP Return to Growth
October 12, 2009
Taiwan lab develops panda robot
The world's first panda robot is taking shape at a cutting-edge lab in Taiwan where an ambitious group of scientists hope to add new dimensions to the island's reputation as a high-tech power. The Centre for Intelligent Robots Research aims to develop pandas that are friendlier and more artistically endowed than their endangered real-life counterparts.
"The panda robot will be very cute and more attracted to humans. Maybe the panda robot can be made to sing a panda song," said Jerry Lin, the centre's 52-year-old director. Day by day, the panda evolves on the centre's computer screens and, if funding permits, the robot will take its first steps by the end of the year.
"It's the first time we try to construct a quadrupedal robot. We need to consider the balance problem," said 28-year-old Jo Po-chia, a doctoral student who is in charge of the robot's design. The robo-panda is just one of many projects on the drawing board at the centre, which is attached to the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, the island's version of Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The Taipei-based centre also aims to build robots that look like popular singers, so exact replicas of world stars can perform in the comfort of their fans' homes. "It could be a Madonna robot. It will be a completely different experience from just listening to audio," said Lin.
Commercial value is what counts for Lin, who hopes to contribute to the Taiwan economy at a time when it has matured and no longer exhibits the stellar growth of the earlier take-off phase. "If I write 25 academic papers, I won't contribute anything. But if I create something people need, I will contribute to the Taiwan economy," he said. Lin and his team are also working on educational robots that can act as private tutors for children, teaching them vocabulary or telling them stories in foreign languages.
There is an obvious target market: China, with its tens of millions of middle-class parents doting on the one child they are allowed under strict population policies. "Asian parents are prepared to spend a lot of money to teach their children languages," said Lin.
Robots running amok are a fixture of popular literature but parents do not have to worry about leaving their children home alone with their artificial teachers, he said. "A robot may hit you like a car or a motorbike might hit you. But it won't suddenly lose control and get violent. Humans lose control, not robots. It's not like that."
Lin's long-term dream is to create a fully-functioning Robot Theatre of Taiwan, with an ensemble of life-like robots able to sing, dance and entertain. Two robotic pioneers, Thomas and Janet, appeared before an audience in Taiwan in December, performing scenes from the Phantom of the Opera, but that was just the beginning, Lin said.
"You can imagine a robot shooting down balloons, like in the wild west, using two revolvers, or three, but much faster than a person. Some things robots can do better than humans with the aid of technologies," Lin said.
His vision is to turn the show into an otherworldly experience where robots and humans mix seamlessly on stage, leaving the audience in doubt which is which. But the bottomline is the bottomline. Lin wants commercial viability, in the interest of his home island.
"I want to be able to go to an amusement park in the US and see a building where on top it says, 'Robot Theatre from Taiwan'. That's my lifetime goal," he said.
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Source:
http://nz.news.yahoo.com/a/-/technology/6077266/taiwan-lab-develops-panda-robot/
Tags:
China, Taipei, Robot panda, Robot Theatre of Taiwan, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Global IT News, The Centre for Intelligent Robots Research,
September 16, 2009
Australia, US to Invite China to War Games
Australia and the United States will invite China to take part in joint military exercises to help ease fears about an arms race in the Asia-Pacific region.
Ties between Australia and China have been strained over concerns about Beijing's military expansion and the precarious nature of trade negotiations. As a way of soothing tensions, Australian and U.S. defense officials have agreed to approach the Chinese about taking part in joint military exercises.
Admiral Timothy Keating, the commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, told a Sydney newspaper that talks with Beijing were a positive sign that China was willing to cooperate in the plan. Keating also expressed hope that any joint exercise would help the U.S. and its allies better understand China's reasons for boosting its weapons capabilities.
The U.S. is reportedly worried that some of China's military ambitions do not appear to be peaceful. Andrew Davies from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute thinks that closer military sides will benefit all three countries. "It gives each side confidence in the ability of the other to act professionally and it also teaches each side how the other tends to operate, which can reduce the opportunity for accidents and misunderstandings," he said.
China's ambassador to Australia, Zhang Junsai, has welcomed the prospect of joint army and navy exercises as a way of ensuring regional stability and peace. Tensions between Australia and China have intensified recently over Canberra's decision to grant a visa to an exiled ethnic Uighur activist and the arrest in Beijing of an Australian mining executive accused of infringing trade secrets and bribery.
Zhang Junsai hopes the problems can be ironed out. "Current difficulties in bilateral relations is something that China does not want to see. So, we hope Australia will join China to respect and accommodate each other's interests and our concerns," said Zhang. Few details have been released about possible joint military exercises between China, the United States and Australia.
Reports have suggested they could include naval and land activities as well personnel exchanges. A U.S. military spokesman at Admiral Keating's headquarters in Hawaii said that no formal invitations to join an exercise had yet been extended to China.
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Source:
http://www.voanews.com/english/2009-09-03-voa14.cfm
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September 4, 2009
Who's To Blame For The Mortgage Crisis?
If you're having a hard time getting your head around exactly what happened in the historic meltdown of America's home-mortgage market, you're not alone.
As the wife-and-husband investigative team Leslie and Andrew Cockburn suggest in their new documentary, "American Casino," nobody fully understands it: Not the bankers and brokers who sold subprime mortgages (often using deceptive tactics or disingenuous language), not the Wall Street wizards who carved them up into ever more esoteric financial instruments, not the free-market wise men like former Fed chair Alan Greenspan or former Sen. Phil Gramm, and certainly not the ordinary citizens who believed they were fulfilling the American dream and wound up losing their homes, their financial security and their self-respect.
Actually, the Cockburns meet one guy in "American Casino" who understands the whole mess better than most, a California real estate investor named Jeff Greene who smelled the end of the housing bubble around 2006 and bet $1 billion against the mid-decade exuberance of Wall Street. Sitting in his walled and gated beach compound in Malibu, Greene calmly tells the camera that the opportunity for his successful hedge bet (which has yielded $500 million so far) involved massive pain for millions of homeowners.
We meet some of those people too; the Cockburns focus in particular on the African-American community of Baltimore, a city devastated by the tidal wave of foreclosures. Of course foreclosed properties can be found in virtually every neighborhood of every town and city, and at every income level. But Latinos and African-Americans are several times more likely to be affected than whites, and while the problem is undeniably complicated, that almost certainly reflects the enduring legacy of racism. In the 1990s and 2000s, neighborhoods that had previously been "redlined" by traditional lenders became targeted by unregulated and unscrupulous vendors of subprime mortgages, who neither knew nor cared whether borrowers were likely to default on those loans. As we now know, the results were toxic.
One of the film's sad ironies is that middle-class homeowners like Denzel Mitchell, a Baltimore high-school teacher, or Patricia McNair, a family therapist, might well have qualified for conventional loans from normal banks. (One survey mentioned in the film suggests that at least half the people who applied for subprime mortgages in 2006 could have qualified for prime mortgages.) Instead, they were enticed into too-good-to-be-true first and then second mortgages that adjusted sharply upward, which they couldn't realistically afford. Both people are aware that their own lack of financial sophistication is partly to blame for their predicament, but that does nothing to lessen the heartbreak as McNair and her husband have to leave the appealing family home where her adult children grew up, or as Mitchell must abandon his organic vegetable garden and the Tuskegee Airmen-themed bedroom for his little boys.
But if you want to blame somebody for what happened to Mitchell, McNair and millions of other Americans, the place to point the finger is at the fervid deregulation advocated by Greenspan and enacted by Congress under the whip of Gramm and other free-market ideologues. Such laissez-faire reforms created a wide-open marketplace where bankers and brokers could sell whatever extortionate mortgage deals they wanted to whomever they wanted, while lying to consumers about what they were getting and lying to lenders about the borrower's income and assets. Meanwhile, as one anonymous former Bear, Stearns banker tells the Cockburns, Wall Street securities dealers carved up packages of mortgages into abstruse, "fourth-dimensional" instruments to be sold to "idiots."
"American Casino" is of necessity a fragmentary tale; it was being filmed in 2008 as the crisis broadened and deepened, with events unfolding too fast for the Cockburn cameras. But while the mortgage crisis still awaits a rigorous deconstruction along the lines of Alex Gibney's "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," this film stands as an intimate, terrifying document that renders an incomprehensible slice of recent history in human terms. While the stories of Denzel Mitchell and Patricia McNair made me want to weep, the film's most memorable images stem from the Sisyphean task of Jared Dever, a bright and handsome local official in Riverside County, Calif., whose job is to control the county's mosquito epidemic, largely caused by the fetid, abandoned swimming pools behind foreclosed suburban homes.
Dever patrols a nightmarish, new-but-decrepit landscape straight out of the fiction of J.G. Ballard, carefully checking empty houses for signs of meth labs or marijuana grow zones before attacking the pools, whose algae-green water is full of abandoned patio furniture, tires and sports equipment, along with millions of mosquito larvae and the minnows who live on them. I'm not sure that hosing down the whole subdivision with Malathion is any kind of answer. Civilization didn't leave much of an imprint on that place. Now that the bankers have sucked out all its supposed economic value, we might as well drain the pools, knock down the houses and let the coyotes and rattlesnakes take over.
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September 2, 2009
Workers Adjust To The New F-word: Furloughs
"Furlough Fridays" for John Krumm may as well be called "Food Bank Fridays."
Along with 210,000 fellow state government workers, the driver and safety clerk for the Department of Motor Vehicles is helping California balance its battered budget by taking an unpaid day off from work three Fridays each month. But he's not going to Project Open Hand's kitchen to volunteer. "I go to save money and get food for my table," says Krumm, describing a still-life tableau of his furlough handout:
"Couple pieces of chicken. Some fruits and vegetables. Beans, milk and cheese. I'm losing $450 each month from my paycheck, so I'm watching every penny," he says. "And if they make us take off any more days, I won't be able to afford my rent."
As private and public employers seek to whittle overhead while skirting the heavier costs of laying off and rehiring staff, millions of workers are being poked and prodded with America's hottest management tool.
"Furloughs make sense because if you have a good employee, you want to do whatever you can to keep them," says labor lawyer Michael S. Bernick, former head of California's Employment Development Department under Gov. Gray Davis. "But while they may help reduce layoffs, they have their other side — for most workers, taking a 10 to 20 percent pay cut is a big hit."
Furloughs can also create huge workload backups as well as raise sticky legal questions for employers who try to force exempt workers into unpaid leaves. And critics like San Francisco State University professor John Sullivan say the management tool could actually end up causing more workplace problems than they solve. "If you cut everyone's pay," he says, "you'll drive away your top performers and end up with mediocre people."
Cost-cutting tool
As the new F-word makes the rounds of the water-cooler and cocktail-party circuit, it seems everyone from autoworkers to bridge inspectors to newspaper reporters is being forced to take unpaid leave as companies try to stay afloat and governments slash budgets. Firm numbers are hard to come by, according to economist Stephen Levy, who says that in the private sector, at least, "as long as sales start to pick up slightly, we're probably at the peak of layoffs and furloughs right now."
But in an economy where 6.7 million jobs have disappeared since the recession began in December 2007, and as private wages and salaries continue to fall each month, no one's betting against the prospect of more furloughs. In fact, 6 percent of employers surveyed by the consulting firm Watson Wyatt Worldwide say they will force mandatory furloughs within the next 12 months, while nearly one in 10 of those asked say they expect to implement a shortened workweek over the same time frame.
And while nearly half the state governments have instituted or proposed furloughs, it may have been California's historic embrace that moved them onto the front page. In addition to planned layoffs, California hopes to save $3 billion over 17 months by sending home state employees the first three Fridays of each month. With the Department of Personnel Administration using the tool for the first time to bridge its gaping deficit, spokeswoman Lynelle Jolley says furloughs were the best fix for a dire situation.
"With the state in a precarious position, we needed to conserve cash immediately," she says. "The layoff process can be quite lengthy, but with furloughs we can achieve savings immediately. We were desperate."
State governments seem to be taking a page from industries like heavy manufacturing and airlines, which historically have furloughed employees when business slowed. In Silicon Valley, temporary shutdowns have been a common practice, often a year-end tradition at many high-tech firms.
Mark Perry, a computer programmer with 30 years' experience in the valley, says state workers are now "getting a taste of real life that we've known for years in tech. They've been sort of sheltered. "I was with Intel, Fairchild, 23 different companies, and I was furloughed at about half of them until business turned around," says Perry, laid off in 2003 from Applied Materials. "The first time it's a bit of a shock, because you depend on a certain amount of income. But gradually you learn to treat it like you're on a pretend vacation. You kind of expect it and build it into the salary you think you're making. "Furloughs," Perry says, "train you not to live paycheck to paycheck."
Beats a layoff, but "...
A lot of affected employees are conflicted: Having a job is great — but taking a pay cut to keep that job stinks. First-timers like John Krumm are struggling with furlough shock. "I think it's a shame," says Krumm, who works at a San Francisco branch of the DMV. "You've already cut our pay by 14 percent, and if you add another day, you're up to 18 percent. People working here will now be making less than they made when they started 10 years ago."
For a couple employed by the state, the furloughs can be devastating. Krumm says "a lot of my colleagues at the DMV are filing for bankruptcy. A lot of them have a partner or husband who works for the state," which is a double whammy for the family budget.
While most experts stress the positive impacts of furloughs over layoffs, no one says they're a panacea. They punish lower-paid workers disproportionately; they can torpedo workplace morale; and workers whose pay has been cut make for lousy consumers, saving more and spending less, hampering a quick economic recovery.
Forced to downsize by his boss to a three-day workweek, San Jose real estate professional William Huey says his furlough threw him off kilter, "because I'd had this structured routine and suddenly everything changed. On my days off, I had to think, 'What am I supposed to be doing today?' "
Even though his three days eventually turned into a layoff, Huey does see some benefits to mandatory time off. "In retrospect,'' says Huey, who used his forced leave to help his wife start a private Chinese-language school, "it was as if I'd been allowed to leave my job gradually, because having that time off gives you the chance to explore other ideas you may want to try. The furlough,'' he says, "was like the severance package I never got in the end."
Hard choices
Yet for Rick Binger, furloughs became a powerful if painful management tool to save his San Francisco catalog marketing firm and, he hopes, will ensure that his six staffers all have jobs when the recession recedes. In February, faced with a virtual collapse of his business, Binger had his employees take a month off without pay. When new business didn't materialize, the furlough grew even longer until work picked up and employees started coming back to their jobs in July.
"I told everyone I was really sorry, but I just didn't have any work so there was no income coming in," he says. "My hands were tied. Everyone sacrificed, and I think they knew that as hard as this was, it was better than being laid off."
The use of furloughs, says Binger, "enabled me to survive over those four months." Others, though, say furloughs create more problems than they fix. Sullivan, of San Francisco State University, is not only a passionate critic of the practice, but he's now being forced to take a furlough himself as part of the college system's efforts to cut costs.
"I ask employers, 'Why are you doing furloughs?' and they say, 'Because the other guy is,' " he says. "But they're a fad and they don't really save money. It's the poorly managed companies that use them, not places like Microsoft or Google."
Sullivan says the smarter route would be better planning, a greater push for productivity gains — and the corner-office fortitude to let heads roll. "Managers are chicken to make the tough decision and let you go. But that's what a great manager does."
"When you cut time and not workload," he says, "you've really compounded the problem you had to begin with." Just ask Krumm. DMV offices on Monday mornings after a Friday furlough have been described on online forums as a circuslike crush of humanity, with drivers lined up out the door to reach clerks whose workloads have been stacking up since Thursday. "After a while,'' Krumm says, "they have to stop people from coming in the door because otherwise we'd be in violation of the fire code."
FURLOUGH FACTS
Although the actual number of furloughs is hard to come by, one national survey of employers found some interesting statistics:
» 17 percent of employers surveyed in April said they had initiated mandatory furloughs, up from 11 percent the previous month.
» Nearly one in 10 employers expect to implement a shortened workweek within the next 12 months.
» Another 6 percent will force mandatory furloughs.
» 9 percent say they"ll have voluntary furloughs.
» 7 percent have cut workers" salaries.
Source: Watson Wyatt Worldwide
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