Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Surge in 'digital dementia'

Surge in 'digital dementia'

Doctors in South Korea are reporting a surge in "digital dementia" among young people who have become so reliant on electronic devices that they can no longer remember everyday details like their phone numbers.

Doctors in South Korea are reporting a surge in
Doctors in South Korea are reporting a surge in "digital dementia" among young people who have become so reliant on electronic devices Photo: Getty Images
South Korea is one of the most digitally connected nations in the world and the problem of internet addiction among both adults and children was recognised as far back as the late 1990s.
That is now developing into the early onset of digital dementia – a term coined in South Korea – meaning a deterioration in cognitive abilities that is more commonly seen in people who have suffered a head injury or psychiatric illness.
"Over-use of smartphones and game devices hampers the balanced development of the brain," Byun Gi-won, a doctor at the Balance Brain Centre in Seoul, told the JoongAng Daily newspaper.
"Heavy users are likely to develop the left side of their brains, leaving the right side untapped or underdeveloped," he said.
The right side of the brain is linked with concentration and its failure to develop will affect attention and memory span, which could in as many as 15 per cent of cases lead to the early onset of dementia.
Sufferers are also reported to suffer emotional underdevelopment, with children more at risk than adults because their brains are still growing.
The situation appears to be worsening, doctors report, with the percentage of people aged between 10 and 19 who use their smartphones for more than seven hours every day leaping to 18.4 per cent, an increase of seven per cent from last year.
More than 67 per cent of South Koreans have a smartphone, the highest in the world, with that figure standing at more than 64 per cent in teenagers, up from 21.4 per cent in 2011, according to the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning.
Dr Manfred Spitzer, a German neuroscientist, published a book titled "Digital Dementia" in 2012 that warned parents and teachers of the dangers of allowing children to spend too much time on a laptop, mobile phone or other electronic devices.
Dr Spitzer warned that the deficits in brain development are irreversible and called for digital media to be banned from German classrooms before children become "addicted."

Ex-CIA chief to Obama: Strike North Korea. Warns U.S. defenseless against missiles arriving from south pole

By KleinOnline Staff
The Obama administration should “seriously consider” a surgical strike to prevent North Korea from developing long-range missiles capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, argued former CIA director James Woolsey.
In a radio interview Sunday night, Woolsey warned the U.S. is currently wide open and virtually defenseless against a missile coming from a southerly direction, and that both Iran and North Korea made advances toward firing missiles in that direction.
Woolsey further warned of the catastrophic effects of a North Korean missile launch or a satellite that could explode a nuclear warhead over the U.S. as part of an electromagnetic pulse attack.
Woolsey was speaking on Aaron Klein’s WABC Radio show. (Listen to his comments by clicking here)
He stated: “Once you can launch a satellite into orbit, any country would be capable, if it had a nuclear weapon, of detonating the nuclear weapon while on the satellite, while the satellite is in orbit and unfortunately that is a rather easy way to create an electromagnetic pulse.”
And such an EMP attack could “take out a huge share of the United States’ electricity grid,” he said. He pointed out North Korea reportedly already orbited a satellite.
Woolsey recommended the Obama administration follow a policy first enumerated in 2006 by former Secretary of Defense William Perry and now-Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter.
Both diplomats urged President Bush to pre-emptively destroy North Korea’s long-range missiles.
The ex-CIA chief explain that since then North Korea not only sent a satellite into space but also reportedly carried out three nuclear detonations, fulfilling the basic requirements for an intercontinental ballistic missile that can deliver a nuclear warhead against the U.S.
He said that due to the latest North Korean advances Perry and Carter’s recommendation of a pre-emptive strike now “ought to be on the agenda for very serious consideration.”
He continued: “I think Perry and Carter were right then, I think they are even more right now … . I think the substance of their recommendation was quite sound and the [Obama] administration ought to be quite worried about it.”
U.S. South defenseless
Woolsey further warned U.S. Ballistic Missile Early Warning radars and interceptors are currently positioned to take out missile strikes coming to the homeland from the north polar region, while no such systems are focused on missiles arriving from the south.
Asked by Klein whether the U.S. was defenseless against missiles coming from the south, Woolsey replied in the affirmative.
“At least temporarily,” he added. “Some of these systems can be moved and redirected, but generally speaking today our defenses are facing north. Radars and other systems.”
He said there are indications both Iran and North Korea are theoretically prepared for a possible strike from the south.
“Indeed the North Korean and Iranian satellites that have been launched have been launched toward the south and at altitudes that can be quite compatible with the detonation of an EMP system of some kind.”
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EXPOSED: SYRIA’S BACKROOM DEAL WITH RUSSIA. Is this energy deal why Putin is backing dictator Assad?

By Aaron Klein
President Bashar al-Assad inked a secret deal that gives Russia the license to control natural gas resources in Syria, according to informed Middle Eastern security officials.
The officials said Assad last month agreed to sign the document, considered an understanding of principals on control of his country’s gas resources, including transiting pipelines, in exchange for continued Russian support in resisting the insurgency against his regime.
The officials further said Russia helped to broker a separate understanding with Assad that would allow public and private Chinese companies to rebuild damaged infrastructure in Syria if Assad defeats the insurgency.
The alleged deals underscore the economic benefits that may motivate Russia to back Assad while the West, including the Obama administration, aids the rebels seeking a post-Assad Syria.
Syria is a key energy transit route to Europe. A number of countries appear to be seeking dominance of the energy market that runs through Syria.
In 2011, Syria announced it had discovered a promising gas field in the city of Homs, which would later see some of the fiercest battles between Assad’s forces and the rebels.
Oil Minister Sufian Allawi told the state-run SANA news agency that the first wells “were in the Homs governorate and the flow rate is 400,000 cubic meters per day.”
“This discovery opens new perspectives in the region of Qalamun and the Syrian company will continue its drilling,” said Allawi.
Beside the prospect of its own gas field, Syria is also one of the most strategic locations for natural gas pipelines to flow to Europe.
Syria is site of the proposed construction of a massive underground gas pipeline that, if completed, could drastically undercut the strategic energy power of U.S. ally Qatar and also would cut Turkey out of the pipeline flow.
Dubbed the Islamic pipeline, it may ultimately favor Russia and Iran against Western energy interests.
Set to open in 2016, Iran, Iraq and Syria signed a deal in 2010 to construct the 3,480-mile natural gas pipeline connecting Iran’s South Pars field to European customers.
Iranian Deputy Oil Minister Javad Oji announced the pipeline would ultimately have the capacity to pump 3.9 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day.
He told Iran’s official Mehr News Agency the route would “pass through Iran, Iraq, Syria, the southern Lebanon territories and also through the Mediterranean basin,” with a refinery and infrastructure to be built in Damascus.
A key portion of the pipeline is concentrated on the Syrian ports, which would export directly to Europe out of the Eastern Mediterranean. Russia has reportedly built up its naval presence along the major Syrian ports of Latakia and Tartus.
The Islamic pipeline originally may have undermined Russian’s sale of natural gas to Europe, but the new secret deal purportedly signed with Assad may serve to secure Russian interests.
The Islamic pipeline is viewed as a major threat to Turkey, which has long desired to become the main bridge for natural gas and oil between the East and the West. The proposed Islamic pipeline completely cuts out Turkey.
Turkey, however, is a key player in the Nabucco natural gas pipeline, which is being constructed to transit natural gas to Europe from the Central Asia and Caspian regions. That pipeline is set to traverse Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary, and end in Austria.
Turkey has been a key supporter of the rebels fighting Assad’s regime, while Qatar has reportedly been supplied arms and training to the rebels.
The Islamic pipeline would boost the Shiite factions in the Middle East at the expense of Sunni-dominated countries.
Qatar, home to the world’s largest gas field along with Iran, recently proposed a U.S.-backed gas pipeline from the Gulf to Turkey to Europe. Qatar has also had previous designs for a Syria pipeline that would connect to Turkey.
Qatar, while small, is backed up by the U.S. military. It is the location of U.S. Central Command’s Forward Headquarters and the Combined Air Operations Center.

Immigration Bill Incentivizes Employers To Fire Americans and Hire Amnestied Immigrants; Immigration and Obamacare’s Employer Mandate

Immigration Bill Incentivizes Employers To Fire Americans and Hire Amnestied Immigrants; Immigration and Obamacare’s Employer Mandate
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Obamacare is bad enough in and of itself. An immigration bill in the Senate is about to compound the problem. 

Brietbart reports Senate Bill Incentivizes Employers To Fire Americans and Hire Amnestied Immigrants
Under the Gang of 8’s backroom immigration deal with Senators Schumer, Corker and Hoeven, formerly illegal immigrants who are amnestied will be eligible to work, but will not be eligible for ObamaCare. Employers who would be required to pay as much as a $3,000 penalty for most employees who receive an ObamaCare healthcare “exchange” subsidy, would not have to pay the penalty if they hire amnestied immigrants. 
Consequently, employers would have a significant incentive to hire or retain amnestied immigrants, rather than current citizens, including those who have recently achieved citizenship via the current naturalization process.

Following a link from the above article, Phil Klein at the Washington Examiner explains further in Immigration and Obamacare’s employer mandate 
As the implementation of Obamacare approaches, there have been many news reports about companies considering cutting back full-time workers to part-time, or taking other actions to get around the mandate penalties. The immigration bill would offer employers another way out –hiring fewer American citizens and more immigrants with provisional legal status.

It’s not surprising that this unintended consequence hasn’t yet been resolved, because there’s no easy fix. One way of eliminating the problem would be to get rid of the employer mandate in Obamacare altogether – which would be a non-starter for Democrats. The other way would be to give noncitizen immigrants with provisional status access to Obamacare’s benefits – which would destroy any hopes of garnering Republican votes.

The issue was never addressed in any of the more than 200 amendments proposed when the immigration legislation made its way through the Senate Judiciary Committee.
And so here we are. Obamacare encourages hiring part-time workers over full-time workers and an immigration bill, if passed as it currently sits, would encourage hiring of amnestied immigrants over US citizens.

Monday, June 24, 2013

Big Law Firm to Cut Lawyers and Some Partner Pay

Big Law Firm to Cut Lawyers and Some Partner Pay

The headquarters of Weil, Gotshal & Manges are in theĀ in the General Motors building in New York.Tina Fineberg for The New York TimesThe headquarters of Weil, Gotshal & Manges are in the in the General Motors building in New York.
One of the country’s most prestigious and profitable law firms is laying off a large number of lawyers and support staff, as well as reducing the pay of some of its partners, a surprising move that underscores the financial difficulties facing the legal profession.
The leadership of Weil, Gotshal & Manges, a New York-based firm of 1,200 lawyers that counts General Electric and Sanofi as marquee clients and handled the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, informed its employees Monday morning about the reductions.

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Sixty junior lawyers, known in law firms as associates, will lose their jobs. That amounts to roughly 7 percent of Weil’s associates. Roughly 30 of the firm’s 300 partners are having their annual compensation reduced, in many cases by hundreds of thousands of dollars. And 110 staff employees – roughly half of them legal secretaries – are being let go.
Although publicly traded companies, including Wall Street banks, often cull their ranks during fallow periods, it is rare for large law firms, especially elite ones like Weil, to fire employees en masse.
“While we have been able to avoid these actions in the past, and it is very painful from a human perspective, the management committee believes that these actions are essential now to enable our firm to continue to excel and retain its historic profitability in the new normal,” Barry M. Wolf, Weil’s executive chairman, wrote in an e-mail to its employees.
The “new normal,” in the view of Weil’s management and echoed by legal-industry experts, is that the market for high-end legal services continues to shrink. In the years leading up to the financial crisis, profitability exploded and the number of lawyers expanded at the country’s top firms as demand increased about 4 percent a year. But demand has been flat to down for the past five years, according to several industry reports, and shows little sign of picking up.
Dan DiPietro, chairman of the law firm group at Citi Private Bank, said that there were too many lawyers at the country’s largest firms, estimating the excess capacity at as much as 10 percent of the lawyer population. He believes that the profession could possibly experience a wave of job cuts.
“My guess is that a good number of firms have been thinking about right-sizing and waiting for someone to provide them cover and we’ll see more of these moves,” Mr. DiPietro said. “As difficult as layoffs are, it seems that they will be necessary for some firms to get in synch with the current market dynamics.”
The market dynamics at Weil, whose partners make, on average, about $2.2 million a year, are rather unique. During the depths of the financial crisis, the firm avoided the layoffs that some other firms were forced to make. That was largely because of its pre-eminent bankruptcy practice, which advised both General Motors and Lehman Brothers on their Chapter 11 filings. Those assignments, particularly Lehman, generated hundreds of millions of dollars in fees, not only in bankruptcy work, but also from the ream of litigation that flowed from them.
In an interview last week, Weil’s chairman, Mr. Wolf, said that the firm thought that as the crisis-related work wound down and the economy recovered, it would see a pickup in its “transactional business,” the lucrative practice of advising corporations and private equity firms on acquisitions, as well as performing legal work for stock and bond offerings. But transactional activity at Weil remains soft and has not returned to anywhere near pre-2008 levels.
Nevertheless, the firm has performed well relative to its peers, according to data compiled by Bloomberg and Thomson Reuters. In 2012, Weil was ranked No. 1 in private equity representations globally, advising on more than $67 billion worth of transactions. And it ranked No. 2 in domestic mergers and acquisitions, with more than $165 billion in total deals; this year, it has maintained that position, advising on deals like American Airlines‘ $11 billion merger with US Airways and Kinder Morgan’s $5 billion acquisition of Copano Energy. Still, Mr. Wolf said, there is not enough work to keep Weil’s army of lawyers sufficiently busy.
“Our market share has been improving, but the market has been shrinking,” Mr. Wolf said.
Mr. Wolf, a corporate lawyer who joined Weil in 1984 straight out of law school, said that while the decision to cut associates and staff was personally distressing for him and the management committee, there was little debate that it was the right one.
“We believe that this not just a cycle but that the supply-demand balance is out of whack across the industry,” he said. “If we thought this was a cycle and our business was going to pick up meaningfully next year, we would not be doing this.”
Monday is expected to be a grim day at Weil, with partners informing associates of their dismissals in one-on-one meetings. Each will get six months of severance. The firm’s leadership has already informed partners of their pay reductions. (There are no partner cuts because under the firm’s partnership agreement, partners can only be fired for cause.)
The mass layoffs are the first in the 82-year history of Weil, which has 21 offices across the globe and headquarters high above Fifth Avenue in the General Motors building, one of New York’s most coveted business addresses. Last year, the firm posted revenue of about $1.2 billion, and its profits per partner ranked 13th of all firms nationwide.
In the e-mail sent Monday morning, Weil said that it was taking this action “from a position of strength.” It said that it had zero debt and a fully financed pension plan with more than $500 million in assets. It also noted that its partners do not have any long-term compensation guarantees.
By listing those attributes, Weil appeared to be pre-emptively addressing comparisons to Dewey & LeBoeuf, a law firm of a similar size that dissolved last year. Dewey collapsed after disappointing profits and a heavy debt load forced it to slash partners’ salaries. Many Dewey partners had multiyear, multimillion-dollar contracts, and when they did not get paid their guarantee, they fled, crippling the firm.
A year after Dewey’s demise, most industry specialists say that it was an outlier, a victim of gross financial mismanagement. Still, some of Dewey’s problems were the result of trends facing successful firms like Weil.
Among the main factors hurting law firm profitability is that corporate clients have become stingy. Until recently, pricing pressure hardly existed for premium legal services. Decades ago, clients would receive a bill with only a lump sum and the statement “for professional services rendered.”
But today, big corporations, facing business pressures of their own, have clamped down on legal expenses. They have beefed up their own in-house legal staffs and perform a lot of the work themselves. They are demanding that for routine assignments like document discovery, firms use outsourcing firms and contract lawyers rather than more expensive associates. And they routinely ask for discounts or capped fees at places like Weil, which charge more than $1,000 an hour for some partners’ work.
Steven J. Harper, a retired partner at the law firm Kirkland & Ellis and author of “The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis” (Basic Books, 2013), said that Weil’s move highlighted the inexorable long-term industry trend: big law firm partnerships were now nothing more than bottom-line, profit-maximizing businesses.
Profits per partner – a statistic highlighted annually in the closely watched American Lawyer magazine rankings – have become an unhealthy obsession, Mr. Harper said. Driving this fixation is the frenzied lateral hiring market, in which firms are poaching lawyers with large, established books of business from their rivals. Firms fear that if their profitability wanes, they will lose their stars.
“The culture at most of these large law firms is that you must maintain astronomical levels of partner earnings in order to keep your top talent,” Mr. Harper said. “Cutting staff is one way is one way to do that.”
Mr. Wolf, the executive chairman of Weil, said that while the layoffs would help the firm’s profits, the move was not about reducing expenses to pad partners’ bank accounts.
“This is not about cost-cutting but about the future of the firm and strategically positioning us for the next five years,” Mr. Wolf said.
Several industry experts informed of Weil’s decision applauded the move. Peter Zeughauser, a law firm consultant, said that many firms were in denial about the continued slack demand for their services, and Weil’s cutbacks could pressure them into getting leaner.
“We have been telling our clients about these economic realities for some time now,” Mr. Zeughauser said. “Weil is a bellwether firm, and this will be a real wake-up call.”

Friday, June 21, 2013

"We Want Fairness. There Is No Fairness If You Do Not Let Us Cheat"

"We Want Fairness. There Is No Fairness If You Do Not Let Us Cheat"
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To find what is perhaps the best analogy of the mentality behind today's global capital markets and the perhaps the entire US economy as well, one has to travel to Zhongxiang in Hubei province, where a university entrance exam for 800 students did not go quite as expected. Telegraph reports: "When students at the No. 3 high school in Zhongxiang arrived to sit their exams earlier this month, they were dismayed to find they would be supervised not by their own teachers, but by 54 external invigilators randomly drafted in from different schools across the county. The invigilators wasted no time in using metal detectors to relieve students of their mobile phones and secret transmitters, some of them designed to look like pencil erasers. A special team of female invigilators was on hand to intimately search female examinees, according to the Southern Weekend newspaper."
In short: everyone was hoping to continue a historical tradition and simply cheat, but the proctors finally and shockingly pulled the plug. End result: hundreds of test takers who had no idea what to do when the system is not rigged. And summarizing best not only what happened in China, but what is going on in the market now that Bernanke has warned he may pull the liquidity Koolaid shortcut to wealth effects and riches: "Outside, an angry mob of more than 2,000 people had gathered to vent its rage, smashing cars and chanting: "We want fairness. There is no fairness if you do not let us cheat."
Also known as a 20% crash in the market.
Last year, the city received a slap on the wrist from the province's Education department after it discovered 99 identical papers in one subject. Forty five examiners were "harshly criticised" for allowing cheats to prosper.

So this year, a new pilot scheme was introduced to strictly enforce the rules.

When students at the No. 3 high school in Zhongxiang arrived to sit their exams earlier this month, they were dismayed to find they would be supervised not by their own teachers, but by 54 external invigilators randomly drafted in from different schools across the county.

Outside the school, meanwhile, a squad of officials patrolled the area to catch people transmitting answers to the examinees. At least two groups were caught trying to communicate with students from a hotel opposite the school gates.

For the students, and for their assembled parents waiting outside the school gates to pick them up afterwards, the new rules were an infringement too far.
And so the parents, furious that their kids "brilliance" had been exposed as nothing but a shortcut gimmick, stormed the school demanding that the cheating continue!
As soon as the exams finished, a mob swarmed into the school in protest.

"I picked up my son at midday [from his exam]. He started crying. I asked him what was up and he said a teacher had frisked his body and taken his mobile phone from his underwear. I was furious and I asked him if he could identify the teacher. I said we should go back and find him," one of the protesting fathers, named as Mr Yin, said to the police later.
Bottom line: when cheating is not only permitted but encouraged, those who rely on fairness and honesty are at a disadvantage:
 According to the protesters, cheating is endemic in China, so being forced to sit the exams without help put their children at a disadvantage.

Teachers trapped in the school took to the internet to call for help. "We are trapped in the exam hall," wrote Kang Yanhong, one of the invigilators, on a Chinese messaging service. "Students are smashing things and trying to break in," she said.

Another of the external invigilators, named Li Yong, was punched in the nose by an angry father. Mr Li had confiscated a mobile phone from his son and then refused a bribe to return the handset.

"I hoped my son would do well in the exams. This supervisor affected his performance, so I was angry," the man, named Zhao, explained to the police later.

Hundreds of police eventually cordoned off the school and the local government conceded that "exam supervision had been too strict and some students did not take it well".
A picture from the ridiculous situation in China:
And that is perhaps the best explanation of what is going on in the US markets right about now.
We can only hope the crowd of furious E-trade babies that has been used to cheating in the market courtesy of the Fed, doesn't swarm the Marriner Eccles building demanding that the cheating continue.