Exchange rates

Dollar doldrums

From Economist.com

THE dollar has plunged in recent days as the collapse of Bear
Stearns and the Fed’s discount-rate cut contributed further to its
continuing slump. In trading on Monday March 17th the greenback fell to
¥95.76, its lowest point since August 1995, while also touching its
lowest level against the euro since trading began in 1999. Although the
dollar rallied on Tuesday, markets awaited the Federal Reserve’s
interest-rate decision later in the day. Futures markets anticipated a
cut of up to one percentage point, but there were fears this would
cause further flight from the beleaguered currency, perhaps into gold.

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Despite the great variety of phones that are available at the moment
there are still some concepts that seem to be very improbable. The Soft
Phone concept by designer Quin Jiang is probably one of the most
incredible ones.

To understand better the main idea of given concept imagine a phone
made from cotton. It’s very soft, pliable, and light, yet never
compromising on power or performance. The Soft Phone is based on the
electronic cellulose structures; however its functionality is high
enough to satisfy customers’ needs.

As for the whole structure of the phone it represents a series of discs
with electronic fabric stretched in between. The interface uses a
combination of tactile gestures like squeezing to hang-up and touching,
which detects a deformation on the surface to register input. The
fibers are fine enough and optically clear allowing light energy to
pass through to display simple contextual menus. The cell antenna,
battery, camera, and micro electronics are contained inside a tiny clip
which itself is made of soft, squeezable, stress-reducing silica. The
Bluetooth earphones have a special slot that makes them easy to clip on
the wire. Then the wire would charge the earphones via Electromagnetic
Induction Technology.

It’s quite an understandable fact that at present people generally
prefer to buy multifunctional devices. So devices that perform just a
single function should possess some really distinctive features (at
least original design) in order to be bought. Taking this point into
consideration the producers of printers, which probably represent the
most popular single functional devices, decided to make them more
compact, original and useful.