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.

Camera is not all this watch has built in; Bluetooth, Micro SD cards support, MP3
support are all the features it has. We have seen those ones before but
there is one feature that even I didn’t expect to appear in a
cell phone watch. It has a touch screen and stylus to control the
gadget.

Its 1.3 megapixel camera should make pretty good photos however it all
depends on the phone’s quality. You can also upload your MP3
collection on-to Micro SD card and use it as an MP3 player. Cool and
very convenient to use gadget will hit the market soon.

Risk Briefing rates operational risk in 150 markets on a scale of
0-100. The overall scores are an aggregate of underlying scores for ten
categories of risk: security; political stability; government
effectiveness; legal and regulatory; macroeconomic; oreign trade and
payments; financial; tax policy; labour market; and infrastructure. The
model is run when events require it, and at least once a quarter for
each country.

Aug 22nd 2007
From Economist.com

Almost half of the world’s countries can be considered democracies, but only 28 qualify as “full democracies”

There is no consensus on how to measure democracy, definitions of
democracy are contested and there is an ongoing lively debate on the
subject. Although the terms “freedom” and
“democracy” are often used interchangeably, the two are not
synonymous. Democracy can be seen as a set of practices and principles
that institutionalise and thus ultimately protect freedom. Even if a
consensus on precise definitions has proved elusive, most observers
today would agree that, at a minimum, the fundamental features of a
democracy include government based on majority rule and the consent of
the governed, the existence of free and fair elections, the protection
of minorities and respect for basic human rights. Democracy presupposes
equality before the law, due process and political pluralism.

The Democracy index is based on the view that measures of democracy
that reflect the state of political freedoms and civil liberties are
not thick enough. They do not encompass sufficiently or at all some
features that determine how substantive democracy is or its quality.
Freedom is an essential component of democracy, but not sufficient. In
existing measures, the elements of political participation and
functioning of government are taken into account only in a marginal way.

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy index is based on
five categories: electoral process and pluralism; civil liberties; the
functioning of government; political participation; and political
culture. The condition of having free and fair competitive elections,
and satisfying related aspects of political freedom, is clearly the
basic requirement of all definitions.

This index provides a snapshot of the current state of democracy
worldwide for 165 independent states and two territories. This covers
almost the entire population of the world and the vast majority of the
world’s 192 independent states (27 micro-states are excluded).
Several things stand out. Although almost half of the world’s
countries can be considered to be democracies, the number of
“full democracies” is relatively low (only 28). Almost
twice as many (54) are rated as “flawed democracies”. Of
the remaining 85 states, 55 are authoritarian and 30 are considered to
be “hybrid regimes”. As could be expected, the developed
OECD countries (with the notable exception of Italy) dominate among
full democracies, although there are two Latin American, two central
European and one African country, which means that the level of
development is not a binding constraint. Only one Asian country, Japan,
makes the grade.

More than half of the world’s population lives in a democracy
of some sort, although only some 13% reside in full democracies.
Despite the advances in democracy in recent decades, almost 40% of the
world’s population still lives under authoritarian rule (with a
large share of these being, of course, in China).

A blustery success

From Economist.com

The University of Chicago’s business school tops this year’s ranking

The University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business has claimed
top spot in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2007 ranking of full-time
MBA programmes (full report and methodology).
It is the first time the school has led the annual ranking, which is
now in its sixth year. Chicago toppled the Spanish school IESE, which
had ranked in first place for the previous two years, and IESE dropped
to third position.

With three European schools breaking into the top ten this
year—Cambridge, Instituto Empresa and Henley—the top of the
ranking is now split equally between America and Europe. Hong Kong
University of Science and Technology, ranked 20th, is Asia’s highest
placed school

Much of Chicago’s success can be put down to the record of its careers
service (see table below). This is now one of the key competitive
battlegrounds between schools. Indeed, when the Economist Intelligence
Unit asked prospective MBA students why they were considering the
degree, opening new career opportunities was the most popular reason
given. Chicago’s careers office is rated as the world’s best by its
students. Within three months of graduation 97% of Chicago students are
in jobs, the vast majority of them facilitated by the careers office.

Plastic fantastic

From Economist.com

CONSUMERS everywhere have been merrily spending with their credit
cards since the dotcom bust ended in 2003. Americans put most on
plastic: on average, each person splashed out $6,700 in 2005, according
to Ronald Mann at Foreign Policy magazine. But spending more
means repaying more. Personal bankruptcies rose in America by 20%
between 2000 and 2005. Britain, where debit-card spending is higher
than the credit card sort, also saw a big increase in bankruptcies.

Give over

From Economist.com

PAYING TAXES is, for most people, both unavoidable and irksome. But
how much hard-earned pay is taken by governments varies considerably
across the world. Among the rich countries of the OECD, Germans shell
out the most, with a worker earning an average income giving 43% of
their gross pay to the state, with nearly half of that going towards
social security. Workers in Poland hand over nearly 25% of their wages
to social security; whereas Australians pay nothing at all directly.
Mexicans and South Koreans enjoy the lightest taxation by some way.

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Air travel
Excess baggage

Mar 20th 2008
From Economist.com

FEW things will ruin an Easter break more effectively than discovering your luggage hasn’t taken the same trip. Sadly, figures from the Association of European Airlines suggest that airlines are losing more luggage than before. Last year 16.6 bags were delayed for every 1,000 passengers across 25 European airlines, up from 15.7 in 2006. (This excludes no-frills carriers such as EasyJet, and some bigger carriers, which do not report their statistics.) Perhaps avoid TAP Air Portugal, which mislaid nearly 28 bags for every 1,000 passengers. British Airways is the most careless of the big operators, mainly because many of its trips involve connecting flights. The canny traveller could instead opt for Turkish Airlines or Air Malta.
AFP