These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America 'Corporations Bleeding Rural India, Killing Our Farmers' | Pragya Singh | Oct 12,2015 A sudden pest attack has ruined cotton crops in large parts of Punjab, bringing biotech, or BT Cotton back into focus. Farmers who used bio-fertilisers in the Malwa region of the state are said to be safe from this latest pestilence. But those growing BT cotton have lost everything. There has been a massive Whitefly attack on BT Cotton farms in Punjab. We scientists working on bio-safety and ecological assessment of BT technology had predicted that it is a crime technology. The farmers who used non-BT seeds were able to protect their yield while those who used BT Cotton face complete loss. Transgenic BT on the one hand kills beneficial insects such as pollinators and soil micro-organisms. What is the logic behind growing a crop by using a seed that can resist one type of pest but not another? In fact, as explained above, now even the Pink Bollworm is resistant to BT. There have been so many other instances of this kind. Monsanto has emerged as the world’s largest GM seed company.
The Evolution of Foreign Aid Research: Measuring the Strengths and Weaknesses of Donors In 2012, 149 countries around the world received more than $125 billion of Official Development Assistance (ODA). Keeping track of those disbursements is no small feat. Measuring the effectiveness of the aid requires even greater legwork. Fortunately, data on ODA—unlike data on aid from many philanthropic organizations around the world—is systematically collected and monitored by the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC). This allows researchers to not only measure aid effectiveness from DAC countries and agencies, but to also monitor improvement over time and develop best practices for improving impact. In total, 31 DAC member countries and agencies reported on their aid disbursements in 2012. The new report is the third edition of the Quality Official Development Assistance (QuODA) assessment. When it comes to improvements in the quality of foreign aid from 2008 to 2012, Kharas and Birdsall find that the results are mixed. Maximizing Efficiency: Few Improvements Have Been Made
Zuckerberg & Sandberg on how Facebook's culture differs from Google's With Google+ on the rise and Facebook making rapid changes to the platform, it’s only natural that media’s curiosity has peaked a bit in terms of what exactly separates the two competitors from one another. Charlie Rose in particular seemed very interested in the subject during his interview with Facebook’s CEO and COO just yesterday. Rose asked, how does [Facebook's] culture differ from Google? And what exactly is Facebook culture? Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg (once the Vice President of Global Online Sales and Operations at Google), notes that although Facebook and Google might be similar in a lot of ways — they are both founder-led, based in Silicon Valley and driven by engineers — they are still fundamentally different. According to Sandberg, Google is all about “algorithms and machine learning”, a process that she notes is very important and that Google just so happens to be very good at.
This Is Your Brain on Poverty: What Science Tells Us About Poverty Help Truthout continue producing grass-roots journalism and publishing visions for a brighter future throughout 2014 and beyond. Click here to make a tax-deductible donation! Poverty has been identified as a causal factor in lower IQ and psychiatric disorders. (Photo: Franco Folini / Flickr)Talking about poverty and inequality is all the rage these days. Research has only recently been able to identify poverty as a causal factor (rather than merely correlational) in debilitating medical conditions that leave people sick, unable to work and unable to think - all factors that then perpetuate poverty, leaving the poor trapped in a vicious biological cycle. So what can actual science (not Brooks' buzzword-laden version of it) tell us about poverty? If you're a child born into a poor household, you're more likely to exhibit psychological symptoms than if you were born to a non-poor household - symptoms that are a direct result of being born poor. Then something interesting happened.
Plague of Insects Ravages Monsanto GMO Cotton, Causing 15 More Farmer Suicides in India Whiteflies are often kept in check by spiders, but infestations can happen when predators are nowhere to be found due to chemical-intensive farming. The Monsanto Company has long denied its GMO crops and chemicals have had much of an effect on the Indian farmer suicide epidemic, but a new development is once again casting doubt on their assertion. While some claim that Indian suicides have been caused by an economic crunch in general, others point the finger squarely in Monsanto’s direction. In fact, recent rates have climbed as high as “one suicide every 30 minutes.” In total, 290,000 suicides by farmers over the last 20 years have occurred according to the national crime records bureau of India. Plague of Whiteflies Destroys Cotton Crops According to this article from The Times of India, a massive swarm of whiteflies recently destroyed large amounts of cotton crops in Punjab, a state in northwest India. Naresh Kuma Lehri, a seed and pesticide dealer, described the scene to the Times.
Where the world buys its weapons - Business Insider The $8 Trillion Internet: McKinsey's Bold Attempt to Measure the E-conomy - Derek Thompson - Business The Internet -- that 200 million-person, $8 trillion global economy -- accounted for 21 percent of GDP growth in the world's largest economies over the last 5 years, McKinsey found in a report released this week.* As an entity, it accounts for more GDP than the Spanish or Canadian economies, and it's growing faster than Brazil. As a sector, it is now larger than these countries' agriculture or energy industries. Sweeping statements about the size and growth of the Internet are tough to swallow. So here are three highlights from the new McKinsey report: 1. What Is the Internet Economy? There is a lot of Internet to measure, with two hundred million global consumers and $8 trillion in total revenue. 2. As an industry, the Internet contributes more to the typical developed economy than mining, utilities, agriculture, or education. Much of the Internet's contribution to our lives is nearly impossible to measure. 3. *This post originally referred to a 200-billion-person global economy.
Aid in reverse: How poor countries develop rich countries | /The Rules The idea of international development aid lies at the heart of a tremendously successful PR campaign. The narrative we have been sold claims that aid has been effective at reducing global poverty. Here I will argue that there are three problems with this narrative. False accounting The narrative that poverty rates are declining and that extreme poverty will soon be eradicated has a tremendous amount of institutional backing; it is supported by the world’s most powerful governments and promoted through the United Nations Millennium Campaign. It was 1996, at a summit in Rome, when governments first pledged to use aid to halve the number of the world’s poor by 2015. After the UN General Assembly adopted MDG-1, the goal was diluted two more times. On top of this, the International Poverty Line (IPL) has been revised downward a number of times over the past decades in order to serve the poverty-reduction narrative. Who is developing whom? This article originally appeared in Global Policy.
The Vegetables of Truth - How Modern Science Keeps You In Your Place There are two - parallel - universes of science. One is the actual day-to-day work of scientists, patiently researching into all parts of the world and sometimes making amazing discoveries. The other is the role science plays in the public imagination - the powerful effect it has in shaping how millions of ordinary people see the world. Often the two worlds run together - with scientists from the first world giving us glimpses of their extraordinary discoveries. But what sometimes happens is that those discoveries - and what they promise - get mixed up with other social and political ideas. This happened in a dramatic way in the second half of the twentieth century. But by the 1970s it became clear that there were unforeseen consequences. What emerged instead was a powerful distrust of the idea that science and technocratic experts could make a better world. Jane Fonda makes a celebrity appearance - and her interview articulates the mood very well. Beck used the word risk.
Por crise de refugiados, UE ameaça suspender Grécia da área de livre circulação da Europa Medida isolaria país, com fechamento de fronteiras; para União Europeia, 60% das pessoas que chegam ao continente devem ser deportadas A Comissão Europeia, braço Executivo da UE (União Europeia), declarou nesta quarta-feira (27/01) que caso a Grécia não resolva as “deficiências” do controle de suas fronteiras para a entrada de refugiados, o país poderá ser suspenso do espaço Schengen, área onde é possível ir de um país a outro sem passaporte e que é composta por 26 Estados-membros da Europa. Cerca de 850 mil refugiados chegaram à Grécia durante o ano passado A declaração foi feita após um encontro que discutiu um relatório sobre como Atenas está lidando internamente com a crise humanitária. Segundo a Comissão, o governo grego não identifica os refugiados que chegam ao país, o que incluiu a checagem de documentos e o registro das impressões digitais em um sistema eletrônico. Morte de refugiados no mar Mediterrâneo é 'vergonha' para a Europa, diz Tsipras
Deluge of Content on the Web Swamps Yahoo The Rich and Their Robots Are About to Make Half the World's Jobs Disappear Two hugely important statistics concerning the future of employment as we know it made waves recently: 1. 85 people alone command as much wealth as the poorest half of the world. 2. 47 percent of the world's currently existing jobs are likely to be automated over the next two decades. Combined, those two stats portend a quickly-exacerbating dystopia. As more and more automated machinery (robots, if you like) are brought in to generate efficiency gains for companies, more and more jobs will be displaced, and more and more income will accumulate higher up the corporate ladder. That's according to a 2013 Oxford study, which was highlighted in this week's Economist cover story. And, as is historically the case, the capitalists eat the benefits. The prosperity unleashed by the digital revolution has gone overwhelmingly to the owners of capital and the highest-skilled workers. Those trends aren't just occurring in the US, either.