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2013-05-20T09:29:17Z

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2013-05-20T09:27:50Z

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How crowded life is changing us

2013-05-18T08:37:57Z

Created page with "More than half the world’s population are concentrated in urban areas, and this is having an effect not just culturally, but biologically too. And advances in technology are..."

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More than half the world’s population are concentrated in urban areas, and this is having an effect not just culturally, but biologically too. And advances in technology are adding an entirely new dimension to people’s lives.

Imagine a city of the future. Do you see clean streets, flying cars and robots doing all the work? Or something less rosy?

Cities cover just 3% of the planet's land surface, but are already home to more than half of its people. That means cities are bringing people into ever greater contact, where collectively they act as a giant physical, biological and cultural force. Transport links and communication between cities, from superhighways to express trains and planes, allow businesses to operate planet-wide, shrinking the human world and making the global local.

The great homogenisation of the Anthropocene includes human culture and lifestyle as much as any effect on the natural ecosystem. And cities are the biggest expression of that. They truly are universal. I feel at home in cities around the world precisely because they essentially provide the same experience. Some are more violent, or more sleepy, or more wealthy, but the urban environment is at its heart the same. There is not the vast diversity of landscape and experience that exists across the natural world.

The sheer concentration of people attracted by the urban lifestyle means that cosmopolitan cities like New York are host to people speaking more than 800 different languages – thought to be the highest language density in the world. In London, less than half of the population is made of white Britons – down from 58% a decade ago. Meanwhile, languages around the world are declining at a faster rate than ever – one of the 7,000 global tongues dies every two weeks.

It is having an effect not just culturally, but biologically: urban melting pots are genetically altering humans. The spread of genetic diversity can be traced back to the invention of the bicycle, according to geneticist Steve Jones, which encouraged the intermarriage of people between villages and towns. But the urbanisation occurring now is generating unprecedented mixing. As a result, humans are now more genetically similar than at any time in the last 100,000 years, Jones says.

The genetic and cultural melange does a lot to erode the barriers between races, as well as leading to novel works of art, science and music that draw on many perspectives. And the tight concentration of people in a city also leads to other tolerances and practices, many of which are less common in other human habitats (like the village) or in other species. For example, people in a metropolis are generally freer to practice different religions or none, to be openly gay, for women to work and to voluntarily limit their family size despite – or indeed because of – access to greater resources.

Virtual revolution

Now that the technology exists for individuals to communicate instantly with companies, government departments, to broadcast to millions or to specific groups over the internet, the city has gained an entirely new dimension. This “virtual city” of communities formed online, using social networks like Twitter or Facebook, is incredibly powerful and not necessarily limited to the geographical contours of the real city. Like-minded individuals can find each other easily, gathering in online forums or through hashtags and comment streams in the same way as special interest clubs and cafe movements coalesce in the real city. Virtual applications make it easier to sift through a crowd – the Grindr app, for example, allows gay people to find other users of the app in a public setting. Online clubs – like the shopping network Groupon – are attempting to personalise trade exchanges and perhaps develop a proxy for the relationship people might have with a neighbourhood store.

Those petitioning for social or political change can hold governments and companies accountable in a manner never possible before. Instead of ploughing through books of corporate ledgers in libraries, vast amounts of data are now published online and can be searched and filtered in minutes with algorithms, allowing journalists and other groups to discover corruption, tax evasion or other information of public interest. Such information can be self-published in seconds, where it is available for billions to see. In a few seconds, I can compare hospital cancer survival rates in my area or nationally, I can look up how much profit popular stores shift to offshore accounts to avoid taxation, or read hundreds of reviews of a product I’m thinking of buying.

SOURCE: BBC

Thanks for your reading. This is Source site. [http://www.bbc.com/travel/blog/20130514-berlins-carnival-of-cultures BBC]

AzucenaWei

2013-05-18T04:08:45Z

Created page with "State Legislator to Exit Albany, and Critics Say It’s About Time State Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez, the once-powerful Brooklyn Democratic leader who has been accused of sexual..."

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State Legislator to Exit Albany, and Critics Say It’s About Time
State Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez, the once-powerful Brooklyn Democratic leader who has been accused of sexual harassment by several women, said on Friday that he would resign. But his offer only inflamed an uproar over his behavior because, a few words later, he said the resignation would not take effect for five weeks, and then he would run for a seat on the New York City Council.
The Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, whose own handling of the initial allegations against Mr. Lopez has been widely criticized, vowed to press ahead with an effort to expel Mr. Lopez from the Legislature immediately.
And the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn, called for an all-out effort to prevent Mr. Lopez from winning election to that body this fall.
“Vito Lopez should not spend another day in office, let alone a whole month,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said in a statement. “He should resign effective immediately, and if he does not, he must be expelled.”
The denunciations from the state’s leading Democratic officials demonstrated the remarkably steep fall of Mr. Lopez.
Until he was publicly accused of harassment, he had been a political boss with considerable influence. In Brooklyn, he controlled a sprawling nonprofit agency, the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council, that served as a de facto political machine for him and his allies. And in Albany, he had clout as chairman of the Housing Committee.
Mr. Lopez’s determination to run for the Council also served as a reminder of the extraordinary staying power of incumbents in New York. Mr. Lopez was easily re-elected last fall, against only nominal opposition, even after he had been censured by the Assembly, and few are ruling out an election this fall to the Council.
The allegations against Mr. Lopez first became public last August, when Mr. Silver announced that an investigation by the Assembly’s ethics committee had found that accusations by two women were credible.
The New York Times later reported that the Assembly had previously settled two other harassment allegations against Mr. Lopez, but had not made those settlements public, and had not referred the accusations to the ethics committee.
This week, the anger over Mr. Lopez’s conduct intensified after the state’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics issued a report saying female legislative employees had told investigators that Mr. Lopez had groped and tried to kiss them, sought to stay in hotel rooms with them, demanded they massage him, requested that they dress in more provocative clothing and urged them to write him flattering notes. On Thursday, Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Silver said they wanted the Assembly to expel Mr. Lopez.
Mr. Lopez, who is 71 and was elected to the Assembly in 1984, has repeatedly denied wrongdoing, but on Friday morning he tried to quiet the furor by issuing a seven-sentence statement in which he said he would resign on the last scheduled day of the current legislative session.
“Because the citizens of my district voted me back into office last November by an overwhelming majority, I feel obligated to serve out this session of the Assembly,” he said. “I therefore announce that as of June 20, 2013, the last day of the session, I resign my position.”
That date was too far off for many.
“Lopez is living in la-la land if he doesn’t think his actions warrant immediate resignation,” said Assemblywoman Linda B. Rosenthal, a Manhattan Democrat. “His lack of shame is almost as repugnant as his behavior.”
The New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women not only asked for Mr. Lopez’s expulsion, but also assailed Mr. Silver for what it called “his shameful cover-up and protection of a serial harasser.” The organization also said in a statement, “Up to this point, Speaker Silver has failed the many women who were harassed by Mr. Lopez, in turn failing every woman who walks the halls of the Capitol.”
Mr. Silver, who has acknowledged erring in his handling of the initial complaints against Mr. Lopez, now appears determined to move swiftly toward expulsion. (The Assembly has not expelled anyone since it ejected five socialists in the early 1920s.)
On Friday afternoon, Mr. Silver circulated a draft resolution that would begin the process of expelling Mr. Lopez by asking the Assembly’s ethics committee to recommend sanctions against him. Mr. Lopez had already been stripped of his committee chairmanship and seniority privileges last August.
“Assembly Member Lopez should no longer be in public office,” Mr. Silver’s spokesman, Michael Whyland, said. “We will move forward with our resolution on Monday.”
Much of the anger on Friday was focused on Mr. Lopez’s announcement that he intended to pursue a race for the Council. He is a candidate for a seat now held by Councilwoman Diana Reyna, who cannot seek re-election because of term limits.
[http://BBC.com From BBC News ]

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2013-05-18T03:58:33Z

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JameAmendt

2013-05-18T03:43:41Z

Created page with "State Legislator to Exit Albany, and Critics Say It’s About Time State Assemblyman Vito J. Lopez, the once-powerful Brooklyn Democratic leader who has been accused of sexual..."

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User:JameAmendt

2013-05-18T03:42:02Z

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