Wednesday, March 17, 2004

The Edge of Bonneville Crater NASA's Spirit rover peers over the rim and into the interior of a martian crater nicknamed "Bonneville," seen here in a portion of a 180-degree, false-color mosaic. Scientists will use the photo to judge the depth of the surface material and make future observation plans. 7:21:30 PM    comment []

Call-Center Shift: Indian Company To Buy U.S. Firm By ASHOK BHATTACHARJEE DOW JONES NEWSWIRES March 17, 2004 8:29 p.m. NEW DELHI -- VCustomer Corp., an Indian call-center operator, is planning a $50 million acquisition in the U.S., in what would be the biggest such deal so far by an Indian call-center company. Chief Executive Sanjay Kumar said vCustomer wants to be closer to its customers. "We can handle some of the processes better if we have an operational base in the U.S.," he said. The move comes amid a backlash in the U.S. against shipping jobs to India. Mr. Kumar said that hadn't influenced the company's decision. However, industry groups in India have been discussing ways to minimize job losses in the U.S. as more service industries such as call centers subcontract work to Indian companies. Industry groups acknowledge that doing some of the work in the U.S. could mean lower overall profit margins, but many see it as worth pursuing to ensure that they continue to get contracts from the U.S. amid the rising political pressure. Rising U.S. opposition to outsourcing work abroad dominated this week's visit to New Delhi by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, who asked India to help create more jobs in the U.S. by lifting trade restrictions. So far, Indian service businesses' acquisitions in the U.S. have been largely limited to unlisted software companies. But call-center and back-office operations have posted stronger revenue growth than software companies in the recent past as cost-conscious U.S. companies have contracted routine work to Indian providers. At vCustomer, "We are scouting for a smart U.S. company to add more value to our services," Mr. Kumar said. He said the company is in advanced talks and is seeking to close a transaction during the next few months. VCustomer is looking at paying about $50 million in cash. VCustomer, which is backed by financial investors such as Warburg Pincus LLC and WestRiver Capital, generates its entire annual revenue of about $50 million in the U.S. About 3,200 vCustomer employees answer calls for large U.S. retail groups in two call centers located in the Indian cities of New Delhi and Pune. Mr. Kumar said the acquisition would help generate additional business in the U.S. and, possibly, the U.K. "Several of our clients have customers in the U.K.," he said. 7:18:19 PM    comment []

IBM Cites Circuit Breakthrough By DON CLARK Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL March 18, 2004 SAN FRANCISCO -- Researchers at International Business Machines Corp. are claiming a scientific breakthrough that could help produce low-cost sheets of circuitry. Conventional semiconductors are fabricated on rigid disks of silicon and use costly tools and chemical processes to pack as many transistors as possible on each chip. But some companies have been racing to perfect new manufacturing techniques that can lay down thin films of simpler semiconductors over much larger surfaces, including flexible plastics that could be coated with circuitry and churned out in rolls, like newsprint. Such films could be used in making products such as flexible computer displays and solar cells. One obstacle has been that electrical charges tend to pass slowly through existing thin-film circuitry, hampering their effectiveness for some applications. But researchers at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center reported, in a paper being published in the journal Nature, that they have come up with a technique that brings a tenfold improvement to the mobility of electrical charges through a semiconductor film. David Mitzi, who led the IBM research team, says the group found a new way to dissolve semiconductor materials in a liquid to create a film with high electrical mobility. The material was coated on a silicon wafer using a technique that spins the wafer to spread an even coating of the liquid on the surface. Spin-coating is commonly used to apply photographic chemicals on wafers in the process of defining circuitry on chips. For semiconductor materials, the IBM team used chalcogenides, a term that refers to compounds that may include oxygen, sulfur, selenium or tellurium. To dissolve them, they used hydrazine, a compound sometimes used as rocket fuel. One of the next hurdles, Mr. Mitzi said, is to find a substitute for hydrazine, which is extremely toxic. He said he was confident that other solvents will work. He also predicted that the same chemicals could be applied in other ways than spin-coating, such as roll-to-roll processes that could be extremely inexpensive. 7:15:56 PM    comment []

Damage from Warming Becoming 'Irreversible,' Says New Report by Jim Lobe   WASHINGTON -- Ten years after the ratification of a United Nations  treaty on climate change, greenhouse gas emissions that lead to global warming are still on the rise, signaling a "collective failure" of the industrialized world, according to the Washington-based World Resources Institute (WRI), a leading environmental think-tank. "We are quickly moving to the point where the damage will be irreversible," warned Dr. Jonathan Pershing, director of WRI's Climate, Energy and Pollution Program. "In fact, the latest scientific reports indicate that global warming is worsening. Unless we act now, the world will be locked into temperatures that would cause irreversible harm." WRI researchers estimate that greenhouse gas emissions such as carbon dioxide rose 11 percent over the last decade, and will grow another 50 percent worldwide by 2020. Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement that sets out specific targets to follow up on the treaty, 38 industrialized countries were supposed to reduce their emissions by an average of seven percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The administration of former President Bill Clinton signed the Kyoto Protocol, but President Bush withdrew the U.S., which currently emits about 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, from negotiations over Kyoto's implementation. Russia, which indicated initially that it intended to ratify the Protocol, remains undecided. As a result the Protocol--which must be ratified by countries whose greenhouse emissions totaled more than 55 percent of global emissions in 1990 in order to take effect--remains in limbo. WRI decided to make a relatively rare public statement now, both because the tenth anniversary of the UNFCCC's ratification will take place next weekend and because of the growing pessimism surrounding the international community's ability and will to deal with the problem. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which called for voluntary reductions in greenhouse emissions, was signed by, among others, then-President George H.W. Bush, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and took formal effect March 21, 1994. Today, 188 countries are signatories. The Kyoto Protocol grew out of the UNFCCC when it became clear that plans for voluntary reductions would not meet the initial targets, and as climate and atmospheric scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have become increasingly convinced that the rise in global temperatures of about one degree Fahrenheit over the last century is due primarily to artificial emissions, notably the combustion of fossil fuels, including coal, oil, and gas. Studies over the past decade have shown that the warming trend continues. "The five warmest years in recorded weather history have taken place over the last six years," noted WRI's president, Jonathan Lash. "The ten warmest years in recorded weather history have taken place since 1987. Whether it's the retreat of glaciers, the melting of the permafrost in Alaska, or the increase in severe weather events, the world is experiencing what the global warming models predict," he said. Europe, the main champion of the Kyoto Protocol, suffered its hottest year on record last year. Some 15,000 people in France alone died due to heat stress in combination with pollution, while European agriculture suffered an estimated $12.5 billion in losses. Britain's most influential scientist, Sir David King, recently excoriated the Bush administration for withdrawing from the Protocol and ignoring the threat posed by climate change. "In my view, climate change is the most severe problem we are facing today," he wrote in Science magazine, "more serious even than the threat of terrorism." Even the Pentagon recently issued a warning that global warming, if it takes place abruptly, could result in a catastrophic breakdown in international security. Based on growing evidence that climate shifts in the past have taken place with breathtaking speed, based on the freshening of sea water due to accelerated melting of glaciers and the polar ice caps. Given enough freshening, the Gulf Stream that currently warms the North Atlantic would be shut off, triggering an abrupt decline in temperatures that would bring about a new "Ice Age" in Europe, eastern Canada, and the northeastern United States and similar disastrous changes in world weather patterns elsewhere--all in a period as short as two to three years. Wars over access to food, water, and energy would be likely to break out between states, according to the report. "Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life," according to the report. "Once again, warfare would define human life." Even if climate change is more gradual, recent studies have argued that as many as one million plant and animal species could be rendered extinct due to the effects of global warming by 2050. A recent report by the world's largest reinsurance company, Swiss Re, predicted that in 10 years the economic cost of disasters like floods, frosts, and famines caused by global warming could reach $150 billion annually. "Accelerated development of a portfolio of technologies could stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations, enhance global energy security, and eradicate energy poverty," noted David Jhirad, WRI's vice president for research. "We urgently need the political will and international cooperation to make this happen." © Copyright 2004 OneWorld.net 7:07:43 PM    comment []