Chinese officials are fiercely attached to the one-child policy. They attribute to it almost every drop in fertility and every averted birth: some 400m more people, they claim, would have been born without it. This is patent nonsense. Chinese fertility was falling for decades before the one-child policy took effect in 1979. Fertility has gone down almost as far and as fast without coercion in neighbouring countries, including those with large Chinese populations. The spread of birth control and a desire for smaller families tend to accompany economic growth and development almost everywhere.

But the policy has almost certainly reduced fertility below the level to which it would have fallen anyway. As a result, China has one of the world’s lowest “dependency ratios”, with roughly three economically active adults for each dependent child or old person. It has therefore enjoyed a larger “demographic dividend” (extra growth as a result of the high ratio of workers to dependents) than its neighbours. But the dividend is near to being cashed out….

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“So much of the information out there about using web and social media marketing is geared towards selling products and services,” commented Jake Dell, Episcopal Church senior manager of Digital Marketing and Advertising. “We saw the need to write a guide that Episcopal congregations could use and would speak to them, but at the same time we wanted to ”˜borrow’ as much as we could from the business world. We didn’t see a need to re-invent the wheel.”

Included in free Social Media and The Episcopal Church are: six Best Practices; “How To” tips for each practice; and separate sections on church websites and dealing with negative social media.

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Companies have long used criminal background checks, credit reports and even searches on Google and LinkedIn to probe the previous lives of prospective employees. Now, some companies are requiring job candidates to also pass a social media background check.

A year-old start-up, Social Intelligence, scrapes the Internet for everything prospective employees may have said or done online in the past seven years.

Then it assembles a dossier with examples of professional honors and charitable work, along with negative information that meets specific criteria: online evidence of racist remarks; references to drugs; sexually explicit photos, text messages or videos; flagrant displays of weapons or bombs and clearly identifiable violent activity.

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…America’s dominance of innovation and technology is being challenged by other countries.

Figures from Battelle show that China’s spending on research and development is second only to the US because its unprecedented investment in education has created a highly skilled workforce.

The company warns that America’s under-investment in Stem subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) will spark an innovation crisis for the nation in the years to come.

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“This study shows that conventional wisdom ”” to eat everything in moderation, eat fewer calories and avoid fatty foods ”” isn’t the best approach,” Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, a cardiologist and epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and lead author of the study, said in an interview. “What you eat makes quite a difference. Just counting calories won’t matter much unless you look at the kinds of calories you’re eating.”

Dr. Frank B. Hu, a nutrition expert at the Harvard School of Public Health and a co-author of the new analysis, said: “In the past, too much emphasis has been put on single factors in the diet. But looking for a magic bullet hasn’t solved the problem of obesity.”

Also untrue, Dr. Mozaffarian said, is the food industry’s claim that there’s no such thing as a bad food.

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I’m the only one I know that sleeps floating. It’s delicious. You don’t know where you are, and after a while, because your limbs aren’t touching anything, you lose sense that you even have them.

–Story Musgrave, veteran of six space shuttle flights, in Time Magazine, July 18, 2011, edition, page 64

Psychology experiments showed that people presented with difficult questions began to think of computers.

When participants knew that facts would be available on a computer later, they had poor recall of answers but enhanced recall of where they were stored.

The researchers say the internet acts as a “transactive memory” that we depend upon to remember for us.

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Amid the din of warnings about modern technology’s impact on the soul, Kevin Kelly sounds like the happy evangelist from Geekdom. “[W]e can see more of God in a cell phone than in a tree frog,” the Wired magazine cofounder claims in his most recent book, What Technology Wants. A provocative title, to be sure, introducing a more provocative thesis: All human artifacts, from words to wheels to Wikipedia, together act like a living, breathing organism that reflects something of the Divine. “Technology has its roots in God’s work through the universe,” Kelly told CT associate editor Katelyn Beaty as she sat down with the San Francisco native at this year’s Q conference, where Kelly was speaking. He believes that as participants in the technium””Kelly’s word for this tech-ecosystem”””when we try to increase the options in the world, we are part of something godly.”

Kelly came to Christ in 1979, when he got locked out of a Jerusalem hostel and ended up sleeping on a stone slab in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He talked with CT about the Amish, his vision of heaven, and why he doesn’t own a smart phone.

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If we continue as now seems likely, a crunch is coming ”“ in fact three crunches ”“ our global footprint greatly exceeding what the Earth can support, climate destabilisation becoming severe, and fresh water becoming insufficient to feed the Earth’s large population. These crunches will not, by themselves, destroy humanity but they will cause a Darwinian situation; when the going gets tough there will be survival of the fittest. By mid-century, the Earth could be like a lifeboat that’s too small to save everyone.

To be politically correct, organisations don’t use the term ”˜Darwinian’ or talk about ”˜survival of the fittest’, but I am increasingly finding that at elite dinner parties there is already discussion of who the survivors will be. China has enormous fighting spirit and will soon be the world’s largest economy. In 2030 it will have 1.4 billion people. The average footprint of a Chinese person is a small fraction of an average American. The Chinese government does more detailed future planning than perhaps any other government and is determined that China will be one of the survivors. China has been buying the steel and resources it will need in the future. To the largest extent possible it has already cornered the market in rare Earth metals needed for high technology.

The USA combined with Canada will be a survivor, because it is economically powerful and resourceful, and with Canada it has a large amount of land, much of which will benefit from global warming ”“ the breadbasket of the future. Europe, in my mind, is a question mark. Japan will struggle….

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Several states have passed laws requiring affiliates of online retailers like Amazon (AMZN) to collect and remit sales taxes. “Amazon tax” laws have passed in California, New York, Colorado, Rhode Island, North Carolina, Connecticut and Illinois. Lawmakers have tried in at least 14 other states.

But in nearly every case, online retailers have cut ties with their state affiliates. Residents can still buy from the e-tailers, but the affiliates lose business or move.

“The nation’s first few Amazon taxes have not produced any revenue at all, and there is some evidence of lost revenue,” according to a National Tax Foundation study last year.

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“We were first and could not be beaten,” she said. “But that was the Soviet Union.” She feels her country now lags behind in science and technology, but adds she’s happy her country is no longer feared by the West.

That was the theme Thursday when a new statue of Gagarin was unveiled ”” not in Moscow, but in London, near Buckingham Palace, right by a statue of the great British explorer James Cook.

Sergei Krikalyov, who heads Russia’s Gagarin Center for Cosmonaut Training, was there for the unveiling. He called the setting appropriate.

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Spotify in now playing in the U.S.

The online music service, hugely popular in Europe, is now live in the States. But to start using Spotify, users need to be invited in — a very Google-esque move. Well, that is unless you’re willing to sign up and pay for Spotify.

The music-streaming service has been expected for more than a year now as Spotify had to reach agreements with record labels over licensing rights to songs on this side of the Atlantic Ocean.

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The Internal Revenue Service didn’t always properly notify taxpayers after inadvertently disclosing personal information, according to a Treasury Department audit released Thursday.

Not all citizens were notified that their personal information had been released, in a sample of 98 case files from the 2009 and 2010 fiscal years that the IRS had flagged as inadvertent disclosures of personal taxpayer information, according to a report from the Treasury Inspector General for Taxpayer Administration.

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The military must move from defending against cyberattacks to actively deterring such attacks, a top general said Thursday as the Pentagon unveiled a new strategy for dealing with threats from computer hackers.

Under the strategy, the military will seek to develop new protections for military and defense-contractor computer networks. Officials say they will also develop strategies for employing U.S. cyberweapons to retaliate against major cyberattacks.

The Pentagon has concluded that the laws of armed conflict apply in cyberspace, as was previously reported by The Wall Street Journal.

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…what is most striking when you talk to employers today is how many of them have used the pressure of the recession to become even more productive by deploying more automation technologies, software, outsourcing, robotics ”” anything they can use to make better products with reduced head count and health care and pension liabilities. That is not going to change. And while many of them are hiring, they are increasingly picky. They are all looking for the same kind of people ”” people who not only have the critical thinking skills to do the value-adding jobs that technology can’t, but also people who can invent, adapt and reinvent their jobs every day, in a market that changes faster than ever.

Today’s college grads need to be aware that the rising trend in Silicon Valley is to evaluate employees every quarter, not annually. Because the merger of globalization and the I.T. revolution means new products are being phased in and out so fast that companies cannot afford to wait until the end of the year to figure out whether a team leader is doing a good job.

Whatever you may be thinking when you apply for a job today, you can be sure the employer is asking this: Can this person add value every hour, every day ”” more than a worker in India, a robot or a computer?

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A guide to the intellectual trends that, for better or worse, are shaping America right now. (Plus a bunch of other ideas, insights, hypotheses, and provocations.)

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While life expectancy in the US continues to improve, says the report by researchers at University of Washington in Seattle and Imperial College, London, it is not increasing as quickly as in other Western countries, so the gap is widening.

“The researchers suggest that the relatively low life expectancies in the US cannot be explained by the size of the nation, racial diversity, or economics,” says the document, which ranks the US 38th in the world for life expectancy overall.

“Instead, the authors point to high rates of obesity, tobacco use and other preventable risk factors for an early death as the leading drivers of the gap between the US and other nations.”

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We need to recognise that, if intelligible structure, developing and ordered complexity, is the story we have to tell, if the point of genes is to carry information, then the reality of the universe as we know it is suffused with the possibility of mind. Matter itself is pregnant with meanings, we might say – in the sense that the complexification of matter over the ages ends up in the phenomenon of consciousness.

And a scheme that regards consciousness as a purely contingent thing – as it were, an accidental by-product of material processes with which it is essentially unconnected – has a lot of explaining to do; as Cunningham says, it begins to sound like the nineteenth-century zealots who believed that fossils were placed in the soil by the Devil to test our faith.

The possibility of a first-person perspective, if it truly emerges from the unfolding logic of material combination and recombination, simply tells us that the notion of a necessarily “mindless” matter is not sustainable. If the nature of a gene is to carry a message, it is the nature of the recipient vehicle in a new generation to be able to “understand” it. To adapt a famous remark about one mythological cosmology, it’s mind all the way down. Intelligence as we define it entails self-consciousness, the first-person perspective; but something seriously analogous to intelligence has to be presupposed in matter for the entire system of transmitted patterns and “instructions” to be possible.

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Iran said on Saturday it test-fired two long-range missiles into the Indian Ocean earlier this year, the first time it has fired missiles into that sea, according to state television.

“In the month of Bahman (Jan 21-Feb 19) two missiles with a range of 1,900 km (1,180 miles) were fired from Semnan province(in northern Iran) into the mouth of the Indian Ocean,” Amir Ali Hajizadeh, head of the Revolutionary Guards’ aerospace division, told a news conference some of which was shown on television.

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South Carolina boasts a strong connection to the shuttle program. At least six NASA shuttle astronauts have state ties, ranging from Ronald E. McNair of Lake City, who died in the 1986 Challenger explosion, to current NASA administrator Charles Bolden of Columbia, pilot of the mission that launched the Hubble Space Telescope. Both are black and were born and raised in segregation.

Beyond providing astronauts, though, there’s bad news on the horizon as the state is losing one of its chosen paths to the skies.

For three decades, experiments run by South Carolina researchers had ready shuttle access beyond Earth’s gravity. They include about 30 programs run by the University of South Carolina and 35 more by Clemson University. Even tiny Claflin University was in the mix, with four of its projects sent into orbit.

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“Unfortunately, it’s not science fiction,” said Frank Cilluffo, director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University. “The reality is that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula in particular has come up with creative means to disguise explosive devices.”

Known as AQAP, the Yemen-based offshoot of al-Qaeda has been credited with building the underwear bomb used in the Christmas 2009 attempted attack on a Northwest Airlines jet near Detroit and the bombs built into toner cartridges sent last December on cargo carriers.

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On trash day in San Francisco, bins in three colors line the streets, each with a different purpose.

The city requires residents to put recyclable materials into a blue bin, compostables into a green one and regular old garbarge into a black one.

“We even recycle batteries,” says Johanna Partin, the mayor’s director of climate protection initiatives, adding they can be placed in a clear bag on top of any bin.

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Benedict XVI is pushing Vatican communication to take “enormous steps,” according to the president of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications.

Archbishop Claudio Celli affirmed this today when he presented News.va, the Vatican’s new Web portal that will bring news from various Church sources to the same site.

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Google is trying once again to challenge Facebook’s domination of the social networking business. Its main social networking site “Orkut” is very popular in Brazil, but in the rest of the world, Google trails Facebook.

But the company has a new attempt to catch up.

The new social network is called Google Plus, and you’re not allowed to join it. At least, not yet.

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The former Mossad spy chief’s name is on everyone’s lips in Israel ”” with good reason.

Meir Dagan was the head of Israel’s spy agency for eight years and has been credited with raising the international prestige of the agency. So it came as a shock to many that upon leaving office he would talk about one of the most sensitive issues here: Iran.

Dagan has said that a military strike on that nation targeting its suspect nuclear program would be disastrous, and he lambasted the current Israeli leadership for being reckless in pursuing that aim. This past week, Dagan was stripped of his diplomatic passport, in apparent retaliation.

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[Rowan] Williams outlined several challenges churches will encounter this century and urged them to use new means of communication and social media to spread the gospel more effectively.

“There is virtually nowhere you can go in the world where you won’t see a mobile telephone. The church needs to learn how use these new means of communications more effectively for the sake of the gospel. If we have social media, they can also be media for communion,” he said.

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The government urgently needs to recruit an elite cadre of innovators able to lead a workforce with a different, entrepreneurial ethos ”“ including hackers ”“ as solvers of puzzles. Rather than developing security measures in bunkers or silos, we should be bold and emulate the “small world clusters” that brought together the world’s best health laboratories to defeat the Sars epidemic in weeks, not years. The US now admits to a “human capital crisis in cybersecurity,” with estimates that up to 30,000 cybersecurity professionals are needed against the 1,000 it has. The answer could lie in online self-managing collaborative ventures of the kind that created the free open-source pc operating system, Linux. That is the future of cybersecurity, open networks collaborating against mutual threats.

Critically, innovation must not fall victim to budget constraints in the current climate of austerity. The US chairman of the joint chiefs of staff has described the economic crisis and recession as the greatest challenge to national security. In the US, cybersecurity co-ordinator Howard Schmidt forms strategic links with economic policy through the office of management and budget in the White House. The UK National Security Council appears to distance itself from economic matters, regardless of the security risks in a sluggish recovery. Britain needs to learn from the US and ask whether enough cyberspending is allocated to education, research and development. Strategies have to evolve fast. It is not yet too late.

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Mara Hvistendahl is worried about girls. Not in any political, moral or cultural sense but as an existential matter. She is right to be. In China, India and numerous other countries (both developing and developed), there are many more men than women, the result of systematic campaigns against baby girls. In “Unnatural Selection,” Ms. Hvistendahl reports on this gender imbalance: what it is, how it came to be and what it means for the future.

In nature, 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. This ratio is biologically ironclad. Between 104 and 106 is the normal range, and that’s as far as the natural window goes. Any other number is the result of unnatural events.
Yet today in India there are 112 boys born for every 100 girls. In China, the number is 121””though plenty of Chinese towns are over the 150 mark. China’s and India’s populations are mammoth enough that their outlying sex ratios have skewed the global average to a biologically impossible 107. But the imbalance is not only in Asia. Azerbaijan stands at 115, Georgia at 118 and Armenia at 120.

What is causing the skewed ratio: abortion…

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The Vatican is betting an iPod beats “Shush!” in lowering the tour guide noise level in basilicas.

It will even lend you one for free to try to prove its point.

From a tiny booth in the back of St. John in Lateran, the Holy See’s pilgrim agency has been quietly asking tourists if they want to tour Rome’s oldest basilica with an iPod in hand loaded with an app specially designed to access the place’s art, architecture and Christian history.

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