Thursday, December 29, 2011

Women Beat Men to Jobs as Japans Mancession Spurs Deflation

December 26, 2011, 9:28 PM EST

By Aki Ito and Toru Fujioka

Dec. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Three times a week, Seiya Ogawa bikes to an unemployment center in Kadoma, home to Panasonic Corp., looking for work to help pay for his son?s final year at college.

?At this point, I?m willing to take any job,? said the 49-year-old, who assembled electronic circuit boards in what was once a bustling manufacturing suburb of Osaka, Japan?s third- largest city. This month, it?s officially one year since he first signed on at the center, and ?it?s like my humanity?s been stripped from me,? he said.

Ogawa and his son rely on the incomes of his wife and daughter, a social role reversal that is spreading in Japan as factories and building companies fire workers and services that hire mostly women add employees. The new jobs pay lower average wages, making it harder for Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda to spur consumer spending and pull the world?s third-largest economy out of a decade of deflation. The increasing burden as breadwinners also gives women less incentive to marry and have children early in a country that already has the fastest-aging population in the developed world.

?With Japanese companies increasingly moving abroad and a shrinking population making growth in construction work unlikely, these sectors just can?t absorb male workers the way they used to,? said Toshihiro Nagahama, chief economist at Dai-Ichi Life Research Institute in Tokyo. ?Nominal wages are falling and falling as a result. This mancession is far from over.?

National Pride

Japan?s economy is shifting from monozukuri, or making things -- which the nation prides itself on -- to services, especially those catering to the 29 million seniors over age 64. Manufacturing and building industries, where seven out of 10 staff are male, will lose 4 million positions this decade, according to Tokyo-based Works Institute, funded by employment- services provider Recruit Co. Health care, 74 percent female, added people at the fastest pace across all industries in the past three years, growing 16 percent, Labor Ministry data show.

The shift is accelerating, thanks to a near record-high currency that?s wiping out profits at exporters including Panasonic and Sony Corp., giving the government no time to ease the transition. Panasonic forecast its biggest annual loss in a decade this fiscal year, while Sony estimated it will lose 90 billion yen ($1.2 billion).

Panasonic and Sony shares have slumped 45 percent and 53 percent this year, helping pull the benchmark Topix index 20 percent lower. At the same time, Message Co., the nation?s second-biggest operator of nursing homes by number of rooms, has risen 1.6 percent, and Nichii Gakkan Co., operator of the largest number of homes, is up 25 percent.

?Future of Japan?

Services such as nursing and health care are ?the future of Japan,? said Curtis Freeze, founder of Honolulu-based Prospect Asset Management Inc., who is considering adding Message to the $300 million that Prospect manages because its employment policies may reduce staff-turnover costs. Manufacturers ?are in the middle of restructuring, and they?re going to struggle. It?s the smaller services companies that will do most of the hiring.?

Health care, with 19 percent of working women, isn?t the only field to add jobs in the past three years: Education -- another profession where women outnumber men -- as well as research, restaurants and real estate also have grown, even as Japan lost a net 12.1 million positions.

Forty-two percent of people employed in 2010 were women, the highest share since the Labor Ministry made comparable data available in 1973, when the figure was 38.5 percent.

?Really Tough?

?It?s really tough right now,? said Reiko Sato, 31, at the government employment office near her home in Tokyo. ?It?s the end of the year, so there are lots of short-term positions at department stores or restaurants that everyone?s competing to get. It?s easier for the girls, because that?s who the stores want. I just feel bad for the men who have to come here. They probably won?t have something in time for the New Year.?

Manufacturing, where men outnumber women by more than 2-to- 1, is still Japan?s largest employer, accounting for about 16 percent of its 62.5 million workers. In construction, the ratio of men to women is 6-to-1. Since October 2008, the former shrank payrolls by 9 percent and the latter by 11 percent. Meanwhile, the health-care workforce will grow 32 percent from 2010 to 2020, according to Works Institute.

Pay Gap

As a result, one of the developed world?s biggest gender- pay gaps -- second only to South Korea and roughly double the average in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development -- is narrowing. Women between 30 and 34 earned an average 2.99 million yen last year, 69 percent of the 4.32 million yen for men, according to National Tax Agency data. That?s up from 55 percent in 1978.

The increase may help shift consumer spending toward services women prefer, such as traveling and dining out, and away from durable goods including cars and electronics, said Kyohei Morita, chief Japan economist at Barclays Capital in Tokyo. HIS Co., Japan?s largest listed travel agency, has risen 4.3 percent this year, to 2,141 yen.

?It?s because I work that I can go on these trips and buy my favorite makeup,? said Ayumi Ohtaki, a 27-year-old call- center operator in Tokyo who earns 240,000 yen a month. While she?s in no hurry to marry, she said she would want to keep her job after her wedding to ensure she could continue to buy the things she wants.

?If the money?s just from my husband, I wouldn?t be able to do anything fun,? she said.

Birth Rate

With women like Ohtaki marrying later and delaying starting a family, and more men struggling to find work, Japan?s falling birth rate is likely to get worse, said Mary Brinton, a sociology professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who studied the lives of young Japanese men shut out of well-paid, full-time work in the 1990s.

The number of babies born in 2010 was 1.07 million, down from 1.19 million in 2000, according to the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry.

?This so-called mancession is going to cause continuing problems for the marriage rate and birth rate,? she said. ?Many young Japanese men say they want to have a stable job before they consider marrying.?

Even so, the shift toward more female employees isn?t likely to boost overall consumer spending because the factory jobs being lost paid more than the newly created service positions. Social services and nursing paid an average 229,732 yen a month last year, 63 percent of the 362,340 yen for factory workers and 62 percent of the 373,288 yen earned in construction, according to the labor ministry.

?The reality is that women get paid less,? Morita said.

Global Trend

The trend of women replacing men in Japan?s workforce mirrors a similar shift in other developed nations as companies cut back payrolls. Last year, the average male unemployment rate among the OECD countries was 8.5 percent, compared with 8.1 percent for women, according to the organization?s website. In 2000, the situation was reversed, with 5.8 percent of men jobless and 6.8 percent of female workers.

Japan?s unemployment rate in 2010 was 5.4 percent for men and 4.6 percent for women, a record gap. Joblessness may rise to 7.1 percent for men and 5.9 percent for women by 2020, Works Institute estimates.

That?s a bleak outlook for Ogawa, who lives alongside Kadoma?s rusting, shuttered factories, which once drew laborers from across Japan as they boomed with the Panasonic headquarters they surround. He says the stagnation has changed the attitude of young people in their 20s like his son and daughter, who hoard the money they earn rather than spending it.

?It?s hard to tell them to aim high when I?m struggling to find a job,? Ogawa said. ?I don?t dare talk about my good times when I was their age; they just wouldn?t understand.?

--With assistance from Kanoko Matsuyama and Eleanor Warnock in Tokyo. Editor: Adam Majendie, Melinda Grenier.

To contact the reporters on this story: Aki Ito in Tokyo at aito16@bloomberg.net; Toru Fujioka in Tokyo at tfujioka1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Paul Panckhurst at ppanckhurst@bloomberg.net

Source: http://c.moreover.com/click/here.pl?r5665728805

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Friday, December 23, 2011

Bahamas Express begins operating between Florida and the Bahamas


FT. LAUDERDALE - The Bale?ria Group marks a new milestone in its achievements with the beginning of the high speed maritime transport service between Fort Lauderdale and Grand Bahama island. The new service, which operates under the Bahamas Express brand, is a firm commitment to the internationalization of the company and also, therefore, to consolidating the company?s growth in the current economic climate.

The fast ferry Pinar del R?o will operate the new service between Florida and the Bahamas, which undertakes the 76 mile crossing in two and a half hours. Bale?ria Bahamas Express operates on a daily basis, except on Wednesdays, departing from Fort Lauderdale at 10:00 and returning at 19:30, allowing US passengers to take day trips to Grand Bahama island.

The President of Bale?ria, Adolfo Utor, highlighted the potential of this area of the Caribbean and explained that it complements the routes which the company operates in the Mediterranean. Utor also pointed out that there is a market of over 200,000 passengers per year on this new route adding that the company is also working on opening another connection to the island of Bimini, also in the Bahamas. He also stated that despite the fact that at present the company only transports passengers, Bale?ria?s aim for the future is to bring to the United States the mixed route model (passengers, vehicles and cargo) that the shipping company works with in Spain. Bale?ria has invested 4 million Euros in the launching of this new route.

"The Bahamas Express service provides an important link between South Florida and The Bahamas" said David Johnson, director general of the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism. "It is an affordable and easily accessible option that appeals to a variety of travelers, particularly families and for those seeking a relaxing and hassle free route to The Bahamas. We look forward to treating guests to our Bahamian hospitality, whether coming for a day or staying for a week."


Bahamas Express provides service between Ft. Lauderdale and Bahamas

The fast ferry Pinar del R?o, which sails at a speed of 32 knots, has a capacity to hold up to 463 passengers. Furthermore, the ship boasts different services such as a bar-cafeteria, duty free shop and tourist class and first class accommodation, among others. This ship sports a design by the well-known fashion designer Custo Barcelona on its hull. The interior will also be decorated with the same graphics, which depict the sea bed and are dominated by bright colors.

Source: http://sflcn.com/story.php?id=11136

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Study: Professors Have Low Expectations for Business Students ...

The latest results from a recent study do little to shake the growing reputation undergraduate business majors face as being sluggish students who are slow to improve their critical thinking skills.

According to the 2011 National Survey of Student Engagement, senior business majors spend less time preparing for class than their peers in five other disciplines, ranging from engineering to the humanities.

Business students reported they spend about 14 hours a week reading course materials and doing homework, versus 19 hours for engineering majors, 18 for physical sciences majors, 17 for biological sciences and arts and humanities majors, and 15 for education majors. Social sciences majors were on par with business students and also reported spending about 14 hours a week preparing for class. This results are based on responses from college seniors at more than 750 schools in the U.S. and Canada.

What might be more revealing, though, is that business professors had some of the lowest expectations for their students when it came to class preparation, the survey found. Biz professors expected just 15 hours of preparation time a week from their students, the least of any discipline except for education, where 15 hours per week is also the expectation. Faculty in all other disciplines demanded 18 hours a week or more.

While the survey did not give a reason as to why less preparation is generally expected from business students, the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education examined the apathy found in some undergraduate business programs in a jointly published story from April. Citing the book Academically Adrift, they reported:

??on a national test of writing and reasoning skills, business majors had the weakest gains during the first two years of college. And when business students take the GMAT, the entry examination for M.B.A. programs, they score lower than do students in every other major.?

The article cites a report that warns many undergraduate business students may arrive to the major ?by default,? or because it seems the most logical path to employment.

Business is the most popular bachelor?s degree major in the country, according to historic U.S. Dept. of Education data figures. Such a large capture from a wide variety of schools is likely to affect the end result of the NSSE survey. When you isolate business students to those attending schools ranked in Bloomberg Businessweek?s top 50, for example, the NSSE data sounds like it could be misleading ? a fact the Times and Chronicle story notes.

A Bloomberg Businessweek story from October demonstrates this. We found that at many of the top-ranked public universities where students often apply to?and are accepted by?the business school separately, the major is among the most competitive to enter and that selectivity to those programs is on the rise. Such high admissions standards are likely to weed out the languid, and many who are accepted to such programs profess that they spend more than 14 hours a week prepping for class. Odds are, professors? expectations at these schools are higher, as well.

?Erin Zlomek

Source: http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/blogs/mba_admissions/archives/2011/12/study_professors_have_low_expectations_for_business_students.html

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Thursday, December 22, 2011

Which wheats make the best whole-grain cookie doughs?

ScienceDaily (Dec. 20, 2011) ? Festive cookies, served at year-end holiday gatherings, may in the future be made with a larger proportion of whole-grain flour instead of familiar, highly refined white flour. That's a goal of ongoing studies by U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists in Wooster, Ohio.

A study by scientists with the USDA's Agricultural Research Service (ARS) Soft Wheat Quality Research Unit in Wooster was published earlier this year in Crop Science. The research may help plant breeders zero in on promising new wheat plants that might be tomorrow's superstar producers of whole-grain soft wheat flours for cookie doughs.

ARS is USDA's chief intramural scientific research agency.

Consumption of whole grains has been associated, in some studies, with reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. But Americans don't eat enough whole grains, according to wheat expert Edward J. Souza. A former ARS research leader and plant geneticist at Wooster, Souza now directs wheat breeding for an international plant science company.

Souza conducted the cookie-flour study in collaboration with Clay H. Sneller of Ohio State University's Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center at Wooster, and with Mary J. Guttieri, formerly with the center.

New, detailed evidence from their investigation confirms that two inexpensive, readily available and relatively simple tests are reliable tools for getting an early in-the-laboratory indication of how good a promising new wheat may prove to be as a future source of whole-grain cookie flour.

The two procedures-the sucrose SRC (solvent retention capacity) test and the milling softness equivalent test-aren't new. But the Wooster team's study is perhaps the most thorough examination of the tests' reliability as an early screen for a new soft-wheat flour's performance in whole-grain cookie doughs.

The scientists used 14 different commercial varieties of soft wheat for this research. The study showed that breeders and foodmakers can rely on the SRC and softness tests for early screening. Later, when they want to narrow their focus to only those plants that are uniquely superior sources of whole-grain cookie dough flour, they can invest in the "wire-cut cookie test," a more expensive procedure.

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Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111220133807.htm

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Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Occupy the Kremlin: Russia's Election Lets Loose Public Rage (Time.com)

On Monday night, Dec. 5, Moscow saw the biggest protest against Vladimir Putin since he rose to power 12 years ago. Between 5,000 and 7,000 people showed up, packing a square in the center of the capital, hanging from lampposts in the rain, blocking traffic on surrounding streets and chanting for Putin's arrest. They were furious at the elections this past weekend that let his party hang on to its majority in parliament, and unlike the much smaller protests Moscow sees from time to time, this one was not populated by communist grannies or flare-waving nationalists. This was Russia's Internet generation, the yuppies and the college students, whose anger has finally spilled from the blogosphere onto the streets of the capital.

It did not come from out of nowhere. Ripples of frustration ahead of the elections had been suggesting a political sea change for months. At least since Putin announced in late September that he would return for a third term as President next year, his approval ratings have slipped dramatically, spawning a wave of online parodies of him as an aging autocrat. In November, that frustration saw its first mass expression, when he was openly booed by a stadium of fans at a mixed-martial-arts event. The ratings of his United Russia Party have meanwhile gone into free fall, and on Sunday, Dec. 4, when Russians went to the polls to elect a new parliament, United Russia lost a quarter of its seats and failed to get even half of the popular vote. (See an analysis of Putin's dwindling popularity.)

Allegations of massive voter fraud, widely reported by observers and the opposition, were among the reasons for Monday's protest. But they made up a small portion of the grievances chanted in the square (and, for that matter, in simultaneous demonstrations in St. Petersburg, Putin's hometown). To understand the wider animosity toward Putin's rule as well as the reason so many people showed up, it helps to look at a middle-class Moscow suburb about 30 miles (50 km) east of the capital. It is a typically dingy place that has seen typically little in the way of public works since United Russia took power there a few years ago. The locals complain endlessly of corruption in the town government, but there were never any public outbursts of dissent until around midnight on Thursday, a few days ahead of the elections, when two men cut through a padlock, scrambled onto the roof of an apartment tower and hung a giant banner off the side of it. That had never happened there before.

In letters more than a meter tall, the banner sardonically told the locals to "Vote for the party of crooks and thieves." Virtually every Russian would understand this as a reference to the United Russia Party, which has struggled to shake the nickname since it was coined a year ago by anticorruption blogger Alexei Navalny. In a wink at the local bureaucrats, the men who hung the banner signed it with the words, "Sincerely, your alcoholic mayor." The most striking thing about the vandals was not their wit but the fact that neither of them had ever belonged to any political parties or movements. Both of them are average family men in their early 30s -- one an IT engineer, another a local business owner -- and they weren't even politically active until this election cycle.

"I guess I just got tired of whining about Putin on my blog," says Sergei, 31, the IT engineer. "I felt like I had to actually do something, something real." (The two asked TIME not to print their real names, for fear they would be prosecuted; TIME chose not to print the name of their town.) By Saturday night, the eve of the elections, their banner had been removed; instead of paying $400 to reprint it, they went around posting flyers critical of United Russia on all the local apartment blocks. In the context of Russia's docile political culture, the sight seemed bizarre: two full-grown men, risking arrest and humiliation, scampering about in the middle of the night to fulfill some abstract political urge. But one of the flyers helped explain. It showed a picture of an infant above the following caption: "One day, your child will ask you, Papa, what were you doing when the crooks and thieves were robbing our country blind?" See photos of President Obama's trip to Russia.

The flyers were not their handiwork; they had been printed from a Russian website called RosAgit, a kind of free design studio for antigovernment propaganda, and one of many new sites to spring up from Navalny's peculiar brand of Internet activism. Most of his online projects have the same basic mission -- to empower Russia's enormous community of Internet users to engage in real-world activism. One of them, perhaps the most clever, was the site RosYama, which is short for "Russian pothole." It tries to channel a common frustration -- the dismal state of Russia's roads -- by inviting users to post pictures of potholes and log their location on a map. The site then automatically generates an official complaint to the local traffic police, who are legally obligated to respond. If they fail to do so, the site generates a complaint against the police to the prosecutor. The idea is not just to overload Russia's creaking bureaucracy but also to get people to take that step from griping to action. "I don't agree with everything Navalny does," says Alexander, 30, the business owner who posted the banner. "But he has sort of shown us the way."

And Navalny's audience is growing. As of November 2011, Russia has more Internet users than any other country in Europe, and the country's blogosphere, with about 5 million blogs and 30 million monthly readers, has become the last truly free space for political discourse in Russia's tightly controlled media. As became clear on Monday, it has also shaped a generation that is as disaffected as it is politically aware. "So this is what they look like," said Oleg Orlov, an old Soviet dissident and the head of Russia's leading human-rights organization, when I ran into him at the protest. "I've never seem them at rallies before, at least not in such enormous numbers. It's incredible," he said. From the stage erected on the square, the activists tried to focus on that new phenomenon. "The revolution is not made, and the constitution is not defended, on Facebook and Twitter," said Roman Dobrokhotov, a political activist and blogger. "It is made here on the streets." In response, the crowd began cheering, "Russia without Putin!" See more international news in Global Spin.

But the obvious hero of Monday's protest was Navalny. Through his hugely popular blog, he had called on many of his fans to attend, and when he took the microphone, he had a simple message for the hipster demographic. "They can laugh and call us microbloggers," he said. "They can call us the hamsters of the Internet. Fine. I am an Internet hamster ... But I know they are afraid of us." The riot police did look afraid. It was one of the few times in recent memory when they were faced with a crowd too large for them to fully control. As the rally ended, the crowd surged toward them, attempting to march on the Kremlin, and the police were forced to use their truncheons to push them back. About 300 protesters were arrested.

As the rest dispersed, I found Alexander, who had driven down from his suburban home to attend. Beaming and chain-smoking cigarettes, he told me the election results in his hometown had given United Russia a mere 17%, half as much as the Communist Party. Careful not to sound presumptuous, he added, "Maybe it had to do with our banner. I don't know. But it's our little victory." Then he looked back toward the crowd and asked, "Did you see where Navalny went?" By then, he had also been arrested.

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Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/russia/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/time/20111205/wl_time/08599210156900

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