US adds to pressure as British soldiers die in Afghanistan

Posted on August 16th, 2009 by admin.
Categories: Technology.

Three more British soldiers were killed in Afghanistan yesterday, taking the death toll to 204, as ministers prepared for an urgent request from Washington to send more troops.

The expected call for reinforcements will increase pressure on the Government at a time when casualties are rising at an alarming rate.

There is also concern that British lives are being lost to support a government with very different values from those of liberal Western democracies. President Karzai, the Afghan leader seeking re-election this week, has approved a law that critics say condones marital rape.

The three latest victims were from the 2nd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, which had lost a soldier 24 hours earlier. All four were killed by improvised explosive devices while on foot patrols near Sangin, in northern Helmand.

The number of British deaths passed the 200 milestone on Saturday when a soldier wounded in action on Thursday died in hospital in Britain.

Apart from the rapidly rising death toll — 35 since July 1 — The Times understands that new figures to be published by the Ministry of Defence today will reveal that about 800 servicemen and women have been wounded in action since the start of the campaign in 2001. The figures will show that the number wounded in July was double that of the previous month.

The Government expects to be asked to send more troops when General Stanley McChrystal, the American commander of Nato and US forces in Afghanistan, presents the results of his review of forces, likely to come shortly after the Afghan presidential election on Thursday.

British Forces in Afghanistan were boosted by 700 extra soldiers for the election period. They were supposed to be withdrawn in October, but sources said that a “baseline” figure of about 9,000 would be maintained for future operations.

Bob Ainsworth, the Defence Secretary, predicted that Britain’s military role could begin to be scaled down in the next year or two, even though the anticipated recommendation from General McChrystal to double the size of the Afghan National Army from the previously planned 134,000 to about 240,000 would require thousands more troops from coalition nations to train them.

Gordon Brown and Mr Ainsworth both spoke of Britain’s long-term commitment to Afghanistan yesterday, despite the increasing casualties.

However, there was dismay in London that President Karzai had quietly passed a law allowing Shia men to deny their wives food if they refused to obey their husbands’ sexual demands.

Mr Ainsworth accepted that Afghanistan would need support for a long time. General Sir David Richards, the incoming head of the Army, told The Times recently that involvement in some form could last 30 to 40 years. Mr Ainsworth said it was ludicrous to imagine having 9,000 troops in Afghanistan for that length of time. “I genuinely believe that in the next year or so we will be able to show a degree of progress. It won’t be a situation where we will be able to pull back, but we will increasingly see the Afghan National Army taking the front,” he said. “We will be more in a mentoring, in a training situation — supporting them, giving them the steel and capability and the knowledge to be able to do the job they will need to do,” he said on The Andrew Marr Show on BBC One.

Liam Fox, the Shadow Defence Secretary, demanded to know on what basis he was suggesting that British troops could scale down their role. “Has the Government made an agreement with the Americans to hand over Helmand to them?” he asked.

Nick Harvey, the Liberal Democrat defence spokesman, said: “Rather than trying to sway public opinion with false optimism, Bob Ainsworth must admit we need a fundamental change of gear, and a shift from a purely military campaign to one which focuses on achieving peace through meaningful political engagement, co-operation and progress.”

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Myanmar Frees American Man

Posted on August 16th, 2009 by admin.
Categories: Technology.

An American citizen jailed by Myanmar was free in Thailand’s capital Sunday after a U.S. senator secured his release, but the outcome highlighted a debate in Washington over whether such negotiations help human rights in recalcitrant regimes or let those regimes off the hook too easily.

John Yettaw, who had been sentenced last week to seven years in jail for breaking the terms of dissident Aung San Suu Kyi’s house arrest, arrived in Bangkok with Sen. Jim Webb, who became the first U.S. political leader to meet Myanmar Senior Gen. Than Shwe. The ailing Mr. Yettaw is receiving medical treatment for a recent series of seizures.

Sen. Webb (D., Va.) heads a Senate subcommittee concerning U.S. policy to east Asia and is an outspoken advocate of easing sanctions on Myanmar, also known as Burma. He has argued that years of sanctions have failed to move the Southeast Asian country toward democratic reforms, and that curbing trade drives Myanmar into the arms of authoritarian neighbors such as China, which has been ramping up investment in the resource-rich country.

Sen. Webb said he would discuss his recommendations with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and others on his return to Washington. Mrs. Clinton last month had offered a carrot at a regional-security conference in Thailand by saying that if Myanmar frees Ms. Suu Kyi, a jailed pro-democracy leader, it could open the way for the U.S. to allow investments in the country, which Washington currently targets with stiff economic sanctions.

During his visit, Sen. Webb was allowed to meet with Ms. Suu Kyi, raising tentative hopes among some exiled opposition figures that the military government may be signaling a willingness to soften its stance toward her.

At a news conference in Bangkok on Sunday, the senator said he “had a very long discussion” with Ms. Suu Kyi about when sanctions “work and when they don’t work.”

Speculation is growing among some dissidents that Ms. Suu Kyi is coming close to saying there is a case for easing sanctions on Myanmar. After realizing that sanctions have done little to dislodge the generals, “she wants to compromise,” says Nyo Ohn Myint, a former close aide to Ms. Suu Kyi and a foreign-affairs spokesman for her political party, the National League for Democracy. “We need to sacrifice whatever it takes for the country.”

Sen. Webb chose not to disclose any statements made on sanctions during discussions with Ms. Suu Kyi, saying she wanted to wait for a united statement from her National League.

Sen. Webb’s private mission to Myanmar — while approved by the White House — has caused concern among U.S. conservatives and some Burmese dissident groups that worry the military regime will use his visit to improve its international image without having to give up any meaningful ground to its critics.

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The Corporate Lab as Ringmaster

Posted on August 16th, 2009 by admin.
Categories: Technology.

The nation’s big corporate research and development laboratories — at I.B.M., General Electric, Hewlett-Packard and a handful of other companies — have their roots and rationale in the industrial era, when communication was costly, information traveled slowly and social networks were fostered at conferences and lunchrooms instead of over the Web.

Crowdsourcing and other new, more open models of innovation are really byproducts of the low-cost communication and new networks of collaboration made possible by the Internet.

So, in the Internet era, what is the continuing role and comparative advantage of the corporate R.& D. lab?

Its role will be smaller and its advantage diminished, suggests Michael Schrage, a research fellow at the Center for Digital Business at the Sloan School of Management at M.I.T. The idea-production process, according to Mr. Schrage, will continue to shift away from the centralized model epitomized by large corporate labs, going from “proprietary innovation to populist innovation.”

Much of traditional corporate R.& D. spending, he said, has been subsidized by profits that are increasingly under Internet-era pressures. “The economic case for a lot of in-house R.& D. no longer makes sense,” Mr. Schrage said.

The best bet for corporate R.& D. labs, he said, is to adopt a “federated” model that leverages all the innovative work by outsiders in universities, start-ups, business partners and government labs. The corporate lab’s role, then, is to be more of a coordinator and integrator of innovation, from both outside and inside the company walls.

Though hardly alone, Hewlett-Packard has aggressively adopted that approach in the last two years, after Prith Banerjee became the senior vice president for research. Under Mr. Banerjee, former dean of engineering at the University of Illinois at Chicago, H.P. Labs has not only narrowed its focus, placing larger bets on fewer projects, but has also systematically sought outside ideas.

H.P. now runs a yearly online contest, soliciting grant proposals from universities worldwide. The company lists eight fields in which it is seeking advanced research, and scientists suggest research projects in those fields.

The H.P. grants are typically about $75,000 a year, and many of the collaborative projects are intended to last three years. In June, the company announced the 61 winners from 46 universities and 12 countries, including 31 projects receiving a second year of funding. “We are tapping the collective intelligence, selectively, of leading academics around the world,” Mr. Banerjee said.

Alan E. Willner, an electrical engineer at the University of Southern California, is one of those academics. He is an expert in photonics, using light photons instead of electrons to transmit information. The goal of the project with H.P. is to cut power consumption and increase data-transmission speeds between computers in data centers, and eventually even inside of chips.

The H.P. project, he said, supports a research student, provides insights from H.P. scientists and has helped double the productivity of his research team, whose members have co-authored 21 conference and journal papers related to the project in the last year.

Another name on all those papers is Raymond G. Beausoleil, an H.P. research fellow. The U.S.C. team, Mr. Beausoleil said, has helped fill a gap in photonics expertise in the company’s research program and accelerated its progress. He noted that H.P. Labs has long worked with university professors, but that the outreach tended to be informal and ad hoc. “Before,” he said, “there wasn’t necessarily a mandate to collaborate.”

Opening up is a good approach to some problems. But tight-knit teams inside corporate labs, experts say, can outshine the open model when working on multidisciplinary challenges in projects soon heading to market.

G.E. built up a biosciences unit, starting in 2004, to help push its diagnostic imaging technology to new commercial frontiers. Last year, G.E. and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center developed a prototype scanner that sharply cuts the time needed to digitize images on pathology slides.

Now, the G.E. researchers are working on the software and data analysis tools to look into such images for a deeper understanding of diseases. G.E. is collaborating with Eli Lilly and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. But the core is a 15-person team at G.E. Research that includes computer scientists, molecular biologists, chemists and statisticians.

“It really helps to have the close and constant communications loops within the team, because engineers have to learn a lot of biology and biologists have to learn a lot of engineering,” said Fiona Ginty, a bioinformatics scientist who leads the project.

Probably more than any other company, I.B.M. has successfully reinvented its R.& D. labs over the years, analysts say. Jolted by its early-1990s tailspin, I.B.M. opened its labs to the outside world and to customers. Since the mid-’90s, it has sharply shifted its research focus toward its growth engines of software and services.

I.B.M. is a major underwriter of open research in universities, but also collects more patents for its own use than any other company, year after year.

The open innovation model, says John E. Kelly, senior vice president and director of research, has many advantages. But he points to several innovations that became products after originating in I.B.M. labs.

“You can’t leave discovery completely to others and to chance,” he said.

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Declining the order

Posted on June 12th, 2009 by admin.
Categories: Technology.

Dear sirs

Your orders of 18th July for cotton prints is received today and we thank you for your cooperation and assistance rendered to us.

To our regret ,we are unable to accept your order on the delivery  date stipulated by you. we have no enough time to ship your order goods.the minimum period necessary where goods have to be prepared for shipment is three to four weeks ,we sincerely hope to be able to serve you but will see the need for giving us a litte more time to suit your requirement.

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