1 Mozambique and Africa are no basket cases (The Guardian) The shells of stylish colonial-era buildings, like shipwrecks on the ocean floor, still give Maputo a distinct character. But the capital of Mozambique no longer feels like an urban museum. Amid the crumbling grandeur rumble cranes and mechanical diggers, carving out a different skyline. A construction boom is under way here, concrete proof of the economic revolution in Mozambique. Growth hit 7.1% last year, accelerating to 8.1% in the final quarter. The country, riven by civil war for 15 years, is poised to become the world's biggest coal exporter within the next decade, while the recent discovery of two massive gas fields in its waters has turned the region into an energy hotspot, promising a £250bn bonanza.
From Cape Town to Cairo, there are signs of a continent on the move: giant infrastructure projects, an expanding middle class, foreign equity scrambling for opportunities in telecoms, financial services and products aimed at a billion consumers. Growth is no magic bullet for reducing inequality or fostering democracy, but the stubborn truth that it is still the world's poorest continent has done little to dull the confidence and hype about the African renaissance.
Africa has 16 billionaires, topped by Nigerian cement tycoon Aliko Dangote with an estimated fortune of $10.1bn, according to Forbes magazine. Economic growth across the continent will be 5.3% this year and 5.6% in 2013, the World Bank predicts, with some countries hitting double digits. "Africa could be on the brink of an economic take-off, much like China was 30 years ago and India 20 years ago," the bank says. Many of the African lions are already outpacing the Asian tigers.
2 Reason for superstition (BBC) Even pigeons can develop superstitious habits, as psychologist BF Skinner famously showed in an experiment. Skinner would begin a lecture by placing a pigeon in a cage with an automatic feeder that delivered a food pellet every 15 seconds. At the start of the lecture Skinner would let the audience observe the ordinary, passive behaviour of the pigeon, before covering the box. After fifty minutes he would uncover the box and show that different pigeons developed different behaviours. One bird would be turning counter clockwise three times before looking in the food basket, another would be thrusting its head into the top left corner. In other words, all pigeons struck upon some particular ritual that they would do over and over again.
Skinner's explanation for this strange behaviour is as straightforward as it is ingenious. Although we know the food is delivered regardless of the pigeon's behaviour, the pigeon doesn't know this. So imagine yourself in the position of the pigeon; your brain knows very little about the world of men, or cages, or automatic food dispensers. You strut around your cage for a while, you decide to turn counter clockwise three times, and right at that moment some food appears. What should you do to make that happen again? The obvious answer is that you should repeat what you have just been doing. You repeat that action and – lo! – it works, food arrives.
From this seed, argued Skinner, superstition develops. Superstitions take over behaviour because our brains try and repeat whatever actions precede success, even if we cannot see how they have had their influence. Faced with the choice of figuring out how the world works and calculating the best outcome (which is the sensible rational thing to do), or repeating whatever you did last time before something good happened, we are far more likely to choose the latter. Or to put it another way: “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, regardless of the cause.
3 Why sitting can kill you (Sydney Morning Herald) Not only do we need to get more exercise but we also need to spend less of our time sitting down, Australian researchers say. Their study of more than 220,000 NSW residents found the longer you spend sitting down the greater your risk of dying early, even if you otherwise do regular exercise. Sitting can be detrimental for our health because when we sit down there is an absence of muscle contractions, explains Professor P David Dunstan. These contractions are required for the body to clear blood glucose and blood fats from the blood stream.
The study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found adults who sat for more than 11 hours a day had a 40% increased risk of dying within three years, compared with those who sat for fewer than four hours a day. Half a century ago, a British study also showed that workers who were required to sit for long periods of time, such as bus drivers, had higher incidences of cardiovascular disease compared with workers who were required to stand, such as postal workers
4 UK riots: Blame it on upbringing (Al Jazeera) Poor parenting and a lack of support for disenfranchised young people played a major role in sparking last year's British riots, an independent panel reported. The report by Riots Communities and Victims Panel identified a series of problems facing inner cities, ranging from poor parenting and education to high joblessness that left many people with no stake in society and nothing to lose if they joined the riots. It urged the government to develop a strategy for helping half a million "forgotten families" who "bump along the bottom" of society. "When people don't feel they have a reason to stay out of trouble, the consequences for communities can be devastating - as we saw last August," panel chair Darra Singh said.
The panel said that up to 15,000 people took part in the riots, which broke out in north London but spread to other major cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and Bristol, leaving a trail of torched buildings and looted shops in their wake. More than 3,800 people have been arrested in London alone in connection with the riots and cases are still being heard by the courts. Youth unemployment is at a record high of more than one million in Britain, or 22 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds.
5 When a parking lot is so much more (The New York Times) It’s estimated that there are three non-residential parking spaces for every car in the United States. That adds up to almost 800 million parking spaces, covering about 4,360 square miles — an area larger than Puerto Rico. Such coverage comes with environmental costs. The large, impervious surfaces of parking lots increase storm-water runoff, which damages watersheds. The exposed pavement increases the heat-island effect, by which urban regions are made warmer than surrounding rural areas. A better parking lot might be covered with solar canopies so that it could produce energy while lowering heat. Or perhaps it would be surfaced with a permeable material like porous asphalt and planted with trees in rows like an apple orchard, so that it could sequester carbon and clean contaminated runoff.
Architects and designers often discuss the importance of “the approach” as establishing the tone for a place, as the setting for the architecture itself. The parking lot at the Dia art museum in Beacon, NY, created by the artist Robert Irwin and the architecture firm OpenOffice, was planned as an integral element of the visitor’s arrival experience, with an aesthetically deft progression from the entry road to the parking lot to an allée that leads to the museum’s lobby. For something that occupies such a vast amount of land and is used on a daily basis by so many people, the parking lot should receive more attention than it has. We need to ask: what can a parking lot be?
6 India power distribution cos lose Rs 800bn (Press Trust of India) Power distribution companies are projected to have incurred a whopping loss of Rs 800bn, before accounting for government subsidies, in the current fiscal, according to rating agency, ICRA report. The agency projected the losses for discoms— before accounting for government subsidy— in the country at Rs 800bn in FY 2012, much higher than Rs 635bn seen in FY 2010. About 70% of the estimated loss was on account of discoms in Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana, the report said. The mounting losses of discoms, a major problem for the Indian power sector, has also raised concerns of default in the banking system.
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