School meals around the world

Photos of school meals from around the World. Quite an interesting photo essay.

a collection of photos

A series of photos taken of workers from around the globe. Also photos from Lagos, Portugal can be viewed via Flickr.

things worth pondering

Stories have also appeared in the local papers highlighting passengers’ fears that the helmets could be used by motorcyclists to cast spells on their clients, making it easy for them to be robbed.

“Some people can put juju inside the helmets and when they are worn the victim can either lose consciousness or be struck dumb,” passenger Kolawole Aremu told the Daily Trust newspaper.

Nigerian offials have cracked down on improvised helmets used by motorcycle taxis, most namely the calabash variety. Read the the story via BBC Africa.

Paradox of thrift

Barely a year ago cash was considered dangerous to accumulate: investors urging board members for returns in dividends or reinvestment. We have thus seen a reversal of public opinion in recent months as companies are off in a mad scramble for any available operating cash.

No longer. For many big American companies, the day of reckoning came two months ago when the deepening financial crisis brought about the abrupt closure of the overnight commercial-paper market. This briefly sent even the most solid companies into a desperate scramble to find money to meet such basic obligations as paying their staff. Since then, the guiding principle for managers everywhere has been to gather up whatever cash they can find, and then do their damnedest to keep as much of it as possible for as long as possible.

This cash squeeze is a huge problem for the world economy, because as firms cut discretionary spending wherever they can, the result is likely to be a corporate version of what John Maynard Keynes called the “paradox of thrift”. Every firm does what is prudent for itself, but by cutting its spending it slows down the economy still further and thus hurts everybody, including itself. This will only reinforce the need for expansionary monetary and fiscal policy (see article) to boost demand; and also for more direct support in credit markets, such as the Federal Reserve’s prop for the commercial-paper market (already tapped by some large American firms).

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Read the article in its entirety via Economist.

Go green or bust?

Here is a great look at some negative effects of our incessant green activism. I myself question why there is not more public skepticism on green lobbying efforts.

Anti-science attitudes among aid agencies, poverty campaigners and green activists are denying the continent access to technology that could improve millions of lives, Professor Sir David King will say today.

We have the technology to feed the population of the planet. The question is do we have the ability to understand that we have it, and to deliver?

Most Endangered Languages

The linguistics professor, Peter K Austin reports:

Each language expresses the history, culture, society and identity of the people who speak it, and each is a unique way of talking about the world. The loss of any language is a loss to both the community who use it in their daily lives, and to humankind in general. The songs, stories, words, expressions and grammatical structures of languages developed over countless generations are part of the intangible heritage of all humanity.