Can You List The World's Nuclear Powers?

I bet you can’t list which countries are considered nuclear powers.

I have decided to provide my readers with some global stats you can use to impress your friends, win arguments, and help solve global issues. At some point, you probably knew all this. I am here to offer a reminder.

Today’s topic: Nuclear Power Nations

Do you know the 9 nuclear powers?

1. UK
2. France
3. China
4. India
5. Pakistan
6. Russia
7. North Korea
8. Israel
9. USA

Do any of these come as a surprise to you?

BTW, South Africa, Argentina, and Brazil have abandoned their nuclear projects


Source 2008 World Almanac

Do You Know?-- The World's Most Populous Nations?

Do You Know? From: KarlaScottSpeaker.blogspot.com

I have decided to provide my readers with some global stats you can use to impress your friends, win arguments, and help solve global issues. At some point, you probably knew all this. I am here to offer a reminder.

Today’s topic: Most Populous Nations

Do you know the 5 most populous counties in world?

1. China (1/3 of the world)
2. India (1/5 of the world)
3. USA
4. Indonesia (also, world’s most populous island nation)
5. Brazil

Those were pretty easy, right.

Which countries come next?

6. Pakistan
7. Bangladesh
8. Russia
9. Nigeria
10. Japan
11. Mexico
12. Phillipines

Source 2008 World Almanac

McDonald's Loses Trademark Fight Against Malaysia's McCurry

McCurry restaurant owner A.M.S.P. Suppiah and his wife Kanageswary pose for a photo in front of their eatery as they celebrate a court victory over U.S. fast food giant McDonald's in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Tuesday, Sept. 8, 2009. McDonald's lost an eight-year trademark battle to prevent local restaurant McCurry from using the 'Mc' prefix in a precedent-setting judgment by Malaysia's highest court. The Federal Court ruled that McDonald's cannot appeal against another court's verdict that had allowed McCurry to use 'Mc' in its name. (AP Photo/Mark Baker)

Julia Zappei of the AP reports:
The ruling by a three-member panel of the Federal Court ends all legal avenues for McDonald's to protect its name from what it said was a trademark infringement.

"On the basis of unanimous decision, our view is that" McDonald's plea to carry the case forward has no merit, said chief judge Arifin Zakaria. "It is unfortunate that we have to dismiss the application with costs," he said.

McDonald's will have to pay 10,000 ringgit ($2,900) to McCurry, a popular eatery in Jalan Ipoh on the edge of Kuala Lumpur's downtown. McDonald's lawyers refused to comment, except to say the company will abide by the judgment.

McCurry lawyer Sri Devi Nair said the ruling means McDonald's does not have a monopoly on the prefix 'Mc,' and that other restaurants could also use it as long as they distinguish their food from McDonald's.

"This is a precedent for everyone to follow," he said.
A three-member Appeal Court panel had ruled in favor of McCurry Restaurant in April this year when it overturned a 2006 high court ruling that had upheld McDonald's contention.

Arifin said McDonald's lawyers were unable to point out faults in the Appeal Court judgment, which had said there was no evidence to show that McCurry was passing off McDonald's business as its own. The Appeals Court also said McDonald's cannot claim an exclusive right to the 'Mc' prefix in the country.
McDonald's asked the Federal Court for permission to appeal against that decision but was denied Tuesday.

"We are very much relieved. We hope to expand. This is what we wanted to do from the beginning and we were stalled for eight years," said A.M.S.P. Suppiah, the owner of McCurry.

"I am so happy ... we have nothing in similarity with them at all. That's how we have felt all this while," said his wife, Kanageswary Suppiah.
The Appeal Court said McCurry's signboard has white and gray letters against a red background with a picture of a smiling chicken giving a double thumbs-up, in contrast to McDonald's red and yellow "M" logo. McCurry also serves only Indian food, not competing with McDonald's Western menu, the court said.

McDonald's began operations in Malaysia in 1982 and has 137 outlets in the Southeast Asian country.
___
On the net:
http://www.mccurryrecipe.com

Wrong Translation Can Be Dangerous

Left for English speakers and right for Welsh speakers.

The BBC reports: Pedestrians in Wales have been left confused by a road sign telling them to look different ways in different languages.

A temporary road sign in Cardiff city centre urged English speakers to look one way before crossing the road, and Welsh speakers to look the other way.

The sign "pedestrians look left" was translated to say "cerddwyr edrychwch i'r dde" - or "pedestrians look right".

Cardiff council said the sign was the work of a contractor, and it had been removed after the mistake was noticed.
Cardiff council said: "This sign was made by a traffic management contractor, not Cardiff council.

"It was originally placed on St Mary Street earlier this year by Wales & West Utilities while essential maintenance work was carried out.

"Cardiff council has now removed the sign from the area."

Meirion Prys Jones, chief executive of the Welsh Language Board, said: "We would like to stress how important it is to ensure the quality and accuracy of bilingual signs."

Muslims are Caned in Malaysia for Drinking Beer

Muslim model spared from punishment, but just for now KARAI, Malaysia (AP) —

Malaysia abruptly granted a Ramadan reprieve to the first Muslim Malay woman to be sentenced to caning for drinking beer, but insisted Monday the thrashing would still take place after the Islamic holy month of fasting.

Kartika Sari Dewi Shukarno, a 32-year-old mother of two, had been en route to a women's prison for the caning when Islamic officials who took her into custody drove her back home and released her.

Mohamad Sahfri Abdul Aziz, a state legislator in charge of religious affairs, later said the Attorney General's office advised that the caning should be delayed for compassionate reasons until after the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, which began Saturday.

"The sentence is not being canceled," Mohamad Sahfri told the Associated Press.
Amnesty International condemned the sentence, and many critics had said the caning would harm Malaysia's reputation as a moderate Muslim-majority country.

Kartika was arrested in a raid for drinking beer at a hotel lounge in December 2007 and accused of breaching Malaysia's Shariah law, which forbids Muslims from consuming alcohol.

The law provides for a three-year prison term and caning for Muslims caught drinking, but most offenders are fined. Drinking is legal for non-Muslims.

Kartika was sentenced to six strokes of a rattan cane by the Shariah court in July in what was considered a warning to other Muslims to abide by religious laws.
In an interview with the AP last week, Kartika said she wanted to be caned because "I want to respect the law."

Kartika's sister, Ratna, said Kartika was "very stressed" because of the unexpected delay.

Islamic authorities had insisted that the purpose of the caning is to educate rather than punish. They say the rattan cane supposed to be used on Kartika would be smaller and lighter than the one used for men and that she will remain clothed.
Men convicted of crimes such as rape and bribery in Malaysia are caned on their bare buttocks, breaking the skin and leaving permanent scars.


Find this article at:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2009-08-24-malaysia_N.htm?loc=interstitialskip

Five lessons learned about cross-cultural social networking

Compare Mixi, Japan’s #1 social networking site, with Facebook. Mixi uses muted tones and illustration. Facebook uses primary colors and is primarily text-based with photos.

Here is a helpful article addressing some cross cultural issues about social networking. It is written by thoughtfarmer.com

Social networking theorists like to debate whether and how much cultural differences impact the way people respond to and interact with social networks.*

Some, for example, argue that networks such as Facebook mainly reflect and accommodate values and norms prevalent in Anglo-Saxon cultures (U.S., UK, Canada, etc.) — which explains why they’re much less successful elsewhere.

The theoretical discussion turns starkly practical when multinational enterprises develop intranets or other social networking tools for internal use. Differences are real and sometimes critical, as we learned while helping an Asian-based company with offices in Canada, the U.S., Korea and Japan deploy a global ThoughtFarmer intranet.

The good news is that most such differences can be overcome with a little innovation and modification.

Here are five key lessons we learned:

1. Design matters
Asian users said the original ThoughtFarmer pages, designed in Canada, “looked North American.” They enjoyed more muted pastel colors and anime-style emoticons, a look that seemed equally foreign to North American eyes.
This was not a trivial objection. One of the aims of the project was to make this highly distributed and multicultural organization more cohesive. The foreign-ness of the look and feel – on both sides – worked against that.

Solution? More skinning. ThoughtFarmer’s skinning functionality allows web designers to apply CSS designs on a section-by-section basis that suit the preferences of each region.

2. Language matters
You may be willing to exercise whatever language skills you have to glean vital information from the Web written in a foreign tongue. But you’re much less likely to struggle with a language barrier for “merely” social communication. And in many cases, you’ll have no skills.

ThoughtFarmer worked around this critical obstacle by incorporating Google Translate APIs. Users can now click a button to get an immediate machine translation of an intranet page, and then flip back and forth between original and translated page. They can also fill in an online form to order a more accurate human translation.

3. Language subtleties matter
We always use professional translators for translating program labels, tags and instructions into a new language. But we’ve found that professional translation on its own isn’t sufficient — only field testing with native speakers can verify accuracy. And minor mis-translations can have disproportionate effects.
For example, when ThoughtFarmer translated the program to Korean, it used a literal equivalent of the term “favorites”. But Koreans and Japanese use the term ‘scrap’ or ‘scrapping’ when they bookmark a web page – not a translation but the English words. ‘Favorites’ meant little or nothing to them. Result: many didn’t realize the feature was available so didn’t use it.

4. Performance matters
It’s not so much a cultural as a market difference, but norms for Internet connectivity vary around the world. Koreans, for example, enjoy very fast Internet connections – 10 Mbps and up. With the intranet initially hosted in Canada, Korean users complained that response times were slow.

The performance shortfall was small, but employees tend not to use tools that fail to perform to their expectations. Action was needed. The solution in this case was to add mirror servers in Korea and a replication scheme to ensure content was always up to date.

Internet speed expectations in Japan and Korea are extremely high: most home users have connections of 10MBps or more

5. Faces matter
Sometimes cultural differences are intractable – but that doesn’t mean fatal. For example, Korean and Japanese users were uncomfortable with posting pictures of themselves at their personal intranet pages, preferring to use avatars or pictures of pets. They could not state definite reasons for this preference. Expectations around privacy, perhaps, or a culturally-ingrained sense of personal modesty?

Some North American organizations require employees to post pictures as a way to promote cohesion by making even remote fellow employees seem more familiar and accessible. But the disinclination of the company’s Korean and Japanese employees to do this appeared deep rooted and it was decided not to press the issue. Did it undermine the project as a whole? By no means.

In North America and the UK, most people don’t hesitate to share photos of themselves on their profile. In Asia, it’s more common to use an avatar. Judging from some of the profile photos we see, avatars may be the way to go.

ThoughtFarmer co-founder and president Darren Gibbons, who traveled to Korea last year to observe how the customer’s intranet was being used there, says, “We did find key differences. But there were also lots of things we found where we were on the right track. And people there were quite interested in being involved and definitely understood what we were trying to do.”

Cross-cultural differences do have an impact on the way people use social networking and clearly they must be taken into account in designing tools, but many, possibly most, can be worked around. As for the rest? Vive la difference.

*For a fascinating discussion of perhaps subtler cross-cultural differences than are aired here, see this post and ensuing discussion by Mark Masterson of CSC, Can Social Software Work in Germany?, and this interview with Geert Hostede, author of Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions, and Organizations Across Nations.

Facial Expressions "Not Global"

The BBC reports that: A new study suggests that people from different cultures read facial expressions differently.

East Asian participants in the study focused mostly on the eyes, but those from the West scanned the whole face.

In the research carried out by a team from Glasgow University, East Asian observers found it more difficult to distinguish some facial expressions.
The work published in Current Biology journal challenges the idea facial expressions are universally understood.

In the study, East Asians were more likely than Westerners to read the expression for "fear" as "surprise", and "disgust" as "anger".

The researchers say the confusion arises because people from different cultural groups observe different parts of the face when interpreting expression.
East Asians participants tended to focus on the eyes of the other person, while Western subjects took in the whole face, including the eyes and the mouth.

Co-author, Dr Rachael Jack, from the University of Glasgow, said: "Interestingly, although the eye region is ambiguous, subjects tended to bias their judgements towards less socially-threatening emotions - surprise rather than fear, for example.

"This perhaps highlights cultural differences when it comes to the social acceptability of emotions."

The team showed 13 Western Caucasians and 13 East Asians a set of standardised images depicting the seven main facial expressions: happy, sad, neutral, angry, disgusted, fearful and surprised.

They used eye movement trackers to monitor where the participants were looking when interpreting the expressions.

A computer programme given the same information from the eyes as the East Asian observers was similarly unable to distinguish between the emotions of disgust and anger, and fear and surprise.

The paper states that the Eastern participants used a culturally specific decoding strategy that was inadequate to reliably distinguish the universal facial expressions of fear and disgust.

It concluded that information from the eyes is often ambiguous and confusing in these expressions, with consequences for cross-cultural communication and globalisation.

The researchers also point out that this difference in perception is reflected in the differences between Eastern and Western emoticons - the typographical characters used to convey emotions in e-mails.
The Eastern emoticons are not only the right way up but focus on the eyes, whilst in the West the mouth is important.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/8199951.stm

Published: 2009/08/14 11:18:47 GMT

© BBC MMIX
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8199951.stm