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With 2005 fast becoming "the year of the natural disaster", it is time to reflect on how engineering, science and technology can play their fullest part in protecting the planet.
Long before the Asian tsunami struck, the science community predicted the particular region of Indonesia to be hit by the next big earthquake; and the engineering and technology community had developed early warning systems costing only ＄ 30 million. But no government in the region heeded the warnings and no early warning systems were in place. We ignored technology of the advance warnings at our peril of 100,000 victims of the tsunami.
Governments are not alone in ignoring the views of their scientific community; the public too has its doubts. Part of the reason for this lack of confidence must be down to the failure to engage them in a meaningful way about their concerns. Trust is a two-way street. Instead of claiming that everything would be rosy in the scientific garden "if only the public understood", we must work hard to explore concerns, discover fears and delve deep into the depths of public perceptions. We are getting there. There is a growing realization that effective public engagement is of far greater value than banging the "public understanding" drum.
There are still doubters, of course, and sadly their cause is helped whenever they come across opinions presented as fact. All of us must guard against this debilitating practice. In time, effective public engagement should help deliver improved trust as well as better policy, which -- in turn -- might make it more difficult for scientists’ warnings to be ignored.
Today’s technology community is a triumph of international collaboration where engineers and scientists combine to develop solutions to our biggest problems. Of course, technology cannot stop natural disasters but it can mitigate their impact. We are able to identify the birds affected by avian flu. We can chart their migration patterns around the world. We have the means to pursue vaccines. And we have the communication channels to keep people informed.
Extolling the virtues of technology is not to pretend technology is perfect in every regard. Far from it. The profligate and unsustainable use of technology in energy and transport has contributed to climate change. But that doesn’t mean technology has failed us. We must never lose sight of the fact that technology itself will deliver the solutions to the very problems it can create. If we do, technology will remain sidelined and undervalued, and this major social failure will progressively disadvantage us all.
Our vision is of a society embracing technology as a weapon of both progress and defense. Since the beginning of civilization, we have relied on it and enjoyed its benefits -- and most new technologies have had hugely beneficial effects for most people. But now, in an age when the death toll from natural disasters is increasing year on year, with more people living in danger zones, it is ever more urgent that we rely on science and technology to warn us of the dangers to come and provide the solutions we need.

Few creatures on earth are as cute as the black lion tamarin, and few have as dramatic a story line. Pug-nosed and diminutive, with a comic fringe of hair, these monkeys dwell in trees in small tracts of forest in southeastern Brazil. Or they did until 1905, when they were declared extinct. No one saw a black lion tamarin again in the wild until 1970. Later, in the 1990s, some Brazilian researchers turned up a small set of isolated, inbred populations scattered over a wide region. Since that time, they have been engineering tamarin migration, doing everything they can to save the world’s most distinctive primates.
Although they are no larger than house cats, tamarins have brains big for their size and a family life organized like our own. They live in groups anchored by an adult male andadult female, along with their offspring. When a mother bears young, she usually produces twins, and although members of the group share in their upbringing, it is most often the father who carries them around in the trees, where the families feed on fruits, insects and bird’s eggs.
Unhappily for the lion tamarins, their tree-bound niche began to disappear after the Portuguese landed in Brazil and began clearing forest to make room for Rio de Janeiro, the settlements and farms. As is the case for so many threatened species, the breakup of their habitat sounded the death knell for tamarins, depriving them of the continuity of forest they require to remain abundant and safe from potential threats in any single vicinity. The animals avoid predators by hardly ever coming down from the trees, so even a narrow logging road through a forest can begin the breakup by preventing them from moving from one patch of forest to another.
A simple solution was to build bridges across roads, allowing the monkeys to move from one forest to another. With some lumber and the researchers’ work, habitats that had been separated became continuous again, improving opportunities for migrating and mating.
The next step was to broaden the distribution of the population. The researchers captured two families of black lion tamarins and moved them to a new forest. After a year, the moves were declared a success: Not only had 80 percent of the tamarins survived, but they had also produced new offspring. So far, so good. The researchers had learned the animals could adjust to the new habitats, even if the insects there tasted a little different or the trees were a slightly different size.
The techniques for saving species in the wild vary. Species with less stringent habitat requirements, like wild turkeys, have been rescued by moving them into new settings as well as outlawing their killing. More challenging to preserve are species that require a lot of land, like elephants, and species that have highly specific requirements for habitat and prey -- like black-footed ferrets. Ultimately, as in all challenges, knowledge is power to save wild species from extinction.

"A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself," mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species.
Of all the old media, newspapers have the most to lose from the Internet. Circulation has been falling in the U. S., Western Europe and Latin America for decades. But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in the U. S. as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world’s general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people’s daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on-and offline. And they are investing in free dally papers. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it doest, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account -- trying them in the court of public opinion. The Internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper.
In future, some high-quality journalism will be backed by non-profit organizations. Already, a few respected news organizations sustain themselves that way. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller’s national conversation will be louder than ever.

The first 50 years of the next millennium will be critical for the world’s population. By 2050 population growth should have leveled off, but by then we’ll have 10 billion people -- two-thirds as many again as we have today. The rate of population growth is something we can choose right now, though it’s not something that just happens, but a matter of human choice. The choice is a complicated one, with many variables, but it remains a choice.
If we want to prevent a population explosion, we should take action now -- or assist the poorer countries to do so. They need better government, better institutions, better labor and capital markets, better schools.
Anything that increases the value of women’s time and adds to the cost of caring for a child makes a woman less likely to have that child. Since big families are often seen as safety nets for illness and old age, improving poor people’s access to insurance, pensions and welfare institutions also has a major impact. This can be as simple as rural credit, providing a means of saving. Finally, there is education -- both for women and, perhaps even more important, for the next generation of children.
These steps are there to be taken, but there appear to be some countries that are not seriously trying at the moment. If we cannot achieve that we will certainly not control population.
That said, I don’t feel pessimistic that we are going to run out of resources: we are becoming more efficient at producing food faster than the rate at which population is increasing. There is, however, a risk that we will wreck the environment so effectively that the world will no longer be an attractive place to live. That really would be a dismal outcome, to reach world population equilibrium only to find we’d destroyed the natural environment in the process.

Modem cowboy seem to be giving up the bandanna (印花大手帕) handkerchief; yet there was a time when this article was almost as necessary to a cowboy’s equipment as a rope, and it served for purposes almost as varied.
The bandanna made a good sling for a broken arm; it made a good bandage for a blood wound. Early Irish settlers on the Nueces River used to believe that a bandanna handkerchief that had been worn by a drowned man would, if cast into a stream above the sunken body, float until it came over the body and then sink, thus locating the body. Many a cowboy out on the lonely plains has been buried with a clean bandanna spread over his face to keep the dirt, or the coarse blanket on which the dirt was poured, from touching him. The bandanna has been used to hang men. Rustlers used to "wave" strangers around with it as a warning against nearer approach, though the hat was more commonly used for signaling. Like the Mexican sombrero (阔边帽) or the fourgallon Stetson, the bandanna could not be made too large. When the cowboys of the Old West make their final parade on the grassy shores of Paradise, the guidon (旗手) that leads them should be a bandanna handkerchief. It deserves to be called the "flag of the range country".

With 2005 fast becoming "the year of the natural disaster", it is time to reflect on how engineering, science and technology can play their fullest part in protecting the planet.
Long before the Asian tsunami struck, the science community predicted the particular region of Indonesia to be hit by the next big earthquake; and the engineering and technology community had developed early warning systems costing only ＄ 30 million. But no government in the region heeded the warnings and no early warning systems were in place. We ignored technology of the advance warnings at our peril of 100,000 victims of the tsunami.
Governments are not alone in ignoring the views of their scientific community; the public too has its doubts. Part of the reason for this lack of confidence must be down to the failure to engage them in a meaningful way about their concerns. Trust is a two-way street. Instead of claiming that everything would be rosy in the scientific garden "if only the public understood", we must work hard to explore concerns, discover fears and delve deep into the depths of public perceptions. We are getting there. There is a growing realization that effective public engagement is of far greater value than banging the "public understanding" drum.
There are still doubters, of course, and sadly their cause is helped whenever they come across opinions presented as fact. All of us must guard against this debilitating practice. In time, effective public engagement should help deliver improved trust as well as better policy, which -- in turn -- might make it more difficult for scientists’ warnings to be ignored.
Today’s technology community is a triumph of international collaboration where engineers and scientists combine to develop solutions to our biggest problems. Of course, technology cannot stop natural disasters but it can mitigate their impact. We are able to identify the birds affected by avian flu. We can chart their migration patterns around the world. We have the means to pursue vaccines. And we have the communication channels to keep people informed.
Extolling the virtues of technology is not to pretend technology is perfect in every regard. Far from it. The profligate and unsustainable use of technology in energy and transport has contributed to climate change. But that doesn’t mean technology has failed us. We must never lose sight of the fact that technology itself will deliver the solutions to the very problems it can create. If we do, technology will remain sidelined and undervalued, and this major social failure will progressively disadvantage us all.
Our vision is of a society embracing technology as a weapon of both progress and defense. Since the beginning of civilization, we have relied on it and enjoyed its benefits -- and most new technologies have had hugely beneficial effects for most people. But now, in an age when the death toll from natural disasters is increasing year on year, with more people living in danger zones, it is ever more urgent that we rely on science and technology to warn us of the dangers to come and provide the solutions we need.

"A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself," mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species.
Of all the old media, newspapers have the most to lose from the Internet. Circulation has been falling in the U. S., Western Europe and Latin America for decades. But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in the U. S. as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world’s general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people’s daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on-and offline. And they are investing in free dally papers. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it doest, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account -- trying them in the court of public opinion. The Internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper.
In future, some high-quality journalism will be backed by non-profit organizations. Already, a few respected news organizations sustain themselves that way. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller’s national conversation will be louder than ever.

Few creatures on earth are as cute as the black lion tamarin, and few have as dramatic a story line. Pug-nosed and diminutive, with a comic fringe of hair, these monkeys dwell in trees in small tracts of forest in southeastern Brazil. Or they did until 1905, when they were declared extinct. No one saw a black lion tamarin again in the wild until 1970. Later, in the 1990s, some Brazilian researchers turned up a small set of isolated, inbred populations scattered over a wide region. Since that time, they have been engineering tamarin migration, doing everything they can to save the world’s most distinctive primates.
Although they are no larger than house cats, tamarins have brains big for their size and a family life organized like our own. They live in groups anchored by an adult male andadult female, along with their offspring. When a mother bears young, she usually produces twins, and although members of the group share in their upbringing, it is most often the father who carries them around in the trees, where the families feed on fruits, insects and bird’s eggs.
Unhappily for the lion tamarins, their tree-bound niche began to disappear after the Portuguese landed in Brazil and began clearing forest to make room for Rio de Janeiro, the settlements and farms. As is the case for so many threatened species, the breakup of their habitat sounded the death knell for tamarins, depriving them of the continuity of forest they require to remain abundant and safe from potential threats in any single vicinity. The animals avoid predators by hardly ever coming down from the trees, so even a narrow logging road through a forest can begin the breakup by preventing them from moving from one patch of forest to another.
A simple solution was to build bridges across roads, allowing the monkeys to move from one forest to another. With some lumber and the researchers’ work, habitats that had been separated became continuous again, improving opportunities for migrating and mating.
The next step was to broaden the distribution of the population. The researchers captured two families of black lion tamarins and moved them to a new forest. After a year, the moves were declared a success: Not only had 80 percent of the tamarins survived, but they had also produced new offspring. So far, so good. The researchers had learned the animals could adjust to the new habitats, even if the insects there tasted a little different or the trees were a slightly different size.
The techniques for saving species in the wild vary. Species with less stringent habitat requirements, like wild turkeys, have been rescued by moving them into new settings as well as outlawing their killing. More challenging to preserve are species that require a lot of land, like elephants, and species that have highly specific requirements for habitat and prey -- like black-footed ferrets. Ultimately, as in all challenges, knowledge is power to save wild species from extinction.

The first 50 years of the next millennium will be critical for the world’s population. By 2050 population growth should have leveled off, but by then we’ll have 10 billion people -- two-thirds as many again as we have today. The rate of population growth is something we can choose right now, though it’s not something that just happens, but a matter of human choice. The choice is a complicated one, with many variables, but it remains a choice.
If we want to prevent a population explosion, we should take action now -- or assist the poorer countries to do so. They need better government, better institutions, better labor and capital markets, better schools.
Anything that increases the value of women’s time and adds to the cost of caring for a child makes a woman less likely to have that child. Since big families are often seen as safety nets for illness and old age, improving poor people’s access to insurance, pensions and welfare institutions also has a major impact. This can be as simple as rural credit, providing a means of saving. Finally, there is education -- both for women and, perhaps even more important, for the next generation of children.
These steps are there to be taken, but there appear to be some countries that are not seriously trying at the moment. If we cannot achieve that we will certainly not control population.
That said, I don’t feel pessimistic that we are going to run out of resources: we are becoming more efficient at producing food faster than the rate at which population is increasing. There is, however, a risk that we will wreck the environment so effectively that the world will no longer be an attractive place to live. That really would be a dismal outcome, to reach world population equilibrium only to find we’d destroyed the natural environment in the process.

Modem cowboy seem to be giving up the bandanna (印花大手帕) handkerchief; yet there was a time when this article was almost as necessary to a cowboy’s equipment as a rope, and it served for purposes almost as varied.
The bandanna made a good sling for a broken arm; it made a good bandage for a blood wound. Early Irish settlers on the Nueces River used to believe that a bandanna handkerchief that had been worn by a drowned man would, if cast into a stream above the sunken body, float until it came over the body and then sink, thus locating the body. Many a cowboy out on the lonely plains has been buried with a clean bandanna spread over his face to keep the dirt, or the coarse blanket on which the dirt was poured, from touching him. The bandanna has been used to hang men. Rustlers used to "wave" strangers around with it as a warning against nearer approach, though the hat was more commonly used for signaling. Like the Mexican sombrero (阔边帽) or the fourgallon Stetson, the bandanna could not be made too large. When the cowboys of the Old West make their final parade on the grassy shores of Paradise, the guidon (旗手) that leads them should be a bandanna handkerchief. It deserves to be called the "flag of the range country".

With 2005 fast becoming "the year of the natural disaster", it is time to reflect on how engineering, science and technology can play their fullest part in protecting the planet.
Long before the Asian tsunami struck, the science community predicted the particular region of Indonesia to be hit by the next big earthquake; and the engineering and technology community had developed early warning systems costing only ＄ 30 million. But no government in the region heeded the warnings and no early warning systems were in place. We ignored technology of the advance warnings at our peril of 100,000 victims of the tsunami.
Governments are not alone in ignoring the views of their scientific community; the public too has its doubts. Part of the reason for this lack of confidence must be down to the failure to engage them in a meaningful way about their concerns. Trust is a two-way street. Instead of claiming that everything would be rosy in the scientific garden "if only the public understood", we must work hard to explore concerns, discover fears and delve deep into the depths of public perceptions. We are getting there. There is a growing realization that effective public engagement is of far greater value than banging the "public understanding" drum.
There are still doubters, of course, and sadly their cause is helped whenever they come across opinions presented as fact. All of us must guard against this debilitating practice. In time, effective public engagement should help deliver improved trust as well as better policy, which -- in turn -- might make it more difficult for scientists’ warnings to be ignored.
Today’s technology community is a triumph of international collaboration where engineers and scientists combine to develop solutions to our biggest problems. Of course, technology cannot stop natural disasters but it can mitigate their impact. We are able to identify the birds affected by avian flu. We can chart their migration patterns around the world. We have the means to pursue vaccines. And we have the communication channels to keep people informed.
Extolling the virtues of technology is not to pretend technology is perfect in every regard. Far from it. The profligate and unsustainable use of technology in energy and transport has contributed to climate change. But that doesn’t mean technology has failed us. We must never lose sight of the fact that technology itself will deliver the solutions to the very problems it can create. If we do, technology will remain sidelined and undervalued, and this major social failure will progressively disadvantage us all.
Our vision is of a society embracing technology as a weapon of both progress and defense. Since the beginning of civilization, we have relied on it and enjoyed its benefits -- and most new technologies have had hugely beneficial effects for most people. But now, in an age when the death toll from natural disasters is increasing year on year, with more people living in danger zones, it is ever more urgent that we rely on science and technology to warn us of the dangers to come and provide the solutions we need.

"A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself," mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species.
Of all the old media, newspapers have the most to lose from the Internet. Circulation has been falling in the U. S., Western Europe and Latin America for decades. But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in the U. S. as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world’s general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people’s daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on-and offline. And they are investing in free dally papers. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it doest, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account -- trying them in the court of public opinion. The Internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper.
In future, some high-quality journalism will be backed by non-profit organizations. Already, a few respected news organizations sustain themselves that way. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller’s national conversation will be louder than ever.

Few creatures on earth are as cute as the black lion tamarin, and few have as dramatic a story line. Pug-nosed and diminutive, with a comic fringe of hair, these monkeys dwell in trees in small tracts of forest in southeastern Brazil. Or they did until 1905, when they were declared extinct. No one saw a black lion tamarin again in the wild until 1970. Later, in the 1990s, some Brazilian researchers turned up a small set of isolated, inbred populations scattered over a wide region. Since that time, they have been engineering tamarin migration, doing everything they can to save the world’s most distinctive primates.
Although they are no larger than house cats, tamarins have brains big for their size and a family life organized like our own. They live in groups anchored by an adult male andadult female, along with their offspring. When a mother bears young, she usually produces twins, and although members of the group share in their upbringing, it is most often the father who carries them around in the trees, where the families feed on fruits, insects and bird’s eggs.
Unhappily for the lion tamarins, their tree-bound niche began to disappear after the Portuguese landed in Brazil and began clearing forest to make room for Rio de Janeiro, the settlements and farms. As is the case for so many threatened species, the breakup of their habitat sounded the death knell for tamarins, depriving them of the continuity of forest they require to remain abundant and safe from potential threats in any single vicinity. The animals avoid predators by hardly ever coming down from the trees, so even a narrow logging road through a forest can begin the breakup by preventing them from moving from one patch of forest to another.
A simple solution was to build bridges across roads, allowing the monkeys to move from one forest to another. With some lumber and the researchers’ work, habitats that had been separated became continuous again, improving opportunities for migrating and mating.
The next step was to broaden the distribution of the population. The researchers captured two families of black lion tamarins and moved them to a new forest. After a year, the moves were declared a success: Not only had 80 percent of the tamarins survived, but they had also produced new offspring. So far, so good. The researchers had learned the animals could adjust to the new habitats, even if the insects there tasted a little different or the trees were a slightly different size.
The techniques for saving species in the wild vary. Species with less stringent habitat requirements, like wild turkeys, have been rescued by moving them into new settings as well as outlawing their killing. More challenging to preserve are species that require a lot of land, like elephants, and species that have highly specific requirements for habitat and prey -- like black-footed ferrets. Ultimately, as in all challenges, knowledge is power to save wild species from extinction.

The first 50 years of the next millennium will be critical for the world’s population. By 2050 population growth should have leveled off, but by then we’ll have 10 billion people -- two-thirds as many again as we have today. The rate of population growth is something we can choose right now, though it’s not something that just happens, but a matter of human choice. The choice is a complicated one, with many variables, but it remains a choice.
If we want to prevent a population explosion, we should take action now -- or assist the poorer countries to do so. They need better government, better institutions, better labor and capital markets, better schools.
Anything that increases the value of women’s time and adds to the cost of caring for a child makes a woman less likely to have that child. Since big families are often seen as safety nets for illness and old age, improving poor people’s access to insurance, pensions and welfare institutions also has a major impact. This can be as simple as rural credit, providing a means of saving. Finally, there is education -- both for women and, perhaps even more important, for the next generation of children.
These steps are there to be taken, but there appear to be some countries that are not seriously trying at the moment. If we cannot achieve that we will certainly not control population.
That said, I don’t feel pessimistic that we are going to run out of resources: we are becoming more efficient at producing food faster than the rate at which population is increasing. There is, however, a risk that we will wreck the environment so effectively that the world will no longer be an attractive place to live. That really would be a dismal outcome, to reach world population equilibrium only to find we’d destroyed the natural environment in the process.

Modem cowboy seem to be giving up the bandanna (印花大手帕) handkerchief; yet there was a time when this article was almost as necessary to a cowboy’s equipment as a rope, and it served for purposes almost as varied.
The bandanna made a good sling for a broken arm; it made a good bandage for a blood wound. Early Irish settlers on the Nueces River used to believe that a bandanna handkerchief that had been worn by a drowned man would, if cast into a stream above the sunken body, float until it came over the body and then sink, thus locating the body. Many a cowboy out on the lonely plains has been buried with a clean bandanna spread over his face to keep the dirt, or the coarse blanket on which the dirt was poured, from touching him. The bandanna has been used to hang men. Rustlers used to "wave" strangers around with it as a warning against nearer approach, though the hat was more commonly used for signaling. Like the Mexican sombrero (阔边帽) or the fourgallon Stetson, the bandanna could not be made too large. When the cowboys of the Old West make their final parade on the grassy shores of Paradise, the guidon (旗手) that leads them should be a bandanna handkerchief. It deserves to be called the "flag of the range country".

With 2005 fast becoming "the year of the natural disaster", it is time to reflect on how engineering, science and technology can play their fullest part in protecting the planet.
Long before the Asian tsunami struck, the science community predicted the particular region of Indonesia to be hit by the next big earthquake; and the engineering and technology community had developed early warning systems costing only ＄ 30 million. But no government in the region heeded the warnings and no early warning systems were in place. We ignored technology of the advance warnings at our peril of 100,000 victims of the tsunami.
Governments are not alone in ignoring the views of their scientific community; the public too has its doubts. Part of the reason for this lack of confidence must be down to the failure to engage them in a meaningful way about their concerns. Trust is a two-way street. Instead of claiming that everything would be rosy in the scientific garden "if only the public understood", we must work hard to explore concerns, discover fears and delve deep into the depths of public perceptions. We are getting there. There is a growing realization that effective public engagement is of far greater value than banging the "public understanding" drum.
There are still doubters, of course, and sadly their cause is helped whenever they come across opinions presented as fact. All of us must guard against this debilitating practice. In time, effective public engagement should help deliver improved trust as well as better policy, which -- in turn -- might make it more difficult for scientists’ warnings to be ignored.
Today’s technology community is a triumph of international collaboration where engineers and scientists combine to develop solutions to our biggest problems. Of course, technology cannot stop natural disasters but it can mitigate their impact. We are able to identify the birds affected by avian flu. We can chart their migration patterns around the world. We have the means to pursue vaccines. And we have the communication channels to keep people informed.
Extolling the virtues of technology is not to pretend technology is perfect in every regard. Far from it. The profligate and unsustainable use of technology in energy and transport has contributed to climate change. But that doesn’t mean technology has failed us. We must never lose sight of the fact that technology itself will deliver the solutions to the very problems it can create. If we do, technology will remain sidelined and undervalued, and this major social failure will progressively disadvantage us all.
Our vision is of a society embracing technology as a weapon of both progress and defense. Since the beginning of civilization, we have relied on it and enjoyed its benefits -- and most new technologies have had hugely beneficial effects for most people. But now, in an age when the death toll from natural disasters is increasing year on year, with more people living in danger zones, it is ever more urgent that we rely on science and technology to warn us of the dangers to come and provide the solutions we need.

Few creatures on earth are as cute as the black lion tamarin, and few have as dramatic a story line. Pug-nosed and diminutive, with a comic fringe of hair, these monkeys dwell in trees in small tracts of forest in southeastern Brazil. Or they did until 1905, when they were declared extinct. No one saw a black lion tamarin again in the wild until 1970. Later, in the 1990s, some Brazilian researchers turned up a small set of isolated, inbred populations scattered over a wide region. Since that time, they have been engineering tamarin migration, doing everything they can to save the world’s most distinctive primates.
Although they are no larger than house cats, tamarins have brains big for their size and a family life organized like our own. They live in groups anchored by an adult male andadult female, along with their offspring. When a mother bears young, she usually produces twins, and although members of the group share in their upbringing, it is most often the father who carries them around in the trees, where the families feed on fruits, insects and bird’s eggs.
Unhappily for the lion tamarins, their tree-bound niche began to disappear after the Portuguese landed in Brazil and began clearing forest to make room for Rio de Janeiro, the settlements and farms. As is the case for so many threatened species, the breakup of their habitat sounded the death knell for tamarins, depriving them of the continuity of forest they require to remain abundant and safe from potential threats in any single vicinity. The animals avoid predators by hardly ever coming down from the trees, so even a narrow logging road through a forest can begin the breakup by preventing them from moving from one patch of forest to another.
A simple solution was to build bridges across roads, allowing the monkeys to move from one forest to another. With some lumber and the researchers’ work, habitats that had been separated became continuous again, improving opportunities for migrating and mating.
The next step was to broaden the distribution of the population. The researchers captured two families of black lion tamarins and moved them to a new forest. After a year, the moves were declared a success: Not only had 80 percent of the tamarins survived, but they had also produced new offspring. So far, so good. The researchers had learned the animals could adjust to the new habitats, even if the insects there tasted a little different or the trees were a slightly different size.
The techniques for saving species in the wild vary. Species with less stringent habitat requirements, like wild turkeys, have been rescued by moving them into new settings as well as outlawing their killing. More challenging to preserve are species that require a lot of land, like elephants, and species that have highly specific requirements for habitat and prey -- like black-footed ferrets. Ultimately, as in all challenges, knowledge is power to save wild species from extinction.

Modem cowboy seem to be giving up the bandanna (印花大手帕) handkerchief; yet there was a time when this article was almost as necessary to a cowboy’s equipment as a rope, and it served for purposes almost as varied.
The bandanna made a good sling for a broken arm; it made a good bandage for a blood wound. Early Irish settlers on the Nueces River used to believe that a bandanna handkerchief that had been worn by a drowned man would, if cast into a stream above the sunken body, float until it came over the body and then sink, thus locating the body. Many a cowboy out on the lonely plains has been buried with a clean bandanna spread over his face to keep the dirt, or the coarse blanket on which the dirt was poured, from touching him. The bandanna has been used to hang men. Rustlers used to "wave" strangers around with it as a warning against nearer approach, though the hat was more commonly used for signaling. Like the Mexican sombrero (阔边帽) or the fourgallon Stetson, the bandanna could not be made too large. When the cowboys of the Old West make their final parade on the grassy shores of Paradise, the guidon (旗手) that leads them should be a bandanna handkerchief. It deserves to be called the "flag of the range country".

The first 50 years of the next millennium will be critical for the world’s population. By 2050 population growth should have leveled off, but by then we’ll have 10 billion people -- two-thirds as many again as we have today. The rate of population growth is something we can choose right now, though it’s not something that just happens, but a matter of human choice. The choice is a complicated one, with many variables, but it remains a choice.
If we want to prevent a population explosion, we should take action now -- or assist the poorer countries to do so. They need better government, better institutions, better labor and capital markets, better schools.
Anything that increases the value of women’s time and adds to the cost of caring for a child makes a woman less likely to have that child. Since big families are often seen as safety nets for illness and old age, improving poor people’s access to insurance, pensions and welfare institutions also has a major impact. This can be as simple as rural credit, providing a means of saving. Finally, there is education -- both for women and, perhaps even more important, for the next generation of children.
These steps are there to be taken, but there appear to be some countries that are not seriously trying at the moment. If we cannot achieve that we will certainly not control population.
That said, I don’t feel pessimistic that we are going to run out of resources: we are becoming more efficient at producing food faster than the rate at which population is increasing. There is, however, a risk that we will wreck the environment so effectively that the world will no longer be an attractive place to live. That really would be a dismal outcome, to reach world population equilibrium only to find we’d destroyed the natural environment in the process.

"A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself," mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species.
Of all the old media, newspapers have the most to lose from the Internet. Circulation has been falling in the U. S., Western Europe and Latin America for decades. But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in the U. S. as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world’s general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people’s daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on-and offline. And they are investing in free dally papers. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it doest, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account -- trying them in the court of public opinion. The Internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper.
In future, some high-quality journalism will be backed by non-profit organizations. Already, a few respected news organizations sustain themselves that way. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller’s national conversation will be louder than ever.

With 2005 fast becoming "the year of the natural disaster", it is time to reflect on how engineering, science and technology can play their fullest part in protecting the planet.
Long before the Asian tsunami struck, the science community predicted the particular region of Indonesia to be hit by the next big earthquake; and the engineering and technology community had developed early warning systems costing only ＄ 30 million. But no government in the region heeded the warnings and no early warning systems were in place. We ignored technology of the advance warnings at our peril of 100,000 victims of the tsunami.
Governments are not alone in ignoring the views of their scientific community; the public too has its doubts. Part of the reason for this lack of confidence must be down to the failure to engage them in a meaningful way about their concerns. Trust is a two-way street. Instead of claiming that everything would be rosy in the scientific garden "if only the public understood", we must work hard to explore concerns, discover fears and delve deep into the depths of public perceptions. We are getting there. There is a growing realization that effective public engagement is of far greater value than banging the "public understanding" drum.
There are still doubters, of course, and sadly their cause is helped whenever they come across opinions presented as fact. All of us must guard against this debilitating practice. In time, effective public engagement should help deliver improved trust as well as better policy, which -- in turn -- might make it more difficult for scientists’ warnings to be ignored.
Today’s technology community is a triumph of international collaboration where engineers and scientists combine to develop solutions to our biggest problems. Of course, technology cannot stop natural disasters but it can mitigate their impact. We are able to identify the birds affected by avian flu. We can chart their migration patterns around the world. We have the means to pursue vaccines. And we have the communication channels to keep people informed.
Extolling the virtues of technology is not to pretend technology is perfect in every regard. Far from it. The profligate and unsustainable use of technology in energy and transport has contributed to climate change. But that doesn’t mean technology has failed us. We must never lose sight of the fact that technology itself will deliver the solutions to the very problems it can create. If we do, technology will remain sidelined and undervalued, and this major social failure will progressively disadvantage us all.
Our vision is of a society embracing technology as a weapon of both progress and defense. Since the beginning of civilization, we have relied on it and enjoyed its benefits -- and most new technologies have had hugely beneficial effects for most people. But now, in an age when the death toll from natural disasters is increasing year on year, with more people living in danger zones, it is ever more urgent that we rely on science and technology to warn us of the dangers to come and provide the solutions we need.

Few creatures on earth are as cute as the black lion tamarin, and few have as dramatic a story line. Pug-nosed and diminutive, with a comic fringe of hair, these monkeys dwell in trees in small tracts of forest in southeastern Brazil. Or they did until 1905, when they were declared extinct. No one saw a black lion tamarin again in the wild until 1970. Later, in the 1990s, some Brazilian researchers turned up a small set of isolated, inbred populations scattered over a wide region. Since that time, they have been engineering tamarin migration, doing everything they can to save the world’s most distinctive primates.
Although they are no larger than house cats, tamarins have brains big for their size and a family life organized like our own. They live in groups anchored by an adult male andadult female, along with their offspring. When a mother bears young, she usually produces twins, and although members of the group share in their upbringing, it is most often the father who carries them around in the trees, where the families feed on fruits, insects and bird’s eggs.
Unhappily for the lion tamarins, their tree-bound niche began to disappear after the Portuguese landed in Brazil and began clearing forest to make room for Rio de Janeiro, the settlements and farms. As is the case for so many threatened species, the breakup of their habitat sounded the death knell for tamarins, depriving them of the continuity of forest they require to remain abundant and safe from potential threats in any single vicinity. The animals avoid predators by hardly ever coming down from the trees, so even a narrow logging road through a forest can begin the breakup by preventing them from moving from one patch of forest to another.
A simple solution was to build bridges across roads, allowing the monkeys to move from one forest to another. With some lumber and the researchers’ work, habitats that had been separated became continuous again, improving opportunities for migrating and mating.
The next step was to broaden the distribution of the population. The researchers captured two families of black lion tamarins and moved them to a new forest. After a year, the moves were declared a success: Not only had 80 percent of the tamarins survived, but they had also produced new offspring. So far, so good. The researchers had learned the animals could adjust to the new habitats, even if the insects there tasted a little different or the trees were a slightly different size.
The techniques for saving species in the wild vary. Species with less stringent habitat requirements, like wild turkeys, have been rescued by moving them into new settings as well as outlawing their killing. More challenging to preserve are species that require a lot of land, like elephants, and species that have highly specific requirements for habitat and prey -- like black-footed ferrets. Ultimately, as in all challenges, knowledge is power to save wild species from extinction.

Modem cowboy seem to be giving up the bandanna (印花大手帕) handkerchief; yet there was a time when this article was almost as necessary to a cowboy’s equipment as a rope, and it served for purposes almost as varied.
The bandanna made a good sling for a broken arm; it made a good bandage for a blood wound. Early Irish settlers on the Nueces River used to believe that a bandanna handkerchief that had been worn by a drowned man would, if cast into a stream above the sunken body, float until it came over the body and then sink, thus locating the body. Many a cowboy out on the lonely plains has been buried with a clean bandanna spread over his face to keep the dirt, or the coarse blanket on which the dirt was poured, from touching him. The bandanna has been used to hang men. Rustlers used to "wave" strangers around with it as a warning against nearer approach, though the hat was more commonly used for signaling. Like the Mexican sombrero (阔边帽) or the fourgallon Stetson, the bandanna could not be made too large. When the cowboys of the Old West make their final parade on the grassy shores of Paradise, the guidon (旗手) that leads them should be a bandanna handkerchief. It deserves to be called the "flag of the range country".

The first 50 years of the next millennium will be critical for the world’s population. By 2050 population growth should have leveled off, but by then we’ll have 10 billion people -- two-thirds as many again as we have today. The rate of population growth is something we can choose right now, though it’s not something that just happens, but a matter of human choice. The choice is a complicated one, with many variables, but it remains a choice.
If we want to prevent a population explosion, we should take action now -- or assist the poorer countries to do so. They need better government, better institutions, better labor and capital markets, better schools.
Anything that increases the value of women’s time and adds to the cost of caring for a child makes a woman less likely to have that child. Since big families are often seen as safety nets for illness and old age, improving poor people’s access to insurance, pensions and welfare institutions also has a major impact. This can be as simple as rural credit, providing a means of saving. Finally, there is education -- both for women and, perhaps even more important, for the next generation of children.
These steps are there to be taken, but there appear to be some countries that are not seriously trying at the moment. If we cannot achieve that we will certainly not control population.
That said, I don’t feel pessimistic that we are going to run out of resources: we are becoming more efficient at producing food faster than the rate at which population is increasing. There is, however, a risk that we will wreck the environment so effectively that the world will no longer be an attractive place to live. That really would be a dismal outcome, to reach world population equilibrium only to find we’d destroyed the natural environment in the process.

"A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself," mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species.
Of all the old media, newspapers have the most to lose from the Internet. Circulation has been falling in the U. S., Western Europe and Latin America for decades. But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in the U. S. as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world’s general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people’s daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on-and offline. And they are investing in free dally papers. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it doest, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account -- trying them in the court of public opinion. The Internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper.
In future, some high-quality journalism will be backed by non-profit organizations. Already, a few respected news organizations sustain themselves that way. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller’s national conversation will be louder than ever.

With 2005 fast becoming "the year of the natural disaster", it is time to reflect on how engineering, science and technology can play their fullest part in protecting the planet.
Long before the Asian tsunami struck, the science community predicted the particular region of Indonesia to be hit by the next big earthquake; and the engineering and technology community had developed early warning systems costing only ＄ 30 million. But no government in the region heeded the warnings and no early warning systems were in place. We ignored technology of the advance warnings at our peril of 100,000 victims of the tsunami.
Governments are not alone in ignoring the views of their scientific community; the public too has its doubts. Part of the reason for this lack of confidence must be down to the failure to engage them in a meaningful way about their concerns. Trust is a two-way street. Instead of claiming that everything would be rosy in the scientific garden "if only the public understood", we must work hard to explore concerns, discover fears and delve deep into the depths of public perceptions. We are getting there. There is a growing realization that effective public engagement is of far greater value than banging the "public understanding" drum.
There are still doubters, of course, and sadly their cause is helped whenever they come across opinions presented as fact. All of us must guard against this debilitating practice. In time, effective public engagement should help deliver improved trust as well as better policy, which -- in turn -- might make it more difficult for scientists’ warnings to be ignored.
Today’s technology community is a triumph of international collaboration where engineers and scientists combine to develop solutions to our biggest problems. Of course, technology cannot stop natural disasters but it can mitigate their impact. We are able to identify the birds affected by avian flu. We can chart their migration patterns around the world. We have the means to pursue vaccines. And we have the communication channels to keep people informed.
Extolling the virtues of technology is not to pretend technology is perfect in every regard. Far from it. The profligate and unsustainable use of technology in energy and transport has contributed to climate change. But that doesn’t mean technology has failed us. We must never lose sight of the fact that technology itself will deliver the solutions to the very problems it can create. If we do, technology will remain sidelined and undervalued, and this major social failure will progressively disadvantage us all.
Our vision is of a society embracing technology as a weapon of both progress and defense. Since the beginning of civilization, we have relied on it and enjoyed its benefits -- and most new technologies have had hugely beneficial effects for most people. But now, in an age when the death toll from natural disasters is increasing year on year, with more people living in danger zones, it is ever more urgent that we rely on science and technology to warn us of the dangers to come and provide the solutions we need.

Few creatures on earth are as cute as the black lion tamarin, and few have as dramatic a story line. Pug-nosed and diminutive, with a comic fringe of hair, these monkeys dwell in trees in small tracts of forest in southeastern Brazil. Or they did until 1905, when they were declared extinct. No one saw a black lion tamarin again in the wild until 1970. Later, in the 1990s, some Brazilian researchers turned up a small set of isolated, inbred populations scattered over a wide region. Since that time, they have been engineering tamarin migration, doing everything they can to save the world’s most distinctive primates.
Although they are no larger than house cats, tamarins have brains big for their size and a family life organized like our own. They live in groups anchored by an adult male andadult female, along with their offspring. When a mother bears young, she usually produces twins, and although members of the group share in their upbringing, it is most often the father who carries them around in the trees, where the families feed on fruits, insects and bird’s eggs.
Unhappily for the lion tamarins, their tree-bound niche began to disappear after the Portuguese landed in Brazil and began clearing forest to make room for Rio de Janeiro, the settlements and farms. As is the case for so many threatened species, the breakup of their habitat sounded the death knell for tamarins, depriving them of the continuity of forest they require to remain abundant and safe from potential threats in any single vicinity. The animals avoid predators by hardly ever coming down from the trees, so even a narrow logging road through a forest can begin the breakup by preventing them from moving from one patch of forest to another.
A simple solution was to build bridges across roads, allowing the monkeys to move from one forest to another. With some lumber and the researchers’ work, habitats that had been separated became continuous again, improving opportunities for migrating and mating.
The next step was to broaden the distribution of the population. The researchers captured two families of black lion tamarins and moved them to a new forest. After a year, the moves were declared a success: Not only had 80 percent of the tamarins survived, but they had also produced new offspring. So far, so good. The researchers had learned the animals could adjust to the new habitats, even if the insects there tasted a little different or the trees were a slightly different size.
The techniques for saving species in the wild vary. Species with less stringent habitat requirements, like wild turkeys, have been rescued by moving them into new settings as well as outlawing their killing. More challenging to preserve are species that require a lot of land, like elephants, and species that have highly specific requirements for habitat and prey -- like black-footed ferrets. Ultimately, as in all challenges, knowledge is power to save wild species from extinction.

Modem cowboy seem to be giving up the bandanna (印花大手帕) handkerchief; yet there was a time when this article was almost as necessary to a cowboy’s equipment as a rope, and it served for purposes almost as varied.
The bandanna made a good sling for a broken arm; it made a good bandage for a blood wound. Early Irish settlers on the Nueces River used to believe that a bandanna handkerchief that had been worn by a drowned man would, if cast into a stream above the sunken body, float until it came over the body and then sink, thus locating the body. Many a cowboy out on the lonely plains has been buried with a clean bandanna spread over his face to keep the dirt, or the coarse blanket on which the dirt was poured, from touching him. The bandanna has been used to hang men. Rustlers used to "wave" strangers around with it as a warning against nearer approach, though the hat was more commonly used for signaling. Like the Mexican sombrero (阔边帽) or the fourgallon Stetson, the bandanna could not be made too large. When the cowboys of the Old West make their final parade on the grassy shores of Paradise, the guidon (旗手) that leads them should be a bandanna handkerchief. It deserves to be called the "flag of the range country".

The first 50 years of the next millennium will be critical for the world’s population. By 2050 population growth should have leveled off, but by then we’ll have 10 billion people -- two-thirds as many again as we have today. The rate of population growth is something we can choose right now, though it’s not something that just happens, but a matter of human choice. The choice is a complicated one, with many variables, but it remains a choice.
If we want to prevent a population explosion, we should take action now -- or assist the poorer countries to do so. They need better government, better institutions, better labor and capital markets, better schools.
Anything that increases the value of women’s time and adds to the cost of caring for a child makes a woman less likely to have that child. Since big families are often seen as safety nets for illness and old age, improving poor people’s access to insurance, pensions and welfare institutions also has a major impact. This can be as simple as rural credit, providing a means of saving. Finally, there is education -- both for women and, perhaps even more important, for the next generation of children.
These steps are there to be taken, but there appear to be some countries that are not seriously trying at the moment. If we cannot achieve that we will certainly not control population.
That said, I don’t feel pessimistic that we are going to run out of resources: we are becoming more efficient at producing food faster than the rate at which population is increasing. There is, however, a risk that we will wreck the environment so effectively that the world will no longer be an attractive place to live. That really would be a dismal outcome, to reach world population equilibrium only to find we’d destroyed the natural environment in the process.

"A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself," mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species.
Of all the old media, newspapers have the most to lose from the Internet. Circulation has been falling in the U. S., Western Europe and Latin America for decades. But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in the U. S. as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world’s general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people’s daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on-and offline. And they are investing in free dally papers. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it doest, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account -- trying them in the court of public opinion. The Internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper.
In future, some high-quality journalism will be backed by non-profit organizations. Already, a few respected news organizations sustain themselves that way. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller’s national conversation will be louder than ever.

With 2005 fast becoming "the year of the natural disaster", it is time to reflect on how engineering, science and technology can play their fullest part in protecting the planet.
Long before the Asian tsunami struck, the science community predicted the particular region of Indonesia to be hit by the next big earthquake; and the engineering and technology community had developed early warning systems costing only ＄ 30 million. But no government in the region heeded the warnings and no early warning systems were in place. We ignored technology of the advance warnings at our peril of 100,000 victims of the tsunami.
Governments are not alone in ignoring the views of their scientific community; the public too has its doubts. Part of the reason for this lack of confidence must be down to the failure to engage them in a meaningful way about their concerns. Trust is a two-way street. Instead of claiming that everything would be rosy in the scientific garden "if only the public understood", we must work hard to explore concerns, discover fears and delve deep into the depths of public perceptions. We are getting there. There is a growing realization that effective public engagement is of far greater value than banging the "public understanding" drum.
There are still doubters, of course, and sadly their cause is helped whenever they come across opinions presented as fact. All of us must guard against this debilitating practice. In time, effective public engagement should help deliver improved trust as well as better policy, which -- in turn -- might make it more difficult for scientists’ warnings to be ignored.
Today’s technology community is a triumph of international collaboration where engineers and scientists combine to develop solutions to our biggest problems. Of course, technology cannot stop natural disasters but it can mitigate their impact. We are able to identify the birds affected by avian flu. We can chart their migration patterns around the world. We have the means to pursue vaccines. And we have the communication channels to keep people informed.
Extolling the virtues of technology is not to pretend technology is perfect in every regard. Far from it. The profligate and unsustainable use of technology in energy and transport has contributed to climate change. But that doesn’t mean technology has failed us. We must never lose sight of the fact that technology itself will deliver the solutions to the very problems it can create. If we do, technology will remain sidelined and undervalued, and this major social failure will progressively disadvantage us all.
Our vision is of a society embracing technology as a weapon of both progress and defense. Since the beginning of civilization, we have relied on it and enjoyed its benefits -- and most new technologies have had hugely beneficial effects for most people. But now, in an age when the death toll from natural disasters is increasing year on year, with more people living in danger zones, it is ever more urgent that we rely on science and technology to warn us of the dangers to come and provide the solutions we need.

Few creatures on earth are as cute as the black lion tamarin, and few have as dramatic a story line. Pug-nosed and diminutive, with a comic fringe of hair, these monkeys dwell in trees in small tracts of forest in southeastern Brazil. Or they did until 1905, when they were declared extinct. No one saw a black lion tamarin again in the wild until 1970. Later, in the 1990s, some Brazilian researchers turned up a small set of isolated, inbred populations scattered over a wide region. Since that time, they have been engineering tamarin migration, doing everything they can to save the world’s most distinctive primates.
Although they are no larger than house cats, tamarins have brains big for their size and a family life organized like our own. They live in groups anchored by an adult male andadult female, along with their offspring. When a mother bears young, she usually produces twins, and although members of the group share in their upbringing, it is most often the father who carries them around in the trees, where the families feed on fruits, insects and bird’s eggs.
Unhappily for the lion tamarins, their tree-bound niche began to disappear after the Portuguese landed in Brazil and began clearing forest to make room for Rio de Janeiro, the settlements and farms. As is the case for so many threatened species, the breakup of their habitat sounded the death knell for tamarins, depriving them of the continuity of forest they require to remain abundant and safe from potential threats in any single vicinity. The animals avoid predators by hardly ever coming down from the trees, so even a narrow logging road through a forest can begin the breakup by preventing them from moving from one patch of forest to another.
A simple solution was to build bridges across roads, allowing the monkeys to move from one forest to another. With some lumber and the researchers’ work, habitats that had been separated became continuous again, improving opportunities for migrating and mating.
The next step was to broaden the distribution of the population. The researchers captured two families of black lion tamarins and moved them to a new forest. After a year, the moves were declared a success: Not only had 80 percent of the tamarins survived, but they had also produced new offspring. So far, so good. The researchers had learned the animals could adjust to the new habitats, even if the insects there tasted a little different or the trees were a slightly different size.
The techniques for saving species in the wild vary. Species with less stringent habitat requirements, like wild turkeys, have been rescued by moving them into new settings as well as outlawing their killing. More challenging to preserve are species that require a lot of land, like elephants, and species that have highly specific requirements for habitat and prey -- like black-footed ferrets. Ultimately, as in all challenges, knowledge is power to save wild species from extinction.

Modem cowboy seem to be giving up the bandanna (印花大手帕) handkerchief; yet there was a time when this article was almost as necessary to a cowboy’s equipment as a rope, and it served for purposes almost as varied.
The bandanna made a good sling for a broken arm; it made a good bandage for a blood wound. Early Irish settlers on the Nueces River used to believe that a bandanna handkerchief that had been worn by a drowned man would, if cast into a stream above the sunken body, float until it came over the body and then sink, thus locating the body. Many a cowboy out on the lonely plains has been buried with a clean bandanna spread over his face to keep the dirt, or the coarse blanket on which the dirt was poured, from touching him. The bandanna has been used to hang men. Rustlers used to "wave" strangers around with it as a warning against nearer approach, though the hat was more commonly used for signaling. Like the Mexican sombrero (阔边帽) or the fourgallon Stetson, the bandanna could not be made too large. When the cowboys of the Old West make their final parade on the grassy shores of Paradise, the guidon (旗手) that leads them should be a bandanna handkerchief. It deserves to be called the "flag of the range country".

The first 50 years of the next millennium will be critical for the world’s population. By 2050 population growth should have leveled off, but by then we’ll have 10 billion people -- two-thirds as many again as we have today. The rate of population growth is something we can choose right now, though it’s not something that just happens, but a matter of human choice. The choice is a complicated one, with many variables, but it remains a choice.
If we want to prevent a population explosion, we should take action now -- or assist the poorer countries to do so. They need better government, better institutions, better labor and capital markets, better schools.
Anything that increases the value of women’s time and adds to the cost of caring for a child makes a woman less likely to have that child. Since big families are often seen as safety nets for illness and old age, improving poor people’s access to insurance, pensions and welfare institutions also has a major impact. This can be as simple as rural credit, providing a means of saving. Finally, there is education -- both for women and, perhaps even more important, for the next generation of children.
These steps are there to be taken, but there appear to be some countries that are not seriously trying at the moment. If we cannot achieve that we will certainly not control population.
That said, I don’t feel pessimistic that we are going to run out of resources: we are becoming more efficient at producing food faster than the rate at which population is increasing. There is, however, a risk that we will wreck the environment so effectively that the world will no longer be an attractive place to live. That really would be a dismal outcome, to reach world population equilibrium only to find we’d destroyed the natural environment in the process.

With 2005 fast becoming "the year of the natural disaster", it is time to reflect on how engineering, science and technology can play their fullest part in protecting the planet.
Long before the Asian tsunami struck, the science community predicted the particular region of Indonesia to be hit by the next big earthquake; and the engineering and technology community had developed early warning systems costing only ＄ 30 million. But no government in the region heeded the warnings and no early warning systems were in place. We ignored technology of the advance warnings at our peril of 100,000 victims of the tsunami.
Governments are not alone in ignoring the views of their scientific community; the public too has its doubts. Part of the reason for this lack of confidence must be down to the failure to engage them in a meaningful way about their concerns. Trust is a two-way street. Instead of claiming that everything would be rosy in the scientific garden "if only the public understood", we must work hard to explore concerns, discover fears and delve deep into the depths of public perceptions. We are getting there. There is a growing realization that effective public engagement is of far greater value than banging the "public understanding" drum.
There are still doubters, of course, and sadly their cause is helped whenever they come across opinions presented as fact. All of us must guard against this debilitating practice. In time, effective public engagement should help deliver improved trust as well as better policy, which -- in turn -- might make it more difficult for scientists’ warnings to be ignored.
Today’s technology community is a triumph of international collaboration where engineers and scientists combine to develop solutions to our biggest problems. Of course, technology cannot stop natural disasters but it can mitigate their impact. We are able to identify the birds affected by avian flu. We can chart their migration patterns around the world. We have the means to pursue vaccines. And we have the communication channels to keep people informed.
Extolling the virtues of technology is not to pretend technology is perfect in every regard. Far from it. The profligate and unsustainable use of technology in energy and transport has contributed to climate change. But that doesn’t mean technology has failed us. We must never lose sight of the fact that technology itself will deliver the solutions to the very problems it can create. If we do, technology will remain sidelined and undervalued, and this major social failure will progressively disadvantage us all.
Our vision is of a society embracing technology as a weapon of both progress and defense. Since the beginning of civilization, we have relied on it and enjoyed its benefits -- and most new technologies have had hugely beneficial effects for most people. But now, in an age when the death toll from natural disasters is increasing year on year, with more people living in danger zones, it is ever more urgent that we rely on science and technology to warn us of the dangers to come and provide the solutions we need.

"A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself," mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species.
Of all the old media, newspapers have the most to lose from the Internet. Circulation has been falling in the U. S., Western Europe and Latin America for decades. But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in the U. S. as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world’s general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people’s daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on-and offline. And they are investing in free dally papers. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it doest, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account -- trying them in the court of public opinion. The Internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper.
In future, some high-quality journalism will be backed by non-profit organizations. Already, a few respected news organizations sustain themselves that way. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller’s national conversation will be louder than ever.

Few creatures on earth are as cute as the black lion tamarin, and few have as dramatic a story line. Pug-nosed and diminutive, with a comic fringe of hair, these monkeys dwell in trees in small tracts of forest in southeastern Brazil. Or they did until 1905, when they were declared extinct. No one saw a black lion tamarin again in the wild until 1970. Later, in the 1990s, some Brazilian researchers turned up a small set of isolated, inbred populations scattered over a wide region. Since that time, they have been engineering tamarin migration, doing everything they can to save the world’s most distinctive primates.
Although they are no larger than house cats, tamarins have brains big for their size and a family life organized like our own. They live in groups anchored by an adult male andadult female, along with their offspring. When a mother bears young, she usually produces twins, and although members of the group share in their upbringing, it is most often the father who carries them around in the trees, where the families feed on fruits, insects and bird’s eggs.
Unhappily for the lion tamarins, their tree-bound niche began to disappear after the Portuguese landed in Brazil and began clearing forest to make room for Rio de Janeiro, the settlements and farms. As is the case for so many threatened species, the breakup of their habitat sounded the death knell for tamarins, depriving them of the continuity of forest they require to remain abundant and safe from potential threats in any single vicinity. The animals avoid predators by hardly ever coming down from the trees, so even a narrow logging road through a forest can begin the breakup by preventing them from moving from one patch of forest to another.
A simple solution was to build bridges across roads, allowing the monkeys to move from one forest to another. With some lumber and the researchers’ work, habitats that had been separated became continuous again, improving opportunities for migrating and mating.
The next step was to broaden the distribution of the population. The researchers captured two families of black lion tamarins and moved them to a new forest. After a year, the moves were declared a success: Not only had 80 percent of the tamarins survived, but they had also produced new offspring. So far, so good. The researchers had learned the animals could adjust to the new habitats, even if the insects there tasted a little different or the trees were a slightly different size.
The techniques for saving species in the wild vary. Species with less stringent habitat requirements, like wild turkeys, have been rescued by moving them into new settings as well as outlawing their killing. More challenging to preserve are species that require a lot of land, like elephants, and species that have highly specific requirements for habitat and prey -- like black-footed ferrets. Ultimately, as in all challenges, knowledge is power to save wild species from extinction.

Modem cowboy seem to be giving up the bandanna (印花大手帕) handkerchief; yet there was a time when this article was almost as necessary to a cowboy’s equipment as a rope, and it served for purposes almost as varied.
The bandanna made a good sling for a broken arm; it made a good bandage for a blood wound. Early Irish settlers on the Nueces River used to believe that a bandanna handkerchief that had been worn by a drowned man would, if cast into a stream above the sunken body, float until it came over the body and then sink, thus locating the body. Many a cowboy out on the lonely plains has been buried with a clean bandanna spread over his face to keep the dirt, or the coarse blanket on which the dirt was poured, from touching him. The bandanna has been used to hang men. Rustlers used to "wave" strangers around with it as a warning against nearer approach, though the hat was more commonly used for signaling. Like the Mexican sombrero (阔边帽) or the fourgallon Stetson, the bandanna could not be made too large. When the cowboys of the Old West make their final parade on the grassy shores of Paradise, the guidon (旗手) that leads them should be a bandanna handkerchief. It deserves to be called the "flag of the range country".

The first 50 years of the next millennium will be critical for the world’s population. By 2050 population growth should have leveled off, but by then we’ll have 10 billion people -- two-thirds as many again as we have today. The rate of population growth is something we can choose right now, though it’s not something that just happens, but a matter of human choice. The choice is a complicated one, with many variables, but it remains a choice.
If we want to prevent a population explosion, we should take action now -- or assist the poorer countries to do so. They need better government, better institutions, better labor and capital markets, better schools.
Anything that increases the value of women’s time and adds to the cost of caring for a child makes a woman less likely to have that child. Since big families are often seen as safety nets for illness and old age, improving poor people’s access to insurance, pensions and welfare institutions also has a major impact. This can be as simple as rural credit, providing a means of saving. Finally, there is education -- both for women and, perhaps even more important, for the next generation of children.
These steps are there to be taken, but there appear to be some countries that are not seriously trying at the moment. If we cannot achieve that we will certainly not control population.
That said, I don’t feel pessimistic that we are going to run out of resources: we are becoming more efficient at producing food faster than the rate at which population is increasing. There is, however, a risk that we will wreck the environment so effectively that the world will no longer be an attractive place to live. That really would be a dismal outcome, to reach world population equilibrium only to find we’d destroyed the natural environment in the process.

Few creatures on earth are as cute as the black lion tamarin, and few have as dramatic a story line. Pug-nosed and diminutive, with a comic fringe of hair, these monkeys dwell in trees in small tracts of forest in southeastern Brazil. Or they did until 1905, when they were declared extinct. No one saw a black lion tamarin again in the wild until 1970. Later, in the 1990s, some Brazilian researchers turned up a small set of isolated, inbred populations scattered over a wide region. Since that time, they have been engineering tamarin migration, doing everything they can to save the world’s most distinctive primates.
Although they are no larger than house cats, tamarins have brains big for their size and a family life organized like our own. They live in groups anchored by an adult male andadult female, along with their offspring. When a mother bears young, she usually produces twins, and although members of the group share in their upbringing, it is most often the father who carries them around in the trees, where the families feed on fruits, insects and bird’s eggs.
Unhappily for the lion tamarins, their tree-bound niche began to disappear after the Portuguese landed in Brazil and began clearing forest to make room for Rio de Janeiro, the settlements and farms. As is the case for so many threatened species, the breakup of their habitat sounded the death knell for tamarins, depriving them of the continuity of forest they require to remain abundant and safe from potential threats in any single vicinity. The animals avoid predators by hardly ever coming down from the trees, so even a narrow logging road through a forest can begin the breakup by preventing them from moving from one patch of forest to another.
A simple solution was to build bridges across roads, allowing the monkeys to move from one forest to another. With some lumber and the researchers’ work, habitats that had been separated became continuous again, improving opportunities for migrating and mating.
The next step was to broaden the distribution of the population. The researchers captured two families of black lion tamarins and moved them to a new forest. After a year, the moves were declared a success: Not only had 80 percent of the tamarins survived, but they had also produced new offspring. So far, so good. The researchers had learned the animals could adjust to the new habitats, even if the insects there tasted a little different or the trees were a slightly different size.
The techniques for saving species in the wild vary. Species with less stringent habitat requirements, like wild turkeys, have been rescued by moving them into new settings as well as outlawing their killing. More challenging to preserve are species that require a lot of land, like elephants, and species that have highly specific requirements for habitat and prey -- like black-footed ferrets. Ultimately, as in all challenges, knowledge is power to save wild species from extinction.

Modem cowboy seem to be giving up the bandanna (印花大手帕) handkerchief; yet there was a time when this article was almost as necessary to a cowboy’s equipment as a rope, and it served for purposes almost as varied.
The bandanna made a good sling for a broken arm; it made a good bandage for a blood wound. Early Irish settlers on the Nueces River used to believe that a bandanna handkerchief that had been worn by a drowned man would, if cast into a stream above the sunken body, float until it came over the body and then sink, thus locating the body. Many a cowboy out on the lonely plains has been buried with a clean bandanna spread over his face to keep the dirt, or the coarse blanket on which the dirt was poured, from touching him. The bandanna has been used to hang men. Rustlers used to "wave" strangers around with it as a warning against nearer approach, though the hat was more commonly used for signaling. Like the Mexican sombrero (阔边帽) or the fourgallon Stetson, the bandanna could not be made too large. When the cowboys of the Old West make their final parade on the grassy shores of Paradise, the guidon (旗手) that leads them should be a bandanna handkerchief. It deserves to be called the "flag of the range country".

With 2005 fast becoming "the year of the natural disaster", it is time to reflect on how engineering, science and technology can play their fullest part in protecting the planet.
Long before the Asian tsunami struck, the science community predicted the particular region of Indonesia to be hit by the next big earthquake; and the engineering and technology community had developed early warning systems costing only ＄ 30 million. But no government in the region heeded the warnings and no early warning systems were in place. We ignored technology of the advance warnings at our peril of 100,000 victims of the tsunami.
Governments are not alone in ignoring the views of their scientific community; the public too has its doubts. Part of the reason for this lack of confidence must be down to the failure to engage them in a meaningful way about their concerns. Trust is a two-way street. Instead of claiming that everything would be rosy in the scientific garden "if only the public understood", we must work hard to explore concerns, discover fears and delve deep into the depths of public perceptions. We are getting there. There is a growing realization that effective public engagement is of far greater value than banging the "public understanding" drum.
There are still doubters, of course, and sadly their cause is helped whenever they come across opinions presented as fact. All of us must guard against this debilitating practice. In time, effective public engagement should help deliver improved trust as well as better policy, which -- in turn -- might make it more difficult for scientists’ warnings to be ignored.
Today’s technology community is a triumph of international collaboration where engineers and scientists combine to develop solutions to our biggest problems. Of course, technology cannot stop natural disasters but it can mitigate their impact. We are able to identify the birds affected by avian flu. We can chart their migration patterns around the world. We have the means to pursue vaccines. And we have the communication channels to keep people informed.
Extolling the virtues of technology is not to pretend technology is perfect in every regard. Far from it. The profligate and unsustainable use of technology in energy and transport has contributed to climate change. But that doesn’t mean technology has failed us. We must never lose sight of the fact that technology itself will deliver the solutions to the very problems it can create. If we do, technology will remain sidelined and undervalued, and this major social failure will progressively disadvantage us all.
Our vision is of a society embracing technology as a weapon of both progress and defense. Since the beginning of civilization, we have relied on it and enjoyed its benefits -- and most new technologies have had hugely beneficial effects for most people. But now, in an age when the death toll from natural disasters is increasing year on year, with more people living in danger zones, it is ever more urgent that we rely on science and technology to warn us of the dangers to come and provide the solutions we need.

"A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself," mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species.
Of all the old media, newspapers have the most to lose from the Internet. Circulation has been falling in the U. S., Western Europe and Latin America for decades. But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in the U. S. as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world’s general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people’s daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on-and offline. And they are investing in free dally papers. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it doest, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account -- trying them in the court of public opinion. The Internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper.
In future, some high-quality journalism will be backed by non-profit organizations. Already, a few respected news organizations sustain themselves that way. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller’s national conversation will be louder than ever.

The first 50 years of the next millennium will be critical for the world’s population. By 2050 population growth should have leveled off, but by then we’ll have 10 billion people -- two-thirds as many again as we have today. The rate of population growth is something we can choose right now, though it’s not something that just happens, but a matter of human choice. The choice is a complicated one, with many variables, but it remains a choice.
If we want to prevent a population explosion, we should take action now -- or assist the poorer countries to do so. They need better government, better institutions, better labor and capital markets, better schools.
Anything that increases the value of women’s time and adds to the cost of caring for a child makes a woman less likely to have that child. Since big families are often seen as safety nets for illness and old age, improving poor people’s access to insurance, pensions and welfare institutions also has a major impact. This can be as simple as rural credit, providing a means of saving. Finally, there is education -- both for women and, perhaps even more important, for the next generation of children.
These steps are there to be taken, but there appear to be some countries that are not seriously trying at the moment. If we cannot achieve that we will certainly not control population.
That said, I don’t feel pessimistic that we are going to run out of resources: we are becoming more efficient at producing food faster than the rate at which population is increasing. There is, however, a risk that we will wreck the environment so effectively that the world will no longer be an attractive place to live. That really would be a dismal outcome, to reach world population equilibrium only to find we’d destroyed the natural environment in the process.

Few creatures on earth are as cute as the black lion tamarin, and few have as dramatic a story line. Pug-nosed and diminutive, with a comic fringe of hair, these monkeys dwell in trees in small tracts of forest in southeastern Brazil. Or they did until 1905, when they were declared extinct. No one saw a black lion tamarin again in the wild until 1970. Later, in the 1990s, some Brazilian researchers turned up a small set of isolated, inbred populations scattered over a wide region. Since that time, they have been engineering tamarin migration, doing everything they can to save the world’s most distinctive primates.
Although they are no larger than house cats, tamarins have brains big for their size and a family life organized like our own. They live in groups anchored by an adult male andadult female, along with their offspring. When a mother bears young, she usually produces twins, and although members of the group share in their upbringing, it is most often the father who carries them around in the trees, where the families feed on fruits, insects and bird’s eggs.
Unhappily for the lion tamarins, their tree-bound niche began to disappear after the Portuguese landed in Brazil and began clearing forest to make room for Rio de Janeiro, the settlements and farms. As is the case for so many threatened species, the breakup of their habitat sounded the death knell for tamarins, depriving them of the continuity of forest they require to remain abundant and safe from potential threats in any single vicinity. The animals avoid predators by hardly ever coming down from the trees, so even a narrow logging road through a forest can begin the breakup by preventing them from moving from one patch of forest to another.
A simple solution was to build bridges across roads, allowing the monkeys to move from one forest to another. With some lumber and the researchers’ work, habitats that had been separated became continuous again, improving opportunities for migrating and mating.
The next step was to broaden the distribution of the population. The researchers captured two families of black lion tamarins and moved them to a new forest. After a year, the moves were declared a success: Not only had 80 percent of the tamarins survived, but they had also produced new offspring. So far, so good. The researchers had learned the animals could adjust to the new habitats, even if the insects there tasted a little different or the trees were a slightly different size.
The techniques for saving species in the wild vary. Species with less stringent habitat requirements, like wild turkeys, have been rescued by moving them into new settings as well as outlawing their killing. More challenging to preserve are species that require a lot of land, like elephants, and species that have highly specific requirements for habitat and prey -- like black-footed ferrets. Ultimately, as in all challenges, knowledge is power to save wild species from extinction.

Modem cowboy seem to be giving up the bandanna (印花大手帕) handkerchief; yet there was a time when this article was almost as necessary to a cowboy’s equipment as a rope, and it served for purposes almost as varied.
The bandanna made a good sling for a broken arm; it made a good bandage for a blood wound. Early Irish settlers on the Nueces River used to believe that a bandanna handkerchief that had been worn by a drowned man would, if cast into a stream above the sunken body, float until it came over the body and then sink, thus locating the body. Many a cowboy out on the lonely plains has been buried with a clean bandanna spread over his face to keep the dirt, or the coarse blanket on which the dirt was poured, from touching him. The bandanna has been used to hang men. Rustlers used to "wave" strangers around with it as a warning against nearer approach, though the hat was more commonly used for signaling. Like the Mexican sombrero (阔边帽) or the fourgallon Stetson, the bandanna could not be made too large. When the cowboys of the Old West make their final parade on the grassy shores of Paradise, the guidon (旗手) that leads them should be a bandanna handkerchief. It deserves to be called the "flag of the range country".

With 2005 fast becoming "the year of the natural disaster", it is time to reflect on how engineering, science and technology can play their fullest part in protecting the planet.
Long before the Asian tsunami struck, the science community predicted the particular region of Indonesia to be hit by the next big earthquake; and the engineering and technology community had developed early warning systems costing only ＄ 30 million. But no government in the region heeded the warnings and no early warning systems were in place. We ignored technology of the advance warnings at our peril of 100,000 victims of the tsunami.
Governments are not alone in ignoring the views of their scientific community; the public too has its doubts. Part of the reason for this lack of confidence must be down to the failure to engage them in a meaningful way about their concerns. Trust is a two-way street. Instead of claiming that everything would be rosy in the scientific garden "if only the public understood", we must work hard to explore concerns, discover fears and delve deep into the depths of public perceptions. We are getting there. There is a growing realization that effective public engagement is of far greater value than banging the "public understanding" drum.
There are still doubters, of course, and sadly their cause is helped whenever they come across opinions presented as fact. All of us must guard against this debilitating practice. In time, effective public engagement should help deliver improved trust as well as better policy, which -- in turn -- might make it more difficult for scientists’ warnings to be ignored.
Today’s technology community is a triumph of international collaboration where engineers and scientists combine to develop solutions to our biggest problems. Of course, technology cannot stop natural disasters but it can mitigate their impact. We are able to identify the birds affected by avian flu. We can chart their migration patterns around the world. We have the means to pursue vaccines. And we have the communication channels to keep people informed.
Extolling the virtues of technology is not to pretend technology is perfect in every regard. Far from it. The profligate and unsustainable use of technology in energy and transport has contributed to climate change. But that doesn’t mean technology has failed us. We must never lose sight of the fact that technology itself will deliver the solutions to the very problems it can create. If we do, technology will remain sidelined and undervalued, and this major social failure will progressively disadvantage us all.
Our vision is of a society embracing technology as a weapon of both progress and defense. Since the beginning of civilization, we have relied on it and enjoyed its benefits -- and most new technologies have had hugely beneficial effects for most people. But now, in an age when the death toll from natural disasters is increasing year on year, with more people living in danger zones, it is ever more urgent that we rely on science and technology to warn us of the dangers to come and provide the solutions we need.

The first 50 years of the next millennium will be critical for the world’s population. By 2050 population growth should have leveled off, but by then we’ll have 10 billion people -- two-thirds as many again as we have today. The rate of population growth is something we can choose right now, though it’s not something that just happens, but a matter of human choice. The choice is a complicated one, with many variables, but it remains a choice.
If we want to prevent a population explosion, we should take action now -- or assist the poorer countries to do so. They need better government, better institutions, better labor and capital markets, better schools.
Anything that increases the value of women’s time and adds to the cost of caring for a child makes a woman less likely to have that child. Since big families are often seen as safety nets for illness and old age, improving poor people’s access to insurance, pensions and welfare institutions also has a major impact. This can be as simple as rural credit, providing a means of saving. Finally, there is education -- both for women and, perhaps even more important, for the next generation of children.
These steps are there to be taken, but there appear to be some countries that are not seriously trying at the moment. If we cannot achieve that we will certainly not control population.
That said, I don’t feel pessimistic that we are going to run out of resources: we are becoming more efficient at producing food faster than the rate at which population is increasing. There is, however, a risk that we will wreck the environment so effectively that the world will no longer be an attractive place to live. That really would be a dismal outcome, to reach world population equilibrium only to find we’d destroyed the natural environment in the process.

"A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself," mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species.
Of all the old media, newspapers have the most to lose from the Internet. Circulation has been falling in the U. S., Western Europe and Latin America for decades. But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in the U. S. as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world’s general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people’s daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on-and offline. And they are investing in free dally papers. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it doest, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account -- trying them in the court of public opinion. The Internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper.
In future, some high-quality journalism will be backed by non-profit organizations. Already, a few respected news organizations sustain themselves that way. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller’s national conversation will be louder than ever.

"A good newspaper is a nation talking to itself," mused Arthur Miller in 1961. A decade later, two reporters from the Washington Post wrote a series of articles that brought down President Nixon and the status of print journalism soared. At their best, newspapers hold governments and companies to account. They usually set the news agenda for the rest of the media. But in the rich world newspapers are now an endangered species.
Of all the old media, newspapers have the most to lose from the Internet. Circulation has been falling in the U. S., Western Europe and Latin America for decades. But in the past few years the web has hastened the decline. In his book The Vanishing Newspaper, Philip Meyer calculates that the first quarter of 2043 will be the moment when newsprint dies in the U. S. as the last exhausted reader tosses aside the last crumpled edition.
Newspapers have not yet started to shut down in large numbers, but it is only a matter of time. Over the next few decades half the rich world’s general papers may fold. Jobs are already disappearing. According to the Newspaper Association of America, the number of people employed in the industry fell by 18% between 1990 and 2004.
Having ignored reality for years, newspapers are at last doing something. In order to cut costs, they are already spending less on journalism. Many are also trying to attract younger readers by shifting the mix of their stories towards entertainment, lifestyle and subjects that may seem more relevant to people’s daily lives than international affairs and politics are. They are trying to create new businesses on-and offline. And they are investing in free dally papers. So far, this fit of activity looks unlikely to save many of them. Even if it doest, it bodes ill for the public role of the Fourth Estate.
Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.
The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account -- trying them in the court of public opinion. The Internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper.
In future, some high-quality journalism will be backed by non-profit organizations. Already, a few respected news organizations sustain themselves that way. An elite group of serious newspapers available everywhere online, independent journalism backed by charities, thousands of fired-up bloggers and well-informed citizen journalists: there is every sign that Arthur Miller’s national conversation will be louder than ever.