Mitsubishi Electric to exit mobile phone ops

TOKYO, Mar 3: Mitsubishi Electric Corp said it planned to exit its loss-making mobile phone business, becoming the latest Japanese electronics maker to withdraw from a market dominanted by overseas giants such as Nokia.

The company said on Monday it expects a one-off loss of about 17 billion yen ($164.1 million) on a pretax level for the year ending March 31 due to the withdrawal.

The Tokyo-based company said, however, that the loss is likely to be offset by improving operational efficiency in other businesses.

Mitsubishi Electric expects 100 billion yen in sales from its cellphone operations in the current business year and shipments of 2.1 million units.

That would be less than 0.2 percent of global mobile phone shipments for calendar 2007, according to data from research firm IDC.

Mitsubishi Electric, which has already withdrawn from overseas cellphone markets, plans to cease shipments to NTT DoCoMo Inc, its sole mobile phone customer, by September.

Mitsubishi Electric's decision follows a January announcement by Sanyo Electric Co Ltd that it would sell its loss-making cellphone business to Kyocera Corp for 40-50 billion yen.

Shares in Mitsubishi Electric were down 5.2 percent at 924 yen by midday, underperforming the Nikkei average, which fell 4 percent.

(AGENCIES)

Sharks search for food 'similar to the way humans shop'

LONDON, Mar 3: Believe it or not, sharks find food using a search pattern which is similar to the way humans shop.

A team of international scientists has found that hungry sharks take "strange" walks like humans to search for sparsely distributed prey in oceans, the Natural Environment Research Council which funded the research said in a release.

According to the team, the search pattern is known as Levy Walk where the predators use a series of small motions interspersed with large jumps to new foraging locations. This increases the chance of finding food, however widely scattered it might be.

"Systematic searching is not the most efficient strategy if you're looking for sparse items. If you go to the supermarket to buy eggs you look for them in one place, and if you don't find them there you choose another location.

"You probably won't start at one end of the supermarket and search every aisle. Predators increase energy gain by adopting the Levy Walk, so they can travel further to find food," according to the study's lead author Dr David Sims of University of Plymouth.

The team analysed the dive data from sophisticated electronic tags attached to a diverse range of marine animals, such as sharks, tuna, cod, sea turtles and penguins, in various locations around the world.

The researchers compared this data to the distribution patterns of their prey and found similarities, suggesting that the predators have evolved this search rule to get the best possible results from their foraging expeditions.

"We developed a computer model from the foraging data, and this confirmed that the observed patterns're indeed optimal for naturally dynamic prey fields. The search rule seems to be a general solution for success in complex and changeable environments," Dr Sims said. (PTI)

Low turnout for Thai Senate elections

BANGKOK, Mar 3: Little-known candidates and voter weariness caused a low turnout in weekend elections for Thailand's Senate, the first poll for an upper house since a September 2006 coup, officials and analysts said today.

About 56 per cent of eligible voters turned out for yesterday's race to pick a senator for each of the country's 76 provinces.

That compared to nearly 75 per cent turnout in December's general election run under a new post-coup constitution.

''We won't complain about the turnout because there have been several national and local elections,'' Election Commissioner Prapan Naikowit told reporters.

As well as the normal slew of local and provincial polls, in the last two years Thailand has had three general elections, a constitutional referendum and another vote for a Senate that never even met before the coup rendered it obsolete.

Under the 2007 army-designed constitution to replace the 1997 ''People's Constitution'', the new Senate consists of 76 elected members and 74 appointed by top civil servants.

It can pass laws, appoint independent watchdog bodies, debate government performance and recall cabinet ministers, top legislators and judges accused of corruption.

Thai media said the senators, who are meant to be without party affiliation, were a mix of pro and anti-Thaksin candidates.

(AGENCIES)

North Korea says war games threaten nuclear deal

SEOUL, Mar 3: North Korea today said US and South Korean war games that started at the weekend could halt an international deal designed to end the secretive state's nuclear arms programme.

The criticism suggests little has changed in relations between the Cold War foes despite last week's unprecedented concert of the New York Philharmonic in Pyongyang which was seen by many as a chance to help start a thaw.

''(These war games) clearly show that the United States continues to pursue its hostile policy of squeezing our republic to death,'' North Korea's KCNA news agency quoted a Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying.

''This nuclear threat won't work with us but will only put the brakes on the denuclearisation process on the Korean peninsula,'' the spokesman was quoted as saying.

He said the military exercises had forced the North to bolster its ''deterrent'', the paranoid state's code for its nuclear arsenal.

North Korea has missed an end of 2007 deadline to give a complete inventory of its nuclear arms programme as agreed under a deal with regional powers.

The reclusive North, which started late last year to take apart its Soviet-era nuclear plant as a part of the deal, would be removed from a US terrorism blacklist and see better opportunities for trade if it submits its nuclear inventory.

The chief US envoy to the nuclear talks left China at the weekend without meeting his North Korean counterpart, who said he was ''not ready'' for talks aimed at pushing forward the stalled nuclear deal.

The United States and South Korea have been staging annual joint war games for years. This year's drills end on March 7.

North Korea regularly denounces them as a preparation for invasion and nuclear war.

Yesterday, a North Korea military official was quoted by the official media as saying the communist state was ready to strike back against the military exercises.

The United States has about 27,000 troops in the South to support the country's 670,000-strong military. North Korea is one of the world's most militarised states with an army of 1.2 million, most of whom are stationed near the border. (AGENCIES)

Unfolding credit crisis seen as top economic threat

WASHINGTON, Mar 3: The cascading fallout from the subprime loan crisis, barely a cloud on the horizon a year ago, is now viewed by experts as the gravest threat to the US economy.

In a survey being released today, 34 per cent of the members of the National Association for Business Economics ranked the financial market turmoil from those loan defaults as the number 1 threat to the economy over the next two years.

That compares with 18 per cent from an August survey, when the most serious threat was seen by 20 per cent of the economists as terrorism and the conflicts in the Middle East.

A year ago, the credit crisis did not even register as a chief threat.

The latest survey found that 18 per cent of association members listed excessive debt held by households and businesses as the top problem.

The questioning of 259 economists took place during the first two weeks of February. Events since then have underscored the credit crisis problems.

On Friday, the Dow Jones industrial average plunged by 315.79 points. The decline resulted from a combination of grim economic news, including a new estimate from UBS Securities analysts that the financial system losses from securities backed by mortgages and other debt would total USD 600 billion. That far surpassed the USD 400 billion that many economists projected until recently.

At the heart of financial institutions' problems are securities backed by subprime mortgages. They have gone into default at record rates because of the housing market's steep slump. These loans were extended to borrowers with weak credit histories. (AGENCIES)

Indians among 190 arrested in Dubai for alleged sex trade

DUBAI, Mar 3: Authorities have arrested 190 Asian women, including Indians, in one of the biggest crackdowns on sex trade in Dubai.

The arrests came after police received a tip-off that a number of women were involved in prostitution in some hotels in Naif area of Dubai, police said.

Police raided a number of hotels in the area over the weekend and arrested 10 suspected pimps from Bangladesh and 190 women from Bangladesh, India and Indonesia.

However, the exact number of arrested Indians was not revealed.

The UAE enacted a law in November last year making human trafficking punishable by life imprisonment, and has set up a state body to combat the menace.

Police arrested 170 people three months ago in the last such crackdown in Dubai.

Earlier, Dubai police chief Dhahi Khalfan Tamim had said that the police would continue its crackdown on prostitution rings and urged women duped into the illegal trade to contact the police.

The UAE last week announced the setting up of shelter homes across the country for women and children, who have become victims of human trafficking.

The homes will provide the victims with safety, guarantee them healthcare as well as psychological and social support. (PTI)

Coming soon to Japan: remote control with a wink

TOKYO, Mar 3: Don't read to much into someone winking at you in Japan -- a researcher says he has developed a system that will soon let people run their iPods with the flick of an eye.

The system, comprising a single-chip computer and a couple of infrared sensors, monitors movements of the temple and is so tiny that it can be built into the side of a pair of eyeglasses.

Closing both eyes for one second starts an iPod, while blinking again stops the machine. A wink with the right eye makes the machine skip to the next tune while with a wink of the left eye it goes back.

As a person does not have to move either hand, the system can serve a "a third hand" for caregivers, rock-climbers, motorbike drivers and astronauts, as well as people with disabilities.

"You don't have to worry about the system moving incorrectly as the system picks up signals when you close your eyes firmly. You can use this when you're eating or chatting with someone," said the device's developer, Kazuhiro Taniguchi.

The system -- dubbed "Kome Kami Switch," or "Temple Switch" -- can easily differentiate a deliberate one-second wink from natural blinking, said Taniguchi, a researcher at state-run Osaka University's Graduate School of Engineering Science.

"Normally you blink in an energy-saving manner, very quickly and lightly, but you would close your eyes more firmly to operate a device," he told AFP.

"There are some people who are incapable of winking on one eye. For those, we can programme the system to give a command when they blink twice in a fast sequence," he said. (AGENCIES)

China Minsheng buys 4.9 pc stake in American UCBH Holdings

BEIJING, Mar 3: China Minsheng Banking Corp today said it has received approval from the China Banking Regulatory Commission to buy a 4.9 per cent stake in the US-based UCBH Holdings under a USD 95 million deal.

The bank had completed the remittance approval procedure in the State Administration of Foreign Exchange, official Xinhua news agency said quoting a bank statement here.

China Minsheng had said in October last year that it would pick up a 20 per cent stake in UCBH, the holding company of the US-based United Commercial Bank, which primarily serves the Chinese communities and American companies doing business in China.

UCBH Holdings said the deal was the first strategic investment in a banking institution in the US by a Chinese mainland bank.

The deal is expected to help the mid-sized Chinese bank to improve its asset management and develop a full range of financial services. (PTI)

Bad grades? Faulty memory could be to blame

CHICAGO, Mar 3: Defects in working memory -- the brain's temporary storage bin -- may explain why one child cannot read her history book and another gets lost in algebra, new research suggests.

As many as 10 per cent of school age children may suffer from poor working memory, British researchers said in a report last week, yet the problem remains rarely identified.

''You can think of working memory as a pure measure of your child's potential,'' Dr Tracey Alloway of Britain's Durham University said in a telephone interview.

''Some psychologists consider working memory to be the new IQ because we find that working memory is the single most important predictor of learning,'' Alloway said.

Many children with poor working memory are considered lazy or dim. But Alloway said with early identification and memory training, many of these underachievers can improve.

Working memory allows people to hold and manipulate a few items in their minds, such as a telephone number. Alloway compares working memory to a box.

For adults, the basic box size is thought to be three to five items. People who have more than that on a mental grocery list are likely to forget something.

''Since there is this limit, it is important to put in the right thing. Irrelevant information will clutter up working memory,'' Nelson Cowan, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Missouri, said in a telephone interview.

The question many researchers are struggling with is how to help people with this problem, which appears to be closely tied with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD.

''In children with learning difficulties, it becomes a huge issue, especially around middle school where the demands on working memory grow dramatically,'' said Dr Mel Levine, co-founder of All Kinds of Minds, a nonprofit institute in Durham, North Carolina, that studies learning differences.

LOST IN THE MIDDLE

Levine said working memory allows a reader to remember what is at the beginning of the page when reaching the end of the page. Kids with trouble with active working memory get lost in the middle.

''One little girl told me recently, 'Every time I read a sentence it erases the one that was before it,''' Levine said in a telephone interview. ''That's a perfect example of an active working memory dysfunction.''

Memory training may help improve working memory. ''The claims that are being made are that all of the attention-related aspects of processing and working memory can be trained,'' Cowan said.

Alloway's tool for teachers to assess working memory capacity in children as early as age 4 has been used in 35 schools across Britain.

Levine's institute trains teachers through a program called Schools Attuned, which is working with several thousand schools across the United States, Canada and Europe.

While he is not sure working memory can be expanded, Levine said children can be taught ways to function better in school.

For the girl with the reading problem, Levine's solution was for her to own a set of school books so she could underline key points when she reads. Then she can read those points into a digital tape recorder and play them back.

''While it did not fix her problem, it prevents it from causing too much trouble,'' he said. ''She was very interested because she was telling her mother she was the stupidest kid in her class.

''Now she's telling people, 'I've got to work on expanding my active working memory,''' he said.

(AGENCIES)

Parents urged to go beyond 'big talk' about sex

CHICAGO, Mar 3: Parents should consider having repeated discussions with their children about many aspects of sex instead of one ''big talk'' on impersonal topics linked to sexuality such as puberty, researchers said today.

''Parents who take a checklist approach to broadening their sexual discussion with their children are unlikely to have as great an influence ... As parents who introduce new sexual topics and then develop them through repeated discussions,'' said their report published in the journal Pediatrics.

The study, entitled ''Beyond the 'Big Talk,''' used written surveys given to 312 children in Southern California aged 11 to 15 to assess how frequent and candid their conversations were with their parents about sex.

The more parents talked with their children, the closer their relationships, wrote researchers Steven Martino and colleagues at the Rand Corporation.

The relationships also benefited when the discussions moved beyond ''safe'' or impersonal subjects such as puberty, reproduction and sexually transmitted diseases to more private topics such as masturbation and how sex feels.

The surveys looked at children's attitudes toward their parents over a one-year period and asked about how many of 22 sexual topics were discussed.

Mothers tended to discuss twice as many sexual topics with their children -- 12 -- as fathers did, the study said.

The report cited earlier studies that showed children who were communicated with were more likely to delay intercourse and, if they chose to have sex, to use contraception and have fewer partners. (AGENCIES)

US study shows why winter is "flu season"

WASHINGTON, Mar 3: Influenza viruses coat themselves in fatty material that hardens and protects them in colder temperatures -- a finding that could explain why winter is the flu season, US researchers reported.

This butter-like coating melts in the respiratory tract, allowing the virus to infect cells, the team at the National Institutes of Health found.

''Like an M&M in your mouth, the protective covering melts when it enters the respiratory tract,'' said Joshua Zimmerberg of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), who led the study.

The NICHD is one of the National Institutes of Health.

''It's only in this liquid phase that the virus is capable of entering a cell to infect it.''

Experts have long pondered why flu and other respiratory viruses spread more in winter. No one explanation, such as people staying indoors more, or the destructive effect of the sun's radiation in summer, has fully explained it.

The new report, published in the journal Nature Chemical Biology, could lead to new ways to prevent and treat flu, said NICHD Director Duane Alexander.

''The study results open new avenues of research for thwarting winter flu outbreaks,'' Alexander said in a statement.

''Now that we understand how the flu virus protects itself so that it can spread from person to person, we can work on ways to interfere with that protective mechanism.''

Zimmerman's team used a type of imaging called nuclear magnetic resonance imaging to look at the outer coat of flu viruses.

GOING OUT INTO THE WORLD

Viruses cannot replicate on their own but instead must hijack a living cell. Influenza viruses have a membrane-like outer coating that they fuse to the victim cell.

They inject genetic material into the cell, turning it into a virus factory. Some types of viruses simply explode out of these hijacked cells, but influenza instead ''buds'' out, and uses lipids such as cholesterol from the cells to make a membrane to help it do so.

''This is the protein we make vaccines against,'' Zimmerman said in a telephone interview. The outside envelope protein, called hemagglutinin, gives influenza viruses the ''H'' in their names.

Inside a nice, warm cell, the hemagglutinin is liquid. But at cooler temperatures it starts a process that resembles crystallization, called ordering.

''It solidifies gradually all the way down from 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees F) down to 4 degrees C (39 degrees F),'' Zimmerman said.

''I believe that this gradualness lets it exist at every temperature.''

In warmer outdoor temperatures this protective coating melts, and unless it is inside a living person or animal, the virus perishes.

The finding could also help scientists find new ways to eradicate influenza. In cold temperatures, the hard lipid shell might withstand certain detergents, making it more difficult to wash the virus off of hands and surfaces.

Influenza and other respiratory viruses are spread in small droplets broadcast by coughing, sneezing and talking and which can also settle onto surfaces, to be picked up on fingertips. (AGENCIES)

Childhood now ends at 11: Study

LONDON, Mar 3: Childhood is the golden era in one’s life. But, a new study has found that it now effectively ends at the age of 11 with parents increasingly succumbing to "pester pressure" from their kids.

Researchers in Britain have found that children are forcing their parents to authorise freedoms that belie their years in contrast with the traditional upbringings experienced by their moms and dads.

According to the study, more and more teenagers are being allowed to drink alcohol, stay out late, sleep over at their boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s house and have sex, ‘The Daily Telegraph’ reported today.

Little girls in particular are growing up faster than ever and they no longer want to play with dolls. Instead they go on to pierce their ears, dye their hair and prefer to wear fashionable dresses.

The researchers for the Ramdom House publishers came to the conclusion after carrying out a survey of 1,170 parents with kids under 18.

The survey has showed a gulf between the parental code of a previous generation and the lenient attitudes of today’s parents, with 55 per cent of parents saying that childhood is now "over by 11"—the tender age when children move from primary to secondary school.

Almost three-quarters of parents allow their children to drink alcohol at home before they turn 18, and 45 per cent of parents permit their 16-year-old children to spend the night at a boyfriend’s or girlfriend’s house.

More than half of children aged 16 and under are allowed to stay out past 11 PM, and half are permitted to dye their hair and wear make-up by the time they are 14. Some 57 per cent of kids are permitted to watch adult movies before the age of 18, compared to 46 per cent a generation ago.

Three-quarters of parents admitted that their children had scant regard for their authority and regularly acted against their will, with 72 per cent admitting that they give their children a far easier ride than their parents did.

Eighty-three per cent blame higher disposable incomes for turning rare treats into everyday purchases.

However, here’s a suggestion for little girls from Dame Jacqueline Wilson, the former children’s laureate and author. "I know girls are desperate to look cool but I wish they didn’t all want to wear very high heels and inappropriately tight trendy clothes.

"I’m not saying all under-12s should wear puff-sleeved dresses and little white socks and tee-strap sandals but at least you could run about and play properly in them. And it seems so sad that girls feel embarrassed if they want to play with dolls past the age of six." (PTI)