|
Yves Chauvin
NOBEL PRIZE for Chemistry
Emmanuel Thévenon
journalist, FRANCE
The 2005 Nobel Prize for Chemistry has been awarded to Frenchman Yves Chauvin, who shares this accolade with two Americans.
"The scale of the award is a little overwhelming", admitted 75-year-old Yves Chauvin, on learning that the Swedish Royal Academy of Science had just awarded him the supreme accolade along with Americans Robert Grubbs and Richard Shrock. All three are recognized for their research work on "metathesis" [1], a process that now has numerous applications: from pharmaceuticals to painting, including plastics and food additives. "I led the way," the retired scientist acknowledges, "but they did an important job. It is thanks to them that I have won this prize."
Yves Chauvin spent the major part of his career at the French petroleum institute (IFP), where he devised and perfected four important industrial processes which have been remarkably successful on the international market. "At the same time," stresses Jean-Marie Basset, a member of the French academy of science, "he has always had a very broad and extremely original range of research activity, always ahead of its time."
A science that benefits all
Yves Chauvin established the theoretical bases of the "metathesis" of olefines in 1971, a technique of synthesising petroleum derivatives. This mechanism, which now bears his name, was then taken further by his co-laureates Grubbs and Shrock, who developed an entire family of catalysts [2] for these chemical reactions. Catalysis is one of chemistry’s current priorities. It makes it possible to achieve "clean" reactions that do not demand much energy and do not produce hazardous waste. This is also described as "green chemistry".
Deeply committed to promoting industrial applications consistent with the constraints of sustainable development, Yves Chauvin provides a perfect demonstration of how basic science can be used to benefit people, society and the environment.
(1] The double bonds between atoms are broken and re-made to permit the creation of new molecules.
[2] A catalyst is a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction.
Text courtesy: Label France N62 2 nd Quarter issue, 2006. Embassy of France in Kathmandu-ed.
The Next New Thing Is Here
JEFF GRALNICK,Adjunct professor of new media at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, USA
The last decade's accelerated development of new media and technologies is not over. The next wave of change is centered in the palm of your hand. Delivery of video via cell phones is the newest leap in information technologies, and it has the potential to shake up society in unpredictable ways.
Jeff Gralnick is a broadcast and online news veteran, currently serving as a special consultant on the Internet and new media technologies to NBC News. He is also an adjunct professor of new media at the ColumbiaUniversityGraduateSchool of Journalism.
As an industry, the Internet has been driven by the search for and discovery of "the next new thing," and once again a technological leap has produced it. The explosion of mobile bandwidth combined with new telephone technologies has given us cell phones that take and transmit pictures and that are going to be both "game" and world-changers.
Do you want to know what cell phone video is going to mean? Try these statistics on for size:
# By 2010, global shipment of new cell phones will reach just over 1 billion; 87 percent of those will be video capable.
# By 2010, 228 billion images (still and moving pictures) will be transmitted by cell phone. That's more than will be taken by all other devices combined.
# By 2009, China alone will have 116 million video capable cell phones.
# By 2008, 125 million people will be watching live television on cell phone handsets.
• Consumption of video on laptops and PCs has grown from 900,000 streams and downloads in 2000 to 14.2 billion in 2004. Expectations are those numbers will double and redouble in the next two years.
This is just the beginning. Third-generation cell phones, the so-called 315s, are just beginning to explode across the global communications landscape, flowing from east to west out of Japan and Korea. In these countries, 3G networks were built out first and fastest because mobile access to bandwidth was recognized as the business model key to the communications future. It is no accident that the watchword of SK Telecom, Korea's leading mobile communications company, is "broadband in your hand."
In Korea, the answer to the question-Will people throw away their relatively new and pricey second generation (2G) phones to upgrade to 3G? Clearly appears to be "yes," with migration from 2G to 3G there running at 74 percent in the first quarter of 2005.
While in Asia and Europe 3G is a "new thing" that has arrived, it's just arriving in North America. There, the build out of high-speed wireless networks have lagged and are at the barest of beginning points.
Anecdotal evidence, which is all that is available because actual numbers are being suppressed for what are
called "competitive reasons," suggests that cell phone video consumption is "high," although the number of video-capable handsets in use in the United States has just passed the 1 million mark. Compare that with the number above for China or the 76 million said to be in use in India, and it is clear how far the United States still has to go in this area.
This adds up to an ongoing global explosion of access to news, information, and entertainment content in an unwired world unseen in my view since a little company in Japan called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo Ltd. introduced the transistor radio in 1954. Who, you ask? Today it's called Sony.
The transistorized radio essentially put the world into everybody's shirt pocket or purse. Where you were, so were the news and all forms of entertainment. You could now be in touch with your world all the time. So-called portable radio was the spur for what we know today as "all news radio," and it made "top 40" music part of everyday culture.
What the transistor radio did for audio, the cell phone is doing for video as both a "third screen" for viewing and also the mechanism for sending video material out to other third screens. And that will change forever-yes, forever-the way global societies can and will communicate.
Look at just some of what has happened or is being planned:
• News video is already being provided by cell phones. Two years ago, ITN in London trumpeted the fact that it beat its competition with coverage of a London fire provided by a cell phone user. Similarly, in Chicago in 2005, WBBM scored a news beat with cell phone video of another fire. And those are just "messenger" events in new news coverage by cell-ographers.
• Cable news networks such as CNBC and MSNBC and Fox are already being distributed live on cell phones in the United States. Live reporting by cell phone will follow.
• And what about non-news? At a Media Center new media/wireless conference in Los Angeles in May 2005, Lucy Hood, Newscorps' senior vice president for mobile, sketched out near-term plans for five channels of television for cell phone consumption that would include news, sports, and entertainment.
Similarly, in February 2006, Richard Branson's Virgin Mobile announced at the 3G conferences in Barcelona plans to start selling handsets equipped to receive BT Group digital television content with a single click. Put all of this together and it adds up to the kind of omen a very smart man I once worked with would warn about when he perceived a coming trend or event that demanded attention: "There's a cloud," he would say, "out there on the horizon that's no bigger than a man's hand right now." Small now, he was suggesting, but watch out when it gets here. That is exactly what cell phone video represents-a coming cloud ready to burst over the communications landscape. What will the world be like when it does? Listen to several experts:
At the Barcelona conference where Virgin made its announcement, T- Mobile Chief Executive Rent: Obermann predicted that "mobile will progressively become the primary personal access to the Internet." Sree Sreenivasan, who directs the New Media Department at Columbia University's Graduate School of journalism and is a regular and respected commentator on the Internet, sees a world that will be made both "exciting and scary" where there is access to "video of things we haven't seen properly [or ever] before." He cites the horrific Paris Concorde crash in 2000 as an example. "Instead of just a couple of grainy photos, we'll get high resolution video from ... hundreds or millions ... ready to whip out their [cell phone] cameras and point them at every perceived event." It's a world of instant reporting by a universe of citizen journalists who are empowered by and armed with nothing more than cell phones.
That's the exciting part, but Sreenivasan also sees a significant downside. He points to a Web site like http: //www.bollabacknycblogspot.com, "where alleged street harassers are photographed and put online. "Imagine," he says, "what every aggrieved man or woman can do with every perceived insult, harassment, and threat with these [cell phone] cameras."
It's Worth Thinking About
Adam Clayton Powell III, director of the University of Southern California's Integrated Media Systems Center, projects a world in which cell phones begin providing the opportunity for truly merged communicating.
"It is clear," he told me, "that people want video wherever they are. And in a few years, video IM [instant messaging] no doubt will coexist on cell phones with [programs like] the NBC Nightly News and people will be toggling back and forth between the broadcast and video IM to chat with friends about the news and the newscast." In this merged world, he wonders, "whether those users will still be called `viewers' and the programs they watch will still be called "television."
How fast is this happening and how do we know it is happening?
Reuben Abraham, a sixth-year Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University in New York City who has done work for the Columbia Institute for Tele-information, is convinced that while doing research in India he found the answer. "I watched fishermen come in from a day on the sea," he told me, "and they were watching videos and news on their cell phones. So when it is already happening in parts of the economic spectrum where you would least expect it, you know it is exploding."
What I think Abraham also saw may be the most important byproduct of this new technology-the creation of the true and instant global village. When contracts are being let for high-speed 3G networks all over Africa, including a closed society like Libya's, and when impoverished and undereducated fishermen on the Indian Ocean are dialing into and seeing the world, something remarkable is happening.
Fostering global communication and understanding may not have been the intention of the techies who created 3G-cell technology, but, as an unintended consequence, it is what makes this "next new thing" not a bad thing at all.
Text courtesy: Global Issues, March 2006 issue. EJournal. American Center in Kathmandu-ed.
Wind Energy
From Windmill to World Market Leader
 The wind energy sector in Germany is bursting with strength. Some 18,000 megawatts of wind power are generated here, a world record. Roughly one third of the world's wind turbines and half of the wind power plants in the European Union are to be found in Germany. Between 1998 and 2005, their number trebled to 17,574. That is also good for the environment: wind energy use reduced carbon dioxide emissions in Germany by 21.4 million tonnes in 2004 alone. Last year, with a total output of 26.5 billion kilowatt hours, wind energy supplied more electricity than any other renewable energy source. That is almost twice as much electricity as Berlin consumes in a year.
The German wind energy industry has grown accustomed to breaking records. The order books of companies like Enercon, Repower Systems and Nordex are overflowing. Wind turbines "made in Germany" are in great demand on international markets. In 2005, the German wind industry accounted for roughly half of the worldwide market volume of more than twelve billion euros. The industry is also a job creation engine: the number of employees almost doubled to 60,000 between 2002 and 2005. An even larger workforce will be required in the near future: the construction of more than 30 offshore wind farms in the North Sea and the Baltic Sea is to begin in 2008. They are planned to supply 25,000 megawatts of electricity by the year 2030.
Repower Systems: Electricity Out of the Blue
The Elbe flows towards the North Sea between past and future. On the banks of the river in Brunsbuttel, Schleswig-Holstein, the Brokdorf nuclear power plant stands opposite the world's largest and most powerful wind energy plant. Repower Systems' 5M is the world's first five- megawatt class wind turbine. Under favorable wind conditions it can generate up to 17 million kilowatt hours a year. That is enough energy to supply 4,500 three-person households. Not only the output, but also the dimensions of the 5M are big enough to break several world records. Including the helicopter platform, the prototype in north Germany weighs 1,150 tonnes. Measuring 183 metres in height, the installation is even taller than Cologne Cathedral. When the three 61.5-metre rotor blades turn between seven and twelve times a minute, they cover an area that corresponds to two soccer pitches. It is no wonder that the machine room alone is the size of a detached house.
Since its foundation in 2001, the Hamburg-based company Repower Systems has concentrated on the development and production of multi-megawatt installations. Offshore wind farms and repowering - the replacement of older installations by new, more economic models - are the two ideas on which the former Hamburg environment senator, exShell director and current Repower boss Fritz Vahrenholt is relying. The figures speak for themselves: offshore wind farms with a total output of 45,000 megawatts are planned around the world. Individual offshore wind farms are expected to supply up to 1,000 megawatts - Repower is providing the appropriate system today with the 5M models. Orders have already been received in Hamburg. This summer, the first series production models will be installed 25 kilometers off the Scottish coast. German energy giant Eon and Lower Saxon energy company EWE have also ordered two 5M installations. The company reckons with new orders on the mainland as a result of repowering. The first wind turbines with an output of 600 kilowatts are about to be replaced. A single 5M installation could replace 50 old wind turbines. That is how totally new potential is emerging for wind energy on land.
IFJ concerned over continued violence in Bangladesh
The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) is concerned over continuing violence against journalists in Bangladesh, after eight journalists were injured during a demonstration on May 31.
The journalists were protesting attacks on the newspaper, Dainik Andolaner Bazar, by members of the ruling Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) on May 30, which forced the newspaper to suspend publication.
"The IFJ is concerned that reports of violence against journalists in Bangladesh are continuing and urges the government to act to intervene to stop this spate of attacks and ensure the culprits are brought to justice," IFJ president Christopher Warren said.
The journalists marched from the Satkhira Press Club to the courts to submit a memorandum demanding the immediate arrest and punishment of the attackers on Dainik Andolaner Bazar journalists.
The police charged journalists with batons when journalists tried to enter the courts to submit the memorandum.
The injured media workers included; Kalyan Banerjee of Prothom Alo; M Qamruzzaman of UNB; Amar Desh, Habibur Rahman of Channel I; Mozaffar Rahman of Janmobhumi, Raghunath Kha of Patradoot; Manirul Islam of Ajker Kagoj; and photojournalists Ashrafuzzaman Asha andTamjibur Rahman Tamjid.
Journalists later defied police obstruction by forming a human chain around the court premises for thirty minutes.
This comes only days after 25 journalists were injured in an attack by BNP members at a protest for press freedom.
"The IFJ calls upon the Bangladesh Government to carefully consider the memorandum, and to put an end the violence against journalists, before the situation further deteriorates," Warren said.
For further information contact IFJ Asia-Pacific +61 2 9333 0919
The IFJ represents over 500,000 journalists in more than 110 countries
Rudi Völler: Why Germany will win the World Cup?
Mr. Völler, the obligatory opening question: Why will Germany win the World Cup in July?
 Rudi Völler: Things are looking pretty good before the tournament. We are the home nation at the World Cup and there'll be a tremendous wave of euphoria just like there was at the Confederations Cup. That's why I am sure we've got a good chance of reaching the Final. Let me put it like this, Brazil are the clear favourites, closely followed by Italy , France and Argentina .
And not Holland ?
Rudi Völler: Correct.
 How does a player feel just before the World Cup: Under greater pressure or looking forward to the forthcoming feast of football?
Rudi Völler: You definitely look forward to it. You only start to feel pressure before the first game when you feel even more on edge than you do before the Final. The weeks of preparation are long and tortuous.
What exactly do you remember about your first World Cup?
Rudi Völler: The main thing is, the media scene back then was completely different. That was over twenty years ago: I was already 26 when I played in the Mexico finals. The whole country was football crazy and there was a tremendous atmosphere. On the other hand, there was a lot of stress and arguments in the team. It was the first time Franz Beckenbauer had managed the national side at a tournament. Even so we ended up as runners-up at the Final in what I consider to be the finest football stadium in the world. For me the Aztec Stadium is the Mecca of world football even if there are great stadiums all over the world these days.
How did you feel back in 1990 when you won the Italy World Cup and held the trophy aloft in the Rome evening air?
Rudi Völler: It was wonderful. But the best part of the game was the last four or five minutes. Argentina only had nine players on the pitch and had nothing left to give to the game. Sometimes the dying minutes of a game can drag on but I was enjoying it. We stroked the ball round the pitch and the Argentines couldn't get hold of it – the feeling of winning the World Cup was incredible. If you win the German league title that's just momentary. But World Cup wins last forever. It's funny that in most sports you are the ex-world champions straight after the next world championship. In football you are World Cup winners forever. Just like Olympic champions.
And how did you feel when you went out to Bulgaria 2-1 in USA '94?
Rudi Völler: Of course, you feel very disappointed. And in Germany we were spoiled because we had reached the Final in the three previous tournaments. But as a professional player you have to learn to accept defeat occasionally. However, I did feel sorry for the manager Berti Vogts.
Can you imagine putting World Cup winner on a business letterhead?
Rudi Völler: No, I can't imagine that. And also, you don't have to because everybody knows you are.
You played in three World Cup finals and were manager in 2002. What are the big differences between the two?
Rudi Völler: As a player you are just part of a team. And of course you want sporting success and to produce the best possible personal performances but as a player you don't carry any responsibility. That means you can enjoy yourself more at tournaments. As manager you're up to your neck in it. You can only enjoy a World Cup when it's all over.
Whether we're talking about Franz Beckenbauer, yourself or Jürgen Klinsmann it's amazing how you got the call-up to be Germany manager. How did your wife react when you told her you'd been appointed?
Rudi Völler: Naturally she was surprised. After I explained everything she said, "Of course. You've got to do it". She knew all about the implications of marrying a footballer.
You can't always be fair as a manager. Is that a burden?
Rudi Völler: There are a thousand ways of defining what's fair. You can't satisfy everybody when you pick a team. You often have to accept the burden of making difficult decisions.
Jürgen Klinsmann has decided who's Germany 's number one: Lehmann instead of Kahn in goal. What was your most difficult decision?
Rudi Völler: When you get to a tournament there are always two or three players on the verge of making the squad. Having to tell them they're staying at home isn't easy. It's the same with the World Cup Final; you have to tell one player or the other that they haven't made it into the starting line-up. I didn't lose any sleep over it but you're always under pressure. There's no time to relax.
So you preferred playing to managing at the World Cup?
Rudi Völler: No, it was just different. I liked being the manager. There were highs and lows; but more highs overall.
In the 1986 and 2002 World Cup Finals in Mexico and Japan the goalkeepers Toni Schumacher and Oliver Kahn (against Brazil ) made mistakes that had serious consequences. How does that affect you as a manager and as a player?
Rudi Völler: It was 0-0 for a long time. In 2002, as in 1986, we had quite a bit of time left. It didn't worry me. Mistakes happen and goals are scored. But if you're losing to Brazil you have to open up. And then there's a greater chance of conceding a second goal. That's exactly what happened.
Is it easy talking about these mistakes now?
Rudi Völler: No, why?
What's changed since your success at the 1990 World Cup?
Rudi Völler: When you're still playing you think, the game can't get any quicker. And then you find out after all that it has become more athletic and faster. There won't be any revolutionary changes in tactics but there is a trend towards faster players, that is fleet of foot and quick of mind. That goes together with tactical ability. The important thing is not to be afraid of making mistakes and to want the ball. However, one on ones have become more and more difficult. You left them behind when the tackles started flying in. Today you get two or three players on the man with the ball. It never used to be like that.
You were a World Cup winner in 1990 along with the current Germany coach Jürgen Klinsmann. What was Klinsmann like then as a person?
Rudi Völler: Jürgen was a different kind of professional footballer. He always suffered terribly when we had to spend a long time at training camps. That's why he does things differently today. As players we complemented each other perfectly. The important thing was everyone wanted each other to be successful. We always had a warm and friendly relationship with each other. Photo: picture-alliance / ASA / WerekRudi Völler
You've been a player, manager and Director of Sport. Which part is most pleasant?
Rudi Völler: When I resigned as manager I allowed myself some time out to think things over carefully. What direction was my life taking? Fortunately I still had my connection to Bayer Leverkusen as I had been their manager. But at the moment I'm happiest being Director of Sport. It's good being able to do both.
It's funny that your angry outburst on TV after the Iceland game is better remembered than finishing runner-up at the 2002 World Cup.
Rudi Völler: Curiously there are two episodes in my life that stick in the mind. At home that interview with Waldi Hartmann and abroad the photos of Frank Rijkard when he spat at me in the 1990 World Cup. Wherever I am in the world people always talk about it. Everyone knows the incident. But the worst thing was, I was spat at and I got sent off as well. That was an absolute outrage in my eyes. The referee will take the secret of my sending-off to his grave.
How well are you doing in getting tickets for the World Cup?
Rudi Völler: I'll be working with Günter Jauch on RTL covering the Sunday games – in fact, there'll be eight in total. I am curious about the African teams. I hope a few of them will upset the form books. I must admit to being a bit selfish as there might be one of them that Bayer Leverkusen could afford to buy.
[Courtesy: Federal Web-site, World Cup:2006]
|
