Feng shui man’s hand chopped off

Source: The star.com.my

Vicious attack: Police personnel checking the victim's car for clues after the incident last night. The severed hand is still missing 

 

GEORGE TOWN: A feng shui master had his left hand chopped off in a savage attack outside a restaurant near Jalan Masjid Negeri.

Th’ng Keat Seong, 44, was believed to be walking to his Mercedes-Benz when he was attacked at Jalan Lintang Emas near Jalan Besi at about 8pm last night.

Blood stains were found on the boot of his car which indicated that his assailants could have held his hand there before chopping it off.

Th’ng’s cries attracted the attention of passers-by who rushed him to a private hospital. He managed to call his sister-in-law to seek help after the attack. The number of assailants is not known at press time.

It is learnt that the police are looking for the missing hand. Penang police chief Deputy Comm Datuk Wira Ayub Yaakob said they were investigating the motive for the attack.

It is learnt that police have not ruled out the possibility that someone could have tried to extort money from him.

I never saw it coming, says feng shui master who lost left hand

By ZALINAH NOORDIN
zalinah@thestar.com.my

GEORGE TOWN: Feng shui master Th’ng Keat Seong, whose left hand was chopped off in a vicious attack on Monday, says he really did not see it coming.

Th’ng admitted he did not get any premonition that something bad would happen. “I am a feng shui expert. I don’t predict the future as I’m not a fortune teller,” he said.

Th’ng, 44, offers consultancy services to his clients and has his own shop selling feng shui items in Penang Times Square shopping mall.

He claimed there was someone out there who did not want him in the business due to jealousy.

Th’ng said he was walking to his car after dinner at a restaurant when he was attacked at Jalan Lintang Emas, near Jalan Besi, at about 8pm on Monday night.

Blood stains found on the car boot indicated that his assailants could have held his hand there before chopping it off.

“It all happened so fast and I can’t really recollect what happened, or how the assailants looked like.

“All I can remember is that someone yanked my left arm from behind and I felt a searing pain. The next thing I knew, my left hand was missing and there was a lot of blood,” said Th’ng, who is right handed, when met at the the Gleneagles Medical Centre yesterday.

Feng shui man’s hand still missing

GEORGE TOWN: The left hand of a feng shui master which was chopped off by assailants here on Tuesday is still missing.

Chances are even if the missing hand is found, it would be too late for surgeons to reattach it.

A medical expert, who declined to be named, said under normal circumstances, a severed hand has to be reattached within six hours to have any chance of functioning again.

George Town OCPD Asst Comm Gan Kong Meng believed Th’ng Keat Seong’s assailants had made off with the hand after hacking it off.

“The victim could hardly recall anything as he was in great pain. More than one assailant were involved in the savage attack,” he said yesterday.

ACP Gan said they were investigating the case from all possible angles, including business rivalry as the motive.

“We are appealing to eyewitnesses to furnish us with details of the attack. Those with information can inform the nearest police station,” he said.

Th’ng, 44, offers consultancy services to his clients and has his own shop selling feng shui items at the Penang Times Square shopping mall.

Th’ng, who is reported to be in stable condition, refused to talk to the media yesterday.
He was attacked when he walked to his car after dinner at a restaurant in Jalan Lintang Emas, near Jalan Besi, on Tuesday.

Attackers sever geomancer's hand Click on thumbnail to view

A good fortune teller/fengshui master tell will never read his own life...that is the trick in their trade. Posted by: leechron at Sat Oct 23 10:20:15 SGT 2010 Don't think feng shui master can see his own fortune.....i'd figured he can only see others misfortunes and rectify them before it's too late...:) Posted by: girlgonewild at Sat Oct 23 09:58:44 SGT 2010 MYS style of doing business? Posted by: perceivedtobe at Sat Oct 23 06:52:28 SGT 2010

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China claims supercomputer crown, a threat?

China has claimed the top spot on the list of the world's supercomputers.

 

The Tianhe-1A supercomputer is about 50% faster than its closest rival.

 

The title has gone to China's Tianhe-1A supercomputer that is capable of carrying out more than 2.5 thousand trillion calculations a second.

To reach such high speeds the machine draws on more than 7,000 graphics processors and 14,000 Intel chips.

The claim to be the fastest machine on the planet has been ratified by the Top 500 Organisation which maintains a list of the most powerful machines.

High power
 
China's Tianhe-1A (Milky Way) has taken over the top spot from America's XT5 Jaguar at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee that can carry out only 1.75 petaflops per second. One petaflop is the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.

The news about the machine broke just before the publication of the biennial Top 500 Supercomputer list which ranks the world's most powerful machines.

Prof Jack Dongarra from the University of Tennessee, one of the computer scientists who helps to compile the list, said China's claim was legitimate.

"This is all true," he told BBC News. "I was in China last week and talked with the designers, saw the system, and verified the results."

He added: "I would say it's 47% faster than the Oak Ridge National Laboratory's machine, 1.7 Pflops (ORNL system) to 2.5 Pflops (Chinese system)."

Tianhe-1A is unusual in that it unites thousands of Intel processors with thousands of graphics cards made by Nvidia.

The chips inside graphics cards are typically made up of small arithmetical units that can carry out simple sums very quickly. By contrast, Intel chips are typically used to carry out more complicated mathematical operations.

The machine houses its processors in more than 100 fridge-sized cabinets and together these weigh more than 155 tonnes.
Based in China's National Center for Supercomputing in the city of Tianjin, the computer has already started to do work for the local weather service and the National Offshore Oil Corporation.

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Is China a supercomputer threat?

Jack Dongarra, a professor at University of Tennessee's department of electrical engineering. China's supercomputer is a 'wake-up call.'

 

With China expected to officially take the supercomputer performance crown next month, I asked an expert about the state of supercomputing in the U.S. and whether China poses a long-term threat to the United States' current preeminence in supercomputing.

Nvidia announced yesterday that its chips are powering the "Tianhe-1A" Chinese supercomputer that achieved 2.507 petaflops, beating a U.S.-based system that is currently ranked No. 1 on the June Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world. The Chinese system is a unique hybrid design that uses approximately 7,000 Nvidia graphics chips along with 14,000 Intel Xeon CPUs. The graphics chips are what give the system the extra oomph to catapult it into the top supercomputer spot.

I spoke with Jack Dongarra, university distinguished professor at University of Tennessee's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and part of a group from the University of Tennessee, Oak Ridge National Laboratories, and Georgia Tech that recently purchased a hybrid system. It is important to note that Oak Ridge houses the supercomputer, dubbed "Jaguar," cited above that is currently ranked No. 1 in the world based on the Top500 June list: it is not a hybrid system.

Q: Does Oak Ridge have anything analogous to the Chinese hybrid system?
Dongarra: Oak Ridge has a small version of a machine that is hybrid in nature. So, this is an acquisition that just took place...out of a grant from the National Science Foundation. It involved Oak Ridge National Labs, University of Tennessee, and Georgia Tech. But it's much, much smaller than the Chinese system. The machine is in place and testing is being carried out at Oak Ridge. A node has two Intel Westmere chips and three Nvidia Fermi boards. There are 120 nodes in the system.

What makes the Chinese supercomputer so fast?
Dongarra: The Chinese designed their own interconnect. It's not commodity. It's based on chips, based on a router, based on a switch that they produce.

Is that in essence the secret sauce?
Dongarra: It's similar to Cray. Cray's contribution, besides the integration and software, is the interconnect network. They have a very fast interconnect that makes that machine perform very well. Though [the Chinese] project is based on U.S. processors, it uses a Chinese interconnect. That's the interesting part. They've put something together that is roughly twice the bandwidth of an InfiniBand interconnect [which is used widely in the U.S.]

Will the Chinese system in fact take the No. 1 spot on the Top500 list in November?
Dongarra: Yes. I saw the machine. I saw the output. It's the real thing.

Why doesn't Oak Ridge do what the Chinese are doing?
Dongarra: Oak Ridge doesn't have the ability or technology to develop an interconnect or a router. We don't make computers. We buy computers and use them. It's not within our scope or mission to be in the computer design business.

What's your advice?
Dongarra: You have to remember that you have to not only invest in the hardware. It's like a race car. In order to run the race car, you need a driver. You need to effectively use the machine. And we need to invest in various levels within the supercomputer ecology. The ecology is made up of the hardware, the operating system, the compiler, the applications, the numerical libraries, and so on. And you have to maintain an investment across that whole software stack in order to effectively use the hardware. And that's an aspect that sometimes we forget about. It's underfunded. We fund the hardware but we don't fund the other components. The ecosystem tends to get out of balance because the hardware tends to run far ahead of what we can develop in terms of software. We have machines that have a tremendous level of parallelism. We currently have a very crude way of doing programming.

Who would do that?
Dongarra: The research is performed under the auspices of the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense.

Is this a red flag for the U.S.?
Dongarra: Yes, this is a wake-up call. We need to realize that other countries are capable of doing this. We're losing an advantage.

Brooke Crothers has been an editor at large at CNET News, an analyst at IDC Japan, and an editor at The Asian Wall Street Journal Weekly. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not a current employee of CNET.

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From other news sites

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• About these results

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• Top 500 Supercomputers

Wall St reform architect Frank fights for survival

By Ros Krasny

BOSTON (Reuters) - Representative Barney Frank, the outspoken, witty Democrat closely tied to the 2008 U.S. bank bailout, faces a tough re-election battle after 15 terms in office at a time when incumbency itself is a liability.

Challenging the Massachusetts liberal is Republican Sean Bielat, an Iraq war veteran, and opinion polls suggest Frank has an uncomfortably narrow lead over a political unknown.

In the run-up to Tuesday's congressional elections, Frank has faced a torrent of negative ads and mailings, much of it from groups outside the state who support candidates from the conservative Tea Party movement.

Last week, Frank borrowed $200,000 from his personal savings to prop up his campaign, saying he needed "to defend against outside attacks."

A recent opinion poll showed Frank with 49 percent of likely voters, Bielat at 37 percent and 12 percent undecided. Frank kept his seat in the House of Representatives with 68 percent of the vote in 2008 and ran unopposed in 2006.

Massachusetts has already been the scene of one of the year's biggest upsets, when Republican Scott Brown won a special election for the U.S. Senate seat held for almost five decades by a Democratic Party pillar, the late Edward Kennedy.

"If Barney Frank loses, it would be as significant as Scott Brown's win. You would really begin to see the depths of this anti-government sentiment," said Marc Landy, professor of political science at Boston College.

WALL STREET TIES THAT BIND

American voters are in a surly mood over the weak economy, unemployment near 10 percent and the state of the housing market as banks face scrutiny over how they handled the paperwork in home foreclosures across the country.

Frank, 70, has been chairman of the powerful House Financial Services Committee for almost four years.
He helped to broker the $700 billion fund to bail out banks at the height of the financial crisis and he promoted legislation to slow foreclosures and keep afloat Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the federally controlled companies that own or guarantee more than half of the $11 trillion in U.S. mortgages.

He was a chief architect of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, the Obama administration's plan for tighter regulation of the financial industry.

Bielat's campaign has tagged Frank as a "key player in America's financial collapse" who "has promoted much of what caused the worst economic downturn in decades."

Landy said some see Frank as the "personification of the cozy relationship between the government and irresponsible finance."

Frank's congressional district stretches from the affluent Boston suburbs of Brookline and Newton southward to the working-class towns of Fall River and New Bedford.

 The New Bedford Standard-Times newspaper has backed Frank over Bielat, 35, a political novice, former U.S. Marine and project manager at a company that designs and builds robots.

"Recoil from Barney Frank's gruff manner if you will, but his intellect and effectiveness make him invaluable," it said.

Even if Frank is re-elected, some wonder whether he might retire if Republicans gain control of the House, as most polls suggest, and he loses his committee chair
.
"Being in the minority is not as much fun," said Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College.

But Frank has unfinished business -- reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and defense of the Dodd-Frank Act against a Republican assault.

Some veteran lawmakers who lose powerful committee chairs might be tempted to call it a day, especially given the rancor in Washington, but Frank is probably not among them, said Thomas Whalen, a political historian at Boston University.

"He'll never quit," said Whalen. "He'll be taken out of the Capitol on a slab."

(Reporting by Ros Krasny; Editing by Ellen Wulfhorst and John O'Callaghan)

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Survival-made-easyfor executives

By ANDREW LEE
andrewlee@thestar.com.my

How to Relax without Getting the Axe
Author: Stanley Bing
Publisher: Harper

FEW people working in large businesses seem content with their day-to-day jobs. The initial diligence that any newcomer displays is unsustainable as soon as he finds out that business is a hamster wheel, that he is the hamster running all day long, huffing and puffing to keep things turning.

As soon as it dawns upon the newcomer that there is in fact no future (or a bleak one, at the very least), work becomes a chore, effort is kept to a bare minimum, and quality of the final product is compromised. The newcomer eventually rises to a certain position where he no longer has the opportunity to advance any further, thus becoming the bitter and disgruntled employee who is stuck in a situation where staying on and quitting equate to the same thing – hardship.

Yet, for every obligated rodent who keeps the wheel running, there is a sleek furball happily “working” in the corner office down the hall. These guys seem to contribute less, and are often more unreliable and irresponsible. However, they soon rise to the top on the back of hefty bonuses and “business meetings” to various countries. The rodent, it seems, eventually mutates into the fat cat.

These crafty people have mastered the concept of executive life, what Bing describes as “the middle ground between slavery and unemployment”.

In his book, he goes on to explain the executive life. Citing examples such as the provision of big bucks with bonuses (in spite of screwing up), US$150 lunches, the loss of touch with reality, as well as drinks with “friends” who would like to see you dead. According to Bing, the secret of happiness is to live such a life whether one deserves to or not. The fact is that nobody deserves to. Therefore, to quote Bing: “Why shouldn’t you not deserve to at the same high level as other guys who don’t deserve to?”

The book teaches us a phalanx of ploys, evasions, hoaxes and clever swindles grouped together under a simple name: Executricks. Along the way, Bing guides us through the core skills that no budding office ear picker can afford to do without - delegation (telling people what to do and having them do it), absence (operating from the digital vacuum), abuse of status (it can be done), decisiveness (even when confused) and engagement (but only when necessary).

Bing cites a few examples of respected figures who have mastered executricks. The greatest delegator in history, Ronald Reagan was widely chastised back in the day for sleeping during meetings and allowing his wife to act as the actual chief executive. Yet, he is remembered as one of the greatest American presidents, with nary a word implying that he snoozed through the majority of his second term.

Today, great potentates such as Putin, Jobs, Gates and Kim Jong Il are honoured more in the breach than in the observance most of the time. They have mastered the ability to be the perceived train drivers when they are, in effect, invisible. Can you imagine a Kremlin worker complaining about how lame his boss is for not having been in the Pedestrian Control Department for years? No – the reason being that Putin is totally there, even when he’s not.

It may seem this is the perfect book for those who intend to shirk responsibilities, however Bing makes it clear in one of the final chapters in the book that work is inevitable to the executive. Work is like crisis; there is usually one waiting to happen. The goal therefore is clear – to work with maximum power for the shortest amount of time possible.

But how is one to know what work is, and what isn’t? Thankfully, included in the book are several important definitions of work:

a) Professional expertise, accumulated by you over a period of time, is needed;
b) The need to “get things right the first time” is not imaginary;
c) You get paid for it, and if you don’t do it you don’t get paid at all; and
d) Somebody told you to do it.

The key when the alarm bells sound are to treat every piece of work as a battle. There’s a reason why business types love to read biography and history – it provides them with a useful metaphor! There are numerous conflicts that one could be dealing with during work, and as long as one manages to avoid getting bogged down in long-term unwinnable campaigns (Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan), one should be fine. Transform these into short, hard pitched battles, and one can give up work and get back to “work”.

A word of caution. This book is not for budding yuppies looking to rise to the top of their respective businesses or management consultancies. There are various self-help, motivational and Warren Buffett-type books available in the market for such cases (although fetching tea or coffee while staying attentive to the various needs and wants of your boss probably helps as much, if not more). Rather, this book is for the person who realises his or her standing within an organisation, and intends to derive the maximum utility from such a position.

Bing’s ethics might be questionable – but then again, so were Machiavelli’s in the medieval period. And nobody called Sun Tzu a saint either, yet both men are exalted on the same podium as a certain Ronald Reagan. The same fate awaits Putin, Gates, Kim Jong Il and whoever else is able to master the subtle yet effective skills of executricks. Now if you will excuse me, there is a sandwich I need to enjoy.

Who ‘Ruled the Air’ in 1910? (And Who Rules It Now?)

• By Matthew Lasar, ars technica
• Categories: Spectrum, Telecommunications, Wireless

“We each have a signal. A stream of raw power that flows with us. A power. A superpower. A super communication power.” So proclaims Verizon Wireless’s innovative “Rule the Air” advertising campaign.

“Send your signal forth with luminous videos, glorious data, and sublime megapixels,” another Verizon ad urges consumers. “Transmit your latest brainstorm over the airwaves. You just might start a revolution.”

Indeed, the airwaves are fundamentally democratic, Verizon insists. “Air has no prejudice,” a procession of women declare in a Rule the Air video spot. “It does not care carry the opinions of a man faster than those of a woman. It does not filter out an idea because I’m 16 and not 30.” 

Verizon: Rule the air ad. spencss1 http://www.youtube.com/user/spencss1

Virtually unscathed

Revolutionary, democratic, unprejudicial — Verizon’s campaign comes as Americans debate whether the wireless broadband airwaves really represent any of these wonderful things. Who will really rule the air, consumer advocates wonder, smartphone users or the wireless carriers? Two mobile providers dominate the broadband airwaves and, thanks to a recent federal court decision, they enjoy unchecked power to limit or prioritize data, content, and features at their pleasure.

But this isn’t the first time a big carrier tried a charm offensive of this sort. A century ago, the insurgent phone company of the time — American Telephone and Telegraph — also found itself swimming in a sea of public worry. Consumers and independent providers feared (rightly, as it turned out) that the corporation would prevail in its ultimate goal, the acquisition of almost all of the nation’s phone lines.

And so AT&T launched the Progressive Era equivalent of a “Rule the Air” campaign. Obviously there’s a difference between then and now. Verizon offers wireless service; AT&T leased out its land lines. But in terms of policy objectives, the historian Roland Marchand thought that AT&T’s crusade worked.
When the Federal Communications Commission launched its first probe into the company’s aggressive practices in the mid-1930s, AT&T emerged “virtually unscathed” from the ordeal, Marchand noted in his classic history, Creating the Corporate Soul: The Rise of Public Relations and Corporate Imagery in American Big Business.


“When observers asked why investigations of the telephone monopoly had elicited almost no public support during the perilous mid-1930s, corporate analysts almost unanimously gave credit to AT&T’s 30-year campaign of coordinated institutional advertising and public relations,” his study concluded.
Let’s go back to the first “Rule the Air” campaign and see how it plied its magic.

The Multiplication of Power

Besieged by critics who warned that AT&T was gradually pushing independents out of the market, the company responded with a slogan: “One Policy-One System-Universal Service.” The “curse of Bigness” would be countered with the argument that bigness was best for consumers, for the nation, and especially for businessmen.

AT&T technology represented the “Multiplication of Power,” an early magazine advertisement insisted. The word “power” became ubiquitous in Bell ads. “Has the increased ability of the American business man to bring people to him from every locality, far and near, over the Bell Telephone System, been the cause of the mulitiplication of his power and his principality?” an ad rhetorically asked

You bet it had, just about every AT&T/Bell pitch proclaimed. AT&T represented the “Triumph of Science: Making a Neighborhood a Nation.”

And so it went — the telephone represented the “annihilator of space,” another magazine ad announced. AT&T “beguiled men with talk of their personal power,” Marchand observed, then piled on statistics about subscribers or dollars or lines or miles “to brag of the company’s own magnitude and resources.”

The early ads exhibited a decided penchant for the recitation — to the point of incantation — of large figures. Over the first 10 years, some 70 percent of the ads cited at least one figure in the thousands, millions or billions. Sixty percent included one or more figures in millions or above. Between 1908 and 1912, texts of seven individual ads incorporated ‘million(s)’ and ‘billion(s)’ at least four times. In 1914 the corporation outdid itself by including figures in the millions or billions some 14 times in its April advertisement and nine times in August.

Supreme and glorious

But, note the presence of a woman stretching out the “Transcontinental Phone Line,” a clear reference to the transcontinental railroad built a generation earlier. AT&T was always ambivalent about how to deploy feminine images.

As Marchand noted, the Bell System consistently pitched to the business class first — the phone represented as essential to companies and professionals. Bell ads often drew the latter as square-jawed guys confidently clinching deals in their offices. AT&T marketers were far more ambivalent about touting the telephone as a venue for “female” gossip (as if men didn’t gossip as well).

AT&T’s “bias towards ultilitarianism and no-nonsense masculinity” had a purpose, Marchand argued. “A monopoly utility company, one charged with supplying a functional service, needed to assume a dignified civic stature; it had reasons to shun any association with frivolous indulgences.”

But the corporation was also anxious to emphasize the “democratic” nature of telephone service, especially during the First World War, as women’s suffrage became a national issue and, in 1920, a national reality.
“War gave woman her supreme and glorious opportunity to enlarge her field of service,” an AT&T institutional ad explained shortly after the conflict. “In the counting house and chemical laboratory she has loaned her brains to the cause.” And “in telephone service, also, a host of capable, loyal daughters” further the nation’s future, the pitch continued.

Indeed, AT&T itself represented the essence of democracy, a publicly owned corporation exemplifying the central phrase of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “Of the people, by the people, for the people.”
“People of every walk of life, in every state in the Union, are represented in the ownership of the Bell Telephone System,” another ad explained. “People from every class… ”
And, of course, “Of all AT&T’s stockholders, the respectable, needy widow gained central station by virtue of her representation of the ‘many citizens of small means’ who depended on the company’s profits,” Marchand observed. “No plutocrats were visible here.”

Evading the worst

By the mid-20th century, these advertising campaigns had repeatedly helped AT&T to avoid anti-trust scrutiny, even as the company gradually gobbled up most of the nation’s phone carriers. In 1913, the corporation avoided breakup or nationalization by agreeing to connect with local carriers and to a more regulated approach to their acquisition. In 1919, the Bell System released itself from wartime government control.
“The leading AT&T executives … freely attributed the success of their negotiations to the previous 10 years of AT&T advertising,” Marchand concludes.

And in 1935, when the “seemingly inevitable” government challenge finally arrived:

The FCC’s relatively harmless specific recommendations, at a time when many corporations felt themselves gravely threatened or impaired, clearly represented a victory for AT&T. [AT&T] Vice President [Arthur] Page pointed to AT&T’s good public reputation as the reason such a “natural target” had escaped attention earlier in the “investigating craze,” and he took delight in the public’s apparent indifference to the investigation reports. Fortune magazine buttressed the judgment of AT&T’s executives that the investigation had “produced only the most trivial accusations” against the company. It credited the absence of any public outcry to the success of the corporation’s tireless advertising and public relations campaign.

A century later, we have a repetition of AT&T’s approach in Verizon’s “Rule the Air” offensive. Will it work? The campaign doesn’t seem to be getting great results in terms of new subscribers, but with Verizon’s 4G device lineup impending, that’s an unfinished story.

The bigger question is how we’ll define who really “rules the air,” and under what terms? Do consumers enjoy sovereignty solely by virtue of their purchase of the newest, coolest mobile-broadband device? Or must they have some say in the terms under which “the air” is sold to them, and under what circumstances data and features on the public byways are managed, prioritized or even barred?
Who rules the air? Hopefully this time around, that question won’t be decided by an ad agency.

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Further reading

These nearly century-old magazine advertisements are just some of the amazing illustrations to be found in Marchand’s Creating the Corporate Soul, published by University of California Press. The 460-page book also includes chapters on the auto industry, the World Fairs of the 1890s through the 1930s, and General Electric. A great holiday gift for all technology lovers, you can buy it directly through UC Press here.
Follow us for disruptive tech news: John C. Abell and Epicenter on Twitter.
See Also:

• In Escalating War Against Verizon, AT&T Is Getting Tone Deaf — and …
• Verizon to AT&T: Can You Sue Me Now?
• Verizon Leads, AT&T Runs Last in Wired.com’s 3G Speed Test …
• AT&T Sees No Threat in a Verizon iPhone
• Cap My iPhone? Try This Instead, AT&T
• A Step Ahead of Regulators, Verizon Activates Concession Mode …

Tags: AT&T, Verizon

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Dollar doldrums: No end in sight

10 Yr Treasury vs USD Index: Economic Analysis By HiddenLevers Aug 1 Aug 16 Sep 1 Sep 16 Oct 1 Oct 16 2.3% 2.4% 2.5% 2.6% 2.7% 2.8% 2.9% 3.0% 3.1% 76 78 80 82 84 5d | 1m | 3m | 6m | YTD | 1y | 5y | 10y | All Economic Analysis By HiddenLevers

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- All hail the puny dollar?

The greenback slipped once again Monday morning, falling to a new 15-year low against the yen. The dollar also fell against the euro and pound.

The renewed dollar sell-off comes after global financial ministers pledged to avoid currency wars at the conclusion of the G-20 meeting in South Korea Saturday.

Accusations of currency manipulation have roiled financial markets, with U.S. officials expressing frustration about how artificially low they believe the Chinese yuan is when compared to the dollar.

But global traders are continuing to sell the dollar. And that's because, somewhat ironically, many investors feel that the U.S. may be doing some manipulation of its own -- intentional or not.

The Federal Reserve is widely expected to unveil a new round of asset purchases at its next policy meeting, a two-day session that wraps up on November 3.

This so-called practice of quantitative easing is generally viewed as bad for the dollar because the Fed would be essentially printing money in order to pay for the long-term bonds it plans to buy.

Michael Pento, senior economist with Euro Pacific Capital in Westport, Conn., said that more quantitative easing is troubling because it may discourage foreign investors from buying the dollar, which is something they did in droves during the height of the financial crisis of 2008.

At that time, the dollar was still viewed as a safe bet and its status as the world's reserve currency was not in doubt. Pento worries that this may not be true for much longer.

"The dollar is being destroyed on a daily basis," he said. "Another massive round of easing would put everyone on notice that if you are seeking to hide in our dollar you will be severely punished."

0:00 /2:53Weak dollar is a double-edged sword

The fear is that if the dollar continues to fall, foreign creditors will eventually get tired of the weak dollar and sell their Treasuries. That would push long-term yields much higher and could help bring about inflation.

So far though, as the chart at the top of this column shows, long-term yields have been edging lower even as the dollar continues to fall.

Along those lines, not everyone is sweating the weak dollar. Alex Bellefleur, financial economist with Brockhouse Cooper, a brokerage firm in Montreal, said it's worth noting that the stock market has been rallying as the dollar has weakened.

"The U.S. dollar has been the laggard in international currencies. But that could help in terms of boosting exports and earnings for large companies," Bellefleur said. "We don't think this is something that's negative in the near-term."

The problem is that at some point though, the cons to the weak dollar will outweigh the pros.

Pento said that if the widely-watched U.S. dollar index, which measures the dollar against a basket of key currencies, falls below 70, that could jeopardize the dollar's standing around the world. That index is currently around 77.

But Bellefleur doesn't think that the dollar will slide that much more. He said that for the dollar to truly lose its reserve status, something has to replace it. And he doesn't believe that will happen anytime soon.

"There are still no alternatives to the dollar as the world's reserve currency. The euro used to be viewed as possibly being one but people have had second thoughts about that," he said.

Keep track of the dollar and other currencies

Dean Popplewell, chief currency strategist for Oanda, a Toronto-based foreign exchange broker, said investors should not forget gold. He noted that weakness in the dollar has coincided with the record run in the yellow metal.

So while investors may not think the euro can replace the dollar, gold -- which risk-averse investors love because of its tangible nature -- may be another story.

"At the moment, gold is trading as if it's the reserve currency. People want commodities over the dollar," Popplewell said.

Popplewell added that as long as the Fed has an easy money policy in place, the weak dollar trend is likely to continue. He predicts that the euro, currently trading around $1.40, could climb as high as $1.46 before the year is out.

"There will come a time when the dollar stops depreciating. But right now everyone has the same bet. It's a one-way, lemming trade," he said. "There is no money to be made on betting on the dollar at this point."

- The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Paul R. La Monica. Other than Time Warner, the parent of CNNMoney.com, and Abbott Laboratories, La Monica does not own positions in any individual stocks.   

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Blood pressure checks performed by barbers improve hypertension control in African-American men

Neighborhood barbers, by conducting a monitoring, education and physician-referral program, can help their African-American customers better control high blood pressure problems that pose special health risks for them, a new study from the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute shows.
 

The study -- the first to subject increasingly popular barbershop-based health programs to a scientific scrutiny with randomized, controlled testing -- demonstrates the haircutters' heart health efforts work well enough that they could save hundreds of lives annually, according to results to be published online today on the Archives of Internal Medicine website at http://archinte.ama-assn.org/ and in the peer-reviewed medical journal's Feb. 28, 2011, print issue.

In the research -- led by Ronald G. Victor, MD, a hypertension expert and associate director of the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute -- barbers for 10 months offered blood pressure checks during men's haircuts and promoted physician follow-up with personalized health education for customers with high blood pressure. This enhanced screening program markedly improved blood pressure levels among the barbershops' patrons. Although blood pressure levels also fell in a comparison group whose members received only educational brochures about high blood pressure, the improvement was greater in the barber-assisted group.

Uncontrolled hypertension is one of the most prevalent causes of premature disability and death among African-Americans. African-American men have the highest death rate from hypertension of any race, ethnic and gender group in the United States – three times higher than white men.

"What we learned from this trial is that the benefits of intensive blood pressure screening are enhanced when barbers are empowered to become healthcare extenders to help combat this epidemic of the silent killer in their community"," said Victor, the Burns and Allen Chair in Cardiology Research. "Barbers, whose historical predecessors were barber-surgeons, are a unique work force of potential community health advocates because of their loyal clientele."

Since the 1980s, African-American-owned barbershops and hair salons have hosted screening programs for medical conditions that disproportionately affect African-Americans. Victor's study concludes that if hypertension intervention programs were put in place in the estimated 18,000 African-American barbershops in the U.S., it would result in the first year in about 800 fewer heart attacks, 550 fewer strokes and 900 fewer deaths.

Seventeen African-American-owned barbershops in Dallas and approximately 1,300 male patrons with confirmed hypertension participated in this study, which ran from March, 2006, to December, 2008, when Victor was professor of medicine at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.

All African-American men patronizing the participating shops were offered baseline blood pressure screenings for hypertension. The shops then were assigned randomly to the intervention or comparison group.

Barbers at the nine shops in the intervention group were trained to measure blood pressure properly and they offered free checks with every cut. If a customer's reading was high, the barber encouraged him to see his doctor, and, if he did not, the barber called the study's nursing staff to arrange a physician visit. The customer, in turn, got a free haircut if he returned to the shop with a doctor-signed referral card.

In the eight shops in the comparison group, customers received a blood pressure check at the study's outset, and then were offered standard educational pamphlets about hypertension.

At the study's conclusion, 20 percent more hypertensive patrons in the intervention group had their blood pressure controlled with medication compared to 10 percent in the control group.

"We need further exploration to make this kind of program scalable and sustainable," said Victor, who is launching a new study with African-American barbershops in Southern California. "If this kind of program could be applied to large numbers of African-American men, that would be an enormous asset in preventing heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure and other serious complications of hypertension,"

More information: Arch Intern Med. Published online October 25, 2010. doi:10.1001/archinternmed.2010.390
Provided by Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

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