Il y aura un quiz sur le vocabulaire

The limelight, however, is not always favourable for the Muslim sisters. As the cause of women emerges as the main battleground between liberals and Islamists in new democracies in the Middle East, some of the most prominent sisters are seen as an integral part of a sinister Brotherhood plot to Islamise the state and undermine women’s rights. At a time when liberals are seeking to limit the encroachment of Islamic law on a new constitution, a stream of accusations have depicted the Muslim sisters as supporters of lifting the ban on genital mutilation and of lowering the marriage age for girls from the current 18.

Liberal activist Manal Tibe, who resigned from the panel drafting the new constitution, at a demonstration in support of the protection of women’s rights

Many liberal women, however, consider the sisters and their ability to influence mainstream society as a bigger threat than the Brotherhood men. “I can’t claim to understand them 100 per cent but I think they have undergone some kind of brainwashing,” says Hoda Badran, chairwoman of the Alliance for Arab Women, a liberal women’s group.

I hear more dread at a Cairo demonstration where liberal women are protesting against a constitution drafting process that is overwhelmingly influenced by the Brotherhood. “What scares me is that the sisters are all about obedience and loyalty – the commands come from high above and they just follow,” says Zeynab Abdel Rahman, a 40-year-old veiled woman who runs a charity and supports a liberal party. “If the Brotherhood writes the constitution, they will rule according to their sharia.”

To be sure, the Muslim sisters live in a peculiar world, with the strict interpretations of Islam leaving them with convictions that seem at odds with fast-changing modernity. For decades, they have been cocooned in a society that sustained itself by looking inwards and guarding its secrets – Brotherhood families have often intermarried, for example. Although there is much debate within the movement, once a decision is taken by the guidance bureau, such as the move to field a presidential candidate, which the Brotherhood had promised Egyptians it would not do, discussion ends.

The sisters argue that respect for leadership decisions is one of the greatest assets of their movement. “The Muslim Brotherhood’s biggest strength is that they have very dedicated young people ready to implement the democratic decisions even though they might not agree with some of them. That’s why we win elections,” says Asem.

Oumayma Kamel, the senior sister who sits on the panel drafting the constitution and who has been at the receiving end of much criticism, says that the liberals are zeroing in on issues that are simply not priorities. What about women’s education and the fight against illiteracy, she asks, which is still rampant in rural Egypt? What about the struggle against poverty in a country where nearly half the population is impoverished? “Is it equality or equity? That’s the issue. What the liberals care about is women’s freedom. But women’s condition won’t improve without education,” she tells me. “Men and women have the same rights and responsibilities but I know that there are differences between men and women, it’s biological. Being a mother is a woman’s most important job, it’s fundamental, and so we speak of the protection of motherhood and child and the liberals don’t like it.”

In reality, however, some sisters admit that the Brotherhood has never given much thought to women’s rights. A patriarchal organisation, it has also left issues that are important to women to be decided by the men. Nor has there been much pressure for a rethinking of positions because Egyptian society is, in any case, largely conservative. A woman need not be in the Brotherhood to be warned by her parents against confrontation at home and told to seek the counsel of her husband.

Within the sisterhood, however, you can glean a diversity of views, with some of the younger sisters seemingly more attuned to women’s rights, and more empowered by last year’s revolution. With time and greater political participation perhaps their voices will be better heard.

“The waters are stirring and we have started to think about what we know about women’s rights,” says Nermeen Hassan, the medical professor. She teaches a course to other sisters about preparing for marriage. In the past, the course instructed the girls to look nice and not pester their husbands. “Now there is no longer language that says you should be obedient but more emphasis on complementing each other and that there should be no power struggle between men and women,” she explains. “We also talk about housework and say that sharia does not oblige a woman to do it, that men and women should discuss it and if no agreement is reached, then the man must provide a servant.”

Not quite a revolution yet – nor would such recommendations benefit poorer families – but, as Hassan says, it is all part of a “natural” evolution in the Brotherhood. One, however, that is not fast enough or radical enough for non‑Islamists.

Roula Khalaf is the FT’s Middle East editor

Supercomputers - Speed within reach at affordable prices

By Jessica Twentyman December 2, 2008 3:58 pm Financial Times

This has been a milestone year in supercomputing. These high-performance machines, engineered to cope with the most mathematically intensive tasks, have hit new heights of power and performance, while becoming more widely available to businesses.

Twice yearly, in June and November, the 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world are ranked by Top500.org, a group of supercomputing experts from the Universities of Mannheim and Tennessee and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

In June, IBM’s Roadrunner supercomputer, based at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, became the first machine to achieve the long-coveted goal of breaking the “petaflop” barrier, processing more than one million billion calculations per second.

In November, Cray’s Jaguar supercomputer, installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, also passed that milestone. In the most recent rankings, Roadrunner and Jaguar notched up performances of 1.105 petaflops and 1.059 petaflops, respectively.

These are giant leaps. “When I started out in the supercomputer industry 25 years ago, we were all talking about the megaflop barrier – millions of operations per second,” says Margaret “Peg” Williams, senior vice-president of engineering at Cray, an established supplier in the field. “These days, that’s just dull and we’ve broken the gigaflop and teraflop barriers along the way to today’s petaflop performance.”

Today, even the cheapest PC runs at gigaflop rates yet it is only 11 years since the US government spent about $33m to build ASCI Red, one of the first supercomputers to achieve one teraflop.

The rate of progress equates to a 1,000-fold increase in processing power roughly every 10 years, says Dave Turek, vice president of IBM’s Deep Computing group, and that in turn has led to “enhanced fidelity”, or more refined analysis, in terms of output.

“We’re now getting to the point where a supercomputer isn’t just used to model the behaviour of a single component in a jet engine, for example, but whole collections of components, working together in an integrated system.

“Or we can model different processes on a much smaller or larger scale, from the effect of a new drug on a disease at a molecular level, to the impact of human behaviour on climate change over hundreds of years. And we can perform these tasks far faster, too.”

This ability, he says, is largely down to parallel processing – breaking a large computing task into logical components and processing them simultaneously on a vast pool of multiple processors.

The more chips added to a machine, the quicker they can process large tasks, as long as the application is engineered to run in parallel, rather than sequentially.

Since parallel processing became available to commercial organisations in the early 1990s, the line has blurred between traditional supercomputing, geared to solving complex scientific problems, and high performance computing (HPC), which aims to deliver bulk processing power.

Indeed IDC, the consultancy, has redefined its supercomputer category to include HPC systems costing more than $500,000.

Sales of such systems, it estimates, grew by 24 per cent in 2007, to reach $3.2bn.

But as the technology takes on an increasingly important role in industry and government, as well as academic research, it is increasingly the low end of the market, for HPC systems costing less than $250,000, that is the real engine of growth.

The road to such growth began in the 1990s, when high-end computing systems started using standard components in place of proprietary technology.

“Twenty years ago, a supercomputer was built from exotic components that made it blindingly fast and blindingly expensive as well,” says John Barr, an analyst with the 451 Group, an industry research company.

Today’s supercomputers, he says, use commodity chipsets from Intel and AMD and interconnect technologies based on the widely used Ethernet and Infiniband standards. Prices have dropped and smaller organisations are now able to take advantage of the processing power.

Arguably the most striking example of this came in September with the announcement of a partnership between Cray and Microsoft, which has made rapid advances in the sector with its HPC Server operating system.

The two companies launched the Cray CX1, touted as ”the most affordable supercomputer Cray has ever offered”, with prices starting at $25,000.

Vince Mendillo, director of HPC for Microsoft, says the CX1 is aimed at organisations in industries such as life sciences and financial services that are exploring supercomputing and do not have the in-house expertise or resources to run a fully fledged supercomputer.

The partners also hope to lure scientists, and researchers with discretionary IT budgets, to use the system to run workloads locally, creating ”supercomputing on the desktop”, rather than on huge, centralised machines.

A similar model is offered by chip maker Nvidia, which in November announced a “Personal Supercomputer” design, that will enable other manufacturers to build high-performance computers that look like traditional workstations.

Already, a number of PC vendors, including Dell and Lenovo, have signed up to offer workstations based on this design, at prices starting below $10,000, according to Andy Keane, general manager of GPU computing at Nvidia.

These machines, he says, will enable researchers to conduct at least some of their research at their desks.

“Now, researchers tend to write the code on a standard notebook and then take it to the supercomputer in order to deploy it,” he says.

Carrying out research at a workstation will reduce the time it takes to work on problems and crunch data, he adds.

The growing availability of HPC capabilities, however, raises questions about environmental impact: they consume enormous amounts of energy.

Mr Turek of IBM points out: “Energy efficiency has become as important as raw performance for the modern supercomputer. Now, it’s all about how much computing you can get out of each megawatt consumed.”

New York subway devastated by storm

By Robert Wright in New York Last updated: October 30, 2012 3:52 pm Financial Times

New York City’s subway system faces the most devastating disaster in its 108-year history after the storm surge from post-tropical storm Sandy flooded seven of its 10 tunnels under the East River, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s chief executive has said.

There was also severe damage to other commuter transport infrastructure, including flooding to a Long Island Railroad tunnel under the East River, flooding on a Path train tunnel under the Hudson and flooding to the Brooklyn-Battery road tunnel.

Although Joseph Lhota, the MTA’s chief executive, declined to put a date on when service would be fully restored, it looks likely to be weeks before service on key commuter routes returns fully to normal.

“The New York City subway system is 108 years old, but it has never faced a disaster as devastating as what we experienced last night,” Mr Lhota said. “Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on our entire transportation system in every borough and county of the region. It has brought down trees, ripped out power and inundated tunnels, rail yards and bus depots.”

New York’s public transport networks appear to have suffered some of the most severe damage in the region affected by Monday night’s storm, the largest in decades to hit the US’s eastern seaboard. New Jersey transit services remained suspended on Tuesday and Chris Christie, the state’s governor, said all routes had suffered “major damage”. All large New York area airports – including JFK, Newark and La Guardia – also remained closed.

However, the Washington Metro, the US’s second-busiest mass transit system, was able to announce plans for a partial restoration of service from 2pm on Tuesday.

It is likely to be the damage to New York City’s underwater rail tunnels that takes longest to rectify. Mr Lhota told New York’s WNYC public radio that he would be unable until later in the day on Tuesday even to estimate how long restoration of service in the affected tunnels would take. However, in a report following last year’s Hurricane Irene, Klaus Jacob, a professor at Columbia University, told WNYC that a “best-case scenario” for reopening a flooded subway tunnel would take 29 days.

Mr Lhota told WNYC he was going to try to get the subway running again “as quickly as I possibly can”. But the challenge was likely to be not only that the tunnels had been inundated but that the flooding had involved saltwater entering delicate electrical systems.

“Water and electricity never mix properly, but when you add salt to it, once the water is gone, the salt leaves a film,” Mr Lhota said. “The way electronics work on the subway system is two pieces of metal running together conducting electricity. And if there’s anything in between those two pieces of metal – like film left over from salt – that needs to be cleaned off because the connections need to be clear.”

Mr Lhota stressed, nevertheless, that the subway system was flexible and that it would be possible to reroute some services. Two of the system’s East River crossings are by bridges, which appear to have suffered little damage.

On other key commuter services, Mr Lhota said the Long Island Rail Road yards by Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, as well as its East River tunnels and much of the network in suburban Long Island, had all been flooded. Tracks on the Metro North railroad connecting Westchester County and Connecticut to New York City had suffered damage from “hundreds” of trees on the track, he said.

On non-MTA services, the Path service – operated by the New York New Jersey Port Authority and linking New York City and parts of New Jersey – remained suspended. There were pictures of water flooding into the foundations of new buildings at the site of the World Trade Center, which connect to a Path train station, and reports that Path’s tunnel under the Hudson by the site was flooded.

China is making rapid advances in technology, but without reform in the education system and a culture tolerant of failure, it won't produce the next Steve Jobs, says technology entrepreneur Kai-Fu Lee in an interview with the BBC, as part of a series of features on challenges for China's new leaders.

What was the technology scene like in China when you went there in the late 1990s?

In 1998 I returned to China to work for Microsoft and start up technology research labs. Young Chinese people I met while in the US showed a lot of potential and were very hungry for success, very hard-working. I felt with my experience that I could help them realise their potential as well as to do great things for my employer.

How much has it changed since then?

In the late 1990s business leadership was lacking. Companies were being built, but leaders did not have enough experience to run them. Industries were much smaller and it felt like a backward country.

Fourteen years on, we see a very vibrant economy with powerful and successful companies led by leaders with experience. At that time, many companies were about pure manufacturing and now there are quite a few in the hi-tech sector. They are not in the forefront of the world, but they are capable companies with decent technology portfolios.

What capacity does China have to develop a truly creative technology industry?

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  Kai-Fu Lee is a Chinese-American technology entrepreneur
  
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  He is currently the CEO of China-based Innovation Works, a venture capital firm for Chinese technology start-ups
  
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  In 1998 he went to China to set up Microsoft Research Labs.
  
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  In 2005 he became founding president of Google China and stayed as its chief there until 2009
  

Companies like Apple and Google are innovative from their very roots, built to change the world and with people willing to take big risks. The US has a culture tolerant of failure, driven by individual passion. Companies are not started to make money or make the founders a billionaire, but to build great technology.

China is in a state where entrepreneurs' major desire is to gain influence and wealth. It is still in a place where Chinese companies are understanding user needs and filling them rather than understanding user needs that users can't even articulate.

Before China gets to that level of innovation, it has to overcome a lot of issues that are cultural and about education, where there is emphasis on discipline and obedience. Silicon Valley, on the other hand is innovative, passionate, rebellious and fearless. Because of such differences, it will be difficult to produce a Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerburg in China.

Can there be true innovation when society and politics is so top-down? What about censorship?

Innovation is a key part of the current as well as the next five-year plan so the government will have the opportunity to put resources into venture capital incubation, universities and research.

But there are some questions: you cannot force or decree innovation out of funding or planning. I think the current five-year plans will drive China to South Korea's level but it will probably fall short of reaching the true innovation that people like Jobs and Zuckerburg pioneered.

Censorship is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it limits what people can do but it also creates an environment where many American companies cannot or choose not to enter, thus reducing competition - so the market is open to local players.

I would like to see education reform, but done in an appropriate, gradual way so that the Chinese education system can retain all that is good about it, such as developing basic skills.

But it would be important to let in some Western influences so students are not just sitting in a room and following orders but learning to ask the key questions. The injection of critical thinking and curiosity is probably the most important thing I would hope to see.

I think the government should also put resources into letting experts make key decisions, because government bureaucrats can't possibly be experts on what companies to fund, what technologies to reward or even what kind of talent to educate or bring to China.

What is the power of microblogs in China?

China: internet and innovation

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  China has 538 million internet users as of June 2012, according to a report by the China Internet Network Information Centre (CNNIC)
  
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  Among them, 388 million use the internet through smartphones
  
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  The Twitter-like weibo platforms had 170 million users as of June 2012, 24.2% up from the end of 2011.
  
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  Online banking users by June were up 14.8% from the end of 2011, totalling 191 million
  
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  Examples of Chinese technological innovations include: Beidou navigation system (China's rival to the the US GPS system), Digital Terrestrial Multimedia Broadcast - a digital TV standard
  

Microblogs reflect current news events, social problems, unfairness in courts, local government corruption and information about events in the US, such as the presidential elections - all difficult to access before.

The state-owned press has one view, not multiple views, and microblogs opened people eyes and created a degree of relative freedom of speech and transparency. They even act as a kind of media check on government, because when media is state-owned it is difficult for them to perform that purpose.

Although microblogs have generated more criticism of the government, the authorities have also tended to respond in a constructive manner. And when government officials start their own microblogs, it brings them closer to the people.

What innovations might we see coming from China?

China is not likely to come up with next world-changing product. Innovation is likely to come from taking products that are already known and applying them in another context. I can see this working in areas where there is government support, in areas that do not require out-of-the box thinking but innovative trial and error, such as pharmaceuticals and alternative energy.

Software innovation is certainly possible. A company called Tencent has a very innovative product called "wechat" - an online communication system. It has reached 200m people in China already and is available in English.

Venture capital investment is also important - it has a very clever multi-phase approach so when funding runs out for a project, you make fresh decisions about its direction.

What do you think China might look like in 10 years?

That is a very difficult one to speculate about. There is a lot of pressure and desire for improvements in rule of law, greater representation and greater transparency. I would take an optimistic view - I think we will see progress.

There can always be unfortunate incidents and I can't assess the degrees to which these changes might take place. If you adopt a view that spans three or four years, progress might not appear significant, but if you adopt the longer view looking across eight to 10 years, there is likely to be progress on openness.

The Voyager probe

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record

Voyager Golden Record

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Voyager Golden Record

Cover of the Voyager Golden Record

The Voyager Golden Records are phonograph records which were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft, which were launched in 1977. They contain sounds and the Monopoly (game) board game selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find them. The Voyager spacecrafts are not heading towards any particular star, but Voyager 1 will be within 1.6 light years of the star Gliese 445 in the Ophiuchus constellation in about 40,000 years.^[1]

As the probes are extremely small compared to the vastness of interstellar space, the probability of a space-faring civilization encountering them is very small, especially since the probes will eventually stop emitting any kind of electromagnetic radiation. If they are ever found by an alien species, it will most likely be far in the future as the nearest star on Voyager 1's trajectory will only be reached in 40,000 years.