Since its initial conceptualisation during the early 1980s, SMS text messaging has now become the most widely used data application in the world, with 2.4 billion active users, or 74 percent of all mobile phone subscribers.
With tuition costs and student debt on the rise, a new model is on the rise: OpenCourseWare (OCW). OCW refers to online course materials that have been created by universities and shared freely with the world via the internet. The MIT OpenCourseWare, established in 2002, was one of the pioneers of the system and to date nearly 100 million students access its online courses, with barely 1 percent of the students coming from MIT itself.
A New Jersey man has filed a lawsuit against the Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Fargo for colluding with Visa and Mastercard in a “conspiracy to fix the prices” that ATM users pay when they withdraw cash from a machine not within their bank’s network.
China, the largest foreign holder of US Treasuries, cut their holdings by US$36.5 billion in August – The same month that saw Standard & Poor downgrade America’s credit rating score.
In a report by Chinese state-controlled news agency China Daily, China’s 3.1 percent cut is also the first decrease in its holdings since a 0.8 percent decline in February. It was the biggest dollar sell-off by China this year, following net buying of more than $8 billion in July.
There are two sides to the current world food crisis. On the one hand, the world is facing a global food shortage, where hundreds of millions of people are malnourished with little to no access to food. Furthermore with global population growing exponentially every day, the problem will be exercerbated even further in the future.
FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act has been recently enacted by the Obama Administration, requiring U.S. citizens living abroad to file U.S. tax returns and detailed annual foreign account disclosure statements going back to 2003.
A Buddhist temple medium from the Malaysian island state of Penang has conducted a religious ritual designed to hasten the reincarnation of former Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs, reported the Sin Chew Daily on Sunday.
Obese American workers have cost companies more than US$113 billion in productivity losses each year from absenteeism, according to a Gallup poll released on Monday.
A recent study by Gallup has found that overweight or obese full-time workers with chronic health conditions miss 450 million more days of work each year than would healthy workers, costing businesses US$153 billion annually lost in productivity. In the same study, it was revealed that 86 percent of workers are obese, or have other chronic health issues.
The United Nations is predicting that the milestone seven billion population mark will be achieved on October 31st. But the UN Population Council vice-president has also warned that the population surge will have a devastating impact on the environment.
According to demographers, the world’s population didn’t reach 1 billion until 1804, and it took 123 years to hit the 2 billion mark in 1927. Then the pace accelerated – 3 billion in 1959, 4 billion in 1974, 5 billion in 1987, 6 billion in 1998.
Increased volatility in global food prices has left millions of Pakistanis unable to achieve the basic levels of food security, admitted Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani in a public message observing World Food Day on October 16.
“The food insecurity caused by high food prices is an issue that, unfortunately, is faced by millions in Pakistan,” he said, adding that the World Food Day theme for 2011 – Food Prices – From Crisis To Stability – highlighted “the growing trends of high food prices and its impact on the most vulnerable.”
