‘By redefining a selector, you do not cause it to lose any of its inherent attributes A tag redefined with CSS keeps its specified properties. All those properties display, unless the specific existing properties that make up its appearance are changed.
With CSS, you could make the <b> tag a larger font size and italic, as follows:
b {font-size: larger; font-style:italic;}
Even though it is not specified in the CSS definition, this text would still be bold. You could, however, set the <b> tag not to be bold by changing the font-weight property, as follows:
p b {font-weight: normal;}
This overrides the <b> tag's natural state whenever bold text is being set within a paragraph.’
Jason Cranford Teague, 'DHTML and CSS for the World Wide Web', 2nd edn (2001) Peachpit Press, p. 47
‘ "The PDA is dead," says David Levin, the boss of Symbian, the leading maker of smartphone software. Anssi Vanjoki of Nokia, the world's biggest mobile-phone maker, agrees. PDAs without wireless connectivity are doomed, he says. Even as Nokia, Sony, Ericsson and other handset makers build PDA-like functions into their smartphones, some PDA makers are adding phone capability to their handhelds. The two camps have arrived at the same result— a hybrid PDA-phone—from opposite directions.
David Nagel of PalmSource, the firm that licenses the Palm operating system to makers of phones and PDAs, dismisses the idea that one camp or the other has won. To say that there is a single “killer device” is, he says, an oversimplification, for there is room for a whole range of PDA-like devices in the marketplace—of which smartphones, in his view, are just one kind. PalmSource is, he says, well placed to compete with Symbian and Microsoft to provide the software to power pocket-sized devices.’
Economist, Oct 15 2003. Full text at Economist website.
‘A team of US physicists has struck a blow for common sense: they have shown that an effect cannot precede its cause. The experiments confirm that recent work in which light appeared to travel faster than its speed in a vacuum does not conflict with the notion of causality, in which effects follow their causes.
Einstein's theory of special relativity asserts that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum, conventionally denoted as c. If something were to outstripc, this would lead to the possibility that an event could take place before the event that caused it. You could read these words before I've written them, for instance.
This troubling scenario seemed, at face value, to be implied by experiments carried out three years ago, in which a light pulse was measured as travelling through a cold gas of metal atoms at a speed greater than c.
At the time, most physicists did not greatly fear for relativity or causality. They argued that what really matters is how fast information can be sent. 'Information' here means any signal that can affect an object or system - a light pulse that can trigger a device, for example.
A light pulse is a bunch of light particles - photons - moving at a variety of speeds. The bunch can be assigned an overall group velocity.
Researchers argued that if some photons at the leading edge of a pulse travelled faster than c, such that the group velocity were greater than c, the pulse could not have any effect - it would not convey any information - until the bulk of the photons arrived some time later.
But what exactly is the speed of the information (denoted vi) in such a pulse? Physicists struggled to agree on an answer.
Some argued that information speed should be identified with the group velocity, so that it can exceed c, violating causality. Others said that vi must be less than or equal to c in all situations.
Most people recognize the difference between the group velocity and the speed at which information can be propagated," insists Arthur Dogariu, a physicist at the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, New Jersey.
Lene Hau of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who has also profoundly altered the speed of light in super-cold gases, agrees, adding: "The real question is: what defines information?"
The new study, by Daniel Gauthier of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, and colleagues, provides an answer. The researchers looked at how fast information can pass through a medium in which some photon speeds exceed c considerably.
Gauthier's team points out that transmitting information isn't just a matter of sending a signal. The signal has to be encoded at one end and read at the other. To convey information, a signal has to change - for example, light must get brighter.
The maximum speed of information transfer, the researchers say, corresponds to the earliest time at which this point of change can be detected ...
Gauthier's team found that information encoded in a pulse travelling through a gas of potassium atoms takes longer to be detected than information in a pulse travelling through a vacuum at speed c. Even if the pulse's group velocity far outstrips the speed of light, the information velocity can never exceed c.
In other words, the pulse arrives sooner but takes longer to announce its arrival.’
Philip Ball, Nature Science Update, 16 October 2003. Full text at Nature website.
‘On its shores, and at the bottom of the Caspian Sea, lie the world's biggest untapped fossil fuel resources. Estimates range from 110 to 243bn barrels of crude, worth up to $4 trillion. According to the US department of energy, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan alone could sit on more than 130bn barrels, more than three times the US's reserves. Oil giants such as ExxonMobil, ChevronTexaco and BP have already invested more than $30bn in new production facilities.
I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian," said Dick Cheney in a speech to oil industrialists in 1998. In May 2001, the US vice-president recommended in the national energy policy report that "the president makes energy security a priority of our trade and foreign policy", singling out the Caspian basin as a "rapidly growing new area of supply".
With a potential oil production of up to 6m barrels per day by 2015, the Caspian region has become crucial to the US policy of "diversifying energy supply". It is designed to wean the US off its dependence on the Arab-dominated Opec cartel, which is using its near-monopoly position as pawn and leverage against industrialised countries. As global oil consumption keeps surging and many oil wells outside the Middle East are nearing depletion, Opec is expanding its share of the world market. At the same time, the US will have to import more than two-thirds of its total energy demand by 2020, mostly from the Middle East.
Many people in Washington are particularly uncomfortable with the growing power of Saudi Arabia. There is a fear that radical Islamist groups could topple the corrupt Saud dynasty and stop the flow of oil to "infidels". To stave off political turmoil, the regime in Riyadh funds the radical Islamic Wahabbi sect that foments terror against Americans around the world. In a desperate effort to decrease its dependence on Saudi oil sheiks, the US seeks to control the Caspian oil resources. However, fierce conflicts have broken out over pipeline routes. Russia, still regarding itself as imperial overlord of its former colonies, promotes pipeline routes across its territory, including Chechnya, in the north Caucasus. China, the increasingly oil-dependent waking giant in the region, wants to build eastbound pipelines from Kazakhstan. Iran is offering its pipeline network via the Persian Gulf.
By contrast, Washington champions two pipelines that would circumvent both Russia and Iran. One would run from Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to the Indian Ocean. Construction has already begun for a $3.8bn pipeline from Azerbaijan's capital, Baku, via neighbouring Georgia to Turkey's Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. BP, its main operator, has invested billions in oil-rich Azerbaijan, and can count on support from the Bush administration, which recently stationed about 500 elite troops in war-torn Georgia.’
Lutz Kleveman, The Guardian, October 20 2003.Full text at the Guardian website.
‘there is a condition called ventricular tachycardia which can need immediate medical treatment. Here the heart is pulsating at between 120 and 200 beats a minute - the normal rate is between 50 and 100 beats - in the ventricles, which are the two large chambers of the heart, while the rate in the two smaller chambers called the atria remains the same.
Ventricular tachycardia is usually a result of heart disease, but can also occur in healthy people. The first symptoms can be faintness and palpitations with a feeling of breathlessness or chest pain.
If doctors feel they need to act at once to stop the attack they will carry out a cardioversion, which is a small electric shock, carefully timed to trip the heart back into its normal rhythm. The patient will be under sedation.
A patient with the condition ventricular tachycardia is likely to be sent home with drugs to reduce the risk of another attack. Regular testing will be required to ensure the drugs are controlling the condition. If they do not, surgery may be needed to investigate the area causing the irregular rhythm, or the patient will have a tiny device called a defibrillator implanted in their chest, which will give out a small electrical impulse whenever the irregular rhythms begin, to get the heart back on a normal beat.’
Patrick Wintour & Sarah Boseley, Guardian, 20 October 2003. Full text at the Guardian website.
‘Before Mr Modigliani came along, economists regarded saving as largely the preserve of the rich....
Mr Modigliani was sceptical of this thinking. He noted that the whole story of economic growth and development was one of accumulating capital through thrift. That led him to create—with Richard Brumberg, a graduate student—a more detailed model of how and why people save.
The upshot was the “life-cycle hypothesis”. In essence, this says that people save during their working lives in order to spend when their income wanes in old age. In a similar way to Milton Friedman's "permanent income hypothesis", which was developed at about the same time, Mr Modigliani's theory supposes that people base their saving on their expected incomes over their whole lives. Thus they save more when their income is above its expected lifetime average because of transitory shocks, such as an unexpected bonus or a few high-earning years.’
The Economist, Oct 2 2003. Full text at the Economist website.