Tuesday, June 11, 2013

DECCAN HERALD 11

Panorama
Dateline
New Delhi
Annapurna Singh

For news and updates from across the nation. P 12

Slide in rupee has everyone worried with few solutions in sight

he Indian rupee fell to a life-time low of 58 against a dollar on Monday. A fall of almost one rupee from the previous days close. This was the sharpest slide in the currency against the greenback in nearly two years. Obviously, it sparked concerns all over. The market panicked, investors went jittery, the government stepped in to calm down the market as the analysts predicted the Indian currency might hit 60 to a dollar in the first half of the year itself. Although the rupee has been losing its sheen for quite sometime, the fall has been sharper in the month of May. The fall between January and May has been almost four per cent against the dollar. But along with the Indian rupee, most of the emerging market currencies have

been suffering. Take the case of Brazilian Real, Turkish Lira, Indonesian Rupiyah, Malaysian Ringit or the South African Rand. In fact the Rands fall has been the sharpest. It has slumped 11 per cent from January to May. Official data shows that the dollar has strengthened against 22 of 24 emerging-market currencies this year. If all the emerging market currencies are bleeding vis-a-vis the US dollar, then why is this heightened worry? The reason for the currency devaluation is not India specific. But, the consequences of the devaluation could very much be India specific. It is probably for this reason that there is a greater concern. What could be the consequences? The kind of fall that the rupee has witnessed in the past few weeks, will certainly force the Reserve Bank of India to stay on hold the monetary policy for sometime. Higher the interest rate, more the costs of borrowing money, hence, slower production in the domestic market and slower investment. It also means the cost of production

to an unprecedented 5 per cent of gross domestic product in the year ended March 31. And, a still high government expenditures over its revenues or the fiscal deficit. When a country runs a high CAD, there is all the more pressure built up on the currency. The recent increase in gold imports has also contributed to the raising concern over widening gap in the CAD. Higher demand Although the government has taken certain steps sporadically to stem the rise in gold imports with the latest being a further 2 per cent hike in gold import duty, the analysts say it is still unable to control the demand for the yellow metal. They believe lack of investment avenues results in higher demand for gold, making it inelastic in nature. Coming to the immediate reason behind the rupee depreciation, it is the rise in US treasury yield that is pulling the foreign investors from emerging markets, including Indias debt portfolios. The US saw

goes up. The move is also bound to be inflationary and will push up subsidies on the budget. Rupee, as against the other emerging market currencies, is falling not only because the dollar is getting strengthened but it is also because of the fundamental problems that India currently has. Its historic high current account deficit, the trade account deficit, that has widened

its treasury yields move faster ever since the first noise of a tweaking in the quantitative easing, which is equivalent to money printing was heard early this month. This move was even more pronounced when the jobless claims data improved a couple of days ago. Analysts have gone to the extent of predicting the fall in rupee to as steep as 60 to a dollar in the fist half of the year, if the RBI does not intervene to stem the fall. Harish Galipelli, head, commodity and currency derivaties at JRG Wealth Management Ltd, told Deccan Herald that the rupee may drop to 60 level very soon, perhaps within the first half of the year itself, if the RBI choses to stay away. According to Abhishek Goenka, CEO of India Forex Advisors, the rupee may move towards 58 to a dollar this week itself. Goenka was also concerned about emerging markets facing huge outflows from the debt markets. The situation is quite grave, the end of Quantitative Easing in six months down the line could lead to major imbalance

among the emerging nations. The era of free money coming to an end will move the base of growth for all of them, he said. The government is equally worried, so is the RBI, but whether the authorities should go in for an artificial correction in the currency by intervening in the market? The general consensus is, certainly not. A temporary arrest in fall of rupees can only be a temporary solution to the problem. It will currently increase the capital flows, but the question is how long can a country depend on external flows, which are by nature very volatile. This will also make the long term external situation worse. Currently, the RBI has a reasonable quantity of forex reserve at around $ 300 billion, but the quality of the reserve is not all that good. Excluding gold, the ratio of our foreign exchange reserves to external debt is now just 68 per cent. For every dollar owed, India can repay only 68 cents, the data released in December last year said. So, the experts say that it is prudent to let the rupee find its own level.

US spy agency turns virtual landlord of digital assets

The unlimited access to data raises troubling questions about privacy and civil liberties
By James Risen and Eric Lichtblau

Making noise for womens rights

By Suzy Menkes

hen American analysts hunting terrorists sought new ways to comb through the troves of phone records, emails and other data piling up as digital communications exploded over the past decade, they turned to Silicon Valley computer experts who had developed complex equations to thwart Russian mobsters intent on credit card fraud. The partnership between the intelligence community and Palantir Technologies, a Palo Alto, California, company founded by a group of inventors from PayPal, is just one of many that the National Security Agency and other agencies have forged in recent years as they have rushed to unlock the secrets of Big Data. Today, a revolution in software technology that allows for the highly automated and instantaneous analysis of enormous volumes of digital information has transformed the NSA, turning it into the virtual landlord of the digital assets of Americans and foreigners alike. The new technology has, for the first time, given Americas spies the ability to track the activities and movements of people almost anywhere in the world without actually watching them or listening to their conversations. New disclosures that the NSA has secretly acquired the phone records of millions of Americans and access to emails, videos and other data of foreigners from nine US Internet companies have provided a rare glimpse into the growing reach of the nations largest spy agency. They have also alarmed the government: On Saturday night, Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said that a crimes report has been filed by the NSA. With little public debate, the NSA has been undergoing rapid expansion in order to exploit the mountains of new data being created each day. The government has poured billions of dollars into the agency over the last decade, building a 1-million-square-foot fortress in the mountains of Utah, apparently to store huge volumes of personal data indefinitely. It created intercept stations across the country, according to former industry and intelligence officials, and helped build one of the worlds fastest computers to crack the codes that protect information. While once the flow of data across the Internet appeared too overwhelming for NSA to keep up with, the revelations of the last few days suggest that the agencys abilities are now far greater than most outsiders believed. Five years ago, I would have said they dont have the capability to monitor a significant amount of Internet traffic, said Herbert S Lin, an expert in computer science and telecommunications at the National Research Council. Now, he said, it appears that they are getting close to that goal. The agencys ability to mine metadata, data about who is calling or emailing, has made wiretapping and eavesdropping on communications far less vital, according to data experts. That access to data from companies that Americans depend on daily raises troubling questions about privacy and civil liberties

DATA SECURITY: The spy agencies have long been among the most demanding customers for advanced computing and data-mining software.

that officials in Washington, insistent on neartotal secrecy, have yet to address. American laws and American policy view the content of communications as the most private and the most valuable, but that is backwards today, said Marc Rotenberg, the executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington group. The information associated with communications today is often more significant than the communications itself, and the people who do the data mining know that. In the 1960s, when the NSA successfully intercepted the primitive car phones used by Soviet leaders driving around Moscow in their Zil limousines, there was no chance the agency would accidentally pick up Americans. Today, if it is scanning for a foreign politicians Gmail account or hunting for the cellphone number of a suspected terrorist, the possibilities for what NSA calls incidental collection of Americans are far greater. Law restrictions US laws restrict wiretapping and eavesdropping on the actual content of the communications of American citizens but offer very little protection to the digital data thrown off by the telephone when a call is made. And they offer virtually no protection to other forms of nontelephone-related data, like credit card transactions. Because of smartphones, tablets, social media sites, email and other forms of digital communications, the world creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of new data daily, according to IBM. The computer giant estimates that 90 percent of the data that now exists in the world has been created in just the last two years. From now

until 2020, the digital universe is expected to double every two years, according to a study by International Data Corp. When President George W Bush secretly began the NSAs warrantless wiretapping programme in October 2001, to listen in on the international telephone calls and emails of US citizens without court approval, the program was accompanied by large-scale data mining. Those secret programmes prompted a showdown in March 2004 between Bush White House officials and a group of top Justice Department and FBI officials in the hospital room of John Ashcroft, then the attorney general. Justice Department lawyers who were willing to go along with warrantless wiretapping argued that the data mining raised greater constitutional concerns. In 2003, after a Pentagon plan to create a data-mining operation known as the Total Information Awareness program was disclosed, a firestorm of protest forced the Bush administration to back off. But since then, the intelligence communitys data-mining operations have grown enormously, according to industry and intelligence experts. The confrontation in Ashcrofts hospital room took place just one month after a Harvard undergraduate, Mark Zuckerberg, created a startup called Facebook; Twitter would not be founded for another two years. Apples iPhone and iPad did not yet exist. The spy agencies have long been among the most demanding customers for advanced computing and data-mining software - and even more so in recent years, according to industry analysts. They tell you that somewhere there is an American who is going to be blown up, said a former technology executive, and

the only thing that stands between that and him living is you. In 2006, the Bush administration established a programme known as the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, to accelerate the development of intelligence-related technology. Its stated purpose was to undertake high-risk, high-payoff research programs that have the potential to provide the United States with an overwhelming intelligence advantage over future adversaries. IBMs Watson, the supercomputing technology that defeated human Jeopardy! champions in 2011, is a prime example of the power of data-intensive artificial intelligence. Watson-style computing, analysts said, is precisely the technology that would make the ambitious data-collection program of the NSA seem practical. Computers could instantly sift through the mass of Internet communications data, see patterns of suspicious online behaviour and thus narrow the hunt for terrorists. Both the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency have been testing IBMs Watson in the last two years, said a consultant who has advised the government and asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak. Privacy advocates say that a national debate must take place to come up with new rules to limit the intelligence communitys access to the mountains of data. Rotenberg, referring to the constitutional limits on search and seizure, said, It is a bit of a fantasy to think that the government can seize so much information without implicating the Fourth Amendment interests of American citizens.
The New York Times

an fanciful fashion become a force for good? Since the disaster in Bangladesh in May, when the crumbling of a faulty factory killed more than 1,000 female seamstresses, fast fashion has developed a toxic reputation. The ugly side of pretty things was epitomized by the image of a sultry Beyonce wearing an inexpensive bikini on billboards across the world. Yet this same star was rocking it on June 1 at a concert in London as she sang a heartfelt duet of Crazy in Love with her husband, Jay-Z. The music event was called Sound of Change Live and it was organised by the Chime for Change womens campaign and underwritten by Gucci, once known as a brand of soft shoes and hard partying but now aiming to bring attention to womens rights to education, justice and health. I am hoping this concert has inspired people to come together to support women Chime is a sound of many bells vibrating, and through technology we can do it very easily, said Salma Hayek, whose husband, Francois-Henri Pinault, has made it a mission for his luxury group, formerly PPR, but now named Kering, to support best practices in his own empire and to support Chime for Change, a womens empowerment initiative. The superstar list of celebrities, from Jennifer Lopez to Madonna, who chimed for education and came onstage with the Pakistani education activist Humaira Bachal and the Academy Award-winning film director Sharmeen ObaidChinoy, guaranteed a large online audience, estimated at more than one billion. The Web viewers joined the 50,000 spectators seated at the concert, in Twickenham Stadium in southwest London. The event raised more than 4 million pounds, or $6.2 million.

Female empowerment. Prince Harry opened the event in an onscreen appearance, and with royals like Charlotte Casiraghi of Monaco and Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie in the audience, the event resonated across the world, even if a Twitter feed on the concert included people asking whether Beyonce's raunchy mesh hose and barely-there costumes were symbolic of female empowerment. For Frida Giannini, Guccis designer, the idea, more than a year in the planning, had been to reinterpret Bob Geldofs Live Aid from the 1980s by NYT

making celebrities the halo around an urgent cause. Fund-raising is at the heart of Chime for Change, but there is something awkward about weighing a $2,000 handbag against the Afghan Institute of Learning, which offers education and health care to women and children, or a Pakistani school sponsored by Madonna. Yet the event drew Desmond Tutus daughter Mpho to speak up for womens empowerment and say: Let us not fear that our individual acts are too small to change 'his-story into 'our story.' Those who sniff at the idea of stars turning out for a charitable event should listen to Obaid-Chinoy, who has brought the reality of life in Pakistan to the big screen. In places like Pakistan, grass roots activists need a boost and outside support is often critical, the film director said. Even within the country, pop icons lend their voices to educational and health projects and it does wonders. Catching the attention of youth isnt always easy and engaging them is even more difficult. If a celebrity is able to further a cause just by lending his or her voice to it, Im all for it! A similar view was expressed by Susan Ann Davis, chairwoman of Vital Voices, a Washington-based organization founded in 1997 by Hillary Rodham Clinton to focus on female empowerment, womens political participation and human rights. Its challenging to catch the attention of media much less the public on important issues without the help of celebrities, VIPs, corporate titans and politicians, Davis said. Their involvement is often the critical factor in breaking though the noise to draw attention and recruit supporters. In the current music scene, women seem to have the most fire. One woman who was emphatically in favour of the event and its reverberation across the world was Maz Kessler, whose Catapult company, an online crowd-funding platform founded in 2012 with the support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, allowed each member of the audience to become a donor. Audience members who bought a ticket received a voucher that could be used on the Catapult site to select a cause and donate money to womens issues. I am focused on fund-raising it is for us to take it from there and go deeper, Ms. Kessler said. The activist thinks that the engagement of celebrities is part of the story and that there is a role to play for everyone.

WHATS THE BUZZ

Grilled foods may increase cancer risk

Its time for picnics and parties with lots of grilled goodies, but experts at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute have warned that all that sizzling and flipping on the gas or charcoal grill may also be cooking up cancer-causing chemicals. And surprisingly, those chemicals have been linked to breast, stomach, prostate, and colon cancer, according to the American Institute for Cancer Research. But Stacy Kennedy, MPH, RD, CSO, LDN, a Dana-Farber nutritionist, said that doesnt mean

giving up those tasty summer time treats like burgers, steaks, and ribs. Its really about planning ahead and making wise choices, he stated. There are two risk factors to keep in mind. First, research has shown that high-heat grilling can convert proteins in red meat, pork, poultry, and fish into heterocyclic amines (HCAs). These chemicals have been linked to a number of cancers. What happens is that the high temperature can change the shape of the protein structure in the meat so it becomes irritating in the body and is considered a carcinogenic chemical, explained Kennedy. Another cancer-causing agent, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), is found in the smoke. PAHs form when fat and juices from meat products drip on the heat source. As the smoke rises it can stick to the surface of the meat. Thats where the main cancer causing com-

pound occurs in grilling. So you want to reduce the exposure to that smoke, said Kennedy.

Duck genome could be key to fighting bird flu

Scientists have completed the genome sequencing and analysis of the duck, which was one principal natural host of influenza A viruses that killed 36 people and caused a loss of 6.5-billiondollars to Chinas economy. As a natural host of influenza A viruses (including H5N1), the duck is known to often remain asymptomatic under influenza infection. To uncover the interactive mechanisms between the host and influenza viruses, researchers sequenced the genome of a 10-week-old female Beijing duck, and conducted transcriptomic studies on two virus-infected ducks.

This work yielded the draft sequence of a waterfowl-duck for the first time, and the data indicated that the duck, like the chicken and zebra finch, possessed a contractive immune gene repertoire comparing to those in mammals, and it also comprises novel genes that are not present in the other three birds (chicken, zebra finch and turkey). By comparing gene expression in the lungs of ducks infected with either highly or weakly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 viruses, the team identified genes whose expression patterns were altered in response to avian influenza viruses.

How brain forms long-term memories

Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have uncovered how a protein called Arc regulates the activity of neuronsproviding much-needed

clues into the brain's ability to form long-lasting memories. These findings also offer newfound understanding as to what goes on at the molecular level when this process becomes disrupted. Led by Gladstone Senior Investigator Steve Finkbeiner, MD, PhD, this research delved deep into the inner workings of synapses. Synapses are the highly specialised junctions that process and transmit information between neurons. From inside the nucleus, the authors found that it was Arc that directed the process required for homeostatic scaling to occur. This strengthened the synaptic connections without overstimulating themthus translating learning into long-term memories.