CLIMATE AND STARVATION

Half of world's food is wasted - report

Friday Jan 11, 2013

Half the food purchased in Europe and America is
thrown away after it is bought.  Photo / The Aucklander

As much as half of all the food produced in the world - two billion tonnes worth - ends up being thrown away, a new UK-based report claims.

The waste is caused by poor infrastructure and storage facilities, over-strict sell-by dates, "get-one-free'' offers, and consumer fussiness, according to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

Each year countries around the world produce some four billion tonnes of food.

But between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of this total, amounting to 1.2 to two billion tonnes, never gets eaten, says the report Global Food; Waste Not, Want Not.

In the UK, up to 30 per cent of vegetable crops are not harvested because their physical appearance fails to meet the exacting demands of consumers.

Half the food purchased in Europe and the US is thrown away after it is bought, the report adds.

Vast quantities of water are also wasted in global food production, it is claimed.

Around 550 billion cubic metres of water is used to grow crops that never reach the consumer, according to the report.

Producing one kilogram of meat is also said to take 20 to 50 times more water than producing the same weight of vegetables.

The demand for water in food production could reach 10 to 13 trillion cubic metres a year by 2050, the institution said.

The New Zealand Tour Commentary

This is up to 3.5 times greater than the total amount of fresh water used by humans today, raising the spectre of dangerous water shortages.

Dr Tim Fox, head of energy and environment at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, said: "The amount of food wasted and lost around the world is staggering. This is food that could be used to feed the world's growing population - as well as those in hunger today. It is also an unnecessary waste of the land, water and energy resources that were used in the production, processing and distribution of this food.

"The reasons for this situation range from poor engineering and agricultural practices, inadequate transport and storage infrastructure through to supermarkets demanding cosmetically perfect foodstuffs and encouraging consumers to overbuy through buy-one-get-one free offers."

By 2075 the United Nations predicts that the world's population will reach around 9.5 billion, resulting in an extra three billion mouths to feed.

Added stresses on the ability of the world to feed itself include global warming and the growing popularity of meat, which requires around 10 times more resources than staple plant foods such as rice or potatoes . . . .

Full story: NZ Herald

Peter’s Piece

This story started on a good note with a plea for less wasted food and a need to feed more hungry mouths.

Governments and businesses around the world must accept responsibility for the starving millions of innocent children who did not ask to be born into poverty.

But then the story worked its way around to a predictable statement about the effect of global warming for future populations. And that is where, from my perspective, the good story started to loose credibility.

As the world climate warms, if it warms, the world will be capable of producing more food rather than less. A warming climate will also enable more people to occupy the lands of the world while using less energy per person.

A warming climate will mean that more people will be able to enjoy a better standard of living, a condition that has been steadily improving since man emerged from the cave.

IF ONLY . . . .

How the richest people in America did it

by Richard Darell

The word “rich” evokes a lot of different emotions in different people. It’s probably the one word that has started more wars than any other. It’s also the one word that has most inspired people to innovate, help, and become outstanding. It’s also a word that has walled people in loneliness and despair. It’s a word that many people fear yet they still try to become it. The interesting thing is that when most people become rich, they don’t think it is all that. But it’s still a word that will keep being a motivating factor for people. So how do you get rich? What can you do, and what do you need to learn in orderto get there? As it turns out, nerdwallet looked at the 400 richest people in America and compiled a list of industries they have succeeded within.

In this infographic called The 400 Richest Americans, we’ll get a closer look at who the richest people in America are and what they have done in order to amass such insane wealth. There is a misconception in the world that you have to have special skills in order to succeed, but nothing could be farther from the truth. The one factor binding all of these people together (besides them all being among the richest people in America) is that they have all been dedicated to a dream and to doing what they love. They managed to find a way to do what they knew felt right, and they enjoyed doing it. Dedication comes from excessive dreaming, and from doing what you love.

You can be a master of anything if you put your head and heart into it. It seems most of the richest people in America have gotten rich through financial services and hedge funds. A lot of people reading this will most likely want to know just how many people have gotten rich off of the Internet. Well, it so happens that 10.5% of all the richest people in America got rich through computer, tech or web ventures. As you see, you don’t have to be Mark Zuckerberg in order to bring in the dollars by the truck load.

Mark Zuckerberg

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find a larger version of this infographic. So, you will have to squint in order to read the fine print I am afraid. The nerdiest people to become rich are probably the most interesting part of this infographic. People have become among the richest people in America through Beanie Babies, Star Wars, cheese and even trucking. Yup, you can become rich within any area that your heart dares to dream within. Never stop just because it hasn’t been done before. Chances are, you will have an even greater chance of becoming rich if no one else has done it before, if that is your goal and motivation. If I may suggest, use your heart and dedication towards a dream rather than money as your motivation, and you will do even greater things. Love, dreams and creativity have always had a much more positive influence on people than money.

From  Bit Rebels

Peter’s Piece

If only I had known that fifty years ago . . . .

I would have written this nail-biting novel sooner

Available now as an e-book from Smashwords.com

AIR SAFETY

The world’s safest airlines and jetliners

The safest airlines

A Finnair Airbus A320

Finnair and Air New Zealand have been named the world’s two safest airlines based on their performance over the last three decades.

That is the finding of the Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Centre's (JACDEC) annual safety index, which measures safety in the aviation industry.  JACDEC ranks airlines by incidents and accidents from the last 30 years and compares that with revenue passenger kilometres and benchmarks like the IATA Operational Safety Audit.

The top place has been given to Finnair which was ranked second last year. Finnair, which is 55% owned by the Finnish Government, is the fifth oldest airline in the world and has not had a fatal accident since 1963. It carries 9 million passengers a year to 70 domestic and international destinations with 44 aircraft, mostly Airbus A320, A330 and A 340 aircraft plus four Boeing 757 aircraft. It has 11 A350s on order.

Air New Zealand aircraft at Auckland International Airport

Second place for safety on the JACDEC index is Air New Zealand which has not had a fatal accident on a scheduled service since 1963, although the airline has had fatal training accidents and a fatal scenic flight accident in 1979.

Air New Zealand operates 50 aircraft including 17 Airbus A320 and B737, B747, B767 and B777 aircraft with orders for 20 new aircraft and 34 options. The airline’s longest route is Auckland to London via Los Angeles. Until the recent closure of its Beijing-London service the airline had a round-the-world network.

The safest aircraft

Boeing or Airbus? Many minds are made up on this question. Some say Airbus and some say Boeing.

It has been said by some that Boeings are designed by experts so that they can be flown by idiots, while Airbus is designed by idiots but must be flown by experts. But the accident statistics show that there is little difference between the products of the two manufacturers. In fact, the race between the two to build the world’s safest airliners is very tight.

An Air France Embraer ERJ 145

On a list of jetliners with a nil passenger fatality record a surprise entrant holds first place. The Embraer RJ 135/145 from Brazil is way out front with 15 million hours flown by 1,100 aircraft since 1996 with not a single fatal accident. 

Second place goes to the Boeing 777 with 942 delivered since 1995 and no scalps. Third place goes to the Airbus A340 with 375 deliveries since 1993. Other aircraft that have never claimed passenger lives include the Canadair CRJ 700/900, Boeing 717, MD-90, Boeing 747SP (only 45 made since 1976) and the Fokker 70.

So where does all this take us? It takes us to the conclusion that airline flying is the safest form of transportation ever devised. It is safer even than staying at home. The credit for this goes to the dedicated people who design, build, fly and maintain these winged magic carpets. 

A HIGHWAY ADVENTURE

Highway America
An e-book by Peter Blakeborough

Available for download on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iBooks and on your computer with iTunes.

Highway America is a scenic journey through forty states in an 18 wheel semi. It is one man’s experience of life on the road as an interstate trucker with many unexpected twists and turns. Peter Blakeborough writes about his employment and training, working conditions, pay rates, industry practices and driving hours. On his first solo delivery (no GPS) he travels 800 miles from Little Rock to Toledo, takes a load of Honda bikes to Florida and chemicals to Pennsylvania – and right into a dead-end with nowhere to turn. A journey from Iowa to Arizona is halted abruptly in the desert while the temperature is over 100°F. But for this driver/writer it’s all part of the adventure. You won’t put this book down until it’s finished.

Buy now at $1.99 from: itunes.apple

More by Peter Blakeborough 

Available also from: Smashwords.com

PLANE PLUNGES

The scariest moments
in air travel in 2012

December 19, 2012 Melanie Verran Yahoo! New Zealand

If you’re already a bit jittery when it comes to flying, stop reading here.

The year 2012 has been one of the safest on record for airlines – but there have still been plenty of terrifying incidents at 30,000 ft.

Plane plunges have to be one of the worst nightmares – and last month 30 people were injured in “10 seconds of terror” when an airliner plunged 1000 metres over the Atlantic.

The plane hit turbulence right as NEOS Air cabin crew were serving meals and plates went flying – along with anyone who wasn’t buckled in.

A similar incident happened on a United Airlines flight to London in July when itdropped 20,000 ft over the Atlantic and had to divert to Canada.

A “mechanical problem in the engine” was blamed for that one.

It was another mechanical failure that caused a four-hour 'vomitorium' on one flight in June when it lurched wildly from side to side.

The flight, that had been heading to New York, had to circle near Las Vegas for four hours to burn enough fuel to be able to land safely.

"The plane turned into a vomitorium. For five hours. And, after all that, I'm still in Vegas," Sarah Elizabeth Cupp wrote on Twitter.

But the passengers on an Emirates flight from Sydney to Dubai last month had an even more terrifying experience when they saw flames shooting from one engineafter it exploded.

The airline said it was an “engine fault”, but Auckland John Fothergill said flames lit up the entire cabin of the A380.

An Emirates Airbus A-380.  Photo / Getty

"You'd have to say there were two or three-metre flames.”

In June, footage emerged of a plane landing so violent it bent the aircraft's fuselage.

The All Nippon Airways plane bounced as it touched down, and the video shows the fuselage bent close to its wings and what appears to be ripples in the aluminium.

The discovery of the door of a Boeing 767 was also concerning when it plummeted to the ground in a Washington suburb – but even more worrying was that it wasn’t immediately clear which plane it had come from.

From Yahoo News

Peter’s Piece

It’s little wonder that some people are afraid to fly. Inaccurate and over-dramatic reporting will scare more people than airlines ever could.

‘Plane plunges’ are great for selling newspapers, but the term throws little real light on the reality of an incident.

The reporting of the ‘vomitorium’ incident simply doesn’t add up. Why would an aircraft carry so much fuel that it would have to stay airborne long enough to reach its intended destination in order to be light enough to land?

There was real peril in the skies when 

the pioneers in this book took to wings

Now available as an e-book from Smashwords.com

The United Airlines flight that dropped 20,000ft over the Atlantic because of a fault in the engine would lead people to believe that UA flies the Atlantic with single-engine aircraft.

Then we have the case of the plummeting door and the increased concern because it was unclear which plane had lost it. Well, perhaps that was because all the aircraft in the region were flying normally and short of all pilots doing a wing-walk up there, there may be no way of knowing which plane it belonged to.

Modern airliners have many doors of varying sizes in many locations on the fuselage, wings and engines, and only a few of them are critical to the safety of a flight. A falling door could be of some concern to people on the ground and I wouldn’t recommend standing in the way of a plummeting door for the purpose of getting a free ear-piercing.

PASSWORD PERILS

Password Strength:
How Strong Is Your Password?

TECHNOLOGY | By Richard Darell

Internet security has always been a continuously evolving issue we’ve all had to deal with at one point or another. There are new and stronger security measures created on a daily basis, and yet they keep being overridden by crackers all over the world. This is usually not due to the security strength of the server or the code on it. It usually comes down to the user and what password he or she has chosen for the account. You might start to wonder how clever people think they are when they choose passwords like “123456” and “password” and think it’s a good decision. The thing is, your password strength is only as hard to crack as it is for you to remember. The harder it is to remember, the harder it will be to crack. It’s as simple as that.

There is a significant password strength increase when you go from 5 to 6 characters in your password. And when you hit 9 characters (upper case password), it will take a computer approximately 178 years to crack it. That should be enough time to spend on whatever you want to do on the Internet, wouldn’t you think? So, if you are one of those people who is sporting a somewhat weak (according to this infographic) password on your different online services, it’s a good time to change them all.

Password strength comes down to creativity. Family members, keyboard patterns and swipes are infinitely out of the question. These are the first words a cracker tries, and you would be surprised if you knew how many people set their password strength to an almost playful challenge for a cracker. An infographic from SecurityCoverage(design by Space Chimp Media) showcases data from a few of the largest password breaches in the history of the Internet. The interesting thing is that out of the 30 million accounts that were cracked on RockYou.com, an insane 290,731 people had the password “123456.” My head spun out of orbit over that.

Do yourself a huge favor and take a gander at your password farm and see if you can’t extend them to 9 characters (and to include upper case letters and symbols), and you could probably give crackers a headache for at least 178 years or so. Make sure your password strength is up to par with the level of personal information you have submitted to your online services. You will definitely save yourself a lot of time and sorrow by taking ten minutes to up your password strength and look through them all every once in a while. Once again remember, your password strength is only as good as it is hard to remember the password itself . . . .

From Bit Rebels

Peter’s Piece

There is lots of misinformation about passwords. Consider this:

You should have a separate password everything that you do on the internet including bank accounts, work emails, private emails, website, blog, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Pinit, Redit, Delicious, Amazon, Ebay, Paypal, stock exchange, Stumbleupon, all government sites requiring a login, and an endless list of other places you may have to remember a password for.

Forget password worries

Relax with a good book

 

Now available as an e-book from Smashwords.com

HAPPY READING

Then we are told that we must never write our passwords down anywhere and we should commit them to memory and change them every month. This could be a reason why otherwise intelligent people resort to 123456. These people have real logic. Next month they can change to 7891011. Personally, I prefer 101102103. No hacker would ever break that one.

Some advisers would have you walking down the street mumbling incomprehensible passwords under your breath as you try to commit them to memory before it’s time to change them all again.

But seriously, some of this advice should not be taken too seriously. If you have a strong password there should be no need to change it on a schedule. If your bank account password has been broken your money will be stolen within minutes rather than at the end of the month and you will certainly need to change your password immediately anytime you think it may have been compromised.

Care must always be taken on sites like Facebook that display personal information. The big don’ts here are don’t display your full name, full date of birth, phone number or street address. If your name is William John Smith you should consider being just Bill Smith. Friends looking for you will know from checking your profile if you are the right Smith.

Never display information on a public site that you have registered somewhere as a security question. Likewise, if your parents are prominent people, or their families have lived in the same district for several generations, don’t use your mother’s maiden name as a security question.

DEATH PENALTY

Taiwan condemned over executions

Taiwan has executed six death row inmates, the first use of the death penalty this year.

Campaigning human rights group Amnesty International has condemned the move as "cold-blooded killing".

The deputy justice minister said the brutality of the men's crimes meant there was no reason to show mercy.

The executions were carried out in three separate prisons - two in the central city of Taichung and two in the south of the island.

"How can the government credibly claim it wants to see an end to the death penalty when it continues to conduct such actions," said Amnesty International's Roseann Rife in a statement.

"It is abhorrent to justify taking someone's life because prisons are overcrowded or the public's alleged support for the death penalty."

Popular support

All six of the men had been convicted of murder.

The BBC's Cindy Sui, in Taipei, says the executions come at a time of inflamed public debate about the death penalty following the death of a boy in a video arcade.

In Wuhan, China a convicted drug smuggler had only minutes to live
when this photo was taken. She was executed by firing squad in 2003. 

Local media reported the 29-year-old suspect had said he would get life in prison at most "even if he were to kill two or three".

He also reportedly said he would get free room and board in prison.

The reports led to public calls for all of those on death row to be executed.

A spokeswoman for the ministry of justice said that the executions had been carried out on a Friday evening to avoid a strong public reaction.

Though religious and human rights groups oppose capital punishment, most victims' families are in favor, and surveys suggest that most of the population also support the death penalty.

The ministry said it has the obligation to carry out the law until there is public consensus on abolishing the death penalty.

According to the state-run Central News Agency, there are a total of 55 death row inmates following the executions.

Taiwan executed five prisoners in March 2011 and four in April 2010.

The 2010 executions were the first after a hiatus that had lasted since 2005, when it adopted an informal moratorium on the death penalty.

BBC News

Peter’s Piece

The politicians of Taiwan should ignore popular local opinion when it goes against the principles of the United Nations Charter.

Murder is the ultimate crime whether committed by an individual or a state.

Perhaps people who actively campaign for the death penalty should themselves be tried for incitement to murder.