Tiananmen, Forgotten - New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/04/opinion/tiananmen-forgotten.html?emc=edit_ty_20140603&nl=opinion&nlid=18615288&_r=1

Tiananmen, Forgotten

By HELEN GAOJUNE 3, 2014

BEIJING — I don’t remember the first time I heard the term liu si — June 4 — which is how the Tiananmen protests, the widespread demonstrations in 1989 that ended in bloodshed, are referred to in China. It was perhaps sometime around 2003, when I was 15 or 16. The word was probably uttered at the dinner table by one of my parents, both of whom were on the Avenue of Eternal Peace, the street in front of Tiananmen Square, on that night. They bore witness to the senseless killing, a memory that has haunted them ever since.

I do remember the first time the topic came up in conversation with my Chinese peers. On June 4, 2009, the 20th anniversary of the crackdown, I was shopping with a friend at a convenience store near Tsinghua University, when she, a junior at the university, turned to me, next to a shelf of colorful shampoos and conditioners. “Some people have been talking about this incident, liu si,” she said. “What was it all about?”

Twenty-five years after the massacre, the topic remains taboo here. I try to piece together the events of that spring through underground documentaries, foreign reports and conversations with my parents. Yet the more facts and anecdotes I gather, the more those crowds and gunshots seem unreal, like tragic scenes from an old foreign film.

To my generation, people born in the late 1980s and 1990s, the widespread patriotic liberalism that bonded the students in the early 1980s at the start of the economic reform period feels as distant as the political fanaticism that defined the preceding decades. Chinese leaders, having learned their lesson during the Tiananmen protests, have kept politics out of our lives, while channeling our energies to other, state-sanctioned pursuits, primarily economic advancement.

Growing up in the post-Tiananmen years, life was like a cruise on a smooth highway lined with beautiful scenery. We studied hard and crammed for exams. On weekends, we roamed shopping malls to try on jeans and sneakers, or hit karaoke parlors, bellowing out Chinese and Western hits.

This alternation between exertion and ennui slowly becomes a habit and, later, an attitude. Both, if well-endured, are rewarded by a series of concrete symbols of success: a college diploma, a prestigious job, a car, an apartment. The rules are simple, though the competition never gets easier; therefore we look ahead, focusing on our personal well-being, rather than the larger issues that bedevil the society.

Many of my Chinese peers, for example, are unfamiliar with the stories ofChen Guangcheng and Ai Weiwei, whose courageous struggles against the state are better known among my Western friends. Topics such as the religious repression in Tibet and military crackdowns in Xinjiang barely make a dent on the collective consciousness of my generation. The few times that I’ve spoken to my Chinese friends about the self-immolations among Tibetan monks, I’ve been met with looks of surprise. A few seconds later, some have asked, “Why?”

Perhaps nowhere is this indifference toward politics and civil rights more pronounced than in the insouciance of young people about the Communist Party’s attempts to expunge historical truths from public memory.

The majority of my generation still believes, for instance, that the war against Japanese invasion in the 1930s and ’40s was fought primarily by Communist soldiers, while the Nationalist army “passively resisted the Japanese and actively combated the Communists,” as told in my high school history textbook. The Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution mean little more than the scanty facts we had to memorize for the national college entrance exam.

The massacre of 1989, the most recent tragedy of all, is also the most forgotten: One of the first victims of the massacre, Jiang Jielian, was a junior at my high school. While his mother, Ding Zilin, and other mothers of the victims, are still seeking justice for the death of their sons and daughters, Jiang’s name is known to few of my classmates.

The party is responsible for distorting my generation’s understanding of history through state education and blocking our access to sensitive information. Yet even those who are well-aware of the state’s meddling make little effort to seek truth and push for change.

When I returned to China after finishing college in the United States in 2012, I was shocked to discover how few of my friends use VPN, software that allows one to scale China’s Great Firewall and access blocked sites like Twitter and other media platforms. Well-educated and worldly, they nonetheless see censorship more as a nuisance of daily life, something to be begrudgingly endured, rather than an infringement on their freedom of speech.

“I have to keep an eye on my watch when I browse foreign websites,” a friend at Peking University told me. Contrary to academic institutions worldwide that aim to make information available to students and scholars, Peking University charges an hourly fee for on-campus access to foreign websites. “It’s a little annoying, but I don’t browse them often anyway,” my friend explained. “Except when I check my email.”

If the previous generations learned the cost of political transgression through persecutions and crackdowns, today’s youth, especially those from elite backgrounds, instinctively understand the futility of challenging the system. After all, most of the time, power interferes with our personal lives only in the form of nettlesome restrictions. These inconveniences — from censorship to the vehicle license lottery, a system that distributes a limited number of license plates to a huge number of new drivers who apply each month — feel not unlike the dogmatic words of Marxist philosophy in our school textbooks, which we mock in private but dutifully memorize and copy onto exams.

Rebelling against these hurdles seems both naïve and unproductive — an understanding that the system has inculcated into us early on — as it would likely achieve little. Circumvention and compromise help us move forward, in a society where the price of falling behind is surely greater than the minor harms in our daily lives caused by state power.

Over time, such an approach is rationalized, and even defended by the very group of young elites who in previous generations have been the most passionate advocates for change.

Last October, Xia Yeliang, an economics professor at Peking University, was dismissed from his job after making bold demands for political change. The school insisted that Mr. Xia was fired for poor teaching skills. When the news broke, scores of university students rushed to defend the school’s claim on social media from what one called “Western media’s typical tactic to smear the image of China.”

“Outsiders may pay more attention to freedom of speech, but students here care more about academics and teaching,” a friend who was a student at the university said to me at the time. “Neither side should impose its opinion on the other.”

Today, most of my high school friends, having graduated from top Chinese universities, are working at state banks and government-owned enterprises. Several have passed the competitive civil-service exam and landed cushy positions in government. Nationwide, China’s best and brightest are chasing the stability and prestige offered by the state system: A survey conducted by Tsinghua University reveals that state-owned enterprises and government organs rank as the two most desirable destinations for university graduates.

Outsiders, as my Peking University friend might say, may lament the contrast between the conservative outlook of today’s Chinese youth and the unbounded liberalism of the Tiananmen generation. But among the minority of my peers who are familiar with liu si, the rosy romanticism on the square in 1989 takes on a different hue today, when viewed in the fluorescent light of a government office cubicle.

In a recent conversation with a high school friend, who is now an editor at People’s Daily, the flagship of the state-run media, he brought up the subject of Tiananmen. An avid follower of Western news and user of Facebook, he shrugs off the urgency for Chinese society to revisit the event. “What do you think it can bring us, to resurrect liu si?” he asked. “Nothing is going to change. We have to move forward.”

Helen Gao is a journalist based in Beijing.

The brave new world of DIY faecal transplant - BBC NEWS

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-27503660

26 May 2014 Last updated at 23:29

The brave new world of DIY faecal transplant

By William KremerBBC World Service

You would have to be desperate to take a sample of your husband's excrement, liquidise it in a kitchen blender and then insert it into your body with an off-the-shelf enema kit. This article contains images and descriptions which some might find shocking.

In April 2012, Catherine Duff was ready to try anything. She was wasting away with crippling abdominal pains, nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea so severe she was confined to the house. At 56, in the US state of Indiana, she had come down with her sixth Clostridium difficile infection in six years.

"My colorectal surgeon said: 'The easiest thing would be to just take your colon out.' And my question was: 'Easier for whom?'"

Appalled at the idea of losing her large intestine, Duff's family feverishly searched for alternative treatments on the internet. One of them turned up an article about a doctor in Australia, Thomas Borody, who had been treating C. diff with an unusual process known as faecal transplant, or faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT).

Clostridium difficile is an obnoxious microbe, usually kept in check by other bacteria in our guts. Problems arise when antibiotics remove some of these "friendly" bacteria, allowing C. diff to take over. One doctor compares it to the hooligan on the bus who is prevented from doing any harm by the sheer number of people on board. A course of antibiotics is equivalent to some of these people getting off at a stop, allowing the hooligan to run wild. About 50% of a person's faeces is bacteria, and a faecal transplant is like a whole new busload of people - the friendly bacteria - being hustled on board.

John and Catherine Duff

It's an emerging, but not new treatment. Chinese medicine has recommended swallowing small doses of faecal matter for some ailments for 1,500 years. It's also a treatment option in veterinary medicine. In 1958, a Denver surgeon, Ben Eiseman, used faecal transplants to treat an inflammation of the colon. He wrote the procedure up in a journal article, which, years later, inspired Thomas Borody to try the radical treatment on patients with C. diff. Now the head of the Centre for Digestive Diseases in New South Wales, Borody has recorded some striking successes.

Duff showed the article about Borody to her gastroenterologist, her infectious diseases consultant and her colorectal surgeon. But none of them had performed a faecal transplant and none was willing to try. When Duff said that she intended to administer the treatment herself with her husband's faeces, the gastroenterologist agreed to send a sample away to be screened for disease.

After they received the all-clear to use the stool, it was Duff's husband John that donned plastic gloves and assiduously followed the instructions they found online. He was no doctor, but as a retired submarine commander Duff considered him equal to the task.

"He was in the habit of spending months at a time in a metal tube with over 100 men," Duff says. "As a result, nothing grosses him out. So he was the one that made the donation, and then mixed it in a blender with saline, and then he gave it to me in an enema.

"My husband kissed me after I lay down and told me not to worry, that everything was going to be OK, and that it was going to work."

Then he threw away the blender.

Duff lay on her back with her legs in the air, trying to hold the foreign material in her body. She lasted four hours before needing to go to the toilet. They started the process at 16:00 in the afternoon. By 22:00 that night she felt almost completely better. "And I had been literally dying the day before," she says. "I was going into renal failure - I was dying."

Lots of people die from Clostridium difficile. In the US, the figure is estimated by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to be 14,000 per year, while in England and Wales, 1,646 deaths from C. diff were recorded in 2012.

Even though antibiotics cause the disease, most patients are cured by more antibiotics. But for some, the problem returns after every course of drugs, as it did for Catherine Duff.

There is growing recognition that faecal transplant is the best way to treat patients like these. In the first randomised trial of the technique published in the New England Journal of Medicine last year, 94% of patients were cured by the treatment, whereas a course of antibiotics cured just 27%. The disparity was so huge that the researchers stopped the trial early, on the grounds that it was unethical to deny the better cure to the cohort assigned antibiotics.

Dozens of other trials involving faecal transplants are either in progress or have recently been completed. Dr Ilan Youngster was one of the authors of a pilot study, published in April in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, which found that using frozen faecal samples, administered "top-down" through a tube in the nose, was as effective as using fresh samples in a "bottom-up" procedure.

Youngster admits that even when frozen, faeces have a slight smell. "It's not a very pleasant treatment, especially from a psychological point of view," he says. "But we have yet to encounter a sick person with C. diff who has refused this treatment. It's a horrible disease. We had a patient with cancer that contracted C. diff and he said 'If I could get rid of one of these two diseases, please get rid of the C. diff.'"

Frozen faecal matter in Dr Youngster's trial at Massachusetts General Hospital

In the US, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has puzzled over how to regulate faecal transplant, but some doctors do offer the treatment, usually by colonoscopy. Catherine Duff, who set up the patient advocacy group the Fecal Transplant Foundation at the beginning of 2013, originally listed 19 providers on her website. Now there are about 75.

But she says that's nowhere near enough and people are dying because there is no provider close to their home. "Even if those doctors did nothing but faecal transplant, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they couldn't meet the need," she says.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

I decided, after hemming and hawing and talking to my son, that yes, he would let me put poo up his bum to see if that would work”

Sky CurtisAuthor, The Fecal Transplant Guidebook

Dr Alexander Khoruts at the University of Minnesota says clinics are concerned that offering faecal transplant could scare other patients away, as the smell is unmistakeable. "Imagine blending stool in a clinic space - the aesthetic problems with that are not trivial. When you click on the 'blend' button and the surface area of that faecal material increases thousands of folds in a matter of seconds, it is quite potent."

The difficulty of getting to a clinic that offers faecal transplant and abundant availability of free faeces explains why many continue to opt for what Duff and her husband did in 2012 - a self-administered transplant. She estimates that for every procedure that takes place in a clinic, scores more occur in bedrooms and bathrooms around the US.

A website, The Power of Poop, is full of tips and personal stories to help people with their first at-home faecal transplant, and a Facebook group under the name Sally Brown shares advice from patients who have immersed themselves in the science of gut microbiota.

Alongside the science there is humour, and Duff's Fecal Transplant Foundation is planning to bring out a range of merchandise including sweatshirts, beverage holders, baseball caps and bumper stickers with "unique and possibly hysterically funny slogans" alongside the foundation's awareness-raising brown ribbon.

Most DIY faecal transplant patients are, in fact, not suffering from C. diff, but from a range of other diseases that they believe the procedure will help, and which doctors are not willing or allowed to treat with faecal transplant. They include conditions that would appear to have very little to do with gut bacteria - including MS, autism, and diabetes - but the most common ailments treated are the inflammatory bowel diseases Crohn's and ulcerative colitis.

The efficacy of faecal transplant on these diseases - which around 1.5 million people suffer from in the US - is uncertain. Dr Elaine Petrof, an infectious diseases specialist at Kingston General Hospital, Ontario, says that for C. diff sufferers, taking antibiotics is like throwing gasoline on a weed-ridden lawn. "What you've done is you've killed the weeds but you've also killed the grass. So you're now left with a charred, barren, destroyed piece of land and you have to put seeds back on there to get stuff to grow again or the else the weeds will just come back."

She goes on: "With Crohn's disease it's different. Now you're dealing with another garden full of weeds, if you like. So then you're trying to replace a bad ecosystem that's already taken hold with another ecosystem. That's got to be much trickier and more difficult to accomplish."

Gut bacteria - five astonishing facts

1. 90% of cells in our body are bacteria - organically, our bodies are only 10% human
2. We are less than 1% human in terms of the overall gene activity in our bodies
3. Babies are born sterile, but 50% become carriers of C. diff in their first year of life - other bacteria hold it in check
4. One strain of bacteria, marketed as the probiotic Mutaflor, is reportedly from a culture taken from the stomach of a German soldier in WW1 - he was apparently the only one in his barracks not to succumb to food poisoning
5. Jeremy Nicholson at Imperial College London says that developed nations have probably changed their microbial communities more in the last 50 years than in the previous 10,000, thanks to antibiotics and other lifestyle changes

Radio 4 Frontiers: How gut microbiotica influence our health

In 2006, on the very day her husband died from lung cancer, Sky Curtis found herself sitting with her 18-year-old son in a doctor's waiting room in Toronto. He was curled up in a ball in pain, with bloody diarrhoea, a fever, cankers in his mouth, a rash on his face and boils on his legs. He was later diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and informed that his colon would have to be removed.

Like Catherine Duff, Curtis searched for alternative medicines and came across Thomas Borody in Australia. She gave him a call. "He talked to me for hours at a time," she says. "The man is a saint."

Continue reading the main story

Top-down or bottom-up?

• The form of faecal transplant chosen by DIY patients is the enema, but this doesn't send the faecal matter high into the colon, so the process may need to be repeated
• Most US surgeons use colonoscopies, which deliver the solution to the furthest end of the colon, but they require sedatives and the system must be flushed out beforehand
• A nasogastric tube removes the need for a preparatory treatment, but is opposed by some doctors since it sends faecal matter into the stomach - not its normal home
• Dr Alexander Khoruts says gastroenterologists tend to go bottom-up, and infectious disease physicians top-down

Curtis found a local doctor who was willing to prescribe a series of drugs which Borody recommended. Her son went into remission, but later fell sick again, with a new diagnosis of Crohn's. With her son wasting away in front of her eyes, she called Borody again and he suggested a faecal transplant.

"I decided, after hemming and hawing and talking to my son, that yes, he would let me put poo up his bum to see if that would work," she recalls. She had a sample of her own stool screened and they performed their first transplant on Christmas Day, 2008. "I kept thinking, 'I'm giving my kid a bag of [faeces] for Christmas. It wasn't ideal, but he was just so sick and I knew if I waited until after the Christmas holidays he would be dead."

The first few transplants, Curtis says, "sort-of worked". She then toyed with Borody's protocol, and on the basis of personal research into her son's condition, changed the frequency of the transplants and gave him painkillers, anti-inflammatory drugs, sedatives and steroid creams. Bit by bit, he got better.

Curtis was left from this ordeal with material for a memoir and her own protocol, developed through trial-and-error experiments with her son's treatment. This became a handbook that is now one of the key works in the DIY faecal transplant community.

Curtis's story is an inspiration to many, but the impact of faecal transplant on inflammatory bowel diseases is unpredictable, and varies from patient to patient. Unlike Curtis's son, some find they have to continue performing transplants to sustain their health. A team at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York hopes to start a study soon identifying the subgroups of patients that will potentially benefit from the treatment.

"We have to prove the science," says Dr Ashish Atreja from the hospital. "Because if we can't prove the science really works then we are creating an optimism which is not genuine."

Curtis says she has had plenty of people thanking her for her book, and so far, no feedback from disappointed patients, or criticism from doctors. Advocates of faecal transplant insist that it is safe, and point out that there are no published reports of anyone becoming ill as a result of the procedure. "It's about as dangerous as changing a baby's diaper," says Curtis.

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

I'll be the first to admit it's crude - it's essentially like pouring sewage into people”

Elaine PetrofInfectious Diseases Specialist, Kingston General Hospital

Dr Lawrence Brandt at Montefiore Medical Center in New York, one of the first advocates of the procedure in the US, agrees that the administration of stool in an enema is reasonably safe, but he worries that some people may be doing it before other treatment options have been explored, or after a faulty diagnosis.

Ilan Youngster agrees. "We wouldn't want anyone out there getting a stool transplant just because they feel they would benefit from it," he says.

A bigger concern is that they are using untested stool. At Brandt's clinic, donors are screened for a long list of infectious diseases, including HIV and hepatitis, and are subjected to a battery of questions about their lifestyle and habits. Donors with allergies and heart disease are excluded, as well those who have recently taken antibiotics.

"We had one woman who said: 'Can I use my dog's stool?'" says Brandt. "I'm sure that there are some people out there who are saying, 'Well, I have a horse. He's pretty healthy and he has an adequate supply of stool - I'll use his stool." But using animal stool is absolutely not recommended.

Curtis, like all faecal transplant advocates, agrees that it is vital to get stool samples tested, but says that unfortunately only a few per cent of at-home patients do this.

For many patients, the choice of donor is often about more than just choosing someone with healthy stool, she says. "It is important that the donor feels psychologically 'right' because their poo is going into the sick person's body." In the online faecal transplant community, patients occasionally refer to their donors as "poop angels".

In November 2011, Edward Bondurant had a "very strange conversation" with a friend he had known since he was five. "I just said well, you have something that you do every day that might change my life. I knew this person better than my brother but I still felt odd asking - but he immediately said yes."

Edward says he often reads the BBC News website while carrying out a faecal transplant

Bondurant has suffered with ulcerative colitis since 1978, on and off. When it flares up, he says, "you need to be 10 steps from the bathroom - and sometimes that's two steps too many". The drugs he takes for it are expensive - around $11,000 (£6,500) a dose - and have bad side-effects.

Bondurant's first attempt at faecal transplant was a messy disaster but he is now something of a pro, able to do his job as a financial adviser while adopting the best positions needed for the faecal matter to slip into his colon. "I have actually had long conversations, doing large business deals for large sums of money, while hanging upside down," he says.

Although Bondurant still takes drugs when his colitis flares up, he does regular faecal transplants to keep the disease at bay - he has now done more than 100. He can adapt his schedule to his donor's body clock. He only lives five blocks away, so Bondurant either swings by his house, or his donor, letting himself into Bondurant's house with his own key, drops off his droppings, leaving them in Tupperware in his fridge.

Faecal deposits being processed at OpenBiome

But there is no medical reason why you need to be best friends with your faecal donor. At the beginning of 2013, two friends at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology started OpenBiome, a non-profit making stool bank. Deposits from three fully-screened donors are kept in 250ml bottles at -80C, before being shipped to hospitals for $250 (£150) each. A frozen stool bank gets around the logistical problems of handling fresh faeces, and the time delay involved in screening new donors. So far, 370 little bottles have been sent to 39 hospitals.

A recently proposed rule from the FDA, that donors should be known to the patient or the doctor administering the faecal transplant, threatens OpenBiome's business model, but the owners are still feeling upbeat about the future. Their latest venture is in capsules containing faeces. Similar products have been trialled successfully by researchers at the University of Calgary and Ilan Youngster is currently working on a further study. Thomas Borody also uses them - he calls them "crapsules". Taking faecal tablets, although still revolting as a concept, is less invasive than a colonoscopy or enema.

OpenBiome's prototype faecal capsule

A different vision of the future of the treatment is a move away from faeces altogether. Instead, patients would receive a live bacterial culture targeted to fight Clostridium difficile - in effect, a synthetic stool.

Although it would be developed from faecal samples, it would only need to contain a handful of strains of bacteria, not the hundreds present in excrement, which would make its impact on the human gut more reproducible and understandable.

Trevor Lawley at the Sanger Institute in the UK is down to just 18 strains in his synthetic stool. He is in the process of overcoming a series of technical problems, such as how to grow these anaerobic organisms and prevent them from evolving before they can be used. But he says the real challenge in the emerging field of "live biotherapeutics" is how to regulate it.

Meanwhile, in Canada Dr Petrof has already cured C. diff in two patients using a synthetic solution containing 33 strains of bacteria grown inside a "robogut"- an imitation colon.

Faecal transplant, she says, works. "But I'll be the first to admit it's crude. It's essentially like pouring sewage into people." Her synthetic stool, on the other hand, smells a lot less obnoxious and is a sterile-looking milky colour.

"It's still the same concept of using a microbial ecosystem or community of bacteria," says Petrof. "But we're just moving away from taking it out of the toilet."

A miniature Robogut in action - Petrof and her colleagues call their synthetic stool "RePOOPulate"

The Original Wolf of Wall Street Carl Icahn Returns - TIME

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2c9171%2c2159274%2c00.html

The world's most ravenous capitalist is taking on the world's most valuable firm, Apple

By Rana Foroohar Monday, Dec. 16, 2013

Carl Icahn is the richest man on Wall Street. He's the most feared corporate raider In the world. He may also be the most entertaining financier on the planet. Having grown up in a family that resembled a darker version of Woody Allen's multigenerational working-class Jewish clan in Radio Days, Icahn is prone to one-liners. His real talent is as a mimic, but when I ask him to do Apple CEO Tim Cook, he declines. "Nah, I can't do Cook. I can only do crazies."

Of course, some people say Cook is crazy to listen to Icahn, who has been trying to persuade him since August to give some of Apple's $147 billion cash hoard back to investors in the form of a massive share buyback. Now Icahn is ratcheting up the pressure: he tells TIME that he filed a precatory proposal with Apple on Nov. 26, three days before the deadline for measures to be voted on at the company's next annual shareholders meeting.

His proposal, which calls for a stock buyback, would not be binding on the company's management, and that's typical for shareholder resolutions. But a buyback would almost certainly push up the price of Apple's stock--and increase the value of Icahn's $2 billion in Apple holdings along with those of all the other Apple investors. Icahn says he doesn't consider his proposal an indictment of Cook, who has been at Apple's helm since Steve Jobs died in 2011. "Tim Cook is doing a good job with the business," Icahn tells TIME. "I think he's good at running the business whether he does what I want or not. But Apple is not a bank."

Silicon Valley’s rush to back Bitcoin services rouses concerns - Financial Times

Silicon Valley’s rush to back Bitcoin services rouses concerns - Financial Times

May 30, 2014 at 1:30am

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http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/8baa2bb8-e5bb-11e3-aeef-00144feabdc0.html?segid=0100320#axzz337QiNP00

By Richard Waters in San Francisco

©Bloomberg

Silicon Valley is in danger of promoting a new wave of Bitcoin services for consumers and merchants before the digital currency is secure or stable enough for the mass market, according to some entrepreneurs and financiers working in the field.

Some of the US technology industry’s leading lights have joined the rush to build companies around Bitcoin, seeing it as the foundation for a new financial services industry independent of the current banking system. That has led to a spate of start-ups trying to make it easier for consumers to make payments with the digital currency, and for merchants to accept it.

But a potential lack of security, extreme levels of volatility and regulatory uncertainty make Bitcoin highly unsuitable for such uses, critics say.

“It’s an idiotic sideshow,” said Wences Casares, founder of Xapo, a Silicon Valley start-up that recently launched a service for holding the currency. The relatively small market for Bitcoin – the total amount outstanding is valued at about $7bn – means it is likely to be years before it becomes accepted as a currency for payments, if ever, he added.

Significant parts of the infrastructure needed to support the mass-market use of Bitcoin are also still lacking.

A lack of guaranteed security for the “wallet” services where consumers hold their Bitcoins is one of the biggest obstacles, said Adam Shapiro of Promontory Financial, a consulting firm. Most banks have also held back from working with Bitcoin companies given the regulatory uncertainty surrounding the area, he added.

Despite that, US start-ups have rushed into the field, drawn by hopes that the Bitcoin protocol, like the internet protocol underpinning the web, will provide the foundation for a wave of new applications that disrupt the existing finance industry.

FT Video

Bitcoin future in doubt?

February 2014: The Bitcoin trading website Mt Gox has disappeared from the internet, raising serious concerns among investors and other Bitcoin holders. Stephen Foley, the FT’s US investment correspondent, speaks to Arash Massoudi about what the event might mean for the future of the digital currency

Halsey Minor, a serial entrepreneur and investor who co-founded online news site Cnet and was a prominent early backer of Salesforce.com, joined the race earlier this month with an attempt to take the volatility out of paying with the currency. Users of Bitreserve, which is currently in a private test phase, would have their accounts denominated in whatever currency they choose, with Bitcoin only used as the “back end” of a payments system that would make it possible to move money without incurring the usual fees.

The size of venture capital rounds for Bitcoin companies has also escalated sharply in recent weeks, with a $30m investment earlier this month in Bitpay , a company in Atlanta, and $25m in San Francisco-based Coinbase. Prominent investors who have jumped into the field in recent months include Marc Andreessen, developer of the first web browser, and Jim Breyer, an early backer of Facebook.

Bitcoinmania

FT Alphaville takes you through the latest news as well as the history of Bitcoin

Their rush to back companies building applications for the currency echoes the stampede to invest in consumer internet start-ups in the mid-1990s, after the launch of Netscape’s first browser opened the web to wider consumer use.

But doubters argue that the first successful Bitcoin companies are more likely to be involved more in the back-end “plumbing” needed to make the currency secure and stable, rather than in mass-market services.

“It’s like the beginning of the internet, the first cases were pretty boring,” said Mr Casares. “The really sexy things came later.”

China’s Culture of Compliance Is Crippling the Country - TIME

http://time.com/2797346/tiananmen-square-anniversary/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Rana Foroohar @RanaForoohar
 

May 30, 2014

    

Standing tall A Chinese youth at a demonstration in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 1, 1989Eric Bouvet—Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

Next week will be the 25thanniversary of Tiananmen Square. It was a turning point not only for China, but also for the world, in the sense that it heralded a new era in which growing wealth and growing political freedom in emerging markets didn’t necessary go hand in hand. This year, China will very likely overtake the U.S. as the world’s largest economy. It has certainly become wealthy. But it has also become less free–as have so many of the world’s largest developing nations–think Russia, Turkey, many parts of Africa and Latin America, etc.

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The question is, that can juxtaposition last another 25 years—or even another five? It’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, particularly as I delve into New Yorker writer Evan Osnos’ very interesting new book on China, “Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China” (FSG). The core premise of the book is that individual ambition and authoritarianism in countries like China will inevitably come into conflict with one another. As people get richer, they want more freedom, and they put pressure on their governments to deliver it. The problem is that these governments are often much better at delivering wealth than they are at delivering anything close to liberal democracy.

I think we may be reaching a tipping point in the next few years around that juxtaposition between growth and choice in the emerging world. China is, as always, the most dramatic example of this. The recent cyber-hacking scandal, for example, was portrayed by many pundits as yet another example of how the Middle Kingdom is leaping ahead of U.S. government and business interests, stealing American intellectual property and using it to gain a competitive edge. But as I argued, China’s IP theft actually underscores what a “me too” economy the Middle Kingdom still is. China is good, very good, at copycatting other people’s ideas (Osnos’ stories of various Chinese entrepreneurs, like the village woman behind the Chinese version of match.com, are fascinating on this score), but it has yet to create many global brands–aside from Lenovo’s computers and the college mini-fridges made by the low-end white goods producer Haier.

I think the lack of a top-shelf innovation culture has a lot to do with the lack of choice in Chinese society. I once spoke to a Wal-Mart executive in China who told me that he had trouble getting employees in one department to address basic problems in another–picking up boxes that had fallen off a shelf, or order new supplies, for example–because they were afraid of stepping out of their silos. That’s not about work ethic–the Chinese have that in spades–but a culture of compliance. In China, it’s important, sometimes deadly important, to swim in your own lane.

Another issue with the growth of higher end Chinese business is that entrepreneurs don’t trust the stability of the government. I’ve heard time and time again from wealthy people in China (many of whom are looking to get their money out – witness the percentage of high end property purchases in luxury real estate markets worldwide that are made by the Chinese) is that it doesn’t pay to develop businesses for the long haul here, because uncertainly and political risk is so high. People tend to get in, get out, and become serial entrepreneurs, rather than spending decades working on innovation, a la developed countries like the U.S., Japan, or Germany.

How will all this affect China? If the Middle Kingdom can’t make the leap to the “middle income” stage of development, which history shows is the trickiest one (only a handful of developing countries globally have made it), then unemployment will rise and social stability will fall. How will that affect Americans? In a sense, it already is. Trade tensions mean many U.S. companies are rethinking how, or if, they’ll do business in China, with myriad ramifications for us all. For more on all of that, as well as the economic legacy of the Tiananmen event, listen to my radio show, Money Talking, on WNYC this week

Google sets up 'right to be forgotten' form after EU ruling - BBC NEWS

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27631001

30 May 2014 Last updated at 05:15

Google has launched a service to allow Europeans to ask for personal data to be removed from online search results.

The move comes after a landmark European Union court ruling earlier this month, which gave people the "right to be forgotten".

Links to "irrelevant" and outdated data should be erased on request, it said.

Google said it would assess each request and balance "privacy rights of the individual with the public's right to know and distribute information".

"When evaluating your request, we will look at whether the results include outdated information about you, as well as whether there's a public interest in the information," Google says on the form which applicants must fill in.

Google said it would look at information about "financial scams, professional malpractice, criminal convictions, or public conduct of government officials" while deciding on the request.

Earlier this month, the BBC learned that more than half of requests sent to Google from UK individuals involved convicted criminals.

This included a man convicted of possessing child abuse images who had also asked for links to pages about his conviction to be wiped.

'Fraudulent requests'

“Start Quote

As we regulate the internet, I think we're not going to see the kind of innovation we've seen”

Larry PageGoogle

On 13 May, the EU's court of justice ruled that links to "irrelevant" and outdated data on search engines should be erased on request.

The case was brought by a Spanish man who complained that an auction notice of his repossessed home, which appeared on Google's search results, infringed his privacy.

On Friday, Google said that EU citizens who want their private details removed from the search engine will be able to do so by filling out an online form.

However, they will need to provide links to the material they want removed, their country of origin, and a reason for their request.

Individuals will also have to attach a valid photo identity.

"Google often receives fraudulent removal requests from people impersonating others, trying to harm competitors, or improperly seeking to suppress legal information," the firm said.

"To prevent this kind of abuse, we need to verify identity."

Less innovation?

However, in an interview given to the Financial Times, Google boss Larry Page said that although the firm would comply with the ruling, it could damage innovation.

He also said the regulation would give cheer to repressive regimes.

Mr Page said he regretted not being "more involved in a real debate" about privacy in Europe, and that the company would now try to "be more European".

But, he warned, "as we regulate the internet, I think we're not going to see the kind of innovation we've seen".

Mr Page added that the ruling would encourage "other governments that aren't as forward and progressive as Europe to do bad things".

A right to be forgotten?

• In 2012, the European Commission published plans for a "right to be forgotten" law, allowing people to request that data about themselves to be deleted
• Online service providers would have to comply unless they had "legitimate" reason to do otherwise
• The plans are part of a wide-ranging overhaul of the commission's 1995 Data Protection Directive
• UK's Ministry of Justice claims that the law "raises unrealistic and unfair expectations"
• Some tech firms have expressed concern about the reach of the bill

People Are Already Scrambling to Get Their Past Scrubbed From Google - TIME

http://time.com/103381/google-right-forgotten-takedown-requests/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Victor Luckerson @VLuck
 

May 16, 2014

    

Just three days after the European Union’s high court ruled that citizens have a right to request search engines remove information about them from search results, people are already lining up to have unsavory bits of their history scrubbed from Google’s servers

Just three days after the European Union’s high court ruled that citizens have the “right to be forgotten” from search engine results, Europeans are already lining up to get unsavory bits of their history scrubbed from Google’s servers. The tech giant is scrambling to come up with a mechanism to handle the flood of requests and could face new financial costs because of the ruling.

More than 500 million people across 28 European countries now have the legal right to demand that Google remove from its search results links that they believe are no longer timely or relevant, even if the facts contained in said links are true. Already a former politician who wants to run again has requested that Google remove articles about his past time in office, according to a person familiar with the matter. Other requests have come from a university lecturer who wants to scrub articles about his job suspension and a man convicted of owning child pornography who wants to remove articles about the conviction, the person familiar said.

It’s not yet clear whether Google has complied with these or any other takedown requests.

“The ruling has significant implications for how we handle takedown requests,” a Google spokesperson said in an email. “This is logistically complicated – not least because of the many languages involved and the need for careful review. As soon as we have thought through exactly how this will work, which may take several weeks, we will let our users know.” He declined to say how many takedown requests Google has received, but a German regulator told the New York Timesthat such requests in Germany had increased tenfold since the ruling.

The tech giant is still reeling from the surprise judgment by the European Union’s Court of Justice, which ruled in favor of a Spanish lawyer who had been demanding Google to remove links to an article about debts he owed in the 1990’s. The ruling, centered on the idea that old web pages would fall out of public knowledge if not for Google’s ability to quickly scour the entire Web, vastly broadens the scope of a 1995 directive that grants Europeans extensive protections for their personal data. If Google refuses to comply with a citizen’s takedown demand, that person can have a judge or arbiter decide on the validity of the case. Google could potentially face significant costs litigating to keep old links in its search database and implementing a system that allows it to comb through thousands of takedown requests. Yahoo search and Microsoft’s Bing will also be affected.

Because of First Amendment protections of free speech and Google’s large political clout, experts believe it ishighly unlikely that the “right to be forgotten” will ever be adopted as law in the United States.

13 Easy Ways to Teach Yourself to Be More Confident -TIME

http://time.com/107218/be-more-self-confident/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+timeblogs%2Fcurious_capitalist+%28TIME%3A+Business%29

• Minda Zetlin
 

May 21, 2014

    

Few are born confident, research shows. The self-assured learn to be that way, and you can too

Are you as confident as you’d like to be? Few people would answer “yes” to that question. But, according to Becky Blalock, author and former Fortune 500 executive, anyone can learn to be more confident. And it’s a skill we can teach ourselves.

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Begin by forgetting the notion that confidence, leadership, and public speaking are abilities people are born with. In fact, research shows that being shy and cautious is the natural human state. “That’s how people in early times lived to pass on their genes, so it’s in our gene pool,” she says. “You had to be cautious to survive. But the things they needed to worry about then are not the things we need to worry about today.”

How do you teach yourself to be more confident? Here’s Blalock’s advice:

1. Put your thoughts in their place.

The average human has 65,000 thoughts every day, Blalock says, and 85 to 90 percent of them are negative–things to worry about or fear. “They’re warnings to yourself,” Blalock says, and left over from our cave-dwelling past. It makes sense–if we stick our hand in a flame our brain wants to make sure we don’t ever do that again. But this survival mechanism works against us because it causes us to focus on fears rather than hopes or dreams.

The point is to be aware that your brain works this way, and keep that negativity in proportion. “What you have to realize is your thoughts are just thoughts,” Blalock says. They don’t necessarily represent objective reality.

2. Begin at the end.

“There are so many people that I’ve asked, ‘What do you want to do? What do you want to be?’ and they would say, ‘I don’t know,’” Blalock says. “Knowing what you want is the key. Everything else you do should be leading you where you want to go.”

3. Start with gratitude.

Begin the day by thinking about some of the things you have to be grateful for, Blalock advises. “Most of the 7 billion people in the world won’t have the opportunities you do,” she says. “If you start out with that perspective, you’ll be in the right frame of mind for the rest of the day.”

4. Take a daily step outside your comfort zone.

There’s a funny thing about comfort zones. If we step outside them on a regular basis, they expand. If we stay within them, they shrink. Avoid getting trapped inside a shrinking comfort zone by pushing yourself to do things that are outside it.

We’ve all had experiences where we’ve done something that terrified us, and then discovered it wasn’t so bad. In Blalock’s case, she was visiting a military base and had gotten to the top of the parachute-training tower for a practice jump. “They had me all hooked up, and I said, ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do this, I have a small child at home,’” she recalls. “The guy took his foot and pushed me off the tower. When I got out there I realized it wasn’t that bad.”

We won’t always have someone standing by to kick us out of our comfort zones, so we have to do it for ourselves. “Just act!” Blalock says.

5. Remember: Dogs don’t chase parked cars.

If you’re running into opposition, questions, and doubts, there’s probably a good reason–you’re going somewhere. That doesn’t mean you should ignore warning signs, but it does mean you should put those negatives in perspective. If you don’t make changes, and challenge the status quo, no one will ever object to anything you do.

6. Get ready to bounce back.

“It’s not failure that destroys our confidence, it’s not getting back up,” Blalock says. “Once we get back up, we’ve learned what doesn’t work and we can give it another try.” Blalock points out that the baseball players with the biggest home run records also have the biggest strikeout records. Taking more swings gets you where you want to go.

7. Find a mentor.

Whatever you’ve set out to do, there are likely others who’ve done it first and can offer you useful advice or at least serve as role models. Find those people and learn as much from them as you can.

8. Choose your companions wisely.

“Your outlook–negative or positive–will be the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” Blalock says. “So be careful who you hang out with. Make sure you’re hanging out with people who encourage you and lift you up.”

When she quit her C-suite job to write books, she adds, some people were aghast and predicted that no one would read them while others were quite encouraging. It didn’t take her long to figure out that the encouraging friends were the ones she should gravitate toward.

9. Do your homework.

In almost any situation, preparation can help boost your confidence. Have to give a speech? Practice it several times, record yourself, and listen. Meeting people for the first time? Check them and their organizations out on the Web, and check their social media profiles as well. “If you’re prepared you will be more confident,” Blalock says. “The Internet makes it so easy.”

10. Get plenty of rest and exercise.

There’s ample evidence by now that getting enough sleep, exercise, and good nutrition profoundly affects both your mood and your effectiveness. “Just moderate exercise three times a week for 20 minutes does so much for the hippocampus and is more effective than anything else for warding off Alzheimer’s and depression,” Blalock says. “Yet it always falls of the list when we’re prioritizing. While there are many things we can delegate, exercise isn’t one of them. If there were a way to do that, I would have figured it out by now.”

11. Breathe!

“This one is so simple,” Blalock says. “If you breathe heavily, it saturates your brain with oxygen and makes you more awake and aware. It’s very important in a tense situation because it will make you realize that you control your body, and not your unconscious mind. If you’re not practicing breathing, you should be.”

12. Be willing to fake it.

No, you shouldn’t pretend to have qualifications or experience that you don’t. But if you have most of the skills you need and can likely figure out the rest, don’t hang back. One company did a study to discover why fewer of its female employees were getting promotions than men. It turned out not to be so much a matter of bias as of confidence: If a man had about half the qualifications for a posted job he’d be likely to apply for it, while a woman would be likelier to wait till she had most or all of them. Don’t hold yourself back by assuming you need to have vast experience for a job or a piece of business before you go after it.

13. Don’t forget to ask for help.

“Don’t assume people know what you want,” Blalock says. “You have to figure out what that is, and then educate them.”

Once people know what you want, and that you want their help, you may be surprised at how forthcoming they are. “People are really flattered when you ask for advice and support,” she says. “If someone says no you can always ask someone else. But in my experience, they rarely say no.”