The New Nation - Internet Edition

Getting a sense of Coca-Cola's philanthropic ideas!

Dr. Sudhirendar Sharma

In a country where 70% of irrigation water and 80% of its domestic water supplies come from its rapidly depleting groundwater reserves, groundwater recharge is bound to get unstilted support. What if the recharge is funded by Coca-Cola from out of the profit it nets by extracting groundwater in the first place! That the company's expanding business eyes country's groundwater reserves is pushed aside. Not without reason as everybody is brainwashed by the corporate PR that passes for news these days, which makes everyone think that the Coca-Cola groundwater recharge model is the greatest invention to come down the pike since the wheel was invented.

It needs multiple voices and committed cheerleaders to hold aloft the corporation's water stewardship credentials. That it's bottled waterbrand Dancing was awarded with `Consumer's International 2007 International Bad Product Awards' - filtering drinkable tap water andselling it back to the market, particularly in Europe; that it faces charges for human rights abuses of union members trying to organise Coca-Cola plants in Colombia; and that two-thirds of freshwater used by Coca-Cola is converted into wastewater globally are facts that the company will see erased sooner from the public memory!

Co-opting unsuspecting civil society organisations to support corporation's green makeover comes handy. Coca-Cola's long-term partnership with the World-wide Fund for Nature; it's recent supportof $1 million to the Global Water Challenge, and its ongoing funding for more than 100 community water projects in 49 countries are designed to help the company avoid addressing reasonable questions. In India, where the privatisation of the state is nearly complete and where the idea of capitalism is fast sinking into middle-class psyche, the propaganda that a beverage company is recharging groundwater gets accepted without question.

No surprise, therefore, the groundwater withdrawal by Coca-Cola in Plachimada in Kerala is not seen as gross violation of a communal asset for meeting private interests. In similar tone, the soft water company's groundwater withdrawal in Kaladhera in Jaipur is considered insignificant when compared to irrigation withdrawals in the same region. Need it be argued that while irrigation withdrawals are in larger public interest, groundwater extraction helps the company accumulate private wealth. Can appropriation of communal asset like water be justified for generating corporate profits?

That the profit thus generated are channelised to demonstrate how capitalism actually works if done right, and how if done right it will save those people from underdevelopment and lives of hardship and misery is at the core of Coca-Cola's community initiatives. Let there be no doubt that while the intentions of the company may seem pious onpaper, its philanthropic motive is shrouded in corporate mystery. Milton Friedman had rightfully said: "there is one and only one social responsibility of business - to use its resources and engage inactivities designed to increase its profits."

Coca-Cola rightly argues that a successful business must be - in both perception and reality - a functioning part of every community in which it operates.

No wonder, it supports no less than 320 community water projects across 17 states and takes pride in generating 15 additional jobs through supply and distribution for each job in the company. It maintains that by creating jobs and enabling business it contributes to alleviating poverty in the communities it serves.

But that each job makes water dearer to the communities and that it returns to them in bottled form at exorbitant price is something the company will like us to ignore.

Undoubtedly, there are myriad anomalies in managing public water distribution systems that have resulted in severe water shortages across the country. Allowing multinational corporations unrestricted access to groundwater under the Indian Easement Act is one amongst them.

How indeed the country treats Coca-Cola and its clones will determine how prepared it is towards addressing the issue of emerging water poverty? A country that is dependent on groundwater for meeting its growing public demand cannot allow private companies to siphon profit out of its shrinking groundwater reserves in return of suspected favours via a vulnerable civil society. Can a killer be pardoned because he engages in simultaneous public service too?

Supercomputer sets record

John Markoff

An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought- after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the IBM BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation's stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.

Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas D'Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

The machine is an unusual blend of chips used in consumer products and advanced parallel computing technologies. The lessons that computer scientists learn by making it calculate even faster are seen as essential to the future of both personal and mobile consumer computing.

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop - one thousand trillion calculations per second - has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic competitiveness.

By running programs that find a solution in hours or even less time - compared with as long as three months on older generations of computers - petaflop machines like Roadrunner have the potential to fundamentally alter science and engineering, supercomputer experts say. Researchers can ask questions and receive answers virtually interactively and can perform experiments that would previously have been impractical.

"This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing, " said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who for several decades has tracked the performance of the fastest computers.

Each new supercomputing generation has brought scientists a step closer to faithfully simulating physical reality. It has also produced software and hardware technologies that have rapidly spilled out into the rest of the computer industry for consumer and business products.

Technology is flowing in the opposite direction as well. Consumer-oriented computing began dominating research and development spending on technology shortly after the cold war ended in the late 1980s, and that trend is evident in the design of the world's fastest computers.

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an IBM Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony's PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.

"Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade," said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics. "

The innovations flowing from this generation of high-speed computers will most likely result from the way computer scientists manage the complexity of the system's hardware.

Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.

"We've proved some skeptics wrong," said Michael Anastasio, a physicist who is director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. "This gives us a window into a whole new way of computing. We can look at phenomena we have never seen before."

Solving that programming problem is important because in just a few years personal computers will have microprocessor chips with dozens or even hundreds of processor cores.

The industry is now hunting for new techniques for making use of the new computing power. Some experts, however, are skeptical that the most powerful supercomputers will provide useful examples.

"If Chevy wins the Daytona 500, they try to convince you the Chevy Malibu you're driving will benefit from this," said Steve Wallach, a supercomputer designer who is chief scientist of Convey Computer, a start-up firm based in Richardson, Texas.

Those who work with weapons might not have much to offer the video gamers of the world, he suggested.

Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the resurgence of the United States in supercomputing.

Although American companies had dominated the field since its inception in the 1960s, in 2002 the Japanese Earth Simulator briefly claimed the title of the world's fastest by executing more than 35 trillion mathematical calculations per second. Two years later, a supercomputer created by IBM reclaimed the speed record for the United States. The Japanese challenge, however, led Congress and the Bush administration to reinvest in high-performance computing.

"It's a sign that we are maintaining our position," said Peter Ungaro, chief executive of Cray, a maker of supercomputers. He noted, however, that "the real competitiveness is based on the discoveries that are based on the machines."

Having surpassed the petaflop barrier, IBM is already looking toward the next generation of supercomputing. "You do these record-setting things because you know that in the end we will push on to the next generation and the one who is there first will be the leader," said Nicholas Donofrio, an IBM executive vice president.

By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States' supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop.

Source: International Herald Tribune)

Obama on the Nile

Thomas l. Friedman

This column will probably get Barack Obama in trouble, but that's not my problem. I cannot tell a lie: Many Egyptians and other Arab Muslims really like him and hope that he wins the presidency.

I have had a chance to observe several U.S. elections from abroad, but it has been unusually revealing to be in Egypt as Barack Hussein Obama became the Democrats' nominee for president of the United States.

While Obama, who was raised a Christian, is constantly assuring Americans that he is not a Muslim, Egyptians are amazed, excited and agog that America might elect a black man whose father's family was of Muslim heritage. They don't really understand Obama's family tree, but what they do know is that if America - despite being attacked by Muslim militants on 9/11 - were to elect as its president some guy with the middle name "Hussein," it would mark a sea change in America-Muslim world relations.

Every interview seems to end with the person I was interviewing asking me: "Now, can I ask you a question? Obama? Do you think they will let him win?" (It's always "let him win" not just "win.")

It would not be an exaggeration to say that the Democrats' nomination of Obama as their candidate for president has done more to improve America's image abroad - an image dented by the Iraq war, President Bush's invocation of a post-9/11 "crusade," Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and the xenophobic opposition to Dubai Ports World managing U.S. harbors - than the entire Bush public diplomacy effort for seven years.

Of course, Egyptians still have their grievances with America, and will in the future no matter who is president - and we've got a few grievances with them, too. But every once in a while, America does something so radical, so out of the ordinary - something that old, encrusted, traditional societies like those in the Middle East could simply never imagine - that it revives America's revolutionary "brand" overseas in a way that no diplomat could have designed or planned.

I just had dinner at a Nile-side restaurant with two Egyptian officials and a businessman, and one of them quoted one of his children as asking: "Could something like this ever happen in Egypt?" And the answer from everyone at the table was, of course, "no." It couldn't happen anywhere in this region. Could a Copt become president of Egypt? Not a chance. Could a Shiite become the leader of Saudi Arabia? Not in a hundred years. A Bahai president of Iran? In your dreams. Here, the past always buries the future, not the other way around.

These Egyptian officials were particularly excited about Obama's nomination because it might mean that being labeled a "pro-American" reformer is no longer an insult here, as it has been in recent years. As one U.S. diplomat put it to me: Obama's demeanor suggests to foreigners that he would not only listen to what they have to say but might even take it into account. They anticipate that a U.S. president who spent part of his life looking at America from the outside in - as John McCain did while a P.O.W. in Vietnam - will be much more attuned to global trends.

My colleague Michael Slackman, The Times's bureau chief in Cairo, told me about a recent encounter he had with a worker at Cairo's famed Blue Mosque: "Gamal Abdul Halem was sitting on a green carpet. When he saw we were Americans, he said: 'Hillary-Obama tied?' in thick, broken English. He told me that he lived in the Nile Delta, traveling two hours one way everyday to get to work, and still he found time to keep up with the race. He didn't have anything to say bad about Hillary but felt that Obama would be much better because he is dark-skinned, like him, and because he has Muslim heritage. 'For me and my family and friends, we want Obama,' he said. 'We all like what he is saying.' "

Yes, all of this Obama-mania is excessive and will inevitably be punctured should he win the presidency and start making tough calls or big mistakes. For now, though, what it reveals is how much many foreigners, after all the acrimony of the Bush years, still hunger for the "idea of America" - this open, optimistic, and, indeed, revolutionary, place so radically different from their own societies.

In his history of 19th-century America, "What Hath God Wrought," Daniel Walker Howe quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson as telling a meeting of the Mercantile Library Association in 1844 that "America is the country of the future. It is a country of beginnings, of projects, of vast designs and expectations."

That's the America

A coup by any other name?

Gareth Jenkins

On Friday, Public Prosecutor Abdul-Rahman Yalcinkaya filed a case with the Turkish Constitutional Court calling for the closure of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) on the grounds that it had become a centre for attempts to undermine the principle of secularism enshrined in the Turkish constitution. Yalcinkaya also called for 71 members of the JDP to be banned from all political activity. They include Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan and most of the rest of the party's leadership.

The court is expected to rule on whether or not the application meets the procedural requirements by the end of this month, after which the JDP will have a month to present its initial defence. In the past, party closure cases have usually taken anything from eight months to several years to be concluded.

Hardline Turkish secularists have always been suspicious of the JDP's ultimate intentions. The JDP was formed in 2001 from the remnants of a succession of political parties which had been outlawed for allegedly trying to undermine secularism. There is no dispute that, in their youth, JDP leaders such as Erdogan frequently espoused a hardline interpretation of Islam and even sometimes called for the introduction of Sharia law. However, in the run-up to the JDP's victory in the general election of November 2002, Erdogan and the other party leaders maintained that they had changed and repeatedly expressed their commitment to secularism. Nor, during its first five years in government, did the JDP attempt to introduce any radical, anti-secular measures.

However, if anything, the JDP's moderation appears to have made hardline secularists even more suspicious. They refused to accept that the JDP leaders really had changed, maintaining that they were just biding their time until they felt strong enough to implement a radical Islamist agenda. Nor was the JDP unaware of how it was regarded by the secular Turkish establishment, particularly the country's still powerful military. During its first five years in power, the JDP sought to avoid confrontation and backed down whenever the military expressed disapproval of any of its policy initiatives.

The change came in spring 2007 when the military intervened to try to prevent the JDP from appointing Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul to the presidency. The JDP responded by calling an early general election which it won by a landslide, taking 46.6 per cent of the popular vote. Over the months that followed, the Turkish military adopted a low profile, apparently unwilling to risk another humiliating rebuff from the Turkish electorate.

Emboldened by what it regarded as the secular establishment being cowed into silence, since July last year, the JDP has not only appointed Gul to the presidency but pushed ahead with a series of initiatives which challenge the traditional interpretation of secularism in Turkey, most recently by trying to lift the ban which prevents women wearing headscarves from attending university.

But, even if the military has remained silent, the response from the other bastion of the Turkish establishment, namely the judiciary, has demonstrated that the JDP's confidence was, at best, premature. Yalcinkaya's decision to press for the closure of the JDP stunned not only the party but the entire country and looks set to overshadow the political agenda for months to come.

Yalcinkaya's attempts to close down a party which has the support of nearly half the Turkish electorate has triggered protests from outside and inside the country, including from some of the JDP's opponents.

"Turkey can't get anywhere by closing down parties," said Sinan Aygun, the chairman of the Ankara Chamber of Commerce. "I may be extremely critical of the government but I can't support such a disastrous initiative."

Ollie Rehn, the Commissioner for Enlargement for the EU, which Turkey still hopes to join, dryly noted: "It is difficult to say that this respects the democratic principles of a normal European country."

Erdogan was characteristically blunt. "Our people don't deserve this," he said, warning Yalcinkaya that he, rather than the JDP, would suffer the most from the application.

But the real problem is probably not so much Yalcinkaya's application but the often draconian Turkish laws under which it was filed. A large proportion of his 162 page indictment consists of quotations from speeches given by leading JDP officials. Most are fairly innocuous. However, there are statements which, even if they are acceptable in most countries in the world, would appear to be illegal under Turkish law. For example, Yalcinkaya has indicted four local JDP officials from the provincial town of Nigde who campaigned in the 2007 election under the slogan "An end to 84 years of darkness", in a reference to the 1923 foundation of the Turkish Republic from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Regardless of whether or not it should be illegal, under Turkish law, political parties are forbidden from working for the overthrow of the existing constitutional order.

There is a small possibility that the Constitutional Court will simply refuse to consider the case. However, the general expectation is that it will decide to hear Yalcinkaya's application.

As a result, even if the court eventually rules not to close the JDP, Turkey faces a long period of uncertainty and potential instability at a time when the economy is slowing and social divisions deepening, not just between the JDP and secularists but also between nationalist Turks and Kurds. Yet even many of the JDP's opponents admit that this is exactly what they want to help them in their efforts to close down the JDP. However, it is crystal clear that banning popular leaders from politics and closing down their party would simply be a recipe for chaos.