A Dream for a Better World

In people’s mind, all parts of polar bears are priceless. At present, a polar bear skin can be sold up to some thousand dollars and people use it to produce carpet as luxurious decoration. In arctic area, polar bear skin is considered as daily object and it is also used as tribute to the king and queen in Norway. The meat of polar bear is very fresh and delicious but its liver is toxic because of excessive Vitamin A. In addition, polar bear is very popular in circus, especially small bears. In such case, polar bear hunting never stops. Polar bear can be killed just by guns. Inuit people can kill polar bears easily by dogs and firearms. Arctic National Conservation Area has set some laws to protect polar bear and every Inuit person can kill a polar bear every year if no excessive hunting occurs. However, some commercial hunting activities for polar bears have brought bad consequences. According to some report from media in Europe, about 10 companies in Europe have offered polar bear hunting groups charging 20000 pounds and they have published the bloody photos for hunting through internet. Among those pictures, injury can be found in some polar bear bodies and it proves that polar bears were killed gradually. Experts estimate that more than 1000 polar bears are killed every year among 22000 to 25000 ones and most hunters are mainly from Canada, USA, and Russia etc. A hunting company in Alaska published their advertisement on internet and said, “Go adventure with us for the largest booty, polar bear”. The company said that they had had enough quotas for polar bear hunting the next year. Hunters from America, European countries and Japan all kill polar bear excessively and US geological experts predict that the quantity of polar bear all over the world will decrease by 2/3 because the ice on which polar bears live are melting in a fast speed.
Besides human unreasonable hunting for polar bears, killing among polar bears also starts. As the global warming occurs, ice on which the bears live is melting so it is very difficult for bears to hunt food. Consequently, they start to get food by killing the species of the same kind. Environmentalists ever took photos for killing among polar bears. A male polar bear managed to separate a small bear and its mother and finally killed and ate the small baby. In addition, the male bear took remains of the dead bear to its home for next dinner. Actually, environmentalists can record more and more killing among polar bears. As for such phenomenon, some people think it is very common and they also think it is nothing to do with global warming. However, we cannot ignore that as the global temperature rises and ice starts to melt, homes of polar bears have been destroyed and they also have lost some preys. In addition, even they are excellent swimmers; they cannot stay in the sea for long time after ice melts. In other words, they have more chance to be drowned to death.

Compared with the social status of women in the past, women nowadays have more and more rights and they can compete with men in many fields. However, the fact is that women are not as equal as men in the society in the world and the situation in developed countries is not the exception.
The inequalities between women and men can be found in the following aspects. Firstly, compared with men, women have less chance and rights to receive education. Receiving education is the basic rights for everyone in the modern society and it can change one’s fate. In the past decade, women can get more chance to go to school and learn knowledge but many women in rural areas do not have the chance to go to school. According to some data, 70% illiterate people of 37 million are women and most are from rural areas. In recent years, some “Hope Project” has shown that 80% children are girls of more than 4000 children who are assisted to go to school by them. Secondly, the proportion of women who have the chance to participate in politics is still very small. Women’s participation is the symbol of a civilized and progressive society. Our government has taken some pressures to offer more chance to women to participate in politics but there are still some problems. Most female officials are not young and most of them are at the position of a deputy to a chief in the government. In addition, most of them are designated into departments related with the masses. Government also sets kinds of criterions for women who want to participate in politics so they have more challenges. Thirdly, women do not have more chance to obtain enough rights for job and social security. Income is the important condition for women to get equal status as men. Under the situation of globalization, industrial structure has been adjusted and job hunting is more difficult for women. More and more women have to engage in work with low income and long working time. As for female college students, according to a report, they can get a job after 8 to 10 interviews but male college students can obtain a job after 2 to 3 interviews. In addition, when companies lay off employees, they would fire the female staff first. Fourthly, some media issue some views which are ideas of discrimination for women and they also commercialized the image of women. Fifthly, women have to act different roles in companies and families. After they work from the company, they have to do housework at home. Many men think that women have the unshirkable duty to do housework and they never help their wives to do that.
Equality between women and men is very important for the social harmony. Otherwise, the social development will be hampered. In order to improve women’s social status, women should struggle for their rights all the time and government and media should also provide favorable environment for women’s development.

In order to escape reality, seek for excitement and get relaxation, many people are addicted to drugs. Drug abuse appeared thousands of years ago and it also can be found in modern society. People’s health in China was terribly destroyed in the Opium War 170 years ago and national strength was also weakened. So Chinese people were fear of drug abuse too much and government also took pressures to resist drug abuse. However, in recent years, more and more teenagers start to take drugs.
So why so many young people are addicted to drug abuse? Firstly, they are lured by those of the same age. Young people always pay much attention to peers’ ideas and if their peers say, if you do not try, you are a coward, and then they likely try to take drugs. In addition, young people are very curious about everything. Once they take drugs at the first time, they will take more in future. Secondly, young people like to pursue feelings of excitement. Teenagers are not as rational as adults and they pay more attention to feelings. They just like the feelings of walking on air but they never think about the serious results. Thirdly, families are lack of harmony. Many parents often quarrel and they do not care kids and ignore children’s feelings. Living in such family, children feel very lonely then they turn to drug abuse. Besides, single-parent families also adversely affect children’s growth. In order to support family, single-parent has to work hard and they spend too much time working. So their kids are prone to lured by ban men. Fourthly, school should also be responsible for youth drug abuse. First, some students suffer from stress without getting good grades and teachers also can not offer timely help. Second, some students can not be accepted by classmates at school then they play truant and turn to drugs. Third, teachers do have enough time to help “special students” who are bad students in others’ mind. Fourth, school can not offer proper and enough education about laws. Fifthly, drug traffickers always try to lure youth to take drugs to get high profits and laws at present are very loose. Then drug traffickers have more chance to sell drugs to youth and teenagers also have more chance to get drugs.
Drug abuse not only destroys young people’s health but also damages social harmony. So we should take some pressures to prevent and resist drugs abuse. First, parents should pay more attention to children’s growth and often communicate with kids. Second, government ought to propagate the disadvantages of drugs abuse and draft strict laws for drug abuse punishment. Third, school should care more about students’ behavior and supply more info about the danger of drug abuse. Fourth, government should set up special institute to cure those with drug addiction on both physiology and psychology. Actually, in order to avoid drug abuse, teenagers should learn to refuse drugs offered by drug traffickers and say no. They can even disclose criminals and help police to arrest them.

Recently, scientists have given people a warning and they tell people that the number of kinds of sea turtle living in Malaysia is rapidly decreasing and some species are even at the edge of extinction. If people can not take timely pressures to protect them, they will disappear in Malaysia forever.

Malaysia is the paradise for sea turtles. At present, leatherback turtle, olive-skin turtle and hawksbill turtle are most seriously threatened. Ancestors of theirs have lived in the sea since 2 billion years before. Leatherback turtles in Malaysia take the dominant place of all kinds of turtles on the earth with the largest number. Terengganu in Malaysia is one of the ten places for leatherback turtles in the world Experts said that leatherback turtles could be found at more than 10,000 places thousands of years ago but less than 10 places in recent years.

Why sea turtles in Malaysia have decreased so many? Obviously, they are killed by human beings and cooked for delicious dishes. Some days ago, a report said that some fisherman from Hainan Island sneaked into sea area in Malaysia to catch sea turtles. They captured more than 300 sea turtles and there were just about 10 alive. Those sea turtles aged from 70 to 80 years old with weight about 70kg on average. Actually, sea turtles from 70 to 80 years old are scarce and the number has decreased a lot in recent years. There is also report like this: an adult sea turtle can be sold up to 20.000 dollars in Chinese market. In addition, people think all parts of sea turtle are great aphrodisiac tonics. So it is very easy to imagine why sea turtles decrease so many. People in Malaysia like to eat sea turtle eggs too much. According to official statics, sea turtle egg supply falls short of demand in Malaysia market. In the year 2007, more than 422,000 sea turtle eggs were sold in Terengganu market. The number 422,000 is double of the output in Terenhhanu. That meant many sea turtle eggs came from other places. Sea turtles in Malaysia have become less and less because of a large number of sea turtle eggs consumption and coastal development and construction.

As for rapid reduction of sea turtles, scientists discussed the problem on an international conference aiming to protect sea turtles. The host of the conference is the world fish center, an international research institute with headquarters in Malaysia. The fund of the research institute mainly comes from private donations and government subsidies. Scientists brought forward 15 suggestions to prevent sea turtle extinction. However, it is far enough to depend on scientists’ suggestions only. Government ought to formulate effective sea turtle protection laws and punish those who capture and sell sea turtles. Many people in Malaysia think those people who capture sea turtles should be put into prison for about 50 years because it takes 50 years for a small sea turtle to grow up as an adult sea turtle. That sounds funny but that is really a serious problem. Reasonable penalty is very necessary.

At present, a TV programmer called Dwelling Narrowness is very popular in China and the two words have become heating words on many media. The content tells us that a lady and her husband struggle hard for buying a house in Shanghai after graduating from university and her younger sister finally could not resist temptation and betrays her poor boyfriend, having an affair with a rich official. Then she becomes a ridiculed fancy woman. The result is that the younger sister losses her baby, her ex-boyfriend and even fertility because she is beaten by the official’s wife when she is pregnant. The story reflects poor people’s life very truly. Actually, many many young people can not afford a house nowadays, not only in China but also other countries. Income increasing seems never catch up with house price rising. What a tragedy in the world! Here introduce dwelling narrowness in different countries.

In a small city located in southeast part of England, the narrowest house attracts different media. The two-storey house, with width less than 2m and length just about 6m is between two white houses and it looks like a sandwich from a distance. There are 4 people living in the small house and unexpectedly, it was a donkey shed before. Though the house is very small, the couples are pleased because the house is so small that they can share heating from both close neighbors. Then they can save to pay for the heating fee. And the couples intend to apply for Guinness record.

Container house also appears in England. Some containers are changed into different rooms for renting. House costs too much in daily expenses and many low-income people can not afford it and they are called IPOD, which means insecure, pressurized and over-taxed. So many young people choose container house because it is cheap and it is also creative.

If container house in England seems kind of romantic, the small hotel in capsule shape called capsule hotel in Japan sounds miserable. Each room of the hotel with length no more than 2m and width and height 1.5m looks like a small box. People living inside even can not stretch themselves. And the sound insulation is of course very bad and the neighbor even can hear your soft cough. Many people with low-income and unemployed live in such house.

So what about America? There is a group called youngworkers. Like Chinese young man born in 1980s, youngworkers also complain that going to university can not bring more income to them and some even regret going to university. They have to pay for the debt of university tuition, increasing medical insurance and other expenses. According to an official survey, compared with 10 years ago, only 10% young people can have not much savings after paying all daily expenses.

Dwelling narrowness is very common all over the world. Young people have to bear more pressure. Some young people purchase house by installment payment and their parents pay for the down payment if their parents have some savings. If young people can not get help from parents and their income is not much, can they have their own houses in future? Maybe.

There are many companies that claim to help you find the best university to attend.  However, it has been discovered that some of these companies get paid by universities to bring them students.  This is an ethical problem.  Here a student is paying them to find the BEST university for them and here they are choosing the University that pays them most.

So, Tianjin Universal www.tianjinuniversal.com, our sister site will now offer these services with the guarantee that every University it helps you find will be the best for you!  They even have a free video to explain more about their services.  You can watch this free video at   Choosing the Best University.wmv.

In a bold departure from Bush-era energy policy, the Obama administration suspended a coal company’s permit to dump debris from its proposed mountaintop mining operation into a West Virginia valley and stream.  In addition, the administration promised to carefully review upward of 200 such permits awaiting approval by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  Mountaintop-removal coal mining is the greatest environmental tragedy ever to befall our nation. This radical form of strip mining has already flattened the tops of 500 mountains, buried 2,000 miles of streams, devastated the country’s oldest and most diverse temperate forests, and blighted landscapes famous for their history and beauty. Using giant earthmovers and millions of tons of explosives, coal moguls have eviscerated communities, destroyed homes, and uprooted and sickened families with coal and rock dust, and with blasting, flooding and poisoned water, all while providing far fewer jobs than does traditional underground mining.

The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.  Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the firm they were unacceptable and demanded they be renegotiated. But the bonuses will go forward because lawyers said the firm was contractually obligated to pay them. The payments to A.I.G.’s financial products unit are in addition to $121 million in previously scheduled bonuses for the company’s senior executives and 6,400 employees across the corporation.  A.I.G., nearly 80 percent of which is now owned by the government, defended its bonuses, arguing that they were promised last year before the crisis and cannot be legally canceled. Of all the financial institutions that have been propped up by taxpayer dollars, none has received more money than A.I.G.

One in every 31 adults, or 7.3 million Americans, is in prison, on parole or probation, at a cost to the states of $47 billion in 2008, according to a new study. Criminal correction spending is outpacing budget growth in education, transportation and public assistance, based on state and federal data. Only Medicaid spending grew faster than state corrections spending, which quadrupled in the past two decades.  The increase in the number of people in some form of correctional control occurred as crime rates declined by about 25% in the past two decades. As states face huge budget shortfalls, prisons, which hold 1.5 million adults, are driving the spending increases. One in 11 African-Americans, or 9.2 percent, are under correctional control, compared with one in 27 Latinos (3.7 percent) and one in 45 whites (2.2 percent).

Financial institutions that are getting government bailout funds have been told to put off evictions and modify mortgages for distressed homeowners. They must let shareholders vote on executive pay packages. They must slash dividends, cancel employee training and morale-building exercises, and withdraw job offers to foreign citizens. As public outrage swells over the rapidly growing cost of bailing out financial institutions, the Obama administration and lawmakers are attaching more and more strings to rescue funds. The conditions are necessary to prevent Wall Street executives from paying lavish bouses and buying corporate jets.  Some bankers say the conditions have become so onerous that they want to return the bailout money.  They say they plan to return the money as quickly as possible or as soon as regulators set up a process to accept the refunds.

Scientists have discovered a 650 million year old, 1 km wide reef, sitting in Australia’s outback. Fossils of ancient sponges or other early primitive animals may be awaiting discovery there.  Scientists say that the reef is of “internationally significant” because it dates from a 5-10 million year period between two major ice ages.  They continue that it provides a significant step forward in showing the extent of climate change in Earth’s past and the evolution of ancient reef complexes.  It also contains fossils which may be of the earliest known primitive animals.  There is a good chance that the new fossils and organisms found in the reef will provide significant insight into the evolution of early multi-cellular life.

The latest bright idea in energy efficient lighting for homes and offices uses big science in nano-small packages to dim the future Edison’s light bulb.

In the August issue of Nature Photonics, available online, scientists at the University of Michigan and Princeton University announce a discovery that pushes more appealing white light from organic light-emitting devices.

More white light is the holy grail of the next generation of lighting. The innovation in the paper “Enhanced Light Out-Coupling of Organic Light-Emitting Devices Using Embedded Low-Index Grids” describes a way to deliver significantly more bright light from a watt than incandescent bulbs.

“Our demonstration here shows that OLEDs are a very exciting technology for use in interior illumination,” said Stephen Forrest, U-M professor of electrical engineering and physics and vice president for research. “We hope that white emitting OLEDs will play a major role in the world of energy conservation.”

Forrest and co-author Yuri Sun, visiting U-M from Princeton University, have wrestled with a classic problem in the new generation of lighting called white organic light-emitting devices, or WOLED: Freeing the light generated, but mostly trapped, inside the device.

A lighting primer: Incandescent light bulbs give off light as a by-product of heat, The light is appealing, but inefficient, putting out 15 lumens of light for every watt or electricity.

The best fluorescent tube lights put out some 90 lumens of light per watt, but the light can be harsh, the fixtures are expensive, and the tubes lose their efficiency with age. And they rely on many environmentally unfriendly substances such as mercury.

WOLEDs show promise of providing a light that’s much easier to manipulate, while being long lasting and able to provide in different shapes, from panels to bulbs and more. WOLEDs generate white light by using electricity to send an electron into nanometer thick layers of organic materials that serve as semiconductors. These carbon-based materials are dyes, the ones used in photographic prints and car paint, so they are very inexpensive, and can be put on plastic sheets or metal foils, further reducing costs.

The excited electron in these layers casts bright white light. The bad news, Forrest said, has been that some 60 percent of it is trapped inside the layers, much the way light under water reflects back into the pool, making the water surface seem like a mirror when viewed from underneath.

The Nature Photonics paper describes a tandem system of organic grids and micro lenses that guide the light out of the thin layers and into the air. The grids refract the trapped light, bouncing it into a layer of dome-shaped lenses that then pull the light out.

This process—all of which is packed into a lighting sandwich roughly the thickness of a sheet of paper—was shown to emit approximately 70 lumens from a single watt of power.

More light out means getting more bang for the electricity buck, a crucial question since 22 percent of the U.S. electricity consumption is lighting.

“If you can change the light efficiency by just a few percentage points, there’s a few less coal plants you’ll need,” Forrest said.

Reducing the amount of coal-generated electricity and finding more efficient ways to power appliances and lighting is one of the focuses of U-M’s Michigan Memorial Phoenix Energy Institute, and the WOLED work is one example of how science can open new doors in conservation, said Gary Was, institute director.

“That energy efficient lighting can be made from the same materials as car paint and that they can be made in such thin, formable sheets boggles the mind,” Was said. “This is one of many exciting creations that research is giving us in the pursuit of energy efficiency. This is also the kind of innovation that is required in the drive for energy sustainability.

Forrest said WOLED work isn’t done yet. The fun part, he said, is that WOLEDs can be framed in different forms.

“Plugging into a wall at low voltage, putting it on a flexible metal foil, or on plastic that won’t break when you drop it,” Forrest said. “This is what makes it so fun because it’s such a unique lighting source.”

The research was funded by the U.S. Department of Energy through a subcontract from the University of Southern California and by Universal Display Corp.

Forrest is part of the Michigan Memorial Phoenix Energy Institute, which develops, coordinates and promotes multidisciplinary energy research and education at U-M. He also is on the scientific advisory board of Universal Display Corp.

The next challenge, he said, is to reduce the cost, which currently is too high to be commercially competitive.

“You have to be able to do this dirt cheap, Forrest said. “People don’t spend much for their light bulbs.”

Visit http://www.theenergyefficientlightingcompany.com.au for more information on energy efficient lighting and commercial lighting products.

In the time that records have been kept of bird populations, 20 percent of all species have gone extinct. More are likely to follow. In March the release of a large-scale, 24-year survey gave one of the clearest pictures yet of the decline of Australian and Asian shorebird. The results of the survey are dire.  The researchers’ counts showed a steady decline, beginning in the mid-1980s. By 2006 the number of migratory shorebirds had dropped by 73 percent and the number of Australia’s resident shorebirds had fallen by 81 percent.  The survey revealed that inland wetlands were more important to both resident and migratory birds than had been realized, and that wetland loss from damming and the diversion of river water for irrigation was at least in part responsible for the shorebird decline in Australia.

Biotechnology companies are keeping university scientists from fully researching the effectiveness and environmental impact of the industry’s genetically modified crops, according to an unusual complaint issued by a group of those scientists.  Critics of biotech crops have long complained that the crops have not been studied thoroughly enough and could have unintended health and environmental consequences.The problem, the scientists say, is that farmers and other buyers of genetically engineered seeds have to sign an agreement meant to ensure that growers honor company patent rights and environmental regulations. But the agreements also prohibit growing the crops for research purposes.

The environmental damage caused to developing nations by the world’s richest countries amounts to more than the entire third world debt of $1.8 trillion, according to the first systematic global analysis of the ecological damage imposed by rich countries. There are huge disparities in the ecological footprint inflicted by rich and poor countries on the rest of the world because of differences in consumption.  The researchers examined so-called “environmental externalities” or costs that are not included in the prices paid for goods but which cover ecological damage linked to their consumption. They focused on six areas: greenhouse gas emissions, ozone layer depletion, agriculture, deforestation, overfishing and converting mangrove swamps into shrimp farms. The team confined its calculations to areas in which the costs of environmental damage are well understood.