₦airaland Forum

Strike Adds to Problems at Indian Auto Plant
By VIKAS BAJAJ and SRUTHI GOTTIPATI
MUMBAI, India — A strike at the biggest Indian car company, Maruti Suzuki, idled one of its four major production plants for the fifth consecutive day on Tuesday. The dispute pits the aspirations of manufacturing workers against the economic realities of a national labor glut.

The strike is the latest in a series of labor relations problems at the four-year-old plant in Manesar, about 30 miles south of New Delhi, that are crimping sales for the automaker. The company, which makes about half the cars sold in India, is majority-owned by Suzuki of Japan.

Maruti Suzuki has said that its sales fell 20.8 percent in September from a year earlier, to 85,565 cars, largely because of earlier problems at the Manesar plant. The factory, where workers began the current strike Friday, has the capacity to produce 1,200 cars a day, including popular models like the Swift, A-Star and SX4.

Shares of Maruti Suzuki were little changed in Mumbai on Tuesday, but the stock is down more than 24 percent this year.


Read the rest here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/12/business/global/strike-adds-to-problems-at-indian-auto-factory.html?_r=1&hp=&pagewanted=all

Kudos GEJ

This is the correct response. Not really supposed to abandon your citizens to foreign lands, even if they commit heinous crimes (even if your country don't give a crap about this particular dude.)

Otherwise you look bad and "lose face."

You and I as private individuals can condemn the dude, but Nigeria as a state cannot.

The current system is just. . . stupid. Makes no sense.

Most people don't let their own property run down, right?

Yet for some reason the FG has no real issue lettings its roads fall apart.

I don't get it.

Since it looks like the FG will never fix the federal roads it owns, perhaps the roads should be handed over to the states. Allow the states to then erect tolls to raise cash for road maintenance.

When we hear stories of grandmothers protesting being violated by youths, then I will agree that it is a fvcked up region.

Hehe

BTW, Mito=Arsene=Fstranger

arsenefc:
Great idea. Since we cant make ours work, its best we give the money to people who can make theirs work, instead of squandering the money as we usually do.


Great idea GEJA.


But of couse, as usual our intellectually challenged disaporans will disagree.

Human housefly again chattering nonsense.

Dumb@sses like you are why Nigeria is in the mess it is.

"Intellectually challenged", indeed.

RIM is screwed long term, I think.

By WILL CONNORS, BEN DUMMETT and CHRISTOPHER LAWTON

Research In Motion Ltd. scrambled to restore service to millions of BlackBerry users around the world Wednesday as the company's worst-ever outage vexed office workers, government officials, emergency responders and others who rely on the messaging device.


BlackBerry users saw further disruptions in service, the third consecutive day of problems that have now spread from Europe into Asia and North America. Spencer Ante has details on The News Hub.

The intermittent service disruptions come at a vulnerable time for RIM, which has been struggling with dwindling BlackBerry shipments as it competes with Apple Inc.'s iPhone and gadgets powered by Google Inc.'s Android software.

The disruptions in email, instant-messaging and Web browsing—which forced many BlackBerry users to resort to phone calls and faxes—affected most of the Canadian company's key markets, including North America, Europe and Asia, and a big chunk of its 70 million world-wide subscribers.

RIM has disclosed few technical details about the problem and by late Wednesday had stopped forecasting when service might be fully restored.

Plagued by Service Problems

See key dates of service disruptions for Research In Motion's BlackBerry.


More photos and interactive graphics
In a hastily organized conference call with reporters Wednesday afternoon, RIM's chief technology officer for software, David Yach, said the company didn't see any signs of hacking or other security breaches. Several U.S. government agencies affected by the disruptions said Wednesday they were in touch with RIM about the problems, but there were no indications from officials that RIM was suffering from anything other than an internal malfunction.

RIM has blamed the problem on a hardware failure in its network infrastructure. RIM routes users' email messages and other data through its own network, which the company says makes such communication more secure. But, as the latest disruptions show, that arrangement can lead to widespread outages when RIM hits its own glitches. The company said late Tuesday it fixed the hardware problems, but expected additional delays as it worked through a "backlog" of data to users. Customers in Europe, the Mideast and Africa have suffered through intermittent outages since Monday.

RIM's Mr. Yach said on the conference call Wednesday that the company was forced to "throttle" data traffic through its world-wide servers in order to deal with the backlog, triggering fresh disruptions in previously unaffected markets, including Japan, Singapore and—starting early Wednesday morning—North America.


Disruptions to RIM's BlackBerry service continued around the world for a third-consecutive day, with problems spreading Wednesday into the company's giant North American and Asian markets. Chip Cummins reports on Digits.

Service disruptions affected a wide array of U.S. federal agencies, including the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury, as well as government agencies and emergency services. Officials said, however, that the outages weren't significantly disrupting routine operations.

The big risk to RIM is that the outages will drive so-far loyal BlackBerry customers to give up on the smartphone amid a series of other stumbles in recent years. Co-chief executives Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis are under pressure from shareholders to turn around flagging BlackBerry shipments. Sales of the company's recent PlayBook tablet have been disappointing, and several product launches this year have been pushed back.

We Want to Hear From You

Is your BlackBerry being affected? Leave your comments in our Tech Europe blog

Research In Motion's BlackBerry service suffered a second consecutive day of interruptions across Europe and other parts of the world. Arik Hesseldahl discusses with Simon Constable on Digits.


Zuma Press
Blackberry users across Europe faced a third day of disruption to message and email services.

Journal Community


More

BlackBerry Outage Leaves Users Out of Touch
Heard on the Street: RIM Shareholders Touching the Void
Amid all those troubles, industry watchers are closely monitoring how RIM responds to the outages.

"Expectations are very, very high right now," said Abhi Ingle, a vice president in AT&T Inc.'s business solutions group. "The slightest glitch, people notice." Mr. Ingle, in an interview at a telecom conference in California, said he couldn't comment specifically on this week's outage.

Through all its troubles, RIM has said that its overseas markets were still thriving and customer loyalty remained strong around the world. But this week's outages have triggered a wave of complaints in some of RIM's most important markets and could drive key corporate customers to consider alternatives to BlackBerry services.

"The attributes that allow [RIM] to hold on to customers are the attributes that these outages damage most drastically: reliability and the knowledge that the BlackBerry will always deliver your email in real time," said Forrester analyst Charles Golvin.

Deborah Boudreau, senior director of sales at Canadian broadcaster TVA, rushed into the office earlier than usual Wednesday when she realized she couldn't send or receive emails on her BlackBerry. "It caused me huge grief," she said. "I get lots of emails prior to 9 a.m. that I can maybe act on before I get to the office and I couldn't this morning."


The magnitude of the current BlackBerry outage is unusual and comes at a particularly bad time for the company as it works to shore up its declining position in the smartphone market. MarketWatch's Dan Gallagher reports on Digits.

European companies, suffering through three days of interruptions have been forced to find other means of communicating. A handful of European executives reached Wednesday, however, said they weren't yet considering chucking their BlackBerry accounts altogether, and would give RIM more time to sort out the problem.

Deutsche Post AG spokesman Dirk Klasen said BlackBerrys are one of the company's most frequently used communication tools. He said his colleagues have resorted to using the telephone or fax machines.

"It's simply making people angry hanging around for hours trying to get access to their email services," he said.

The City of Houston sent out an email to all employees warning of the BlackBerry disruptions. Its IT department has been in constant contact with RIM, said Jessica Michan, spokeswoman for Houston Mayor Annise Parker. "This will cause some delays, but the city is not going to stop just because of BlackBerry issues," she said. The Houston police department said email on department BlackBerrys has gone in and out of service, but that has meant little for the average cop on the street, said HPD spokesman John Cannon.

"We dispatch over radio, and the phone and text services are still available," Mr. Cannon said.

For some, the outage was a welcome respite. Vermont's Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy compared it to when he goes scuba diving with his wife and leaves his BlackBerry ashore. "It's been heaven," Mr. Leahy said. "My staff can't find me, nobody can reach me—only my wife, who I call all the time, I'm enjoying the peace and quiet."

Telecom carriers offered little insight. Sprint Nextel Corp. said Wednesday it was working "aggressively" with RIM to sort out the problem, which the big U.S. carrier said started affecting customers at 7 a.m. ET. Verizon Wireless said BlackBerry voice services were still working.

A spokesman for T-Mobile said some customers using BlackBerrys are seeing service delays which RIM is working to resolve.

AT&T declined to comment.

The United Arab Emirates' two telecom operators—Emirates Telecommunications Corp. and Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Co.—said Wednesday they would compensate their BlackBerry customers for service interruptions across Europe and other parts of the world, including in the Middle East, in recent days.

—Monica Gutschi, Angel Gonzalez, Anton Troianovski and Kristina Peterson contributed to this article.
Write to Ben Dummett at Ben.Dummett@dowjones.com, Monica Gutschi at monica.gutschi@dowjones.com and Christopher Lawton at christopher.lawton@wsj.com



Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203914304576626451110144140.html#ixzz1acuRveDT

[quote author=Ileke-IdI link=topic=780486.msg9327368#msg9327368 date=1318469293]Oloshi. Were buruku.
ko ni da fun e. omo mami water, oniranu. E no bo berra for you.[/quote]Lmao

The housefly in human form strikes again. Again poking his nose where no one asked him. Creepy-@ss dude, saying weird sh1t that is as relevant as the price of tea.

The housefly in human form has come again

Always poking his nose where he is not wanted

Is he saying that the #s are wrong? Or just being misinterpreted?

If the former, then what are the correct ones? If the latter, then how?

[size=18pt]On the rise![/size]

Man still cracking up at this 

NL is a very entertaining site

Ola one:
Now you know why some Nigerians are pessimistic?


Just go and apply for your own YouWin abi wetin dem call am?


SMH

Yeah I see what you guys mean

@OP: Ok, I didn't realize that this was going to be one of those "woe is me, cry cry cry" sort of threads.

Carry on

R.ape in university is bad enough.

But r.a.ping grandmothers? Greatgrandmothers?

My grandmom is 85, for Christ's sake. I dunno what sort of animal would violation an old woman. Should be doused with gasoline and set on fire

2mch:
Protest against violation of old women in Enugu
By Ozioma Ubabukoh
Wednesday, 12 Oct 2011


Over 100 women from Ogbaozalla and Ibeku communities in Opi, Nsukka Local Government Area of Enugu State on Tuesday protested against the violation of old women by young men in their community.

The perpetrators, aged between 17 and 25 years, had recently been caught Desecrating old women of 60 to 80 years, including blind women in the area.

The women, who came in three buses, told members of Umuada Igbo Nigeria that out of the 13 violation victims, one had died because of bleeding induced by tears she sustained when some sex-hungry boys violated her.

During the protest, which lasted for more than five hours, the women appealed to UIN to intervene to save them from further harassment as they no longer sleep at night.

They said they had reported the cases, which started since April, to the police for action, but regretted that the situation had not changed.

Speaking to journalists, the Founder and President-General of UIN, Dr. Uzoamaka Ezeofor, who addressed the aggrieved women, expressed disappointment with the attitude of the young boys.

She wondered what form of intimate satisfaction they wished to derive from old women between the ages of 60 and 80 years.

Ezeofor said, “On the part of the Umuada Igbo Nigeria, we are going to Opi on Saturday. All the representatives of seven Igbo speaking states of Abia, Anambra, Rivers, Delta, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo will be there.

“The act perpetrated is an abomination in Igboland, Nigeria and the whole world and all members of Umuada Igbo Nigeria see it as such.

“We are going there to pray and beg God to forgive the perpetrators because such an abominable act can attract the wrath of God, which is capable of wiping out the communities in which the unholy acts was committed.”
http://www.punchng.com/Articl.aspx?theartic=Art20111012162640

Young boys r.a.ping old women?

Wonders will never cease

^-- That is my concern as well

GEJ again

Why are we giving them money to build refinery? Why ship it all the way to Indonesia when the same money you give them can be used to build refinery in your own country? Even if for some reason you don't want to build one in Nigeria, built one in a neighboring country.

Smh

MsDarkSkin:

?

^-- international media is covering it at least

Anything but PDP is fine by me.

Though I wish Mimiko would join ACN

hamziwhiz:
Oya naw, I also need 2 be watered oooo, I nid a book on c++ dat Is self explanatory & a link to download a good compiler as I"m having issues with gettin GNU compiler o.
Please Help me out and I"d owe you my programming career!
Tnx in anticipation

GCC is available for free. Are you on windows? If so you can google around for instructions for installing it on windows. It looks like can also get Visual Studio for free too: http://www.microsoft.com/visualstudio/en-us/products/2010-editions/express

hamziwhiz:
How manage na?, I'd like 2 know how U got d ansa

The two folks above me have given pretty great explanations.

October 12, 2011, 10:39 AM EDT

By Moses Mozart Dzawu

(Updates with comment from agency in second paragraph, analyst in fourth.)

Oct. 12 (Bloomberg) -- Ghana’s economy may expand 13.6 percent this year, as oil output boosts the contribution of industrial production to the gross domestic product.

The provisional estimate, which is based on data for the first nine months of the year, compares with 7.7 percent in 2010, according to a statement handed to reporters by the Ghana Statistical Service. West Africa’s second-biggest economy after Nigeria is valued at 56.3 billion cedis ($34.5 billion) at current prices, the agency said in the statement.

Industry, which includes manufacturing, mining and quarrying and oil, will grow 36 percent in 2011, compared with 5.6 percent in 2010, it said.

The forecast means Ghana may miss the target of 14.4 percent made by the Finance Ministry in a supplementary budget announced in July, said Joe Abbey, an economist at Accra-based Centre for Policy Analysis. The rate is even “a shade higher than what we would have expected, because oil production levels are supposed to be delayed,” Abbey said by phone today.

Output at the Jubilee oil field, which made Ghana the newest oil exporter in Africa, will not reach a production target of 120,000 barrels a day by the end of the year, according to the Finance Ministry.

--Editors: Emily Bowers, Karl Maier.

To contact the reporter on this story: Moses Mozart Dzawu in Accra at mdzawu@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Antony Sguazzin at asguazzin@bloomberg.net.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-10-12/ghanaian-economy-to-expand-13-6-this-year-agency-says.html

Evidence of this hatred?

October 10, 2011

By PERRI KLASS, M.D.

Once, experts feared that young children exposed to more than one language would suffer “language confusion,” which might delay their speech development. Today, parents often are urged to capitalize on that early knack for acquiring language. Upscale schools market themselves with promises of deep immersion in Spanish — or Mandarin — for everyone, starting in kindergarten or even before.

Yet while many parents recognize the utility of a second language, families bringing up children in non-English-speaking households, or trying to juggle two languages at home, are often desperate for information. And while the study of bilingual development has refuted those early fears about confusion and delay, there aren’t many research-based guidelines about the very early years and the best strategies for producing a happily bilingual child.

But there is more and more research to draw on, reaching back to infancy and even to the womb. As the relatively new science of bilingualism pushes back to the origins of speech and language, scientists are teasing out the earliest differences between brains exposed to one language and brains exposed to two.

Researchers have found ways to analyze infant behavior — where babies turn their gazes, how long they pay attention — to help figure out infant perceptions of sounds and words and languages, of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar to them. Now, analyzing the neurologic activity of babies’ brains as they hear language, and then comparing those early responses with the words that those children learn as they get older, is helping explain not just how the early brain listens to language, but how listening shapes the early brain.

Recently, researchers at the University of Washington used measures of electrical brain responses to compare so-called monolingual infants, from homes in which one language was spoken, to bilingual infants exposed to two languages. Of course, since the subjects of the study, adorable in their infant-size EEG caps, ranged from 6 months to 12 months of age, they weren’t producing many words in any language.

Still, the researchers found that at 6 months, the monolingual infants could discriminate between phonetic sounds, whether they were uttered in the language they were used to hearing or in another language not spoken in their homes. By 10 to 12 months, however, monolingual babies were no longer detecting sounds in the second language, only in the language they usually heard.

The researchers suggested that this represents a process of “neural commitment,” in which the infant brain wires itself to understand one language and its sounds.

In contrast, the bilingual infants followed a different developmental trajectory. At 6 to 9 months, they did not detect differences in phonetic sounds in either language, but when they were older — 10 to 12 months — they were able to discriminate sounds in both.

“What the study demonstrates is that the variability in bilingual babies’ experience keeps them open,” said Dr. Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington and one of the authors of the study. “They do not show the perceptual narrowing as soon as monolingual babies do. It’s another piece of evidence that what you experience shapes the brain.”

The learning of language — and the effects on the brain of the language we hear — may begin even earlier than 6 months of age.

Janet Werker, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, studies how babies perceive language and how that shapes their learning. Even in the womb, she said, babies are exposed to the rhythms and sounds of language, and newborns have been shown to prefer languages rhythmically similar to the one they’ve heard during fetal development.

In one recent study, Dr. Werker and her collaborators showed that babies born to bilingual mothers not only prefer both of those languages over others — but are also able to register that the two languages are different.

In addition to this ability to use rhythmic sound to discriminate between languages, Dr. Werker has studied other strategies that infants use as they grow, showing how their brains use different kinds of perception to learn languages, and also to keep them separate.

In a study of older infants shown silent videotapes of adults speaking, 4-month-olds could distinguish different languages visually by watching mouth and facial motions and responded with interest when the language changed. By 8 months, though, the monolingual infants were no longer responding to the difference in languages in these silent movies, while the bilingual infants continued to be engaged.

“For a baby who’s growing up bilingual, it’s like, ‘Hey, this is important information,’ ” Dr. Werker said.

Over the past decade, Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain’s so-called executive function.

These higher-level cognitive abilities are localized to the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain. “Overwhelmingly, children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of executive function,” Dr. Bialystok said.

Dr. Kuhl calls bilingual babies “more cognitively flexible” than monolingual infants. Her research group is examining infant brains with an even newer imaging device, magnetoencephalography, or MEG, which combines an M.R.I. scan with a recording of magnetic field changes as the brain transmits information.

Dr. Kuhl describes the device as looking like a “hair dryer from Mars,” and she hopes that it will help explore the question of why babies learn language from people, but not from screens.

Previous research by her group showed that exposing English-language infants in Seattle to someone speaking to them in Mandarin helped those babies preserve the ability to discriminate Chinese language sounds, but when the same “dose” of Mandarin was delivered by a television program or an audiotape, the babies learned nothing.

“This special mapping that babies seem to do with language happens in a social setting,” Dr. Kuhl said. “They need to be face to face, interacting with other people. The brain is turned on in a unique way.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/11/health/views/11klass.html?ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=print

Aigbofa:
Christ's School, Ado- Ekiti. 1933

Didn't realize it was that old.

I wonder if this is a short-term bounce back though. Have the fundamentals changed in a way that the naira won't continue to depreciate?

I dunno. Probably best to hold a hard currency (e.g. dollars or euro) if you want stability.

Fstranger, you are a bit of a dimwit.

Ordinarily in the past I'd explain why you are being stvpid, but evidently this doesn't seem to help you.

So I won't bother.

Err.

So conceptually couldn't I just:

1) Set i=0.
2) calculate the sum to the left and right of index i, producing two numbers A_i and B_i. I can compute the sums in O(N) time, of course (A_i=0 and requires no computation, B_i equals the sum of the list minus A[0] and takes O(N) time to compute.)
3) Then for k=(i+1). . .  (N-1), compute A_k and B_k. Note that I can do this cheaply just be adding/subtracting components from the original array. So I pay constant time to do each update on an iteration.
4) If I find an equilibrium index when looping from k=(i+1). . . (N-1), then halt the loop and output it.

I pay at most O(N) time in stage (2), and O(N) in stage 3. Throughout this problem, I'm also using only a constant amount of space beyond the original N length list.

I think the above algorithm is correct. All that would be left would be to implement it in Java (shouldn't be too hard.)

But come to think of it,, do we really need anode nine substandard (glorified sec.sch) unis? Why not transform / upgrade nine of the present unis to world class,, one for a particular field of study.

The one being built in Bayelsa will not be substandard. Neither will the one planned for Ekiti.

If you gain admission to the former, at least given what the VC has said and what I know about him, it'll be as good as any university in Nigeria.