After the curtain drew on the European fiscal pact meeting in Brussels on March 2, Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy announced that Spain would miss its European-imposed government budget deficit target of 4.4 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). Instead, he said, Spain’s national government would aim for a 2012 deficit of 5.8 percent of GDP, down from 8.5 percent under his predecessor in 2011. Some Spaniards described his announcement as an assertion of Spanish sovereignty and a rebuff of German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s continual demands for austerity. Outside observers speculated that Spain, the second-biggest economy of the so-called PIIGS countries, might lead a revolt against new fiscal rules. Continue reading Deficit Theatre
Category Archives: Formats
Dispatching the middleman
MANY cabbies pay a dispatcher to keep the fares coming. The dispatchers are an information clearing-house, offering customers a central point of contact and offering on-the-move drivers directions to the nearest prospective passenger. But location-enabled smartphones in the pockets of more customers, and on the dashboards of more drivers, offer a tempting way to skip the middleman. If, that is, customers and drivers can find a handy way to share their locations.
Enter the app developer. In Sweden, Germany, Spain and Britain this new breed of middleman has released a slew of taxi-finding apps in recent years. When a customer requests a taxi, the applications ping the nearest available driver. He can accept the fare, paying a small commission, or skip it. Some applications offer customers an estimate of the fare, ratings of potential drivers or, once a match is made, a moving blip on the map, showing their drivers’ progress. All this is especially useful for visitors unfamiliar with a city or late-night revellers uncertain of their street address.
A Cold July in Baghdad
Researchers in Spain are tapping a new database in their search for historic climate patterns: medieval Arab history. Physicist Fernando Domínguez-Castro of the University of Extremadura in Badajoz, Spain, and his colleagues, including a historian of Arab culture, examined references to droughts, floods, and hail in ten Arab sources written between 816 C.E. and 1009 C.E.. One text told of nights during a Baghdad summer that were so cold that residents bundled up inside their homes rather than sleeping on roofs as was the custom, the team reported in Weather. Continue reading A Cold July in Baghdad
Signs of progress
WHERE the internet has yet to take firm root, people plump for the next-best thing. In many emerging markets this means text messaging. Customers have embraced the short message service (SMS) not just to communicate with each other, but also to get weather forecasts, bus schedules and traffic information, or to vote in television talent shows. Authorities use it for public announcements. Companies text targeted advertising. India even has a rudimentary SMS-based social network.
The reason texting isn’t even more popular in such places has to do with the fact that—despite indignant claims in some quarters that texting is killing literacy—texters must be able to read and write. Continue reading Signs of progress