National / International News

The government is preparing to make a major announcement on new funding for school sport in the next few days.

There are two key questions in a disaster: What victims need and where they need it. But can an app get multiple relief organizations talking?  

Dan Diamond is a family physician near Seattle and he’s done disaster work in Haiti. He’s at the South by Southwest Interactive festival in Austin, Texas, to do a little shopping, for a few good app developers. 

He’s trying to recruit “some brains to help those of who are first responders during disasters in order to do our job better,” he says.

Brad Griffith’s company, SmartCrowdz, is a social media network that was created to coordinate flash mobs and manage big outdoor concerts. Its advertising makes this claim: "SmartCrowdz lets you reach out and join forces with all your participants. Everyone knows their role. Everyone's on the same page."

“Our company is smart crowds,” says Griffith. “We build an event management and marketing platform."

As for the marketing platform, Griffith isn’t trying  to sell gauze and blankets during a disaster. But the same app could be used for merchandising when it's deployed outside a disaster zone.

Putting disaster management into the hands of app developers has its own risks.

Brandon Brewer spent 22 years in the Coast Guard and now works as a disaster relief consultant. “The biggest concerns I have is that they are not fully tested,” he said. Brewer remembers the app that listed handy emergency numbers.

“They were listed alphabetically. And the first Command Center in Alaska started getting distress calls from all over the country via the app," he says. "Because for whatever reason, people were justing hitting the Go button before selecting, you know, 'I'm near New York. I'm near New Orleans.' So we don't want to send helicopters from Alaska to rescue somebody who's really in Long Island Sound.”

That mess up may have been have been the product of app developer culture: Try things, knowing some ideas will work, some will fail. Hit and miss ... Not the best strategy during a disaster.

When you think of flashy, buzzy social media sites, LinkedIn may not spring to mind. It’s a forum for professional networking. But LinkedIn’s stock has nearly doubled since it went public two years ago. And the company is on the move. It’s reportedly in talks to buy Pulse, a news aggregator that 20 million people use to read stories on mobile devices. 

While Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr and other social media sites seem totally different from each other, in the end, they’re after the same thing. So says Chrysanthos Dellarocas, chair of information systems at Boston University’s School of Management. “The ultimate goal of every site is to have more users spend as much time as possible on their properties,” he says.

One way to get users to stick around, Dellarocas says, is to provide more content. Buying Pulse would let LinkedIn users create their own newsfeeds.

“The premise is probably that the more things you can go to LinkedIn to get, the more utility the site will have,” notes Rita Gunther McGrath, a professor of strategy at Columbia Business School. She says it all comes down to getting more eyeballs for advertising dollars.

LinkedIn says it has over 200 million sets of eyes. But according to comScore, they’re not looking long enough. Over 80 percent of our social networking time is spent on Facebook. We use LinkedIn just over one percent of the time.

The most active user in my LinkedIn network -- my mom, who is a public relations consultant -- has over 500 connections, but she says news won’t enhance LinkedIn. That it’s a fluffy feature like LinkedIn’s endorsements, which are similar to a professional version of a Facebook “Like.”

“If you’re active on LinkedIn, you’re noticed. And if you’re noticed, people are just endorsing you all over the place,” she says.

Even if they don’t know you, and what is the point of that? LinkedIn says its endorsements are meant to be a lightweight way for users to recognize their colleague’s skills. It wouldn’t comment on Pulse.

Politicians and taxpayers alike spend a great deal of time thinking about the state of the American education system, debating topics ranging from teacher salaries to the merits of standardized testing. But there’s often less attention given to the buildings where students learn.

It would take over $270 billion just to return American schools to working condition, according to a report released Tuesday by The Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council. They estimate is would require a whopping $540 billion to truly modernize schools.

“The typical parent and the typical taxpayer when asked what constitutes a quality education, will talk exclusively about the who and what -- the teachers and the curriculum -- with no real mind toward the where,” says Rachel Gutter, the director of The Center for Green Schools at the U.S. Green Building Council.

But Gutter says the numbers offered in the report are the organizations best guesses, estimates based on public and private data. Part of the problem, she says, the last major federal study on the condition of schools was in the mid-1990s.

Yet a number of researchers have shown that the conditions in which children learn can affect their educational outcomes.

“Kids who study in a rotten environment where the toilets don’t function and windows are broken and the paint is peeling on the walls are going to do worse,” says Maureen Berner, a professor at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. 

In a study published in the early 1990s, Berner found the average test scores of students learning in buildings deemed to be in poor condition were ten percentage points lower than those in excellent conditions -- even when controlling for other factors, like income, neighborhood, or race.

Moreover, these conditions don’t affect students equally.

“Most of these schools that are in poor condition -- the vast majority -- are in school districts where children of poverty are attending, inner city and rural areas,” says Glen Earthman, a professor emeritus at Virginia Tech who has also research the impact of school condition on student performance.

While the exact amount of money needed to get schools into fighting shape is hard to quantity, school construction spending has dropped in recent years. Schools spent $12 billion on construction in 2011, according School Planning and Management Magazine. That’s about half of what was spent each year from 2000 to 2008.

We got another budget from Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) today. He’s again calling it “The Path to Prosperity,” and there is a lot about it that is familiar.

Ryan says that, with his pan, the U.S. would have a balanced budget in 10 years. But don’t let all the numbers and charts mislead you, budgeting is imprecise. That is something Ryan seemed to acknowledge.

“Balancing the budget is not simply an act of arithmetic,” he said. “Not just getting expenditures and revenues to add up.”

Lawmakers’ budgets are based on forecasts -- predictions, conjecture. June O’Neill, who used to head the Congressional Budget Office, teaches economics at Baruch College. “It’d be an accident,” she said, if those forecasts “ever came true.”

“Yogi Berra once said, ‘It’s difficult to make forecasts because we don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.’” Especially in the long-term, she adds. “How can you possibly guess the behavior of all the different parts of the budget?”

Those parts include demographic changes and GDP, and no one knows how fast the economy is going to grow, or if it is going to grow. Ryan says he expects economic growth will outpace a rise in government spending of 3.4 percent.

Ph.Ds can make model after complicated model, but they can’t predict what the unemployment rate is going to be in a decade.

“If you’re going to be looking out at the budget over the next ten years, you’re forced to make an assumption,” says Randy Kroszner, Norman R. Bobins Professor of Economics at The University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Lots of them, really. And that’s what Paul Ryan has done. He has also made political assumptions. A big one is that Congress will repeal President Obama’s health care law. Another one is more fundamental -- that our priority right now should be to balance the budget.

David Kendall is a senior fellow at Third Way, and he says not everyone is sold on that point.

“Most economists think that, if we have about a three percent deficit, that makes it a sustainable deficit.”

The Democrats will make their rebuttal tomorrow, when Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wa.), the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, unveils her budget -- based on her own set of assumptions.

Hurricane Fly, ridden by Ruby Walsh, becomes the first horse for 38 years to regain the Champion Hurdle title at Cheltenham.

The Queen will not attend planned engagements on Wednesday and Thursday as she continues to recover from her recent illness.

Google has agreed to pay a record fine for collecting wi-fi data as part of its Street View service in the US.

Police searching for a Wales rugby fan who has been missing for over a month say a body has been found in a river.

Foster carers and armed services families will be exempt from controversial changes to housing benefit, ministers say.

David Cameron tells MPs the UK government would consider vetoing any extension to the European Union's arms embargo on Syria.

Google also agreed to delete the private data its vehicles collected while photographing streets. Google has faced similar issues in Europe, where the U.K. decided it had broken the law.

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Students from The Mary Erskine School in Edinburgh discuss the issue of their knowledge of politics and the right to vote.

Syrian rebels are locked in a fierce battle with government troops as they try to take back the Baba Amr neighbourhood of Homs.

The man behind the 3D printed gun has new plans to offer copyright-free access to a range of printable goods.

In Japan, farmers and fishermen are having a tough time making a living anywhere near the site of the nuclear meltdown in Fukushima two years ago. Many consumers are afraid products from the disaster region may be contaminated with radiation.

But one restaurant in Tokyo deliberately serves food from the area of northeast Japan hit by the tsunami and the radiation cloud. The restaurant is called Fukko Shien Sakaba, which roughly translates to “reconstruction supporting drinking place.” On a recent night, I found customers are drawn by a desire to help the disaster victims – and by 96 different kinds of sake.

The manager of Fukko Shien Sakaba pops open a bottle of sake and pours until the glass overflows into a saucer. His rowdy customers cheer on the drinker.

The sake comes from the Tohoku region of Japan -- the area hit by the tsunami and nuclear disaster. Manager Masahide Tateoka says the dishes on the menu are specialties of the region: “Like fresh Wakame seaweed, sashimi, soba-noodles … Fukushima is mainly known for hot-pot dishes, but also its distinctive Fukushima-ramen, and ika-ninjin, a squid and carrot dish. They’re all very popular.”

The restaurant has its own radiation detectors to make sure the food is safe.

In one room, a group of 10 people is drinking beer and sake and using chopsticks to cook seaweed in portable boiling pots.Everyone in this group volunteers in the disaster area. Some of them go every weekend. They’ve delivered food and Christmas presents to displaced people. They’ve planted cherry trees in ground scoured by the tsunami.

College student Naoki Tashiro organizes bus trips for volunteers: “What we do is look for the missing people and right now we can go into places that haven’t been searched before. And what happens is, we find things that remind you that there was a life there: big trees, beer bottles, a coffee can, tires, regular things, but with all this mud, and once out of three times we do find the people, the remains.”

Tashiro says he narrowly escaped being killed. He was scheduled to take a class on March 13th two years ago… but the building that held the classroom was destroyed on March 11th.

At the bar, a couple of men in business suits are sitting in front of empty dishes, getting tipsy on bowls of milky sake. Takashi Kuramochi says he’s mostly been drinking sake. He says sake from the area hit by the tsunami is delicious.

While we’re talking, his colleague, Toru Watajima, gets an alert on his iPhone: “Earthquake!”

The floor starts to sway like a moving subway car.  We get shaken for a good 20 seconds, and then Watajima’s cell phone tells him it was magnitude 6 in the neighboring prefecture.  

But they are already relaxed and back to drinking sake.

The guys say Japanese people are used to this sort of thing. But Kuramochi says the massive earthquake that stuck two years ago was different. He thinks the tsunami and the nuclear accident that followed were the biggest thing ever to happen to Japan, bigger than the atomic bomb. My interpreter translates for him.

“Yes, there’s 2 million people in Tohoku still suffering,” he says, “and I feel like if I want to have a drink and have a good time, why not come to a place to support the Tohoku areas of course, that’s why I come here.”

The restaurant doesn’t only serve food from the disaster area to support the farmers there. It also donates all of its profits to the region. Last year, it contributed 15 million yen. That’s $162,000 to try to help rebuild the cities devastated by the earthquake and tsunami. 

A Colorado judge enters a not-guilty plea for the man accused of killing 12 in a theatre massacre, after lawyers said he was not ready to plead.

The pound falls against both the dollar and the euro after figures show that UK manufacturing output fell by 1.5% in January.

The US space agency reports that its Curiosity rover has identified clay minerals on Mars - an important indicator of water in the planet's past.

Promoter and manager Frank Warren confirms Dereck Chisora has been issued with a new licence.