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FOOTBALL'S RED CARD

 

THE WORLD'S MOST VALUABLE SPORTS TEAM IS drowning in debt. English football powerhouse Manchester United (Forbes estimates its worth at $1.8 billion) had to raise some $800 million in a bond issue last month, which is still $340 million shy of its total debts. Man U needed the bond to pay off the millions that American businessman

Malcolm Glazer borrowed to purchase the team in 2005. But in the first three weeks since the bond was issued it lost nearly 10 percent of its value, a sign that, even though Man U's revenues reached a record $444 million last year, the market is growing wary of debt, particularly the European variety.

Man U isn't alone. Debt levels have also skyrocketed among rivals like liverpool, calling into question the business model of English Premier League football. Each year the three worst teams are banished to a lower league, where vital broadcasting revenues are dramatically reduced. This puts huge pressure on clubs to compete for the best players, who now regularly fetch more than $50 million a year. Unlike in the U.S., there's no system of collective bargaining to restrain wages. As a result, the total salary bill for the Premier League has risen more than 20 percent since 2008. This has created a vicious cycle of rising debt among clubs that must spend extravagantly on players to ensure increased revenue. Any team attempting to be frugal becomes more likely to end up with lower revenue. It's become a game of who can spend the most, and it probably won't end well.

(BY WILLIAM UNDERHILL - Newsweek)

De acordo com o texto, o Manchester United

HAITI'S INDENTURED CHIlDREN

 

THE DAYS AFTER HAITI'S EARTHQUAKE brought joyous reunions for some families. Others faced the grim reality that they'd been suddenly robbed of parents or offspring. But for Haiti's 225,000 restaveks, or indentured children, the quake brought only an uncertain future.

Slavery-which ended with independence in 1804-is illegal in Haiti. And technically, restaveks are not slaves. The institution has its roots in the Caribbean tradition of child lending between families (usually relatives) to pitch in with extra work, care for the elderly or sick, or to provide opportunity to a child from a poor family. Generally, rural parents send their children to live with wealthier families in the cities. In exchange for domestic labor, the children are supposed to receive lodging, food, clothing, medicine, and-most importantly-education. In as many as half of the cases, they do (though classifying treatment in private homes is notoriously difficult). The unlucky ones, called restaveks-from the French rester avec, or "to stay with" -are loaned through normal channels but denied schooling and subject to abuse and degradation. This phenomenon has spiked in modern Haiti, as more and more children end up with equally impoverished families in the slums.

Before the quake, up to 22 percent of Haitian homes contained restaveks, according to a study funded by USAID. Keeping restaveks is illegal, but child loans are not and, given the extent of Haiti's governmental dysfunction, it's hard to tell which cases are which. Now that the quake has thrown family networks into disarray, the flimsy social ties supporting restaveks are likely to break down. "For families struggling in the wake of a catastrophe, restavek kids are the first to go; says Glenn Smucker, an anthropologist who specializes in development work in Haiti. "Their parents are not there to watch out for them, so they're far more vulnerable" to desertion and trafficking.

But even as the numbers of abandoned restaveks swell, the demand for their services is likely to decrease. A mass exodus of residents from Port-au-Prince is reversing decades of migratory trends. If the shift sticks, it means there will be less need for restaveks in the city. But it's also possible that families suffering from the quake's economic aftershocks will feel extra pressure to lend out their children, even as it becomes more likely they'll end up as restaveks. Which, combined with a spike in new orphans, means Haiti will likely see a rise in the number of its street children in the years to come.

(By Katie Paul - Newsweek)

De acordo com o texto, o Haiti tenta resolver o problema das crianças cujos pais morreram no terremoto

MOORE’S LAW DOESN’T MATTER

 

Back in 1965, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore predicted that the semiconductor industry could double the number of transistors on a chip every 12 months (he later amended it to 24 months) for about the same cost. And for half a century, Moore’s Law has held true, making computers cheaper and faster and more powerful. It seems almost that long that experts have been warning that Moore’s Law would eventually run smack into the laws of physics, bringing everyone’s giddy ride to an end. It hasn’t happened yet. Justin Rattner, the chief technology officer at Intel, insists the company can keep doubling the number of transistors on a processor through several more generations of chips over the next decade. The trouble isn’t capacity; it’s speed. A few years ago microprocessors reached 3GHz. You can’t make them faster, or they overheat and start to melt. To solve that problem, the industry began making chips that do several tasks at once, instead of doing a single thing faster and faster. These days we’re seeing dual-core and quad-core chips--in essence, processors with two or four tiny computer engines on a single chip. Within a decade we will likely see chips with 100 cores, maybe even more, Rattner says.

But that raises a new problem: how to put those tiny side-by-side computer engines to good use. The operating systems aren’t set up for it. Neither are the programming languages and development tools. Neither, in fact, are the programmers themselves, who have all grown up writing software to run on a single engine--serially, that is, not in parallel. “For 50 years we’ve done thigs one way, and now we’re changing to a different model,” says Craig Mundie, chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, which as the biggest maker of operating systems and programming tools is leading the drive to solve the puzzle. It’s the biggest single change Microsoft has ever faced, Mundie says. Parallel computing has been around for a long time. But it’s mostly been confined to high-end supercomputers. Writing programs for them is incredibly difficult and time-consuming. The challenge now is to make it possibleand cheap--for ordinary programmers to write programs that run in parallel. Mundie predicts big things when (he doesn’t say if) Microsoft works it all out. After all, the human brain is itself a massively parallel computer; writing programs that can operate in parallel is the key to making computers that seem more like us and less like machines. “In a sense we are trying to build a crude approximation of what nature does in your brain,” says 1 Mundie. “Parallelism is the only way I to get there.” 

(LYONS, Daniel. Moore’s law doesn’t matter. In: Newsweek, August 2009, p.47)

A dificuldade que a fabricante de microprocessadores enfrenta, para continuar atendendo à lei de Moore, está relacionada com

Shakespeare: unanswered questions

Nearly 450 years after his birth, William Shakespeare is still generally considered to be the greatest writer in the English language. Yet

Shakespeare is generally believed to have been born on the 23rd April 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England, the son of a glove maker. He died on the same day in 1616, at the age of 52, in the same town. He was buried in the church where he had been baptised. little is known about the man himself and some critics actually doubt whether he wrote the plays at all.

Very few facts are known of Shakespeare’s early life. He married at 18, but he soon left Stratford and his family to start his acting career. By 1610, Shakespeare had already written most of his 37 plays and his poetry. In this year, 400 years ago, at the age of 46, he retired from London, where he had been living and working for many years.

It is certain that this later period in Shakespeare’s life was quieter. It was a time when his acting company toured much less across the country. Shakespeare was also in a very comfortable financial position and he was officially a ‘gentleman’, much admired by King James and other important figures. He had a very large house in Stratford, as well as being the owner and landlord of other property. In addition, he part-owned two theatres in London, where his plays were regularly performed.

However, this historical figure is still surrounded by mystery: details of Shakespeare’s early life are thin; there is little information about his private life; for a literary genius, his education and also his life experiences seem surprisingly limited. Some critics even question whether the plays are actually his, and have suggested more educated, widely-travelled authors*. Others consider the size of his house and wealth to be evidence that William Shakespeare was in fact a businessman, not a playwright. He certainly had an eye for business and investment, as well as being a remarkable writer. That is, if you believe he wrote the plays!

James Shapiro, a Professor of English, recently published his book Contested Will, the latest in a line of books examining exactly who wrote these famous works. He concludes with certainty that the plays are Shakespeare’s own, although he does highlight the theory that many of the later plays were actually cowritten. This of course is not a popular theory with many lovers of Shakespeare who will prefer not to think of him as a team-player. All things considered, it is unlikely that this book will end the mystery and controversy which surrounds this literary giant.

Adapted from www.macmillanglobal.com May 5th. 22.53 P

 

Glossary

co-write (verb) – to write with someone else; critic (noun) – someone who does not agree with something and gives their opinion about it; doubt (verb) – to think that something will not happen or that it is untrue; highlight (verb) – to describe something in such a way that makes people notice it; limited (adj) – not very good, or not very great in amount; wealth (noun) – a large amount of money and other valuable things.

According to the text, the only incorrect alternative is: