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© The Financial Times Limited 2015. All Rights Reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in anyway.
Edition 2252 FT | 17 Feb 2015
UK tourism gets mandarin
makeover as Chinese invited
to Strongman Skirt Party
By James Kyng, London
London’s Savile Row is the
Tall, Rich, Handsome Street,
the soaring Shard building
is a Star Plucking Tower
and kilt-wearing Scotland’s
Highland Games are the
Strongman Skirt Party.
That is according to a new
set of Chinese names for
101 British tourist destinations unveiled yesterday.
VisitBritain, the national
tourism agency, is giving
the UK’s most loved attractions a mandarin makeover
as part of a campaign to lure
more Chinese visitors.
The country has lagged
behind in attracting Chinese
tourists, partly because visitors must get a UK visa separately from the common
visa that covers members
of the EU’s Schengen area
- allowing free movement
around rival hotspots such
as France, Italy and Spain.
VisitBritain aims to boost
revenue from Chinese tourism to £1bn annually by
2020, up from £492m in
2013. Tourists from China
spend an average of £2,508
per visit, compared with the
overall average of £640.
“China is a different
country with a different
language and British names
don’t mean anything to
Chinese necessarily,” said
Robin Johnson, head of
overseas operations at VisitBritain. “This [campaign]
creates names that actually
bring to life what the attrac-
tions are. We need to bring
out the warmth and the welcome, which is so important
to Chinese visitors.”
The names were suggested
by millions of users of Chinese social media over the
past 10 weeks, with a total
of 13,000 names suggested.
In an outbreak of online de-
VisitBritain aims to
boost revenue from
Chinese tourism to £1bn
annually by 2020, up
from £492m in 2013
mocracy, these suggestions
were then whittled down to
three leading contenders for
each of the 101 attractions
by a voting process on VisitBritain’s Chinese website.
The outright winner of the
naming ballot, with 15,177
votes, was a suggestion by
an internet user identified as
Qiao Chen for his rendering
into Chinese of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, the village in Wales
with the longest place name
in Europe. His winning suggestion was that the village
be called Jian Fei Cun, or
Healthy Lung Village, because just saying it requires
strong lungs.
In the bucolic county of
Dorset, tourism executives
were scratching their heads
over the three leading suggestions for renaming the
Cerne Abbas Giant, the
huge chalk figure with a
full male anatomy. Stylish
Man With Strength, Giant
Without a Stitch of Clothing
and Big White Streaker are
among the candidates.
Copyright The Financial
Times Limited 2015
Up to 100 banks hit by cyber attack threatening potential losses of USD1bn
By Richard Waters,
San Francisco
As many as 100 banks and other financial
institutions around the world have been
hit by one of the most sophisticated cyber
attacks to strike the finance industry, according to a report from Russian security
company Kaspersky, due to be released
today.
The range and extent of the attacks is
still under investigation, with the group
putting a figure of USD1bn on the losses
that the banks have suffered.
However, one representative for Kaspersky admitted that, while this reflected the
amounts targeted in the attacks, the company had not yet been able to confirm how
much money had actually be stolen.
“It’s not 100 per cent clear at this point
whether all the targets were successful or
not,” this person said. “It’s still an attack
that’s very much active.”
The massive potential losses stem from a
series of attacks over the past two years,
It’s not 100
per cent clear
at this point
whether all the
targets were
successful or not
Security expert
Kaspersky
Kaspersky said in a statement yesterday,
which it said was made with the backing of
Interpol, Europol and agencies in a number
of countries that were investigating.
“These attacks again underline the fact
that criminals will exploit any vulnerability in any system,” said Sanjay Virmani,
director of Interpol’s digital crime centre.
The attacks were all said to have been
mounted by an international criminal gang
referred to by the investigators as Carbanak and said to have representatives in
Russia, Ukraine and other parts of Europe,
as well as China.
According to Kaspersky, the gang penetrated banks’ systems by using a technique
called spear phishing in which individual
employees are targeted with emails that
secretly release malware into a company’s
system once they are opened.
The malicious code then sought to identify and study the activities of officials
with authority to transfer large amounts
of cash, using the knowledge to shift
amounts of up to $10m to special accounts
that had been set up in banks in China and
the US. Sometimes, instructions were sent
at predetermined times to ATMs to instruct
them to start dispensing money, according
to Kaspersky.
Similar attacks on banks have been reported by other security researchers in recent years, although the Carbanak group
is notable for both the range of its targets
and sophistication of its methods, said
Vincente Diaz, Kaspersky’s principal security researcher.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited
2015
17.02.2015
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© The Financial Times Limited 2015. All Rights Reserved. Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in anyway.
BUSINESS EDUCATION
Professors stake out academic territory for bitcoin
By Stephen Foley
The last thing Campbell
Harvey wants is to find
himself playing the role of
Lawrence Summers in The
Social Network, who had
to adjudicate arguments
between Mark Zuckerberg
and the Winklevoss twins
when he was president at
Harvard University.
“We do not want a Facebook situation,” Professor
Harvey says, explaining
why students on his bitcoin course at Duke University’s Fuqua School of
Business have to sign “no
poaching” contracts and
non-disclosure agreements.
If all goes according to
plan, the course will launch
nine hot start-ups, ready to
take advantage of venture
capital enthusiasm for the
much-hyped virtual currency - and all without any
cross words or legal fights.
Think of it as a “semester-long business hackathon”, Prof Harvey says,
“and think of me as the
VC professor. The lone requirement of the course is
to propose a venture that is
related somehow to the bitcoin blockchain.”
While
sceptics
may
doubt there could be Facebook-style riches at stake,
particularly since the price
of a bitcoin collapsed last
year, the claims being
made for the technology’s
revolutionary potential are
only getting grander.
This is why Prof Harvey,
a professor of finance, and
other US academics have
created courses that offer
the study of the virtual currency, including the legal
and economic issues that
it raises and, most importantly, the technology that
underlies it.
“We are staking out some
academic territory and trying to get the university’s
brand associated with a
new body of knowledge,”
says David Yermack, the
finance professor at New
York University’s Stern
Business School, whose
MBA course, created with
law school colleague Geoff
Miller, finished before
Christmas. “This is an entrepreneurial venture for
us.”
Bitcoin was created in the
wake of the financial crisis
by an anonymous computer
ft lexicon: keywords explained
bitcoin
Bitcoin is a digital currency. Instead of printing banknotes
or minting coins, a list of the registration numbers of each
“coin” and who owns them is kept. People pay one another by transferring the numbers online. But the system is
anonymised so although there is a register, it is extremely
difficult to track who owns what. This has attracted illegal
acts in the past.
Businesses have now started accepting the currency as a
means of payment. A list of retailers that accept Bitcoin can
be found on Coinmap.org.
Blockchain
The blockchain is essentially a giant record book of all Bitcoin transactions. In this decentralised network, every bitcoin transfer is verified, processed and written down.
The network relies on a combination of code-breaking and
crowdsourcing that has the potential to make economic interactions cheaper, faster and more secure.
The idea is to remove the need for middlemen, banks for
example, to vouch for facts, such as a person’s identity or
the health of their finances.
scientist keen to displace
central banks, government
currencies and the traditional banking system. But
while the currency he created attracted high-minded
libertarians and people of
lower motives, such as drug
dealers and money launderers, it is the technology that
allows the ownership of
a bitcoin to be transferred
from one user to another
which is generating enthusiasm among venture capital investors.
Known as the blockchain,
this transfer mechanism
could be expanded to move
almost any financial asset,
with potential applications
for writing wills, selling
houses or agreeing derivatives contracts.
“Most financial contracts
can be put in the blockchain,” Prof Harvey says.
Some visionaries go even
further. Because the blockchain is based on unique
keys that validate a user’s
identity, they think it could
be a way to allow you to
start your car, open the
door to your house or send
secure texts.
Both the Duke and NYU
courses are interdisciplinary. At Duke, MBA and
law students have been
partnered up with computer science students to create up to nine mini start-up
teams and, according to
Both the Duke and
NYU courses are
interdisciplinary. At Duke,
MBA and law students
have been partnered up
with computer science
students to create up to
nine mini start-up teams
Prof Harvey, angel investors and venture capitalists
are already offering work
space and money for field
trips, as they sniff around
for access to potential new
companies.
One such angel investor
is Rahul Pagidipati, who
looks after his family’s
portfolio of investments in
the healthcare industry and
believes that insurance premiums and medical records
could be transferred via the
blockchain.
“It is probably going to
happen in a college town,”
he says. “Hopefully Duke
will be one of the universities from which some really cool blockchain technologies will come out over
the next few years.”
The NYU course leans
more heavily on the financial and legal ramifications
of the core virtual curren-
cy and has been following
how regulators worldwide
are dealing with it.
Bitcoin has been effectively banned in some
countries, such as Russia,
while the US and the UK
have allowed a certain
amount of experimentation, even though they have
pursued those using it for
illegal acts.
It is this legal focus that
attracted law student Eduardo Petry Veronese to the
NYU course.
“After two big legal issues, a bankruptcy and a
global criminal case, I got
very interested in bitcoin
- just like any good lawyer should,” he says. After
graduation, he hopes to get
involved in bitcoin regulation in his native Brazil.
In contrast to many of his
students, who see bitcoin
as a new kind of gold stan-
dard and a check against
inflation, Prof Yermack
casts himself as a bitcoin
sceptic, at least when it
comes to the potential to
establish a global currency
outside the purview of central banks.
He says his mission is to
convert enthusiasts for the
currency into enthusiasts
for the underlying technology.
“What we are teaching
is a set of issues and technologies,” he says. “The
technology cannot be reversed. Certain sectors of
banking are ripe for disruption, such as international
money transfer, and bitcoin
may be only a first move in
what could be a real change
in the payments system, so
we are going to stick with
this.”
It is a view echoed by
Prof Harvey at Duke, the
idea that something important has been invented,
even if no one is quite sure
what it is yet.
“If you are teaching international finance, you are
derelict not to give some
attention to this invention,”
Prof Harvey said.
“Even if it does not work
out, you have got to talk
about the ideas percolating
out there.”
Copyright The Financial
Times Limited 2015
tue 17.02.2015
FEATURE
F3
ap photo
特刊
Dakota Johnson, left, and Jamie Dornan appear in a scene from the film, “Fifty Shades of Grey”
Lindsey Bahr
AP Film Writer, Los Angeles
A
udiences
were
more than curious
to check out the big-
screen adaptation of
the racy phenomenon "Fifty
Shades of Grey" this weekend.
The erotic drama sizzled in its
debut, earning an estimated
USD81.7 million from 3,646
theaters in its first three days,
distributor Universal Pictures
said.
In addition to destroying Valentine's and Presidents Day
weekend records, "Fifty Shades of Grey" has also become
the second-highest February
debut ever, behind "Passion
of the Christ's" $83.9 million
opening in 2004.
The chart-topping film cost a
modest $40 million to produce. Starring Dakota Johnson
and Jamie Dornan as Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey,
it could be on track to earn
over $90 million across the
Movies
‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ whips up
stunning USD81.7 million
four-day holiday weekend.
"Our fondest wishes were
realized," said Universal's
President of Domestic Distribution Nick Carpou. "This is
one of those moments where I
can speak for the entire studio
and say we're celebrating."
Carpou was especially pleased that audiences in large,
mid-size, and small markets
turned out to see the film despite severe weather challenges
in the Northeast.
"We had a tremendous
amount of interest from smalltown exhibitors," said Carpou,
noting strong outings in the
South. "That speaks to their
box office (usd)
1. “Fifty Shades of Grey,” $81.7 million ($158 million international).
2. “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” $35.6 million ($23.1 million
international).
3. “The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water,” $30.5
million ($13.5 million international).
4. “American Sniper,” $16.4 million ($3.7 million international).
5. “Jupiter Ascending,” $9.4 million ($15.6 million international).
6. “Seventh Son,” $4.2 million ($730,000 international).
7. “Paddington,” $4.1 million.
8. “The Imitation Game,” $3.5 million ($4 million international).
9. “The Wedding Ringer,” $3.4 million.
10. “Project Almanac,” $2.7 million ($340,000 international).
patrons really wanting to see
the film as soon as possible
and be part of what everyone
is talking about."
According to Universal, North American audiences were
68 percent female.
Internationally, director Sam
Taylor-Johnson's adaptation
of British author E L James'
book earned an estimated
$158 million from 9,637 locations in 58 territories. That's
the second biggest international opening for Universal, right behind the $160.3 million
debut from "Fast & Furious
6," and the highest international opening for an R-rated
film ever.
"Those are summer-style
blockbuster numbers in February," said Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for
box office firm Rentrak.
"Controversy, or at least the
conversation that's created by
'Fifty Shades of Grey,' suddenly infuses this movie into the
mainstream conversation," he
added. "They had to very carefully create a movie that was
edgy, push the envelope, but
without going too far to make
it socially unacceptable."
Director Matthew Vaughn's
"Kingsman: The Secret Service" also exceeded expectations, landing in second place with an estimated $35.6
million from 3,204 locations
across the three-day period,
according to Rentrak.
The R-rated comic book
adaptation starring Colin Firth and Samuel L. Jackson cost
a reported $81 million to produce and should earn around
$41 million across the fourday period.
Animated children's film
"The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water" came in third
with $30.5 million in its second weekend in theaters,
This is one of
those moments
where I can
speak for the
entire studio
and say we’re
celebrating
Nick Carpou
Universal Studios
falling only 45 percent. As one
of the few family-friendly options in theaters, Paramount's
PG-rated movie could pass
$100 million by the end of the
holiday weekend.
Rounding out the top five
were holdovers "American
Sniper," with $16.4 million,
and "Jupiter Ascending," with
$9.4 million.
The Oscar-nominated "American Sniper," now in its fifth
weekend of wide release, has
earned over $300 million in
North America to date.
"We should learn in 2015 to
not underestimate how well
films can do," Dergarabedian
said. "Coming off a 2014 where we were down 5.2 percent,
where a lot of movies did not
live up to expectations, 2015 is
right now running like a freight train toward the first $11
billion year in North America."
Estimated ticket sales for
Friday through Sunday at U.S.
and Canadian theaters, according to Rentrak. Where available, the latest international
numbers for Friday through
Sunday are also included. Final domestic figures will be
released today.
NATURE
F4
17.02.2015 tue
自然
Health
Lauran Neergaard
AP Medical Writer, Washington
Report urges new name, better
diagnosis for chronic fatigue
hronic fatigue syndrome
is a real and serious disease
that needs a new name to reflect
that — and a straightforward way
to diagnose the illness, a U.S. government advisory group declared last week.
Patients flooded the prestigious
Institute of Medicine with stories
of years of misdiagnosis or even
being dismissed by skeptical doctors. Last Tuesday, an IOM panel
sought to redefine this long-controversial ailment, setting five
main symptoms as simple criteria for doctors to use in making a
diagnosis.
And the report called for a new
name to replace the “chronic
fatigue” moniker that so many
patients said belittled their suffering. The choice: Systemic Exertion Intolerance Disease, or SEID,
to reflect that symptoms worsen
after exertion.
People shouldn’t “wander around in the wilderness for years
trying to get a diagnosis,” said Dr.
Ellen Wright Clayton, a Vanderbilt University specialist on genetics and the law, who chaired the
committee and said it “issued a
clarion call” for physicians to do a
better job.
The report stressed, “It is not
appropriate to dismiss these patients by saying, ‘I am chronically
fatigued, too.’”
Some groups had already be-
ap photo
C
A slide during a presentation by the Committee on Diagnostic Criteria for Myalgic
Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome report at the Institute of Medicine in
Washington
gun calling the illness by a more
tongue-twisting name — myalgic
encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue
syndrome, or ME/CFS. Whatever
it’s called, the disorder’s hallmark is
persistent and profound fatigue —
where, depending on the severity,
a simple activity like grocery shopping can put someone to bed —
often accompanied by memory
problems and other symptoms.
There’s no medical test for it, leaving doctors to rule out other possible causes, and there’s no specific
treatment.
Last Tuesday’s report said
anywhere from 836,000 to 2.5
million Americans suffer from
the disorder, most of them not
diagnosed. Laura Hillenbrand,
author of best-sellers “Unbroken:
A World War II Story of Survival,
Resilience, and Redemption” and
“Seabiscuit: An American Legend,” has suffered for years from
the debilitating illness.
“Well, in the years in which
I’ve been exhausted it’s been something where I’ve had to drag
myself to my computer or to my
telephone to do interviews,” she
said on CBS television’s “Face the
Nation” last December.
While working on her book
“Unbroken,” she said that over a
two-year stretch, she was “unable
to leave the house a single time,
because I simply wasn’t strong
enough to walk to the car to get
out of the house.”
In 2013, the Department of Health and Human Services asked
the IOM to examine the state of
chronic fatigue diagnosis, to the
dismay of some patient advocacy
groups. But the committee included several chronic fatigue medical specialists and two patients,
and ultimately received hundreds
of comments from the public.
Tuesday, the IOM panel urged
HHS to develop a toolkit that
physicians could use to diagnose
the disorder using its new criteria,
in addition to recommending the
name change.
The committee said diagnosis
requires three core symptoms:
Fatigue and reduction in pre-illness levels of activity that last
for more than six months, that
post-exertion worsening, and
sleep that is unrefreshing despite
exhaustion.
In addition, patients must have at
least one other symptom: Cognitive impairment, sometimes described as “brain fog,” or what’s called
orthostatic intolerance — meaning
symptoms improve when lying
down and patients find it hard to
stay upright for long.
There are ways to treat some of
the symptoms, if doctors make a
diagnosis, said committee member Dr. Lucinda Bateman of the
Fatigue Consultation Clinic in Salt
Lake City.
“We are hoping that these diagnostic criteria provide a very clear
path,” she said. “It’s a fresh start.”
To spread the word, committee
members are writing about the
diagnostic criteria in several medical journals, and the institute’s
web site, www.iom.edu , eventually will post a physician guide
The recommendations mark “a
critical step toward assisting medical providers in making a diagnosis for those with this serious
and debilitating illness,” said Dr.
Nancy C. Lee of the HHS Office
on Women’s Health. She said the
government would review the recommendations.
ASK THE VET
by Dr Ruan Du Toit Bester
3 Feline Allergies Cat Owners Should Control
O
f many possible allergies in a cat,
there are 3 common types of cat
allergies. The symptoms cause discomfort and irritation to the cat but if untreated will manifest themselves into
troublesome issues, such as skin sores,
eye irritation or respiratory problems
all of which can lead to serious infections.
Allergies are an overreaction to a
substance or item that is normally not
harmful. The cat’s immune system
reacts to the antigen (the substance
or item) by disrupting the white blood
cells. This, in turn forces the immune
system to produce histamine; the histamine then causes the capillaries to dilate which decreases blood flow to the
affected areas. The areas then become
hot and itchy causing the cat to scratch.
The 3 most common cat allergies are
Food allergies, Flea allergies, Contact
allergies / Inhalant allergies.
1. Food Allergies
These develop over time after the cat
has been fed the same diet repeatedly.
Symptoms are scratching around the
neck and head, hair loss, diarrhea, flatulence and in the odd case ear infections.
The most common causes of food
allergies are:
- beef
- eggs
- dairy
- chicken
- pork
- rice
Treatment in cases of food allergy is
to perform a food elimination test trial.
The cat will be given a special diet for a
few weeks. Once the cat’s diet has stabilised other foods are introduced, one
at a time, until the cat exhibits another
reaction. This method will take up to 3
months to detect the food which began
the issues. All treats must also be withheld until the food causing the reaction has been determined.
2. Flea Allergies
Of all the cat allergies, this is the most
common of cat allergies. The allergy is
from the flea’s saliva which causes the
reaction in the cat and the cat does not
need to be infested with fleas before a
reaction will appear. Usually the first
sign will be at the base of the tail but
signs are often found around the head
and ears. The cat will show loss of hair
from excessive scratching and digging
or chewing and licking of the irritated
areas. Caution should be shown so that
the areas do not become infected.
Treatment will be either a topical
cream or ointment to help sooth the itching and heal the exposed skin aiding
in the reducing of infection risk.
3. Inhalant Allergies
These allergies are actually quite common and are caused by an overreaction
to airborne particles such as mold,
pollen, and dust mites. The reaction
normally produces an itching sensation
around the cats face, chest, stomach or
feet. In cases that are somewhat more
serious there are signs of upper respiratory distress, like wheezing or persistent sneezing.
Diagnosing inhalant allergies is more
challenging because often the reaction
is triggered by several environmental
issues at the same time. Several tests
may need to be performed such as an
intradermal skin test, where allergens
are introduced, by injection, to the skin
around the eye area. This will allow the
veterinarian to narrow down the cause of the hypersensitivity and treat the
pet. In more extreme case the cat may
require steroid injections to ease the
allergic reaction.
Treatment is a steroid injection in severe cases. The cat can be assisted in
avoiding exposure by keeping windows
and doors closed during pollen season.
Hope this helps
Till next week
Dr Ruan
Ask the Vet:
Royal Veterinary Centre
Tel: +853 28501099, +853 28523678
Emergency: +853 62662268
Email: [email protected]