Japanese find sleep, shelter in cyber cafes

Takeshi Yamashita does not look like a homeless person.

From his carefully distressed jeans to his casual-cool navy striped T-shirt, he is every bit the trendy Tokyoite.

Yet the 26-year-old has been sleeping in a reclining seat in an Internet cafe every night for the past month since he lost his steady office job and his apartment.

It's cheaper than a hotel, offers access to the Internet and hundreds of Manga comic books, and even has a microwave and a shower where he can wash in the morning before heading off to one of his temporary jobs ranging from cleaning to basic office work.

Asked how long he plans to go on living like that, Yamashita smiles and shrugs.

"I hope the situation in Japan will improve. The new Japanese generation doesn't have any money, and many young people don't have any motivation. I don't have money, but I have a dream," he says, sitting in a cubicle with a PC and a stack of comic books.

So what is his dream?

"I don't know. Maybe some ordinary job in an office."

Yamashita is one of Japan's many "freeters" -- a compound of "free" and "Arbeiter", the German word for "worker".

A by-product of the economic crisis that hit Japan and its lifelong employment guarantees in the 1990s, freeters drift between odd jobs.

Earning around 1,000 yen ($8) per hour, they often struggle to pay the rent in Tokyo, one of the most expensive cities in the world where a modest 30 square meter (320 square foot) flat in a central location can easily cost 150,000 yen ($1,250) a month.

Now the economy is recovering, but many freeters are missing out on the upswing after years of unskilled work. Most expanding companies prefer to recruit fresh university graduates or transfer basic jobs to low-wage countries such as China.

As an Internet cafe owner in Tokyo's Ueno district, Masami Takahashi has had a close-up view of social change in Japan.

Around the corner from his cafe, homeless people who cannot even afford a reclining seat sleep in cardboard boxes.

Chinese prostitutes in Japanese kimonos prop up drunken office workers, or "salarymen", who will stumble into Masami's cafe for a nap later in the night.

The salarymen were the first to discover Internet cafes as a cheap alternative to hotels after companies hurt by the economic crisis stopped funding team drinks -- an essential part of Japanese corporate culture -- followed by a night in a hotel.

And then there are customers for whom Takahashi's Internet point is home. Takahashi, an affable host sporting a mullet and a blue track suit, regularly sees freeters taking refuge at his cafe. He has even lent money to some of them out of pity.

"It shows how the social system is changing. It's a bit sad for us Japanese," he told Reuters, scratching his head.

At about 1,400 to 2,400 yen ($12-$20) for a night in a central Internet cafe -- free soft drinks, TV, comics and Internet access included -- prices beat those of Japan's famous "capsule hotels", where guests sleep in plastic cells.

This means that on a Friday night in Shibuya, one of Tokyo's main entertainment districts, the dimly lit cafes are packed.

At 3 am, there is loud snoring from salarymen in suits, their shoes lined up neatly outside each individual cubicle containing a reclining seat or sofa, a computer and a clothes hanger.

There are fashionable young women wearing high heels and short skirts, who missed the last train after a night out.

And there are those who use the discretion of a net cafe to their own advantage.

"I often come here with my boyfriend. Today we escaped from high-school and came here," said 16-year-old Naomi, a schoolgirl in a white shirt, tartan miniskirt and knee-high socks.

Shyly sweeping aside her long brown fringe, Naomi said she started going to net cafes with her boyfriend at the age of 15, telling her parents she was sleeping at a friend's place.

"We usually spend all night talking and reading mangas, and in the morning we go to school".

Like Yamashita, the freeter, many of the cyber homeless fade into this colorful crowd, finding anonymity as well as shelter.

"The younger ones don't look any different from other young people," said Kazumasa Adachi, a manager at one of the more elegant net cafes where staff wear suits and receive customers with the polite efficiency of hotel receptionists.

He recognizes cafe dwellers by the heavy bags they lug around.

"They are different from the real homeless because they belong to the working poor, so they do have some money, whereas the ones on the street have no money at all," he added.

There is no official data on the cyber cafe homeless. Japan's Welfare Ministry plans a wider study on the phenomenon, according to a newspaper report, but in the meantime, it is hard to gauge the scope of the problem or its social impact.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that many are freeters in their mid-to-late-twenties, who stay in a net cafe for a couple of months before settling for a more permanent housing solution.

Those who are older, poorer, with fewer chances of escaping their drifting lifestyle, and sometimes too embarrassed to return home, find themselves at the very bottom of cyber society.

They congregate in run-down Tokyo suburbs such as Kamata, renting poorly ventilated, smoke-filled cubicles with reclining seats for 100 yen an hour.

"It's very uncomfortable. You can't really sleep," said one Kamata cafe guest who preferred not to be named.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/internet/05/08/japan.cyberhome.reut/index.html

EU: Galileo project in deep 'crisis'

Europe's $4.9 billion satellite navigation system is in deep crisis and will require more public funds to get back on track, the European Union said.

The Galileo project -- Europe's rival to the U.S. Global Positioning System, or GPS -- has already seen major delays because the eight companies in the consortium are arguing over how to divide the workload.

The consortium of companies from France, Germany, Spain, Britain and Italy has been given until Thursday to set up a joint legal entity to run the project or risk losing control of it. But German Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee, speaking on behalf of the EU, said he had "little hope left" the consortium will end the infighting in time.

"Galileo is in a profound and serious crisis. We're in a dead-end street," Tiefensee said. "The cardinal problem is that the companies still have not been able to agree on the way forward. We need to find an alternative solution."

The European Commission is to present a proposal on May 16 on how to overhaul the system, which Tiefensee said Monday would not likely be operational in orbit until 2012 -- a year later than had been expected. Tiefensee said Germany, which holds the rotating six-month EU presidency, also wants more public funding for the project.

Under the original plan, European taxpayers were supposed to cover roughly one-third of the $4.9 billion project, which is to create some 150,000 jobs.

"We will hope to find another form of financing, of distributing the cost (within) a public-private partnership," Tiefensee said, adding it has not been decided whether the consortium will be able to hold on to some of the contracts.

Only one out of 30 planned satellites in the system has been launched -- in December 2005. The second satellite missed its autumn 2006 launch date after it short-circuited during final testing.

Galileo was originally to have started launching its 30 satellites -- compared to GPS's 24 -- by 2008. However, that date was postponed to 2011 due to previous disagreements between EU governments on how to pay for the system. Now, Tiefensee says it won't likely be operational until 2012.

Like GPS, Galileo is envisioned to be a network of satellites orbiting Earth that will beam radio signals to receiving devices on the ground, helping users pinpoint their locations.

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/05/08/galileo.troubles.ap/index.html

Study ties coral disease to warmer oceans

Warmer sea temperatures are linked to the severity of a coral disease, according to a study on Australia's Great Barrier Reef that offers a dire warning about global warming's potential impact on the world's troubled reefs.

The 6-year study released on Monday tracked the relationship between water temperature and the frequency of a coral disease called white syndrome across more than 900 miles of the world's largest coral reef.

"We've linked disease and warm water, which is one of the aspects of global warming," said John Bruno, the study's lead author. "Our study suggests as global warming warms the oceans more and more, we could see more disease outbreaks and more severe ones."

The results of the study, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, were to be published on Tuesday in the online journal PLoS Biology.

Researchers have suspected for years that warm sea temperatures were responsible for disease outbreaks on coral reefs. But Bruno said the study was the first to conclusively connect the two.

Reefs are undersea rock formations built by tiny animals called coral polyps. They are important habitats and nurseries for fish and other sea creatures.

Scientists estimate about a quarter of the world's coral has been permanently lost and another 30 percent could disappear over the next 30 years.

The study tracked the fate of 48 reefs across the Great Barrier Reef. They were resurveyed each year for six years and disease data were compared with data on ocean temperature taken from U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellites.

Hot water

Two years ago, unusually hot water across the Caribbean Sea was blamed for a massive surge of coral bleaching, an ailment that turns corals white, and a subsequent wave of deadly diseases that attacked reefs across the region.

In some locations, scientists found a 25 to 30 percent loss of coral and centuries-old corals were killed. Coral bleaching is a different phenomenon from white syndrome.

In the NSF study, scientists found white syndrome, an ailment that has appeared across the Pacific, flourished when the sea temperature rose. In 2002, for example, the frequency of the disease increased 20-fold after a year in which the region saw its second warmest summer.

The study found that the effect of temperature was "highly dependent" on the density of the coral cover. Outbreaks of white syndrome followed unusually warm temperature on reefs with greater than 50 percent coral cover.

The healthiest reefs suffered the most severe disease outbreaks, probably because they had the most dense concentrations of coral polyps.

"It's the same natural principle as what happens when humans are packed together in tight circumstances and they are more prone to disease," said Bruno, an assistant professor of marine ecology at the University of North Carolina.

A host of corals were affected, many of them the important "reef-building" corals that construct the limestone foundation on which coral polyps live.

Bruno said while the study focused on white syndrome, "there is no reason to suspect" that other coral diseases would not be similarly affected by warmer ocean temperatures.

"We are working on the same kind of experiments with yellow band disease," he said. "It's starting to look like there is a role of temperature in driving yellow band disease too."

Source: http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/science/05/08/global.warming.reefs.reut/index.html

NASA's probe shows Jupiter up close and personal

Small moons are acting as shepherds using their gravity to herd dust and boulders in Jupiter's faint rings, NASA scientists reported on Tuesday.

The finding is one of several discoveries made from images captured in late February by the New Horizons probe in what NASA scientists called "a real-world fly-by" of Jupiter, 16 months into its mission to Pluto.

They also got the closest look yet at the "Little Red Spot," an Earth-sized swirling storm that scientists described as a galactic rendition of Vincent Van Gogh's "Starry Night" painting, and dramatic views of volcanic eruptions on Jupiter's moon Io.

These postcards from Jupiter were taken by the piano-sized robotic probe's seven cameras as it came within 1.4 million miles of Jupiter on February 28. About 70 percent of the data has been relayed to Earth so far.

The close encounter allowed New Horizons to make use of Jupiter's gravity to shave three years from its travel time to Pluto. It is expected to arrive in 2015.

The encounter with Jupiter "was a chance to practice ... before the rubber hits the road" with Pluto, Alan Stern, New Horizons principal investigator, told a televised news briefing.

Pictures of Jupiter's faint rings revealed the moons Metis and Adrastea herding rocks with their gravitational pull.

"The boulder-sized particles are definitely being controlled by these shepherding satellites," Jeff Moore of the NASA Ames Research Center in California told the briefing.

Also spied was what appeared to be remnants of an object that had recently collided with the rings. "Individual clusters of particles in the rings is a really new discovery," Moore said.

MYSTERY VOLCANO

On Jupiter's volcanic moon Io, New Horizons revealed an umbrella-shaped plume rising 200 miles into space from the volcano Tvashtar.

"It's really exciting that it performed for us," said John Spencer of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

"Galileo was orbiting for six years and we never saw plumes like that," he said, referring to an earlier mission.

The probe also revealed a mystery volcano, so young its lava has just reached Io's surface, but has yet to emit enough gas to produce a plume.

"We're seeing the birth of a new volcano here," Spencer said.

In about eight years, the mission will produce the closest-ever views of Pluto and the hundreds of other icy objects in the distant Kuiper belt region.

But for now, the NASA scientists are happy with the test drive.

"I think we're ready to rock and roll." Stern said.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSN0126144720070502?src=050207_0838_ARTICLE_PROMO_also_on_reuters&pageNumber=2

Next target of cell phone industry: navigation

After hitting alarm clock makers and camera manufacturers, the cell phone industry has a new target -- personal navigation device makers.

Handset makers see navigation as one of the next major value-adding offerings and even at this very early stage, analysts say the annual market for phone navigation is worth hundreds of millions of euros.

While a few years ago personal navigation device makers like Dutch TomTom shrugged off possible rivalry from the handset industry, they have now acknowledged the potential risk to their business.

The world's top handset maker Nokia started to sell its first navigation phone N95 a month ago, and other top vendors are expected to follow shortly, hoping to make 2007 the breakthrough year for cell phone navigation.

The N95, with a 700-euro price tag, is not in reach of the masses despite first reports showing strong sales, but the Finnish firm aims to bring GPS positioning chips to a wide array of its products.

"I believe it will quickly go through almost the whole of our portfolio," Kai Oistamo, head of Nokia's Mobile Phones unit, told a recent news conference.

The GPS technology enables handset makers to bypass mobile phone network operators and at least some of the navigation phones can be used for routing when not connected to operators' networks.

Operators would get a share of the business when real-time data traffic starts to grow. So far it is the handset makers' dream that people will use phones to find restaurants nearby, but car navigation firms have already started to offer road data.

According to researchers Canalys, the navigation products market is set to grow in 2007 by about two thirds from last year, with traditional personal navigation devices (PND) taking 85 percent of the market.

Analysis firm Berg Insight has forecast annual shipments of handset-based personal navigation products in Europe and the U.S. to reach 12 million units by 2009, compared with 1 million in 2005.

"As the pie grows, more powerful players want to have a piece of it. Nokia was the first to acknowledge it," said Oren Nissim, Chief Executive of Telmap, an Israeli navigation software firm.

Nokia, which bought into the navigation industry last year with the acquisition of German firm Gate5, rolled out a free Nokia Maps service in February, giving away maps and routing data while charging consumers for a turn-by-turn navigation service.

"Nokia's entrance has livened up this market. Interest towards the sector from outside has grown a lot," said Juha Murtopuro, chief executive of Finnish navigation software startup Navicore.

Google and Yahoo are seen as keen to add mobile navigation services to their mapping offerings, while car navigation firms are adding mobile services to their products.

"In the short term I am more worried about the personal navigation device makers, in the long term about the Internet companies," said Ralph Kunz, head of mapping and navigation operations at Nokia, who expects the Internet's advertisement-funded business model to spread to mobiles.

"In the mid term there is no reason to believe why the funding mechanism would not be the same as in the Internet," he said.

Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSL0233196120070502?src=050207_0838_ARTICLE_PROMO_also_on_reuters&pageNumber=2