Word: turning
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Motherless Children How ironic that those emigrant Filipina mothers you profile in "The Motherless Generation" [Nov. 24] are in turn often bringing up a generation of motherless kids in rich countries - kids whose mothers return to work before their children are of school-going age; kids who spend long days with Filipina nannies as "surrogate mothers." Few children - rich or poor, in whichever corner of the globe - prefer gifts and toys to the presence of their mothers. In both cases, the mothers' drive to provide for their offspring financially seems to avoid the simplest of facts: parenting cannot be outsourced...
...Ling Woo Liu correctly points out that, most of the time, spoiled kids grow up to be dependent on their family's wealth. This is unacceptable in today's society; everyone should start working to earn their own money and thus create more "working" brains. This in turn will help the development of countries. Rami El Chamaa, BEIRUT
...farmers seeking better soil have traditionally relied on slash-and-burn agriculture, which generates greenhouse gases and decimates forests. If instead those farmers slow-smoldered their agricultural waste to produce charcoal - in effect, slash-and-char agriculture - they could fertilize existing plots instead of clearing more land. This in turn would reduce emissions in the atmosphere, and so on in a virtuous circle of environmental renewal...
...power a tractor and a biochar tailored to improve particular soils. "If you're going to grow food, you have to do it responsibly," says Bob Hawkins, Eprida's project manager. "And one way of doing that is to use it to generate sustainable energy." A prototype can turn a ton of ground peanut shells into 600 lb. (270 kg) of biochar, with energy as the bonus...
Iceland knows a bit about kicking the fossil-fuel habit. At the turn of the last century, life on the isolated island was bleak. It had been among the poorest nations in Europe for centuries, and a smoky haze choked Reykjavik, thanks to the coal inhabitants burned during the interminable winters. In the 1930s, Icelandic engineers successfully diverted underground water to heat an elementary school, and the rest of the capital slowly followed suit. When the global oil crisis hit in the 1970s, efforts to turn this local resource into electricity - by drilling holes into underground heat pockets and reservoirs...