OXFORD, Miss., Sept. 27 (UPI) -- Early polls pegged Democrat Barrack Obama as the winner over Republican John McCain in Friday's U.S. presidential debate in Oxford, Miss.
A CBS poll of uncommitted voters found 40 percent saying Obama came out on top in the debate, compared to 25 percent for McCain. Thirty-six percent called it a draw.
McCain was considered the better candidate in terms of running the war in Iraq, but Obama was selected as the best manager of the economy. The poll had a margin for error of 4 percent.
CNN ran an unscientific online poll that drew more than 80,500 votes, 67 percent of which went to Obama compared to 28 percent for McCain.
A similar NBC survey drew more than 291,000 clicks and gave Obama the win with 51 percent compared to 35 percent for McCain, while 7.8 percent said they weren't sure and 6.3 percent called it a draw.
Broadband for the two countries grew in parallel for 18 months until the first quarter of this year, when China took a leap forward, according to analysts with Point Topic.
By Antone Gonsalves InformationWeek September 26, 2008 06:18 PM
China has overtaken the United States as having the largest number of broadband lines in the world, a market research firm said Friday.
As of the end of August, the U.S. and China each had about 78 million high-speed lines, British researcher Point Topic said. But with the number of Chinese lines increasing at twice the rate of the U.S., China has since taken the crown.
This is a major milestone for China," Oliver Johnson, chief executive of Point Topic, said in a statement. "Launching people into space is spectacular, but having the biggest broadband market down here on earth means a lot more for building a modern, hi-tech economy." China Thursday night launched three astronauts into space. China's third manned space mission in five years is expected to include the country's first attempt at a spacewalk, The New York Times reported.
When broadband use first surged in China, experts predicted the country would overtake the United States in 2006. However, growth in China leveled off, while the U.S. saw a speed up in the number of broadband lines, Point Topic said. Broadband grew in parallel for 18 months until the first quarter of this year, when China took a leap forward.
In the second quarter of this year, the number of new broadband lines in the U.S. fell to barely 1.1 million from 3.4 million in the last quarter of 2007, Point Topic said. Meanwhile, the number of lines in China soared to 5 million from 3.5 million. By the end of June, the U.S. had nearly 76.9 million broadband lines with China less than 900,000 lines behind. The gap was less than the number of lines China added in July alone, 1.14 million, according to China's official figures.
"We expect Q3 to show some improvement in the U.S.," Johnson said. "It's usually better than Q2. And growth in China is likely to fall back a bit. Even so, China is almost certainly going to come out ahead when all the figures are in."
Given that China has more than three times the homes and people as the U.S., it's not surprising that the country has taken the lead. But what is unexpected is the U.S. falling behind European and Asian countries in the percentage of broadband growth, Point Topic said. The U.S.'s weakening position has "serious implications" for its future competitiveness in a high-tech world.
Point Topic believes U.S.'s problems with broadband growth stems from "light-touch regulation" that allows incumbent operators to keep the broadband market largely to themselves. Less competition has led to higher prices and slower growth. In countries where competition has been more open, the broadband market has leapt ahead, the researcher said.
ABC News' Reynolds Holding Reports: Calling on President Eisenhower to deliver a lesson about accountability, Sen. John McCain invoked two letters authored by the 34th president the night before the Normandy invasion during Friday's presidential debate. One letter, McCain said, was authored in the event that the D-Day invasion was a success and the other, a resignation, in the event it was a failure.
According to the National Archives, late on the afternoon of June 5, 1944, Eisenhower scribbled a note intended for release accepting responsibility for the decision to launch the invasion and taking full blame in the event the effort to create a beachhead on the Normandy coast failed.
In the letter, Eisenhower takes responsibility but makes no mention of resignation.
During the first presidential debate, Senator John McCain called North Korea a “repressive brutal regime,” comparing life there to living in a prison camp. And then he summoned a bizarre statistic, saying that the average South Korean is three inches taller than the average North Korean.
Mr. McCain is correct that there appears to be a growing gap in height between North and South Koreans, likely due to poor nutrition and impoverished living conditions. Studies of escapees from North Korea show that those born after the partitioning of the Korean Peninsula in the North were consistently about two inches shorter than their counterparts in the South, according to a 2004 report in Economics and Human Biology [ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B73DX-4DV1HK2-1/2/c32b4d9d0cec7646cb0089748e15099d ].
While the conditions for North Koreans are troubling, Americans have a similar height gap to worry about, and it also appears to be due to a lower standard of living, poor health care and inadequate nutrition. Last summer, the journal Social Science Quarterly [ http://ideas.repec.org/p/lmu/muenec/1241.html ] reported that Americans are, quite literally, falling short of Europeans. In 1880, Americans were the tallest people in the world. But by 2000, American men, at an average height of 5-feet-10.5-inches, ranked 9th, and women, at about 5-feet-5-inches, fell to 15th. Several Northern European countries rank the highest in height, with the Dutch coming in first, at just over 6 feet for the men and 5-feet-7-inches for the women.
The height gap between Americans and Northern Europeans can’t be explained by an influx of short immigrants. Experts say the United States takes in too few immigrants to account for the disparity, and the height statistics cited in the article include only English-speaking native-born Americans, and don’t include people of Asian and Hispanic descent.
The real answer may be that Northern European countries do a better job of spreading the wealth and taking care of their children.
“We conjecture that perhaps the Western and Northern European welfare states, with their universal socioeconomic safety nets, are able to provide a higher biological standard of living to their children and youth than the more free-market-oriented U.S. economy,” wrote John Komlos, professor of economics at the University of Munich.
I e-mailed Dr. Komlos to ask him if he had seen the reference to short North Koreans in the debate. He said he found Senator McCain’s remark “amusing” as he is the editor of the science journal that originally published the data.
“Of course, a similar argument could be leveled against the U.S. as it is not doing as well as its Western European counterparts,” he wrote. “Of course there are many other indicators that the U.S. health care and diet are not as good as in Western Europe. Western Europeans live longer.”
What do height trends say about the health of a nation? New Yorker writer Burkhard Bilger explored the issue in a fascinating 2004 article called “The Height Gap.”
Over the past 30 years, a new breed of “anthropometric historians” has tracked how populations around the world have changed in stature. Height, they’ve concluded, is a kind of biological shorthand: a composite code for all the factors that make up a society’s well-being. Height variations within a population are largely genetic, but height variations between populations are mostly environmental, anthropometric history suggests. If Joe is taller than Jack, it’s probably because his parents are taller. But if the average Norwegian is taller than the average Nigerian it’s because Norwegians live healthier lives. That’s why the United Nations now uses height to monitor nutrition in developing countries. In our height lies the tale of our birth and upbringing, of our social class, daily diet, and health care coverage. In our height lies our history.
Just like with the North Koreans and South Koreans, the height gap between Americans and Europeans is a relatively new development. The New Yorker article notes that the average American soldier during World War I was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955, the data began to shift. The Germans and other Europeans grew an extra two centimeters a decade, or a little under an inch, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in 50 years.
According to Mr. Bilger, researchers have found that Americans lose the most height to Northern Europeans in infancy and adolescence, “which implicates pre- and post-natal care and teenage eating habits.”
As America’s rich and poor drift further apart, its growth curve may be headed in the opposite direction…. The eight million Americans without a job, the 40 million without health insurance, the 35 million who live below the poverty line are surely having trouble measuring up. And they’re not alone. As more and more Americans turn to a fast-food diet, its effects may be creeping up the social ladder, so that even the wealthy are growing wider rather than taller.
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