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Singapore donates $391,000 to Japan for quake relief

The Singapore government will donate S$500,000 (about US$391,000) to Japan for relief efforts in the current quake and tsunami disaster, Singapore's Foreign Ministry said Tuesday.

The money will be channeled through the Singapore Red Cross Society to buy supplies urgently needed by the survivors of Friday's quake and tsunami, such as mattresses, blankets, bottled water and water containers.

''There has been a spontaneous outpouring of sympathy and compassion from all walks of Singapore society for the victims in Japan from this disaster. We have seen a willingness by Singaporeans to contribute towards helping the victims in Japan,'' Singapore's Ambassador-at-large Chew Tai Soo told a news conference.

Chew, Singapore's former envoy to Japan, said Japanese authorities have told the Singapore Foreign Ministry that survivors at evacuation centers urgently need mattresses and other emergency provisions.

He said Singapore has no plan to evacuate its diplomats and other Singaporeans still in Japan at the moment. There are about 3,000 Singaporeans living in Japan.

Representatives of Mercy Relief, a Singapore-based NGO with vast experience in humanitarian and relief efforts for natural disasters, said at the same news conference that it plans to ship 20,000 packets of instant porridge and 20 manually-powered water treatment systems to Japan on Wednesday.

The focus of the assistance it will provide is likely to focus in Ibaraki, one of the prefectures devastated by the earthquake and ensuing tsunami, said Hassan Ahmad, chief executive of Mercy Relief.

In addition to the donation from the Singapore government, the Singapore Red Cross Society says it has received more than S$70,000 in donations from the public, while Mercy Relief has received about S$18,000 as of Tuesday.

China faces hurdle to provide jobs to young college graduates

China is facing a nagging social problem as young college graduates -- the nation's future elites -- find it increasingly difficult to land hoped-for jobs even though the nation's economy is booming.

To get employed, many have to get by with low-paying jobs that have swollen the ranks of the working poor with college degrees.

They are the fast-expanding ''ant tribes'' of China, young graduates who, the Chinese media say, squeak by with unstable jobs, live in shared rooms and spend hours commuting from the outskirts of the city.

About 6.6 million university students in China are scheduled to graduate this year, and it has been estimated that only about 70 percent of them have managed to line up a job.

Nationwide, the ranks of ant tribes -- young graduates with jobs that pay about 2,000 yuan a month (or US$300) -- have reportedly climbed to several million people.

The Chinese government recently convened the National People's Congress, and unemployment was high on the parliamentary agenda.

With calls for pro-democracy ''Jasmine Revolution'' rallies stirring in the background, the government has vowed to focus on the issue of employment for young college graduates.

Premier Wen Jiabao pledged to spend 42.3 billion yuan to create jobs for college graduates, such as expanding the government's job-training program.

In contrast to the growing frustration among young college graduates in the cities, jobs are plenty in the manufacturing bases in China's booming coastal cities.

The shortage of jobs in the industrial towns, however, centers mostly on simple assembly-line factory work, not stable white-collar jobs most young college graduates yearn for.

Yin Weimin, China's human resources and social security minister, has urged young college graduates to ''go to the interior'' and look for jobs away from coastal regions and help develop the nation's underdeveloped interior provinces.

Still, the situation of unemployment stands unyielding, driven by an increase in the ranks of university students and a mismatch between job seekers and job offers.

China's Internet community was abuzz when news broke that a Beijing University female graduate with a master's degree has recently given up looking for a college-level job, returned to her home in Henan Province and enrolled in a job-training school to learn the ropes of a construction painter.

Chinese experts say it is time for young college graduates to change their elitist mindset and learn job skills that are on demand in the job market.

That kind of advice, however, appears high-sounding in the ears of many young people in China.

As a 24-year-old man in Beijing put it bluntly, ''In China, you need connections to get a job.''

This apparently turns job-seeking among the unconnected into a dark reality.

Nepal directs banks to stop accepting banknotes with king's portrait

Nepal's central bank on Tuesday directed banks and businesses to stop using banknotes bearing the portrait of the country's former king and asked people holding such notes to get them exchanged.

After the country abolished the monarchy in 2008, the central bank started circulating banknotes with the image of Mt. Everest on them and launched a nationwide drive to replace the old notes.

The central bank had sent out a notification last October that banknotes bearing the king's portrait would hold no value from Monday, but it said Tuesday that eight of its counters would continue to accept such banknotes and replace them with new banknotes.

According to the central bank's estimates, around 10 billion rupees ($135 million) worth banknotes bearing the king's portrait are still in circulation in Nepal.

Phone Home

Have you ever read the instructions that came with your mobile phone? You'll find everything you need to know - except how to use your phone as, well, a phone. Taking pictures and videos, texting, sending email, accessing the internet, tweeting, blogging, reading maps and documents, playing games, listening to music, watching videos, researching, and keeping track of what's on your calendar - that's apparently what you need to know to operate your mobile phone.

Talking on it? That's not high on the list of applications.

Look around you. People use mobile phones for all manner of things never mentioned in the instruction manual. It can substitute for a flashlight, a watch, and an alarm clock. Use it to check in via foursquare or Gowalla. Other undocumented uses include getting airline boarding passes and checking prices at retail stores. The latter was particularly evident in December as holiday shoppers compared prices via their phones. Library- related applications include finding books in local libraries and searching online databases.

How close is the word "phone" to oblivion? Those who hedge their bets and use the terminology "mobile device" are probably closer to the mark. What about the act of phoning? Advised by her mother to phone the airline about a possible flight delay, a friend of mine, who is in her late 20s, responded with, "Who phones an airline?" - the web is a faster and more accurate source of flight information - and she can use the browser on her mobile device.

3-D data

Holographic storage sounds like a concept straight out of Star Trek. What it is, though, is a method of recording data in three dimensions, using the volume of a material rather than the traditional, on-the-surface, two-dimensional storage we're all familiar with. InPhase Technologies is on the cutting edge of this technology, having developed a photosensitive polymer that aims to eventually bring holographic storage to the masses.

"You get really, really high data densities, so you can have a variety of form factors that have a lot of capacity," says Liz Murphy, vice president of marketing for InPhase. "On the size of a postage stamp, you can get about 6GB. On a disc a little larger than a DVD, you can get 300GB." That's a lot of data in a tiny space. InPhase's first product will be a 300GB drive intended for write once/read many archival storage for big applications such as online libraries, or for businesses looking for ways to comply with Sarbanes-Oxley. It's expected to arrive in late 2006.

Looking ahead to the next couple of years, holographic storage should start showing up in portable and consumer applications. It holds a lot of promise for memory-hungry devices such as handhelds and smartphones, where size is of the essence. InPhase will be licensing the technology, so entrepreneurs could see it arriving from many different manufacturers. In the business world, where data keeps expanding, more storage in smaller spaces is one technology trend to keep an eye on.

Indonesian family donates $782,000 to Japanese quake victims

A wealthy Indonesian family that owns a coal mining company in Indonesia donated on Wednesday S$1 million (about US$782,000) to the Japanese Embassy in Singapore to help the victims of the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan.

Elaine Low, 24, daughter of Low Tuck Kwong, owner of PT Bayan Resources, handed a check for the amount to Japanese Ambassador in Singapore Yoichi Suzuki.

The U.S. magazine Forbes ranks Low the third richest Indonesian, with assets worth $3.6 billion this year.

The Low family has many friends in Japan and fond memories of Japan's Tohoku region, one of the regions worst hit by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake and ensuing tsunami.