Monday, December 5, 2011

Week7 Reading Journal - 2


The U.S. unemployment rate drops from 9 percent to 8.6 percent in November. The President said 140,000 people were hired in the private sector last month. The reason of the dramatic drop can be found in that 315,000 people stopped looking for a job, not that new jobs were created, said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Mesirow Financial at Chicago. Statistics is a funny thing. As shown in the unemployment rate, numbers can be easily manipulated. Even though the number says the rate went down, the reason might not be because more jobs were created. The unemployment rate in South Korea is about 4 percent last quarter, which indicates near full employment. Despite the number, many young people have difficulties finding a job. They argue that the number they feel is more than 20 percent. Like the U.S., many people give up looking for a job and the government and the ruling party take advantage of the statistics to promote their propaganda.

Week7 Reading Journal - 1


Tokyo Electric Co. running the Japanese nuclear plants in Fukushima said that they found another leak of radioactive water over the weekend. It was estimated that 45 tons of water had been contaminated outside the cooling system and about 300 liters of it had leaked into the sea. Although the amount of radioactive water leaked into the sea is not so much, the leak needs to be considered seriously because the water contains about one million times as much radioactive strontium as the maximum safe level. Even worse, it may cause tissue damage and increase the risk of developing cancer if a human absorbs it. I believe that the Japanese government and the company are doing their best to prevent leakage, but I am expecting more. The radioactive water leak is not only Japanese’s problem. The water may have a fatal impact on some nearby countries’ ecosystem.