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The article offers feedback from "New Scientist" readers on miscellaneous topics in the news as of May 3, 2014. Topics discussed include a report in the March 29, 2014 issue of "New Scientist" on the amount of toilet paper U.S. residents each use during their lifetime, a March 22, 2014 report by the news organization, the Associated Press, on the amount of human waste produced each day in India, and comments on the end of security support for computer company Microsoft's Windows XP system.

The article looks at the increasing number of students in the U.S. who want to visit India to study the country's economic and business sectors. American students are not new to India. It has long been a popular destination for nonprofit work and students of public policy. But now U.S. business schools are realizing the opportunities available in Southeast Asia. INSET: REPORTER'S NOTEBOOK.

The article presents statistics on a variety of topics including the estimated sales and consumption of toilet paper in the U.S. compared to India and Canada. Statistics comparing the population of the U.S. with India and Canada are presented along with a comparison of the number of people who have access to adequate sanitary toilets in the U.S., India, Canada and Ethiopia.

Abstract: BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) are viewed currently as pillars of relative political, economic and financial stability, with the prospect of a major shift in future world power. The paper aims at investigating the relationships among the economic, financial and political country risk ratings of the BRICS and relating those risk factors to their respective national stock markets in the presence of representatives of the world's major stock markets and oil market. It also examines the interrelationships among the national country financial risk ratings factors to discern transmission of the risk spectrum among the countries of this group because of the relevance of this information to investors, traders and policy makers. The results demonstrate that only the Chinese stock market is sensitive to all the factors. Financial risk ratings generally demonstrate more sensitivity than economic and political risk ratings, and political risk is sensitive to both financial and economic risk ratings. Among the five BRICS, Brazil shows special sensitivity to economic and financial risks, while Russia and China hold strong sensitivity to political risk and India demonstrates special sensitivity to higher oil prices. Among the global factors, oil price is more sensitive to economic than financial risk, while the S&P 500 reverses this relationship. The two American quantitative easings (QEs) affect BRICS differently. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The debate over "offshoring" has been brewing since a study by Forrester, a research group, in 2002 claimed that 3.3m white-collar American jobs (500,000 of them in IT) would shift offshore to countries such as India by 2015. Stephen Roach, the chief economist at Morgan Stanley, talks about a "new and powerful global labour arbitrage" that has led to an accelerating transfer of high-wage jobs to India and elsewhere. He reckons this is adding to the bias towards jobless recoveries in western economies. Multinationals may in future do original R&D in low-cost places, but for the moment most of the jobs on the move are the paper-based back-office ones that can be digitalised and telecommunicated anywhere around the world, plus more routine telephone inquiries that are increasingly being bundled together into call centres. The offshoring business remains predominantly English-speaking. It is dominated by American and British companies outsourcing their internal operations to third parties in places such as Ireland, Canada and South Africa, but most of all in India. The main advantage of shifting business operations to India and similar low-cost countries comes from a combination of lower wages and the improvement in the quality and price of international telecommunications. But the benefits of offshoring are not confined to lower costs. For one thing, offshoring allows companies to work round-the-clock shifts, ferrying data back and forth from one place to another as the sun sets. For another, it allows them to rethink the way they solve IT problems.

The article presents information on the disposable diapers made of industrialized cotton grown using lots of pesticides. First disposable diaper was launched in 1949 by U.S. housewife-turned-inventor Marion Donovan. India ranks first in disposable use at 93 billion diapers per year about 20 percent of the global total. Super-absorbent polymers developed by the Japanese company Unicharm Corp. revolutionized the modern disposable. The Mexican company Absormex created a disposable "bioactive" diaper that degraded 200 percent faster than ordinary disposables.

This article reports on a growing number of Indian companies that are providing educational services, including online tutoring, to students in the U.S., as of February 2006. Students connect with their tutors using technology such as Voice Over Internet Protocol so they can actually speak to each other, and electronic whiteboards so students can draw diagrams, work out problems, and erase mistakes, just as they would on notebook paper.

The article offers news related to environmental protection. Last fall, San Francisco passed a legislation requiring local manufacturers doing business with the city to pay fair wages, provide safe working conditions, and allow their employees to unionize. After record monsoons killed more than 1,000 people in India last July, the western state of Maharashtra quickly banned the sale and use of plastic bags, which had clogged drains and contributed to the deadly flooding. Last fall, New York City (NY) officials and the local Audubon chapter announced the "Lights Out NY" initiative, which asks owners of tall buildings to turn off upper-story lights by midnight during the spring and fall migrations.

The article compares Kodak Ultima 100, a film designed to perform to specifications for the Indian skintone, and Kodak Portra 160NC, a U.S. film closest to Ultima 100. Ultima 100 produced visibly more detail in the African-American model's skin than did Portra 160NC. The tests showed a somewhat more yellow-green color balance in Ultima. The very different base tint of the Indian film may pose a challenge for largely digital U.S. minilabs