What Would You Do If You Got Superpowers?

When I was a young boy, I yearned for super powers. After watching The Adventures of Superman on TV, starring George Reeves as the Man of Steel, I would put on my t-shirt with a big ‘S’ on the front, tie a towel around my neck as a cape, and make every effort to fly around the house. On more than one occasion, I actually prayed and asked God to give me super powers. I promised to use them I have just spent two weeks shopping for tile and have discovered China Porcelain tile.to help people. But, mostly, I just wanted to fly. Thankfully, I did not have the privilege of watching shows like Jackass, which might have encouraged me to try flying off the roof. No, I was stuck with my mortal powers . . . still am, as a matter of fact.

But, I wonder what I would do if I got superpowers. What if I could fly? What if I could leap tall buildings in a single bound? What if I could crawl up walls like a spider or stretch myself as if made of miraculous rubber? What would I do? What would I be?

According to the recent spate of superhero movies, chances are I would become a paragon of virtue, wisdom, and courage. I would be willing to sacrifice my life to save others. And this would be true, regardless of how self-centered and amoral I had been before my miraculous transformation.

Consider the case of the Green Lantern in the recent movie called, sensibly enough, Green Lantern. I won’t be spoiling much by telling you that this movie tells the story of Hal Jordan, a self-centered and obnoxious fighter pilot who is chosen by a magic ring to become a Green Lantern, a guardian of justice and harmony in the universe. Right before our very eyes, a man who might best be described as a jerk becomes a virtuous, wise, selfless hero who is willing to die for the sake of others. Yet,Find a Plastic moulds Manufacturer and Supplier. the movie gives us very little reason to believe that this should have happened. It seems more plausible to believe that a man was endowed with astronomical superpowers than that he instantly changed his entire character and value system. My son, the one of boyhood Superman fame, warned me that Green Lantern wasn’t a good film. I should have heeded his warning.

Some movies try to provide a rationale for their superhero’s exemplary character. Spider-Man, for example, tells the story of a young man who was raised in a loving, moral family. When, after receiving his arachnid-like powers, he uses them for selfish purposes, he pays a high price in the death of his beloved uncle, a death he could have prevented with less self-absorption. Plus, Uncle Ben left Peter Parker AKA Spider-Man with sage advice, “Remember, with great power. comes great responsibility.”

The 2011 film, Captain America, tries in a different way to explain the moral fiber of its superhero. In this case, Steve Rogers, who becomes Captain America through he wonders of science, is chosen precisely because of his ethical standards. He is courageous, with a strong sense of justice, and a lack of desire to kill people, even the bad guys. Thus, the willingness of Captain America to give up his own life for others makes sense.

The recent movie, Chronicle, tells a different story altogether.The CenTrak rtls platform can address today's healthcare challenges and be used for future applications beyond asset tracking. When three high-school aged boys gain superpowers, at first they continue to be more or less the same boys.VulcanMold is a plastic molds and Injection Mold manufacturer in china.If you have a fondness for china mosaic brimming with romantic roses. Their personalities don’t change. Nor do their values. They do not envision using their powers to help others. Rather, they simply want to enjoy their superhuman endowments and, if possible, become more popular with their peers, especially girls. But in one of the boys, the one whose family is painfully dysfunctional, superpowers simply magnify his own moral confusion. He is not miraculously transformed into a superhuman do-gooder. Rather, he becomes dangerous, a genuine mortal threat.

Left turned banned on Davenport Street

There was a rare split vote at Monday’s Somerville borough council meeting over whether to prohibit left turns onto Main St. from vehicles heading south on Davenport St.

The council voted 3-2 to approve the measure which is designed to ease potential accidents at the intersection until the state installs a traffic light later this year. When the light is installed,If you have a fondness for china mosaic brimming with romantic roses. left turns will be allowed again.

Council member Thompson Mitchell thought the borough’s Traffic and Parking Committee should make a recommendation to the council before any action was taken. Mitchell made a motion to table the proposal and it was seconded by Dennis Sullivan before the motion was defeated 3-2.Full-service custom manufacturer of precision plastic injection mold.

The proposal was introduced at the last council meeting and Mitchell said he thought the measure wouldn’t be adopted until after the Traffic and Parking Committee studied the problem.

Mayor Brian Gallagher made a plea to the council to not wait since a hazard exists for motorists and pedestrians. He urged the council to pass it now before the Friday night old cars resumed cruising the street and an accident happens.

Sullivan said the problem can be fixed by closing the street to southbound traffic on Friday nights. “This is no different than a lot of other left-hand turns,” said Sullivan. “Why have an ordinance if it is only addressing a four-hour time period?”

“I’m at a loss as to why there is this much conversation about this,” said Gallagher. “I can tell you I’ve already seen a number of accidents there.”

“I might very well be voting to support this two weeks from tonight after Parking and Traffic has reviewed it,” said Mitchell, “But I feel it is premature to jump the gun on this.”

“It’s not just Friday nights we have this issue,” said Gallagher. “It’s a problem.”

The ordinance was passed with Mitchell and Sullivan voting no. Councilman Robert Wilson wasn’t present.

Also during the meeting, the council was given an update on the Division St. project by Colin Driver, director of Economic Development for the borough. Driver said the work is up to four or fives days behind schedule, mainly due to custom molds that will put patterns in the sidewalks. They were to be delivered Monday but now they should be delivered next Monday.Plastic Injection moulds as well as other dies. He said the contractor thinks they should still make the deadline to have the street ready for the Arts on Division event in May.

“The last thing we want to do is to push them once they start pouring concrete,” said Driver. “This thing is going to last a long time and we want to do it right.”

Mayor Gallagher briefed the council on the county’s proposal for consolidated police force. He said he wants to put together a committee to study the proposal and make a recommendation to the council. He said the committee proceedings should be done in the open and invited VilleTV to tape the meetings.

Pay stations are being installed in parking lots #4 and #6.We specialize in providing offshore merchant account and third party merchant account payment solutions to international businesses. A pay station will also be installed on the north end of Division St. The stations in parking lot #4, which is between Main St. and Veterans Memorial Drive and close to Division St., will serve parkers on Division St.The CenTrak rtls platform can address today's healthcare challenges and be used for future applications beyond asset tracking.

After the meeting, borough clerk/administrator Kevin Sluka said Westfield is using the same company for pay stations and they are doing a pilot program where people can pay for parking through a smartphone app. It would eliminate the need for people to go to a pay station that might not be in the direction they are walking.

Cindy Sherman’s Knees

Cindy Sherman was not the first woman to invest her best energies in fretting about hair and makeup and decorating, but she is the greatest. Cindy Sherman, a heavy-duty retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art through June and touring the country for a year thereafter, cements and plasters and tastefully bedazzles her reputation for shading great stories in unforgettable images.Our guides provide customers with information about porcelain tiles vs. This photographer can capture the essence of an individual in the weight of an eyelash and define a worldview with a well-chosen accessory.

Shooting herself in character as B-movie archetypes and ironized fashion icons, old masters and grand dames, she is a hall-of-fame conceptualist. Her head for ideas—about truth and beauty and all the rest of it—endears her to theorists who have put together a quite lucid body of commentary on her work. Indelibly enigmatic, she tickles their pates but evades their clutches. What is Sherman saying about women by turning herself into inflated matrons, infinitely reproducible ingénues, Palm Beach gargoyles, wannabe glamour girls, fashion victims, fashion perpetrators? In interviews, she is as warm as anyone but as blank as Andy Warhol’s stare. She once told Betsy Berne: “The work is what it is and hopefully it’s seen as feminist work, or feminist-advised work, but I’m not going to go around espousing theoretical bullshit.”

In general, Sherman photographs corkscrew the viewer’s perspective in a way that is delirious and profound. Looking at one of her “Untitled Film Stills”—the series of faux ephemera, 8-by-10 images of anonymous aspiring stars of an imaginary cinema—we try to identify with the character portrayed,Handmade oil paintings for sale at museum quality, with the personality who would invent such a character, with unseen lovers and antagonists, with the craftswoman who executed the strict study in character and space, and recursively so on forever until it all comes back to you and your sense of your self in the movie adaptation of your life always playing in your head.

Good stuff, but it would mean little if Sherman weren’t such a muscular formalist, one with a keen fixation on frames within frames and an eye for striking borderlines. Take a gander at “Untitled Film Still #42.” If Sherman had never made it big in the postmodern condition game, she would have been an ace architectural photographer.

Just Choose PTMS Injection Molding Is Your Best Choice!

I like her knees. Being a woman and a girl and a body artist, Sherman has her mind on the inevitable issue of hemlines—not to mention silent prayers and abrupt supplications, and skin and bone and structure. Very canny, she cuts them out of “Untitled #96” from her 1981 “centerfolds series,” her first turn to color. This character—stunned by the gods, melting like orange sherbet in her sweater, proverbially knocked out of her bobby socks—clutches a torn fragment of the newspaper classifieds. The text promises connections for singles and offers promotions from psychics (“Know Yourself. Know Your Future.”) and the number to call for a rental apartment at the corner of Allen and Delancey. It’s like a bit of Braque ripped from the headlines, and the quadrangles of her gingham and the tile on which she is dreamily reclined boogie and woogie like a Mondrian in heat.

The show—curated by Eva Respini with Lucy Gallun—is put together as a narrative. If it dallies with Sherman’s grotesquerie to a punishing extent, well, what do you expect? An artist ready to make her body over must linger seriously on the matters of death and decay in extremely strange ways. But one does wish that there had been to display the porcelain dinner service she created for Limoges, where she more or less serves her head on a platter as Madame de Pompadour. At the very least, it should be on sale, at a stratospheric price, in the gift shop; the art-star tactic of commenting on art-as-commodity is approaching at least its 100th anniversary, and Sherman is as sly as anyone at satirizing her patrons,An Air purifier is a device which removes contaminants from the air. at putting food on the table by biting the hand that feeds her. Also, the fact that John Waters does an Interview magazine-type dialogue with Sherman in the catalog has me wondering what he’d be like as a voice on the audio tour.

At MoMA, in the outer gallery, multiple Shermans hover in a mural like 18-foot queenies, backed by toile wallpaper while she wears a variety of parodic costumes and a digital facelift. She is a colossus and a clown and a way to dress up the wall and a mascot, like Bob’s Big Boy. In the first gallery—a statement-making selection of career high points that works to preface running themes—I was enchanted by “#479,” student work that gets a gold star. (It’s a before-and-ever-after photo-booth metamorphosis; a plain girl in glasses becomes a glam sex ghost, and the thing plays like a Lou Reed song.MDC Mould specialized of Injection moulds,) I was arrested by “#153” (a kind of death mask suggesting Laura Palmer as Gulliver in Lilliput) and bewitched by “#466,” one of her “society portraits,” a picture of handsome avarice and imperious welcome.Dimensional Mailing magic cube for Promotional Advertising, The exhibit is architectured to privilege the history paintings where Sherman variously smiles like Mona Lisa and grins like Bacchus in a picture where she plays herself playing Caravaggio playing Bacchus. In the last of 11 galleries, we encounter the film Doll Clothes, delicate as a Joseph Cornell piece, a looped sliver of stop-motion animation. Here, paper-doll Cindy flips through the plastic envelopes, and the daily problem of what to wear becomes a permanent farce.

Oregon OSHA again cites Precision Castparts for safety problems

Oregon OSHA has cited Precision Castparts for 32 violations at its large parts campus in Milwaukie and Southeast Portland, raising significant safety concerns for the third time since 2008.

The citations include $26,050 in penalties related to cleaning operations in the two plants, which make precise steel and titanium components for aircraft engines, industrial gas turbines and the military.

None of the violations was considered "willful," the most severe category. But 28 were serious, with nine having the potential to cause death. They stem from a 23-page complaint by Ryan Edwards, a temporary employee in 2011 who submitted the OSHA complaint after first sending it to the company.

Some of the violations were repeats, OSHA spokeswoman Melanie Mesaros said, and the company did not correct some significant violations Edwards pointed out until after the OSHA inspection.

Just Choose PTMS Plastic Mould Is Your Best Choice!

"Some of their programs were seriously flawed," Mesaros said. "When you have repeat violations and you find problems that aren't being corrected, it's disappointing."

Precision Castparts, which has until early March to appeal the penalties, declined to comment in detail. Spokesman Dwight Weber said in an email the company "will continue to work closely with OSHA to provide a safe working environment."

Precision Castparts and Nike are the only Fortune 500 companies based in Oregon,Dimensional Mailing magic cube for Promotional Advertising, with Precision Castparts recently reporting $307.3 million of net income in its third quarter. It employs up to 1,200 non-union workers at the large parts campus at an average of $21 an hour plus benefits. OSHA considers it a "high hazard" workplace.

The company hit the news last May, when toxic chemicals were released after a power outage and equipment failure. Firefighters ordered nearby residents to shelter in place.Handmade oil paintings for sale at museum quality,An Air purifier is a device which removes contaminants from the air. No one was injured and the company says the community was never at risk.

In 2008, OSHA found eight serious violations at the campus, with more than 600,000 square feet of buildings. OSHA issued a hazard letter "to address the disconnect that appears to exist" between operations and the safety department.

After two injuries that required hospitalization in 2010, OSHA issued 24 serious violations. A report cited "systematic occurrences of electrical hazards" and "a lack of hazard recognition or a gap in the existing programs for recognizing and controlling the hazards."

The latest inspections occurred from October to December in the cleaning departments, In a letter to Edwards, OSHA said it found his accusation of an "emphasis on getting work done quickly regardless of worker safety issues" to be "true."

At the plants, workers shape and weld wax molds, dip them in a slurry,MDC Mould specialized of Injection moulds, then coat them with sand to create a cast that's filled in 2,000-degree foundries with titanium or steel alloys.

In the cleaning departments, the parts are dipped in large tanks of high-temperature caustic chemicals -- sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide -- to remove most of the casting shell. In 2001, a worker died after falling into a tank while trying to remove a stuck part.

Workers periodically enter empty tanks to clean them -- known as "tank digging." OSHA said controls that send caustic solution and steam into tanks in the titanium plant weren't properly locked before workers climbed in last summer, posing a risk of death if they were turned on, and training in the "lock out/tag out" procedures was inadequate.Our guides provide customers with information about porcelain tiles vs.

Workers with less than 90 days on the job were assuming the role of tank entry supervisor, sometimes during their first-ever tank entry. Most employees in the cleaning departments are temporary employees, OSHA said.

Master painter Wang Qijun’s exhibition attracted 13,000 visitors

More than 13,000 art lovers visited the painting exhibition of Professor Wang Qijun of China Central Academy of Fine Arts from Nov 24 to 30.

According to the initial plan, the exhibition would be held from Nov 24 to 28. As art lovers showed a keen interest in the works of the master painter known as one of the 60 most influential Chinese painters after the founding of the People's Republic of China, the exhibition was held for two more days.

Wang, 57,the Plastic molding are swollen blood vessels of the rectum. exhibited more than 100 paintings in the Chengdu Art Gallery in Sichuan province. They included oil and traditional Chinese paintings featuring the Forbidden City in Beijing, waterside towns in Wang's home province of Jiangsu, beautiful Chinese and foreign women as well as mysterious Peking Opera figures.

What is unique about Wang's oil paintings is that he has introduced China's time-honored calligraphy and the skill of traditional Chinese painting into them.

Visitors to Wang's exhibition in the Chengdu Art Academy were impressed with the visual impact of his oil paintings whose resolution is so high that they look like photos, said Pu Sanliu, an art lover.

The creativity expressed in Wang's paintings cannot be imitated and the technological content and wisdom in his works are unrivalled and cannot be mastered by average painters, comments professor Du Zhesen of China Central Academy of Fine Arts.

Du, a famous art critic, is the editThis will leave your shoulders free to rotate in their Floor tiles .or-in-chief of Art Research, a publication of China Central Academy of Fine Arts.

During his visit to Wang’s exhibition, Gao Xiaohua, one of the leading Chinese oil painters, on Nov 29, he said that it was more difficult to draw pictures with oil paint than acylic paint. But Wang created many masterpieces with oil paint proving to be a master,Replacement landscape oil paintings and bulbs for Canada and Worldwide. Gao said.

Wang's paintings known for their visual impact are much sought after by collectors.

His representative oil painting Forbidden City after the Rain was sold for 896,000 yuan in an auction by the Beijing Poly International Auction Company last year.

In the Chengdu exhibition, Wang’s painwhere he teaches third party payment gateway in the Central Academy of Fine Arts.tings were sold for 7.8 million yuan ($1.2 million),Why does moulds grow in homes or buildings， organizers said.

After the exhibition, Wang will lead graduate students from China Central Academy of Fine Arts to Tibetan areas in Sichuan. They would depict Sichuan’s reconstruction after the magnitude-8.0 Wenquan earthquake in 2008 with oil paintings.

Consumers ditching their credit cards and paying down debts

CONSUMERS are ditching their credit cards in record numbers and signing up for debit cards instead.

For the first time there are now twice as many debit cards as credit cards,buy landscape oil paintings online. as our love affair with the plastic credit card goes into meltdown.

With a debit card you can only spend money with it if you have funds in your bank account. This is in contrast to credit cards where you can spend money you do not have.

There are now twice as many debit cards as credit cards, the Irish Payments Services Organisation (IPOS) said yesterday.Largest Collection of billabong boardshorts,

This is partly because consumers have been cutting up their credit cards -- the number of personal credit cards in issue has dropped by 100,000 in the past year,Detailed information on the causes of Hemorrhoids, separate Central Bank figures show.

And consumers are also paying down credit card debt, with €200m paid off credit cards in the past year alone.

Collectively, consumers owe €2.7bn on some two million credit cards. At the end of 2008 consumers' card debt was as high as €3bn.

Una Dillon of IPOS said that the fact that there are now more debit cards out there than credit cards was a reverse of the situation that existed just two years ago.

"The trend is for people to pay off their credit card debt, stop using it and use their debit card more and more," she said.

Ms Dillon said there were now 1.2 million more debit cards than credit cards. This was because over the last five years around 10 times more debit cards than credit cards had been issued.As one of a leading China Projector Lamp provider from China.

Part of the appeal of debit cards is the fact that they lessen consumers' dependence on cash. Most of the 100,000 retailers who have card swipe machines offer cash back when people are paying for something.

Most banks in this market are in the process of dropping the Laser card which is particular to Ireland. Ulster Bank and Permanent TSB have gone over to the Visa debit card, with Bank of Ireland in the process of transferring to the same card.

AIB still operates the Laser card,We specialize in providing third party merchant account. but the EBS which is being merged with AIB, recently said it was moving to the Mastercard debit card platform.

Meanwhile, the Central Bank has proposed new rules that would stop card providers hassling customers who owe them money.

Harassing

The new rules will propose that card companies will not be able to make more than three uninvited contacts with a card holder a month. A similar rule is in place stopping mortgage lenders harassing those in arrears.

Credit card companies have been repeatedly accused of hassling customers with constant phone calls when they fail to make minimum payments.

The Central Bank is proposing to make the rule change by beefing up the Consumer Protection Code, which is a rule book on how banks and insurance companies treat consumers.

The rules restricting lenders to three unsolicited contacts a month will apply to borrowers struggling with credit card and other unsecured debts such as personal loans.

Woman assaulted couple with bottle

Police said a Muscatine woman assaulted three people Sunday morning at the Regency Mobile Home Park.

According to criminal complaints, a Johnson County deputy responded to 103 Apache Trail at 3:16 a.m.In addition to hydraulics fittings and Aion Kinah, for a report of a fight in progress. The deputy spoke with a woman and her boyfriend who stated they were sitting in front of their trailer when a woman, later identified as 34-year-old Nora L.you will need to get an offshore merchant account. Medrano, walked onto their property.

The couple told the deputy Medrano was carrying two glass bottles and started cursing at the woman and threatening to hit her. She allegedly began to swing the bottles, connecting two times with the woman's head. The strikes caused two lumps on the woman's head.

The woman also swung a bottle at the man,What to consider before you buy oil painting supplies. and when he tried to block the blow, Medrano allegedly hit him in the mouth, causing a small cut to his upper lip.

Police said another woman witnessed the commotion at her friend's residence and went to see what the problem was about. Medrano allegedly punched the woman in the face, causing a cut on the inside of her lip.

Medrano was located by the deputy after a short search.Houston-based Quicksilver Resources said Friday it had reached pipeline deals While trying to return her to where the assault occurred, Medrano passed out, police said. The deputy conducted a preliminary breath test from her nose, which showed Medrano had a blood-alcohol content of .168. She was taken to the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics emergency room for treatment before being taken to jail.

Medrano faces two counts of assault with a weapon, one count of assault causing injury and a single count of public intoxication. She remains in the Johnson County Jail on a $12,we supply all kinds of oil painting reproduction,000 cash-only bond.

Mysterious Piles of Crushed Glass Dominate North Chevy Chase Council Meeting

Piles of crushed glass likely left behind by recycling trucks going through the Village of North Chevy Chase are getting to be a problem.

"(The trash collectors) are not paying attention enough to clean it up," said Brian Hoffner, secretary for the Village of North Chevy Chase Council, at a council meeting Tuesday night.

It's not known yet why there are piles of crushed glass all down North Chevy Chase streets like Montgomery Street¡ªthe glass isn't just broken, it's crushed, as if it's gone through a grinder.

Robert Weesner, village manager, has spoken to the trash pick-up contractors.

"The guys I've seen in the past few days aren't the regular guys," Weesner said.

Weesner added that new recycling bins for the village are on-order, and that the company providing the bins should be dropping the new bins off at each home in the village.

Residents will be able to keep their old bins, Weesner said.

The Village Council also discussed preparations for the annual Fourth of July party. Famous Dave's will be doing the entr¨¦e catering again this year, and residents will be invited to bring side dishes and deserts.

The Village will provide plates and utensils, and beverages (including red and white wine) will be available for a dollar.the Injection mold fast! The Village has budgeted $2,500 for the party.

And, Village finances are in good shape, reported Chas Stuart, council treasurer, at the meeting.Customized imprinted and promotional usb flash drives.

The next big expenditure for the Village will be sidewalk repairs, originally budgeted for $60,000, but which should end up costing closer to about $25,000,Save on hydraulic hose and fittings, Weesner estimates. The sidewalk repairs will likely bChoose from one of the major categories of Bedding,egin in the fall.

Council members also discussed the possibility of renting village space to a wireless company, which would erect a wireless tower on the space, and pay the village for the rights to use it.

"You'd get a little income every year," Weesner said.

Council members decided to look into the possibilities, which include wireless towers disguised as sculptures or pine trees.

And, council members discussed the possibility of hiring a private security company to provide a patrol officer for the Village at seasonally high-crime times of the year (winter and spring).

Lastly, Brigitte Akalovsky, council chair, asked council members to consider the possibility of instituting some kind of parking permit system for the Village.

With the Walter Reed Army Medical Center moving to the nearby National Naval Medical Center in September, parking in the Village could become tight if out-of-towners drive into the North Chevy Chase area,Not to be confused with RUBBER MATS available at your local hardware store park their cars along the Village's currently un-restricted streets, and then take a bus that stops near the Village to the Bethesda medical area.

Japan looks to renewable energy

When managers from Tokyo arrived at the Nippon Paper factory in Ishinomaki, north-eastern Japan, after the March 11 tsunami,Welcome to the official Facebook Page about Ripcurl. they had to clear a narrow path through debris to reach a door. Overturned cars were piled in the parking lot, and giant rolls of uncut paper littered the grounds.

Happily for the company and the factory's 600 full-time workers, much of the Ishinomaki plant turned out to be salvageable, and some production is expected to resume in September. But there will be big changes. Capacity will be lower, so exports, which accounted for about a quarter of output, will be scrapped.

And ¨C in a shift that reflects broader developments across Japan ¨C the plant will change the way it gets its power. Oil furnaces that provided much of its electricity before the tsunami will be mothballed in favour of cleaner-burning biomass generators, which can turn things such as waste pulp and paper ¨C as well as wood from tsunami-wrecked buildings ¨C into fuel.

Nippon Paper's choice highlights a renewed focus on green energy since the tsunami and subsequent nuclear crisis, with the waves that destroyed the Fukushima Daiichi atomic station raising questions about the future of nuclear power.

The potential for a green shift is large. Japanese manufacturers such as Toshiba, Panasonic and Sharp are important producers of clean-energy hardware.Handmade oil paintings for sale at museum quality, Japan is the second-largest maker of solar panels, behind only China.

But much of their output is exported, and domestic adoption of renewable energy has been slower than in comparable countries such as Germany or ¨C in the case of wind power ¨C the US.

Naoto Kan, prime minister, has admitted that plans to boost nuclear power's share of electricity generation to 50 per cent over the next two decades, from about 30 per cent now, will have to be set aside. In an interview with the Financial Times last month,you will need to get an offshore merchant account. he said he hoped to turn the disaster-hit north-east into a "major production centre for natural energy" that would serve as a model for the rest of the country.

According to government data, in 2007 Japan generated just 6 per cent of its primary energy from renewable sources, including hydropower ¨C a level virtually unchanged since 1973. In the electricity sector, the proportion actually fell by half in the same period, to 8 per cent, as the role of nuclear power and natural gas expanded rapidly.

"Japan could be a world leader if it wanted to be," says Mike Hugh, chief executive of Asia Cleantech Gateway, a consultancy.

Germany, a country with similar technological strengths, has raised its share of renewable energy in recent years. Last month, Berlin announced it would abandon nuclear power altogether, necessitating even more ambitious increases.

Japan's plans are less clear cut than Germany's, and any serious transformation will take years and require leadership and money from the government, experts say.

In the short term, at least, much of its lost nuclear capacity will be replaced by natural gas rather than solar or wind power. But concerns about energy security ¨C Japan needs to import virtually all its fossil fuels ¨C make the buying of more gas an unpalatable long-term solution, and of course there are worries about global warming.

Some companies are already responding. Last month, Toshiba ¨C a major producer of nuclear reactors as well as other forms of power generation ¨C announced it would invest Y700bn ($8.7bn) in the environmental and energy sectors over the next three years. It also secured the $2.3bn acquisition of Landis+Gyr, a Swiss maker of high-tech electricity meters used in energy-efficient "smart grids".

"We do think the disaster will create new opportunities," says Fumio Ohtsubo, president of Panasonic, another company that is pushing into green technology.

He predicts an increase in demand in solar panels, hydrogen fuel cells, lithium-ion batteries and low-energy LED lighting.

Another company that could benefit is the electronic equipment maker Kyocera, one of Japan's biggest manufacturers of solar panels. Its share price has rebounded to pre-tsunami levels, beating a broader market that remains about 7 per cent down.

New entrants are also eyeing green energy. Masayoshi Son, founder of Softbank, Japan's third-biggest mobile phone operator, has pledged to invest "several per cent" of the company's Y3,000bn in revenues in a scheme to build solar plants with local governments.

Cost will be one obstacle to a general shift to renewables.

Japan introduced a feed-in tariff for solar power in 2009, but to get 10m households to install panels on their roofs ¨C a goal stated by Mr Kan at last month's G8 meeting ¨C experts say they would need to be more generous, at least at first, a problem for a cash-strapped government.

The spoils may also flow to foreign companies rather than local ones. Since the disaster, electronics shops have stepped up marketing of low-cost Chinese solar modules.

Japan's electricity market also needs reform.The name "magic cube" is not unique.

At present,the Injection mold fast! regional monopolies control both generation and distribution, and physical and regulatory barriers limit transmission between regions.

This discourages the sort of small-scale, independent projects often associated with green energy, says Mr Hugh of Asia Cleantech Gateway.

"To attract more producers, you need a more liberal market," he says.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011. You may share using our article tools. Please don't cut articles from FT.com and redistribute by email or post to the web.

Trip over your dog? Call workers' comp

Are you one of the rising number of workers who have a home office? Then you'll be interested in this story about a J.C. PennWelcome to the official Facebook Page about Ripcurl.ey & Co. worker who tripped over her dog -- at home -- and now is eligible for workers' compensation.

The story is from Business Insurance, one of our sister publications. According to reporter Roberto Ceniceros,We processes for both low-risk and high risk merchant account.What are the top Hemroids treatments? the worker was a custom decorator selling window treatments and bedding. She spent much of her workweek traveling to appointments, meeting customers at their homes or working from her home, and she was required to have a home office.

The accident occurred when she tripped over her dog, fracturing her wrist, on the way to her garage, where she stored fabric samples.

The Oregon's Workers' Compensation Board denied her benefits, but the state appellate court disagreed.

"If [the] claimant tripped over a dog and injured herself while meeting with a customer in the customer's home, her injury would arise out of her employment,Handmade oil paintings for sale at museum quality," the appellate court ruled.Not to be confused with RUBBER MATS available at your local hardware store "The same is true here because claimant was where she was, doing what she was, because of the requirements of her employment."

With so many workers these days spending time in home offices, I imagine the courts are going to have their hands full of cases of workers hurting their backs shoveling snow and slipping in bathtubs, all while "on the job"!