Chips Everywhere

Over the last 30 or so years,British entrepreneur Hermann Hauser has backed about 100 ideas,including three companies that have hit the billion-dollar mark.Plastic Logic,a Cambridge-based outfit launched six years ago,now seems to be shifting into high gear.Earlier this month it announced that it had raised $100 million to buld its first plan in Dresden,Germany.Its plan:to massproduce plastic semiconductors for the first time.If the venture is successful,it could undermine the dominance of the silicon chip that has become almost synonymous with high-tech revolution.

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Food For Thought

Claudia Roden is a Francophone Egyptian Jew whose ancestors were spice traders,and she's a one-woman window on the Middle East.Her new cookbook,"Arabesque:A Taste of Morocco,Turkey,and Lebanon,"offers fresh insight on a region many view in terms of politics and religion.With 150 recipes and dozens of essays on unfamiliar ingredients and customs,"Arabesque" whisks the reader through history,from the ancient Phoenicians to the kitchens of the Ottoman sultans,from ninth-century Baghdad to the Lebanese civil war in the late 1970s and '80s.For example:couscous,she writes,was brought from Ethiopia to North Africa in the seventh century by conquering Arab armies,perfected by Berbers and was recently voted the most popular dish in France,There's also a brief taste of politics:among both Palestinians and Israelis the subject of falafel can spark debates as vehement as those about Jerusalem.

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Lifting The Lid

Where can you find a Saudi break dancer,a Lebanese temptress and a narcoleptic sheik?At Ikbis,a new website that lets Arabs join the file-sharing craze.Internet use in Middle East has increased fourfold in the past six years,with more than 20million logging on each day.The first Arabic language service of its kind,Ikbis has already struck a chord-more than 1000 files went up within a week of its November launch,and the site now tops 30000 page views a day.Like YouTube,Ikbis attracts humorous clips.Ikbis's creators say they hope to provide a public forum for a region where a tight lid is kept on public expression."I think we're all,globally,just starting to understand the power of these digital tools,"says Ahmad Humeid,an Amman based graphic designer and one of the site's founder.