Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi said that the Bushehr power plant is operational, Press TV reported on Wednesday.
“As we have previously announced, Bushehr power plant has reached the criticality stage, meaning it has been successfully launched,” Salehi reportedly said.
The story of evolution, we have been told, is the story of the survival of the fittest….[and] this is partially true…Yet every day, it seems, a book crosses my desk, emphasizing a different side of the story. These are books about sympathy, empathy, cooperation and collaboration, written by scientists, evolutionary psychologists, neuroscientists and others. It seems there’s been a shift among those who study this ground, yielding a more nuanced, and often gentler picture of our nature.
The most modest of these is “SuperCooperators” by Martin Nowak with Roger Highfield. Nowak uses higher math to demonstrate that “cooperation and competition are forever entwined in a tight embrace.”
Church leaders in India have called upon the government to ban the pesticide Endosulfan, saying its health hazards far outweigh its benefits to farming.
However, India’s agriculture ministry ”” which manufactures the pesticide via the government-owned Hindustan Insecticides Ltd ”” claims there is no scientific evidence the chemical agent is harmful to humans, and has so far resisted local and international pressure to stop production.
In a 20April statement Bishop Thomas K Oommen of Central Kerala, the chairman of the Church of South India’s Ecological Concerns Committee, urged the Union Ministry for Environment and Forests to ban Endosulfan.
The Library of Congress and Sony Music Entertainment …[this month] unveiled a new website of over 10,000 rare historic sound recordings available to the public for the first time digitally. The site is called the “National Jukebox” [and it may be found here].
Developed by the Library of Congress, with assets provided by Sony Music Entertainment, the National Jukebox offers free online access to a vast selection of music and spoken-word recordings produced in the U.S. between the years 1901 and 1925.
The website was launched at a Library news conference featuring an appearance by Grammy-winning pianist, singer and actor Harry Connick, Jr. The Columbia recording artist performed the song “I’m Just Wild About Harry,” which is on the site performed by composer Eubie Blake.
Some time after the dotcom boom turned into a spectacular bust in 2000, bumper stickers began appearing in Silicon Valley imploring: “Please God, just one more bubble.” That wish has now been granted. Compared with the rest of America, Silicon Valley feels like a boomtown. Corporate chefs are in demand again, office rents are soaring and the pay being offered to talented folk in fashionable fields like data science is reaching Hollywood levels. And no wonder, given the prices now being put on web companies.
Facebook and Twitter are not listed, but secondary-market trades value them at some $76 billion (more than Boeing or Ford) and $7.7 billion respectively. This week LinkedIn, a social network for professionals, said it hopes to be valued at up to $3.3 billion in an initial public offering (IPO). The next day Microsoft announced its purchase of Skype, an internet calling and video service, for a frothy-looking $8.5 billion””ten times its sales last year and 400 times its operating income. And those are all big-brand companies with customers around the world. Prices look even more excessive for fledgling firms in the private market (Color, a photo-sharing social network, was recently said to be worth $100m, even though it has an untested service) or for anything involving China. There has been a stampede for shares in Renren, hailed as “China’s Facebook”, and other Chinese web giants listed on American exchanges.
[The running online commentary]…instead of being a distraction ”” an electronic version of note-passing ”” the chatter echoed and fed into the main discourse, said Mrs. [Erin] Olson, who monitored the stream and tried to absorb it into the lesson. She and others say social media, once kept outside the school door, can entice students who rarely raise a hand to express themselves via a medium they find as natural as breathing.
“When we have class discussions, I don’t really feel the need to speak up or anything,” said one of her students, Justin Lansink, 17. “When you type something down, it’s a lot easier to say what I feel.”
With Twitter and other microblogging platforms, teachers from elementary schools to universities are setting up what is known as a “backchannel” in their classes. The real-time digital streams allow students to comment, pose questions (answered either by one another or the teacher) and shed inhibitions about voicing opinions. Perhaps most importantly, if they are texting on-task, they are less likely to be texting about something else.
A new iPhone application has brought the traditional Book of Common Prayer together with today’s technology, courtesy of a group from a Nichols Hills church.
The new app, iPray, became available in mid-April, much to the delight of the group of people who helped create it.
David Hill, CEO of Kimray Inc. and a member of All Souls’ Episcopal Church, 6400 N Pennsylvania, came up with the idea for the app as a way to help his children navigate the Book of Common Prayer more easily.
Elizabeth Lorch, a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky and one of the authors of that study, also studied children’s ability to comprehend televised stories. While children with A.D.H.D. were able to recall facts from the stories they watched just as well as other children, there was a difference in their ability to understand the narrative and to separate out what was important.
“Why did an event happen, why did a character do this ”” that’s where the comprehension and recall of children with A.D.H.D. tends to fall down,” she said.
Her co-author Richard Milich, also a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky, suggested that besides the primary implications of this problem for academic performance, this finding may also shed light on social difficulties.
“This inability to see causal relations may affect this social problem we’ve known for 30 years,” he said. “These kids have dramatic social problems. They’re highly rejected by their peers.”
Celebrities including the author Sir Terry Pratchett and the actor Sir Patrick Stewart have backed a campaign to allow terminally ill patients to receive help to die.
But a new poll found 70 per cent of disabled people were concerned that such a reform would create pressure on vulnerable patients to “end their lives prematurely”.
The survey for Scope, the leading disability charity, also found 3 per cent of the 500 disabled people questioned in the ComRes poll feared that they would personally come under pressure to commit suicide if the law were changed.
At an age when his parents won’t let him go to the mall alone and in an era when he would never open up to a stranger, [Scott] Fitzsimones, who lives in Phoenix, already has a growing dossier accumulating on the Web. And while Congress has passed laws to protect the youngest of Internet users from sharing much information about themselves, once those children become teens, the same privacy rules no longer apply.
“It’s the Wild West for teens when it comes to privacy online,” said Kathryn Montgomery, a privacy advocate and communications professor at American University.
A powerful arm of China’s government said Wednesday that it had created a new central agency to regulate every corner of the nation’s vast Internet community, a move that appeared to complement a continuing crackdown on political dissidents and other social critics.
But the vaguely worded announcement left unclear whether the new agency, the State Internet Information Office, would in fact supersede a welter of ministries and other government offices that already claim jurisdiction over parts of cyberspace.
[Sam] Harris was trained as a neuroscientist and received his doctoral degree from the University of California at Los Angeles in 2009. He is best known as the author of two previous books. In 2004, he published The End of Faith, a fierce attack on organized religion. The book, which propelled Harris from near obscurity to near stardom””he has appeared on The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and The O’Reilly Factor””is one of the canonical works of the New Atheist movement, along with Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006) and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell (2006). Harris seemed mostly to play the part of polemicist in the movement. He possesses a sharp wit and an even sharper pen, and his attacks on mainstream religion had a scorched-earth intensity. In 2006, Harris followed this up with Letter to a Christian Nation, an uncompromising response to his Christian critics.
In his latest book, The Moral Landscape, Harris shifts his sights somewhat. He is now concerned with the sorry state of moral thinking among both religious and secular people in the West. While the former are convinced that moral truths are handed down from on high, the latter are perpetually muddled, frequently believing that morals are relative, the product of arbitrary tradition and social conditioning. Harris hopes to sweep aside both kinds of confusion, convincing his readers that objective moral truths exist and that we possess a (properly secular) means for discovering them.
Read the tweets here–fascinating.
A Pakistani computer programmer, startled by helicopters, took to Twitter to complain about the noise Sunday — but inadvertently gave a play-by-play of the high-stakes capture of the world’s most-wanted man.
Distraction and extraction. These are the skills, timeless, of thousands of thieves who work in New York, without a weapon and without attracting notice.
Where in the city can such a thief visit dozens of happy hunting spots on an afternoon’s walk, finding rooms crowded with people staring at laptops or iPads, or texting or talking on phones, and ignoring their purses? A place so comfortable and familiar, with its jazz, leather chairs and Wi-Fi, that customers, otherwise savvy to the city’s dangers, do not think twice about saving a round blond-wood table with a bag or a laptop while they stand in line?
You may be there now, with a grande caffè mocha….
Authorities in South Korea are probing a large system failure at a popular bank, trying to determine whether the incident was an error or a cybercrime that could be repeated elsewhere in the country where business leans largely on electronic transactions.
Problems at the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation began on April 12 and lasted for several days. During that time, customers were blocked from online and automated teller machine transactions. While some services have returned, issues persist with access to credit card information.
The incident has generated 300,000 complaints and prompted pledges of compensation to the agricultural lender’s customers as its affected network gets up to speed again this week, local media said.
The Mountain from Terje Sorgjerd on Vimeo.
Really lovely–watch it all.
Keller did get his dander up after Assange said that watching the American news media cover international events is like watching a goldfish bowl where readers pay little attention to outside perspectives.
Keller seemed to take that as a slight against the prestigious New York Times overseas correspondents. “I have to object to the idea that we’re not interested in what happens outside the U.S.,” he said. “We have 40 correspondents and stringers overseas, and we have four people who have been killed covering the wars.”
Assange said he meant no disrespect to the work of Times correspondents living or dead. But he did get the last word on that topic.
“I say that 40 people covering the entire world in the New York Times, which is the opinion leader of the United States, is a state of desperation,” he said.
Here’s another good reason to lose weight: It may improve your memory and concentration, new research suggests.
Scientists know that overweight and obese people are at a greater risk for memory problems and other cognitive disabilities, but the latest study is one of the first to indicate that substantial weight loss improves brain health.
Hundreds of bloggers have already made enquires about attending a special meeting being arranged by the Pontifical Councils for Culture and Social Communications on May 2nd, just after the beatification of Pope John Paul II. Officials say the meeting was proposed to establish a dialogue between the Church and the new media of blogging.
“If we look today where culture is strongly formed and shaped, it’s the blogosphere. Bloggers have an enormous influence, ties an important community, its an important category, so its right that there to be a meeting of bloggers within the Church in order for the Church to take account of this reality, to dialogue with it, to listen to it, to listen to it, to be aware of it,” says Dr. Richard Rouse, an official at the Pontifical Council for Culture.
Japanese authorities have raised the severity rating of their nuclear crisis to the highest level, seven.
The decision reflects the total release of radiation at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi power plant, which is ongoing, rather than a sudden deterioration.
Level seven previously only applied to the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, where 10 times as much radiation was emitted.
Europe may be starting to burrow its way under Africa, geologists suggest.
The continents are converging; and for many millions of years, the northern edge of the African tectonic plate has descended under Europe.
But this process has stalled; and at the European Geosciences Union (EGU) meeting last week, scientists said we may be seeing Europe taking a turn.
…we can begin to tell a coherent story. Stress and inflammation produce derivatives of cortisol and cholesterol, which trigger misfolding in A-beta proteins. This, in turn, overwhelms the cells’ quality-assurance mechanism and results in growing numbers of insoluble proteins, which aggregate in plaques and tangles. And this blocks the transport of vital ingredients around brain cells, which causes the cells to die.
Somewhere along this chain, there is a link, we must hope, that can be attacked by medication””to prevent inflammation, discourage ozone reactions, encourage the refolding apparatus, improve protein solubility or boost the plaque-removal mechanism.
The line between cyberspace and the physical world is blurring with a new search technology being demonstrated by Autonomy, a British software publisher.
The firm is demonstrating a software-based machine-vision recognition system intended for smartphones and tablet computers that embeds images and videos directly on top of the image of a real object on the user’s display.
Today so-called augmented reality is already widely available on both iPhones and Android phones through software applications like Google Goggles. Hundreds of other apps overlay geographical information on smartphone displays.
American composer Eric Whitacre is a rock star in choral circles. His music is performed by amateur and professional choirs alike, his chiseled good looks have earned him a modeling contract, and, Thursday night, he unveils his Virtual Choir 2.0 on YouTube. It features more than 2,000 singers from around the world, including this reporter.
I’ve been singing in real choirs since I was a kid, so I was intrigued to participate in a virtual one. I recently asked Whitacre how he came up with the concept.
“Well, it all started with this video ”” a young girl named Britlin Losee, who was 17 at the time, posted to YouTube a video of herself singing the soprano part to a piece of mine called ‘Sleep,’ ” Whitacre says.
A British theoretical astrophysicist who has achieved renown for his study of the cosmos and for sounding warnings about the future of humanity has won the $1.6 million 2011 Templeton Prize.
Martin J. Rees of Cambridge University, a former president of Britain’s prestigious Royal Society, was announced the winner on Wednesday (April 6) by the John Templeton Foundation.
The annual prize honors an individual who has made “exceptional contributions to affirming life’s spiritual dimension.” Rees is a somewhat unorthodox choice because he holds no formal religious beliefs.
Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.
So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.
A lot of attention has been focused on the way bookstores and publishing companies are managing the e-book revolution. The role of libraries has often been overlooked. But when HarperCollins Publishing Co. recently announced a new policy that would limit the number of times its e-books can be borrowed, it sparked a larger conversation about the future of libraries in the digital age.
These days, you don’t have to go anywhere near a library to check out an e-book. You can download one to your digital device in a matter of seconds. And there’s no more pesky overdue notices ”” the e-book simply disappears from your device when your time is up.
International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), the world’s largest computer-services provider, may have a tiny solution for a $34 billion public health problem.
Engineers based in IBM’s San Jose, California, facility created nanoparticles 50,000 times smaller than the thickness of a human hair that can search out and obliterate the cell walls of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotic drugs. The minute structures harmlessly degrade, leaving no residue, according to a study describing the work in the journal Nature Chemistry.
Long ago, people gave God parts of their livelihood: goats, sheep, wheat and barley. Much later, they began plopping money into collection plates.
Now, some churchgoers are swiping their bank cards at machines that look a bit like ATMs.
“It’s easier,” says John Muscianes, who attends New Covenant Community Church in northeast Fresno, Calif. “I don’t have to write a check. It’s convenient.”