A further education college is having to protect builders from wolf-whistling girls, in a reversal of traditional gender stereotypes.
Officials at West Kent College in Tonbridge, Kent, sent an email to all pupils warning that the behaviour was “totally unacceptable”, and saying any students caught harassing contractors would face disciplinary action.
The email was sent after a demolition team started work on a £94 million, three-year building project at the campus. Continue reading →
I found an article about the business of assessing cognition and memory. Apparently it is moving from testing brain-impaired patients to assessing healthy peoples’ brains online.
Apparently the FDA uses it as the site reads: “The results from their tests are recognized “end points” by the Food and Drug Administration to determine if new brain medications work”
Although i had a hangover from the party yesterday night dreading that I would turn out age 50, I decided to take the tests anyway with a surprising result
The test consists of three parts:
1) press the corresponding arrow key when the word YES appears
2) press the corresponding arrow key when the word YES or NO appears
3) press a key when a number listed matches a changing number sequence.
It takes only a couple of minutes to complete.
What is your opinion on this test are you faster than your age?
Last Tuesday, seemingly out of nowhere, a huge lump of cement hurtling from the sky crashed through a suburban Moscow home, creating a large hole. But what was the cause? Why, it was the Russian Air force attempting to change the weather of course!
Yes, the relatively common practice of cloud seeding ended in an unfortunate yet hilarious example of how sometimes we shouldn’t mess with the weather. The Russians have been using cloud seeding as a way to prevent rainy weather during important national holidays. On June 12th, the Russian Air Force sent up 12 planes carrying silver iodide, liquid nitrogen and cement powder to seed clouds above Moscow and empty the skies of moisture.
“A pack of cement used in creating … good weather in the capital region … failed to pulverize completely at high altitude and fell on the roof of a house, making a hole about 80-100 cm (2.5-3 ft),” police in Naro-Fominsk told agency RIA-Novosti. Weather specialists said this is the first time in 20 years that this has occurred. The homeowner was not injured, but their pride was. They refused a $2,100 offer from the Air Force to fix the damage, but the home owner declined and stated she would sue for damages and compensation of moral suffering instead.
This wasn’t the first time that cloud seeding failed in some way. In 2006 during the G8 Summit in Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin dispatched fighter jets to seed the skies over St. Petersburg so that it wouldn’t rain on the city. Putin was hoping that the seeding would push the rain towards Finland instead, yet alas, the G8 Summit was drenched anyway. Organizers showed their lack of confidence by supplying rain coats beforehand, which proved popular when the rain came pouring down.
Cloud Seeding is extremely popular in places like the People’s Republic of China which uses the method to produce rainfall in usually arid areas. China also plans to use cloud seeding in Beijing just before the 2008 Olympic Games in order to clear the air of pollution.
The United States also uses cloud seeding to increase precipitation in areas experiencing drought, to reduce the size of hailstones that form in thunderstorms, and to reduce the amount of fog in and around airports. Several countries have looked at cloud seeding as a way to increase snowfall on mountain ranges so that ski seasons can be more sustainable.
While cloud seeding has shown to be effective in altering cloud structure and size, and converting cloud water to ice particles, it’s more controversial, as to whether cloud seeding increases the amount of precipitation at the ground. Part of the problem is that it is difficult to discern how much precipitation would have occurred had the cloud not been “seeded.” In other words, it is hard to ascertain additional precipitation from seeding from the natural precipitation variability, which is frequently much greater in magnitude. Nevertheless, there is more credible scientific evidence for the effectiveness of winter cloud seeding over mountains (to produce snow) than there is for seeding warm-season cumuli form (convective) clouds.
Silver iodide can cause temporary incapacitation or possible residual injury (e.g., chloroform) with intense or continued but not chronic exposure. However, studies by Sierra Nevada of California have shown that the exposure to silver iodide from cloud seeding is less dangerous than exposure from tooth fillings. Notwithstanding this, cloud seeding can be dangerous in other ways. The USAF proposed its use on the battlefield in 1996, although the U.S. signed an international treaty in 1978 banning the use of weather modification for hostile purposes. After the Chernobyl disaster, Russian military pilots seeded clouds over Belarus to remove radioactive particles from clouds heading toward Moscow. So while the current environmental impact is limited, cloud seeding can be used as a hostile measure.
While this method has proved successful in various roles, we should acknowledge that areas that would normally be receiving precipitation won’t because of man-made weather patterns. Using cloud seeding to increase precipitation in usually arid environments can change ecosystems and cause damage to the local habitat for a number of animals. While it is nice to spend the day outside in the sun, we also need those dreaded rainy days as well. I’d rather it rain water than cement on my house, how about you?
Are we aliens? This question has come up due to a new result from studying meteorites, and is getting a lot of web-chatter. I figure I’d better get on this sooner rather than later!
First, the science. Then the chatter. Finally, the caution flag.
The Science:
Some meteorites have been found to contain some relatively complicated organic compounds, including molecules that are components of amino acids, the building blocks of life. For example, the Murchison meteorite, which fell on Australia in 1969, has been found to contain purines and pyrimidines, which are crucial to a large number of biological molecules like DNA, RNA, and ATP (adenosine triphosophate, a chemical our cells use for fuel). Continue reading →
WTF? Judge limits free speech stopping victim from telling what happened.
What is next ?
It’s the only way Tory Bowen knows to honestly describe what happened to her.
She was raped.
But a judge prohibited her from uttering the word “rape” in front of a jury. The term “sexual assault” also was taboo, and Bowen could not refer to herself as a victim or use the word “assailant” to describe the man who allegedly raped her.
The defendant’s presumption of innocence and right to a fair trial trumps Bowen’s right of free speech, said the Lincoln, Neb., judge who issued the order.
“It shouldn’t be up to a judge to tell me whether or not I was raped,” Bowen said. “I should be able to tell the jury in my own words what happened to me.”
Bowen’s case is part of what some prosecutors and victim advocates see as a national trend in sexual assault cases.
“It’s a topic that’s coming up more and more,” said Joshua Marquis, an Oregon prosecutor and a vice president of the National District Attorneys Association. “You’re moving away from what a criminal trial is really about.”
In Jackson County, Senior Judge Gene Martin recently issued a similar order for the trial of a Kansas City man charged with raping a teenager in 2000. Despite the semantic restrictions, the Jackson County jury last week found Ray Slaughter guilty of forcible rape and two counts of forcible sodomy.
Slaughter’s attorney, who requested the pretrial order, declined to comment because she is preparing a motion for new trial. The judge also declined to comment.
Bowen’s case gained national notoriety and drew the attention of free-speech proponents after she filed a lawsuit challenging the judge’s actions as a First Amendment violation. A federal appeals court dismissed the suit, but Bowen’s attorney plans to petition the U.S. Supreme Court.
Although he dismissed her suit, a federal judge said he doubted a jury would be swayed by a woman using the word “rape” instead of some “tortured equivalent.”
“For the life of me, I do not understand why a judge would tell an alleged rape victim that she cannot say she was raped when she testifies in a trial about rape,” wrote U.S. District Judge Richard G. Kopf.
Wendy J. Murphy, an adjunct professor at the New England School of Law in Boston, is representing Bowen. She said the practice is “absolutely” unconstitutional.
“There’s no law anywhere that allows courts to issue these kinds of orders against private citizens,” Murphy said. “That doesn’t mean judges aren’t doing it.”
Prosecutors may object, but rarely do they have the time and resources to stop a trial midstream to appeal, she said.
But in cases where the defendant’s version of events is pitted against that of the alleged victim, “words are really important,” Marquis said.
“To force a victim to say, ‘when the defendant and I had sexual intercourse’ is just absurd,” he said.
Jackson County Prosecutor Jim Kanatzar said juries are smart enough to understand that in the adversarial system of justice, the state is going to take one position and the defense is going to take another.
“These are common terms that are used both in and outside the courtroom,” he said. “If someone says something that one side feels is prejudicial, it can be addressed in cross-examination.”
The issue is a discretionary call with judges, said Jackson County Circuit Judge Brian C. Wimes, who did not preside over Slaughter’s trial. Wimes said he typically would not grant a pretrial order limiting certain words, but he would verbally tell the attorneys to avoid using words in a prejudicial or inflammatory way.
A video that purportedly shows a living, breathing space alien will be shown to the news media Friday in Denver.
Jeff Peckman, who is pushing a ballot initiative to create an Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission in Denver to prepare the city for close encounters of the alien kind, said the video is authentic and convinced him that aliens exist.
“As impressive as it is, it’s still one tiny portion in the context of a vast amount of peripheral evidence,” he said Wednesday. “It’s really the final visual confirmation of what you already know to be true having seen all the other evidence.”
When Peckman went before city officials this month to discuss his proposed ET initiative, he promised to show the video.
Peckman said the general public will have to wait to see it because it’s being included in a documentary by Stan Romanek.
“No one will be allowed to film the segment with the extraterrestrial because there is an agreement in place limiting that kind of exposure during negotiations for the documentary,” he said.
But people won’t have to wait too long to see it for themselves.
“There is an open, public meeting in about a month in Colorado Springs,” Peckman said. “We’ll hope to do one in Denver at some point, and then in a few months, there will be the documentary that anybody can have, and it’ll have the footage.”
An instructor at the Colorado Film School in Denver scrutinized the video “very carefully” and determined it was authentic, Peckman said.
Peckman, 54, said the video was among the reasons he was “compelled” to launch the proposed ballot initiative, which has generated news as far as South Africa.
“It shows an extraterrestrial’s head popping up outside of a window at night, looking in the window, that’s visible through an infrared camera,” he said. The alien is about 4 feet tall and can be seen blinking, Peckman said earlier this month.
In a statement, Peckman said “other related credible evidence” proving aliens exist will be shown at Friday’s news conference, too.
In 2003, Peckman authored an off-beat ballot initiative that would have required the city to implement stress-reduction techniques. The “Safety Through Peace” initiative failed, but garnered 32 percent of the vote.
A further education college is having to protect builders from wolf-whistling girls, in a reversal of traditional gender stereotypes.
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