HONG KONG (Reuters) - Lenovo Group Ltd is stepping up its overseas expansion in the smartphone business after enjoying solid growth at home in China, as the world's No.2 maker of personal computers seeks to offset slowing growth in the traditional PC sector.
Lenovo, also the second-biggest smartphone vendor in China, has begun selling smartphones in countries including Russia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam, although analysts said it faced stiff competition from major players like Samsung Electronics Co Ltd and Apple Inc.
In its October-to-December third quarter, Lenovo shipped 9.4 million phones, including 9 million smartphones, mainly in China, where its smartphone business turned profitable for the first time.
"For the rest of the emerging markets, we will continue to invest in the smartphone business to drive market share," Yang Yuanqing, Lenovo's chief executive, told a media briefing after announcing its best-ever quarterly profit. "When we have enough market share, we can shift to (focusing on) profitability."
The ThinkPad maker reported on Wednesday a quarterly profit of $204.9 million, up by a third from a year earlier. That beat the average estimate of $178.4 million in a Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S poll of 11 analysts, and exceeded its previous record of around $172 million in the three months that ended in December 2007.
In the third quarter, overall revenue grew 12 percent from a year earlier to $9.4 billion, but the bulk of that still came from its PC business.
Lenovo has rapidly gained market share in the PC sector on the back of acquisitions over the past few years. The company trails Hewlett Packard Co by a slim margin in PC shipments, according to technology research group IDC.
As PC demand growth slows, Lenovo has been diversifying into the mobile device sector to tap robust demand for smartphones and tablets, particularly at home in China, the world's biggest market for mobile phones and personal computers.
About a tenth of its third-quarter revenue came from its mobile internet and digital home (MIDH) business - mainly consisting of its smartphone sales in China, which jumped 77 percent to $998 million.
"In my opinion, Lenovo's strategy in mobile devices is that it will focus initially on the overseas markets that it's most familiar with and this includes emerging markets," Eve Jung, an analyst at Nomura Equity Research.
"However, it will face challenges in the sector as companies like Acer and Asustek roll out cheaper tablet PC models to aggressively target markets, such as China, which is Lenovo's traditional stronghold," she said.
In smartphones, Lenovo will have to compete head-on not only with major global players, but also with Chinese rivals like Huawei Technologies Co Ltd and ZTE Corp, which are already among the top five smartphone players globally.
"Its strategy in diversifying into smartphones has proved quite successful in China, but it'll be quite difficult for Lenovo to be as successful as say, Samsung, in overseas markets," said Audrey Chiu, a manager at the investment and research division of Truswell Securities Investment Trust, which invests in Lenovo's shares.
Shares of Lenovo rose 36 percent in 2012, outpacing a 23 percent rise in the Hang Seng Index and beating rivals Hewlett Packard, Dell Inc and Acer Inc, whose stocks fell last year.
On Wednesday, Lenovo shares closed down 2.7 percent prior to the results announcement, compared with the Hang Seng's 0.7 percent rise.
(Reporting by Lee Chyen Yee; Editing by Chris Gallagher)
Jan. 30, 2013 ? Two Rutgers physics professors have proposed an explanation for a new type of order, or symmetry, in an exotic material made with uranium -- a theory that may one day lead to enhanced computer displays and data storage systems and more powerful superconducting magnets for medical imaging and levitating high-speed trains.
Their discovery, published in this week's issue of the journal Nature, has piqued the interest of scientists worldwide. It is one of the rare theory-only papers that this selective publication accepts.
Collaborating with the Rutgers professors was a postdoctoral researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who earned her doctorate at Rutgers.
"Scientists have seen this behavior for 25 years, but it has eluded explanation." said Piers Coleman, professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the School of Arts and Sciences. When cooled to 17.5 degrees above absolute zero or lower (a bone-chilling minus 428 degrees Fahrenheit), the flow of electricity through this material changes subtly.
The material essentially acts like an electronic version of polarized sunglasses, he explains. Electrons behave like tiny magnets, and normally these magnets can point in any direction. But when they flow through this cooled material, they come out with their magnetic fields aligned with the material's main crystal axis.
This effect, claims Coleman, comes from a new type of hidden order, or symmetry, in this material's magnetic and electronic properties. Changes in order are what make liquid crystals, magnetic materials and superconductors work and perform useful functions.
"Our quest to understand new types of order is a vital part of understanding how materials can be developed to benefit the world around us," he said.
Similar discoveries have led to technologies such as liquid crystal displays, which are now ubiquitous in flat-screen TVs, computers and smart phones, although the scientists are quick to acknowledge that their theoretical discovery won't transform high-tech products overnight.
Coleman, along with Rutgers colleague Premala Chandra and MIT collaborator Rebecca Flint, describe what they call a "hidden order" in this compound of uranium, ruthenium and silicon. Uranium is commonly known for being nuclear reactor fuel or weapons material, but in this case physicists value it as a heavy metal with electrons that behave differently than those in common metals.
Recent experiments on the material at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico provided the three physicists with data to refine their discovery.
"We've dubbed our fundamental new order 'hastatic' order, named after the Greek word for spear," said Chandra, also a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. The name reflects the highly ordered properties of the material and its effect on aligning electrons that flow through it.
"This new category of order may open the world to new kinds of materials, magnets, superconductors and states of matter with properties yet unknown," she said. The scientists have predicted other instances where hastatic order may show up, and physicists are beginning to test for it.
The scientists' work was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Simons Foundation. Flint is a Simons Postdoctoral Fellow in physics at MIT.
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Journal Reference:
Premala Chandra, Piers Coleman, Rebecca Flint. Hastatic order in the heavy-fermion compound URu2Si2. Nature, 2013; 493 (7434): 621 DOI: 10.1038/nature11820
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Twitter, the global network for short bursts of information, is buying a startup, Crashlytics, that tracks when bad code causes apps to fail abruptly.
Notably, it appears to be leaving Crashlytics alone. TechCrunch reports that Twitter is not relocating the team from Cambridge, Mass. to Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, and allowing it to continue to serve other customers like Yelp and Waze.
Twitter uses Crashlytics in its own app, as well as Vine, a recently launched app for sharing short, simply edited videos.
Which brings us to an interesting point: Is Twitter changing its acquisition strategy?
Twitter has primarily bought pieces of its own ecosystem, bringing in-house functions previously developed by third-party developers. Summize, a search engine for tweets, and Tweetie, the basis of Twitter's iPhone client, are prominent examples. Those deals have been largely successful, allowing Twitter users to find tweets and use Twitter-branded mobile apps.
It has also bought startups for their talent. Mixer Labs, a location-software startup; Posterous, a blogging platform akin to Tumblr; and Bagcheck, a list-sharing site, are two examples. Those results have been more mixed:
Mixer Labs CEO Elad Gil stayed for two and a half years, running corporate strategy. He left in May 2012.
Posterous CEO Sachin Agarwal played a key role in Twitter's new photo features.
Bagcheck cofounder Sam Pullara stayed for just a year on Twitter's engineering team.
With Crashlytics and Vine, Twitter is setting a new pattern: Buying startups and leaving them alone to develop products in Twitter's safe nest.
The model here is Google's acquisition of Android and YouTube, which it ran for years as standalone divisions.
Twitter's motives may vary deal by deal. As a Crashlytics customer, it may not have wanted the startup to end up in the hands of hostile rivals like Google or Facebook, who surely wouldn't mind learning about the ins and outs of Twitter's mobile-app code.
Vine, on the other hand, seems to have simply charmed Twitter's leaders with the premise of a new art form, a video version of Twitter's 140-character tweets.
But whatever the specific reasoning to buy a company, it's very interesting that Twitter's breaking from the acquire-hire pattern of buying startups and crushing what makes them unique.
LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A lawsuit by a Southern California Christian school against two former teachers who refused to provide proof of their faith could pose one of the first court tests of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on religious freedom.
A legal expert said last year's ruling that religious workers can't sue for job discrimination never specified whether that includes teachers at religious schools.
Calvary Chapel of Thousand Oaks purchased Little Oaks School in 2009, and leaders told employees last year that they would need to provide a statement of faith and a reference from a pastor to renew their contracts.
The two teachers lost their jobs after refusing to provide the documents. After they threatened litigation, school leaders filed their own lawsuit in federal court in Ventura.
James A. Sonne, director of the Religious Liberty Clinic and a lecturer in law at Stanford University Law School, noted that the dispute comes just a year after the high court's ruling in the case of the Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School of Redford, Mich., which holds that religious workers can't sue for job discrimination.
The court refused to specify in that ruling what constituted a religious worker, leaving teachers uncertain of their status under the law.
Sonne said the question remains whether teachers are performing "ministerial duties."
"Churches have First Amendment rights to choose their ministers," Sonne said. "The question is how does that apply outside the liturgical setting? The area where that will be played out is in the religious school context."
The school and its owner say their right to hire teachers who share their beliefs is protected by the California Constitution, the U.S. Constitution's right of the free exercise of religion, and civil rights laws.
The school is incorporated as a for-profit entity, but church leaders said the school is operated not as a profit-generating entity but as a spiritual arm of the church. About 130 students in preschool through fifth grade are taught there.
The teachers, Lynda Serrano and Mary Ellen Guevara, are citing the state's Fair Employment and Housing Act, which prohibits religious discrimination with exemptions that do not include for-profit religious groups.
Sonne said a constitutional ruling under federal law would most likely trump a state provision, which may be the reason the church filed in federal court.
"We're a Christian school," the Rev. Rob McCoy, pastor of the church and headmaster of the school, told the Ventura County Star. "We were coming to the point where we were establishing a Christian curriculum. We wanted to make sure teachers subscribed to that faith."
Serrano, once director of the preschool, had been with the school since 2006. Guevara was hired in 2011.
"They did not believe they should be required to obtain a pastoral reference in order to continue their employment," their attorney, Dawn Coulson, wrote in a letter to church leaders.
The teachers lost their jobs. In the letter from Coulson, they said they were prepared to sue and were asking for $150,000 apiece from the school to settle the case.
Instead of settling, church and school leaders filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court, asking for an injunction that would prevent the teachers from filing their lawsuit in a different venue, the newspaper said. They wanted to make sure litigation took place in federal court.
Their suit names not only the two teachers but the law firm that represents them. It alleges the California Fair Employment and Housing Act is unconstitutional when used to restrict a religious school's hiring practices, even if the group is for-profit.
Purdue University has appointed Steven Schultz as its first in-house legal counsel, effective February 1. As manager of Purdue?s legal function, Schultz will advise Purdue president Mitch Daniels and the Board of Trustees on a range of legal issues, and he?ll oversee the provision of external legal services.
For more than 130 years, Lafayette, Indiana, firm Stuart & Branigin has served as the neighboring university?s primary legal counsel. In a statement provided to CorpCounsel.com, partners at the firm expressed support for Purdue?s decision to change its practices.
In a memo sent to faculty and staff Monday, Daniels said that the adoption of an internal legal counsel model is ?now the general rule among major U.S. universities.? Purdue had been the last of the Big Ten schools to rely exclusively on outside legal representation.
In a press release, Daniels said that by hiring internal counsel, Purdue expects to ?identify opportunities to improve the way we procure and manage legal services and thereby realize certain risk-management, oversight, and cost-savings benefits.?
The change comes at a time when university faculty are expressing frustration with the status quo. At a meeting of the Purdue University Senate Monday, faculty members addressed their concerns with recent legal bills.
According to Purdue spokesman Chris Sigurdson, the university has made $6.8 million in payments to Stuart & Branigin over the last three fiscal years. Fees were split roughly evenly among those years: $2.4 million in 2010, $2.1 million in 2011, and $2.3 million in 2012 .
In an email to CorpCounsel.com, Sigurdson said that specific cases or legal matters were not addressed during the faculty meeting and that the discussion was limited to legal bills incurred over the last 18 months.
University Senate chair J. Paul Robinson said in an email to CorpCounsel.com that the faculty has become concerned about what appears to them to be ?runaway? legal expenses.
Robinson says there hasn?t been sufficient oversight and incentive to resolve legal issues reasonably without ?jumping directly to litigation.? He anticipates the installation of an internal lawyer will cut down on unnecessary use of outside counsel. ?The faculty see central management and review as a welcome process,? he says.
Schultz says that bringing ?oversight of the legal function a little closer to the internal decision-making process? was a goal of hiring in-house counsel, adding that cost controls were a perceived benefit of making the change.
The new in-house counsel is taking the position at Purdue after concluding a stint as VP and first-ever general counsel of Southeastern Indiana Health Organization, and a seven-month appointment as special adviser to the State of Indiana on the Ohio River Bridges Project. He was previously executive director of the Louisville and Southern Indiana Bridges Authority.
Schultz earned his bachelor?s degree from Butler University in 1988, majoring in history and political science. He has a J.D. from Yale Law School and an LL.M. from the University of Cambridge.
After graduation, he practiced corporate law at Barnes & Thornburg in Indianapolis and worked in the London office of Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver and Jacobson, where he specialized in cross-border mergers and acquisitions, private equity transactions, and capital markets financings.
Schultz joined Irwin Financial Corporation in 2001 and became general counsel in 2004. Schultz served as then-governor Daniels?s first chief legal counsel from 2005-2006, before returning to Irwin.
Schultz plans to meet with partners at Stuart & Branigin on his first day on the job at Purdue to discuss how to proceed with their partnership. He says he?ll have a better sense of which matters will be farmed out once he starts. ?I?m going to be laser-focused on identifying those,? says Schultz, adding that he feels fortunate that the firm will still be available to help evaluate legal risks and necessary controls.
Thomas Parent, a partner with Stuart & Branigin, said, ?This change has been under discussion for a long time, and we have been actively engaged with Purdue?s Board of Trustees in evaluating various models for the provision of legal services to the university.? He added that the firm would remain dedicated to advancing the school?s mission.
Purdue?s first in-house lawyer looks forward to helping the school navigate what he anticipates will be great changes on the horizon in the field of higher education law.
Schultz, a life-long Hoosier, says he was honored that he was offered the position at Purdue. ?It?s a world-class institution,? he says, ?renowned for its reputation, research and educational rigor, and the high caliber of its people.?
Schultz?s father was a student athlete at Purdue, and at least a dozen other members of his family attended school there. ?I always rooted for the Boilers,? he says. ?I?ve recently been joking to the Purdue folks that although I became a naturalized citizen of the Butler nation, I was born a Boilermaker.?
28 January 2013Last updated at 12:50 ETBy Jonathan AmosScience correspondent, BBC News
British satellite manufacturer SSTL will build the follow-on spacecraft for an innovative weather forecasting system run by Taiwan and the US.
The Cosmic constellation derives information about the atmosphere from the way it disturbs GPS signals.
A clutch of spacecraft currently provide this service, and SSTL has been contracted to provide up to 12 more satellites.
The intention is to launch a new batch in 2016.
"It's a great win for the company, beating off international competition, and it's also a very interesting project," said Alex da Silva Curiel from SSTL.
"It involves operational meteorology, good climate science and ionospheric science," he told BBC News.
The Cosmic project is a joint initiative between the National Space Organization (NSPO) of Taiwan and the American National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa).
It relies on a smart observation technique known as radio occultation.
This recognises that a transmission from a Global Positioning Satellite, which ordinarily is used to plot a time and a position, will be bent as it passes through air.
The degree to which this refraction occurs is dependent on the properties of the atmosphere at that moment, and can be exploited to pull out information about temperature, pressure and water vapour - key parameters required in weather forecasting.
NSPO/Noaa's Constellation Observing System for Meteorology, Ionosphere & Climate (Cosmic) operates a series of small spacecraft in low orbit to make these observations.
But this satellite series, collectively known as FORMOSAT-3, is beginning to fail and needs replacing.
SSTL, which has a worldwide reputation for manufacturing high-performance, low-cost spacecraft, has now been engaged to build this next generation - FORMOSAT-7.
Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and follow me on Twitter: @BBCAmos
You Are Here: Home ? News ? Refrain Smoking By 40 Reduces Future Health Risk, Says Research
British, American and Canadian researchers scrutinized the histories of smoking and also the death records for 88,496 men and 113,752 women in US over these past seven years. ?Those individuals who ceased smoking at the age of 40 where about 90% of the hazards of enduring to smoke? commented Dr. Prabhat Jha, the author of research and the leader of Centre for Global Health Research based at St. Michael?s Hospital, Toronto.
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Although the graph of smokers who give up smoking by 30 were closed the death rates of people who never smoked.? This graph was taken after considering their risk to lungs, stroke, heart attack, and cancers. ?However, the only message is that it?s never too late to give up smoking. But the investigators also warned that it is not completely safe to smoke cigarettes until the age of 40 and then quit it because the hazards still remain significant as compared to those who never smoked and had same rates of body fats, food consumption and alcohol usage.
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Researchers even say that females who are chain smokers or the one who smoke like men departs their life like men. ?This is really very important study not only for its matter because it possibly reflects the wider population of Canada and US. Moreover, the focal point of this research is to spread the awareness of smoking on the first generation of females who initiated smoking during their teenage and continued through their adulthood?, says Dr. Graham Berlyne, the head of medicinal practice at St. Joseph?s Health Centre in Toronto and also a respirologist.
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Berlyne further added saying that,? the years of passive smoking are not wiped away but the harms done is cut shorted and the lungs have little higher capacity to live and can still work even after losing some capabilities?. In a study, a resident of Toronto, Tracy Hager, 39, is suing lozenges and patches of nicotine to quit smoking. From the last six weeks she has not lit up cigarette but her two teenagers have initiated smoking. ?It is really very disappointing, but for this situation I can?t actually blame anyone except myself?, commented Tracy Hager who is utilizing this research as a motivation to give up her smoking habit.
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However, similar conclusions were driven in the previous researches. The investigators noted proves coming out from India and China points to related patterns in decreasing the expectancy of life for smokers. Furthermore, in the countries with high incomes it was mostly noticed that there were more ex-smokers then the one who started currently. ?But that?s not the case in countries with low to middle income.
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They entitled higher prices for cigarettes by the way of excise taxes, prohibits on tobacco promotion and advertising, restrictions on smoking in public places, and trouble-free admittance to termination efforts.
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Huge Global Problem
Among the complete population of smokers about 1.3 billion smokers reside in middle and low income countries. ?Although, in many of the countries with high income, about more than half population of smokers have quit smoking. Nevertheless, this case is still very rare in the nations with poor income. However, it this current smoking trend persists, cigarette smoking will definitely take lives of one biliion people in the 21st century. The reports say, in the 20th century about 100 million people died due to smoking.
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?For controlling the rate of deaths and diseases due to smoking, taxation is the only most efficient way to get adults to abstain from smoking and prevent teens from starting it? advices Prabhat Jha to the government who is also an associate lecturer in the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at Canada?s University of Toronto.
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Thus, it has become an utmost important to have a look on death rates due to smoking which actually can be kept under control by doing changes in your lifestyle. This research was endowed by National Institutes of Health US, the Bill and the Canadian institutes of fitness research.
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NSF-funded team samples Antarctic lake beneath the ice sheetPublic release date: 29-Jan-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Peter West pwest@nsf.gov 703-292-7530 National Science Foundation
Samples may contain microbes from an ecosystem isolated for thousands of years, with implications for the search for life elsewhere in extreme environments
In a first-of-its-kind feat of science and engineering, a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research team has successfully drilled through 800 meters (2,600 feet) of Antarctic ice to reach a subglacial lake and retrieve water and sediment samples that have been isolated from direct contact with the atmosphere for many thousands of years.
Scientists and drillers with the interdisciplinary Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling project (WISSARD) announced Jan. 28 local time (U.S. stations in Antarctica keep New Zealand time) that they had used a customized clean hot-water drill to directly obtain samples from the waters and sediments of subglacial Lake Whillans.
The samples may contain microscopic life that has evolved uniquely to survive in conditions of extreme cold and lack of light and nutrients. Studying the samples may help scientists understand not only how life can survive in other extreme ecosystems on Earth, but also on other icy worlds in our solar system.
The WISSARD teams' accomplishment, the researchers said, "hails a new era in polar science, opening a window for future interdisciplinary science in one of Earth's last unexplored frontiers."
A massive ice sheet, almost two miles thick in places, covers more than 95 percent of the Antarctic continent. Only in recent decades have airborne and satellite radar and other mapping technologies revealed that a vast, subglacial system of rivers and lakes exists under the ice sheet. Lakes vary in size, with the largest being Vostok Subglacial Lake in the Antarctic interior that is comparable in size to Lake Ontario.
WISSARD targeted a smaller lake (1.2 square miles in area), where several lakes appear linked to each other and may drain to the ocean, as the first project to obtain clean, intact samples of water and sediments from a subglacial lake.
The achievement is the culmination of more than a decade of international and national planning and 3 1/2 years of project preparation by the WISSARD consortium of U.S. universities and two international contributors. There are 13 WISSARD principal investigators representing eight different U.S. institutions.
NSF, which manages the United States Antarctic Program, provided over $10 million in grants as part of NSF's International Polar Year portfolio to support the WISSARD science and development of related technologies.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Cryospheric Sciences Program, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the private Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation also provided support for the project.
The interdisciplinary research team includes groups of experts in the following areas of science: life in icy environments, led by John Priscu, of Montana State University; glacial geology, led by Ross Powell, of Northern Illinois University; and glacial hydrology, led by Slawek Tulaczyk, of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Sharing of expertise by the groups of disciplinary experts will allow the data collected to be cast in a systemic, global context.
The WISSARD team will now process the water and sediment samples they have collected in hopes of answering seminal questions related to the structure and function of subglacial microbial life, climate history and contemporary ice-sheet dynamics.
Video surveys of the lake floor and measurements of selected physical and chemical properties of the waters and sediments will allow the team to further characterize the lake and its environs.
The approach to drilling was guided by recommendations in the 2007 National Research Council-sponsored report, "Exploration of Antarctic Subglacial Aquatic Environments: Environmental and Scientific Stewardship," aimed to protect these unique environments from contamination.
A team of engineers and technicians directed by Frank Rack, of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, designed, developed and fabricated the specialized hot-water drill that was fitted with a filtration and germicidal UV system to prevent contamination of the subglacial environment and to recover clean samples for microbial analyses. In addition, the numerous customized scientific samplers and instruments used for this project were also carefully cleaned before being lowered into the borehole through the ice and into the lake.
Following their successful retrieval, the samples are now being carefully prepared for their shipment off the ice and back to laboratories for numerous chemical and biological analyses over the coming weeks and months.
###
-NSF-
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
NSF-funded team samples Antarctic lake beneath the ice sheetPublic release date: 29-Jan-2013 [ | E-mail | Share ]
Contact: Peter West pwest@nsf.gov 703-292-7530 National Science Foundation
Samples may contain microbes from an ecosystem isolated for thousands of years, with implications for the search for life elsewhere in extreme environments
In a first-of-its-kind feat of science and engineering, a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research team has successfully drilled through 800 meters (2,600 feet) of Antarctic ice to reach a subglacial lake and retrieve water and sediment samples that have been isolated from direct contact with the atmosphere for many thousands of years.
Scientists and drillers with the interdisciplinary Whillans Ice Stream Subglacial Access Research Drilling project (WISSARD) announced Jan. 28 local time (U.S. stations in Antarctica keep New Zealand time) that they had used a customized clean hot-water drill to directly obtain samples from the waters and sediments of subglacial Lake Whillans.
The samples may contain microscopic life that has evolved uniquely to survive in conditions of extreme cold and lack of light and nutrients. Studying the samples may help scientists understand not only how life can survive in other extreme ecosystems on Earth, but also on other icy worlds in our solar system.
The WISSARD teams' accomplishment, the researchers said, "hails a new era in polar science, opening a window for future interdisciplinary science in one of Earth's last unexplored frontiers."
A massive ice sheet, almost two miles thick in places, covers more than 95 percent of the Antarctic continent. Only in recent decades have airborne and satellite radar and other mapping technologies revealed that a vast, subglacial system of rivers and lakes exists under the ice sheet. Lakes vary in size, with the largest being Vostok Subglacial Lake in the Antarctic interior that is comparable in size to Lake Ontario.
WISSARD targeted a smaller lake (1.2 square miles in area), where several lakes appear linked to each other and may drain to the ocean, as the first project to obtain clean, intact samples of water and sediments from a subglacial lake.
The achievement is the culmination of more than a decade of international and national planning and 3 1/2 years of project preparation by the WISSARD consortium of U.S. universities and two international contributors. There are 13 WISSARD principal investigators representing eight different U.S. institutions.
NSF, which manages the United States Antarctic Program, provided over $10 million in grants as part of NSF's International Polar Year portfolio to support the WISSARD science and development of related technologies.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Cryospheric Sciences Program, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the private Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation also provided support for the project.
The interdisciplinary research team includes groups of experts in the following areas of science: life in icy environments, led by John Priscu, of Montana State University; glacial geology, led by Ross Powell, of Northern Illinois University; and glacial hydrology, led by Slawek Tulaczyk, of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Sharing of expertise by the groups of disciplinary experts will allow the data collected to be cast in a systemic, global context.
The WISSARD team will now process the water and sediment samples they have collected in hopes of answering seminal questions related to the structure and function of subglacial microbial life, climate history and contemporary ice-sheet dynamics.
Video surveys of the lake floor and measurements of selected physical and chemical properties of the waters and sediments will allow the team to further characterize the lake and its environs.
The approach to drilling was guided by recommendations in the 2007 National Research Council-sponsored report, "Exploration of Antarctic Subglacial Aquatic Environments: Environmental and Scientific Stewardship," aimed to protect these unique environments from contamination.
A team of engineers and technicians directed by Frank Rack, of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, designed, developed and fabricated the specialized hot-water drill that was fitted with a filtration and germicidal UV system to prevent contamination of the subglacial environment and to recover clean samples for microbial analyses. In addition, the numerous customized scientific samplers and instruments used for this project were also carefully cleaned before being lowered into the borehole through the ice and into the lake.
Following their successful retrieval, the samples are now being carefully prepared for their shipment off the ice and back to laboratories for numerous chemical and biological analyses over the coming weeks and months.
###
-NSF-
[ | E-mail | Share ]
?
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.
Singer Courtney Love in Park City, Utah, on Jan. 19.
By Kurt Schlosser, NBC News
Courtney Love took on Jay-Z's "99 Problems" during an appearance at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, last week. And as her own best critic, the rocker warned before starting the song: "It's so genius, it either sucks, or it's genius."
A video of the Jan. 22 performance at the Star Bar has surfaced on YouTube. The former Hole frontwoman and widow of Kurt Cobain puts her own grungy, acoustic spin on the hip-hop classic. And she doesn't take any lyrical shortcuts, singing the N-word a couple times during the 3-minute video.
Comments varied on the YouTube clip, with some taking offense to her use of the N-word and others defending her right to cover the song as it was written.
"She is a very very? serious musician ... she's got a great voice and is an incredible writer. Unfortunately (but understandably) people find it hard to look past the way she's portrayed by the media," user dubpsychosis88 wrote.
"Courtney has got to be the worst pop? star along with Taylor Swift ... utter crap," wrote Micah Femino.
Hole formed in 1989 and put out the debut album "Pretty on the Inside" in 1991. The band's second album, "Live Through This," came out four days after Cobain committed suicide in Seattle in 1994. The band released "Celebrity Skin" in 1998, and broke up in 2002. Love released a solo album, "America's Sweetheart," in 2004, and she re-formed Hole for 2010's "Nobody's Daughter" with a new lineup of musicians.
Love told Rolling Stone last fall that she teamed with ex-Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha for a single called "This is War," possibly salted for a Feb. 7 release.
Love has long been a magnet for rock 'n' roll attention, from her outspoken Twitter musings to her ongoing feud with the surviving members of Nirvana. She's also had a contentious relationship with her?daughter, Frances Bean Cobain.
But in Park City, she put a clever twist on the end of her cover:?"I got 99 problems, but being a bitch ain't one."
Check out the video below, but be warned that it contains profane language.
A barge carrying 80,000 gallons of oil hit a railroad bridge in Vicksburg, Miss., on Sunday, spilling light crude into the Mississippi River and closing the waterway for eight miles in each direction, the Coast Guard said. A second barge was damaged.
Investigators did not know how much had spilled, but an oily sheen was reported as far as three miles downriver of Vicksburg after the 1:12 a.m. accident, said Lt. Ryan Gomez of the Coast Guard's office in Memphis, Tenn.
It wasn't immediately clear whether the second barge also hit the bridge or if it ran into the first barge, he said. The first barge was still leaking late Sunday afternoon, and emergency workers set out booms to absorb and contain the oil, Gomez said. The river's closure halted at least five northbound and two southbound vessels, he said.
The bridge was found safe for trains, said Petty Officer Carlos Vega
Both barges were being pushed by the tugboat Nature's Way Endeavor. The website for Nature's Way Marine LLC of Theodore, Ala., identifies it as a 3,000-horsepower, 90-foot long boat, making it the largest and highest-powered of the company's five tugs. It was built in 1974 and underwent a complete rebuild in 2011, according to the company.
A company manager referred calls to the Coast Guard command center at Vicksburg.
The Coast Guard Marine Safety Unit Vicksburg sent a team to assess the spill and oversee the cleanup, a Coast Guard news release said. The agency said a command center at Vicksburg included representatives from the Coast Guard and Nature's Way, as well as local officials and law enforcement.
DHAKA, Bangladesh (AP) ? Bangladesh's government has ordered an investigation into allegations that the sole emergency exit was locked at a garment factory where a fire killed seven female workers, an official said Sunday.
The fire Saturday at the Smart Export Garment Ltd. factory occurred just two months after a blaze killed 112 workers in another factory near the capital, raising questions about safety in Bangladesh's garment industry, which exports clothes to leading Western retailers. The gates of that factory were locked.
Government official Jahangir Kabir Nanak said an investigation has been ordered into the cause of Saturday's fire and allegations that the emergency exit was locked.
Altaf Hossain, father of a garment worker killed in the latest fire, has filed a police case against three directors of the factory, accusing them of negligence involving the fire, Dhaka Metropolitan Police Sub-inspector Shamsul Hoque told The Associated Press on Sunday.
He said police had begun an investigation.
Doctors said most of the victims died from asphyxiation.
"When I tried to escape through the emergency exit I found the gate locked," Raushan Ara, a worker at the factory, was quoted as saying by Dhaka's Prothom Alo newspaper.
The newspaper said at least 50 people were injured in a stampede triggered by the fire. Six were hospitalized, while others received first aid treatment on their own.
Some of the injured jumped out of the windows of the two-story factory, survivors said.
Dhaka Metropolitan Police Deputy Commissioner Monzurul Kabir said the bodies of seven women were recovered from the top floor of the factoryt. He said the factory was making pants and shirts, but could not provide further details.
Fire official Abdul Halim said it took firefighters about two hours to bring the blaze under control.
Volunteers joined firefighters in battling the fire as a large crowd gathered outside the factory awaiting word on the fate of relatives. Family members were seen crying near the body of a female worker named Josna, who was 16.
About 250 workers were working at the time of the fire, newspapers said.
It was not immediately known if the factory produced garments for any international companies. The owner was not available for comment, and the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association said the factory was not a member so it had no details.
Earlier this month, Wal-Mart Stores Inc. alerted its global suppliers that it will immediately drop them if they subcontract their work to factories that haven't been authorized by the discounter. The stricter contracting rule, along with other changes to its policy, come amid increasing calls for better safety oversight after the deadly fire in late November at a factory owned by Tazreen Fashions Ltd. that supplied clothing to Wal-Mart and other retailers. Wal-Mart has said the factory wasn't authorized to make its clothes.
Wal-Mart ranks second behind Swedish fast fashion retailer H&M in the number of clothing orders it places in Bangladesh.
Fires have led to more than 600 deaths of garment workers in Bangladesh since 2005, according to research by the advocacy group International Labor Rights Forum.
Microblogging, meet micro video sharing. Just as Twitter curtails anything of substance you'd like to say to a headline requiring a link to a blog or other webpage for any kind of depth, the free Vine app, recently acquired by Twitter, curtails your videos to a mere 6 seconds. That's not necessarily bad: Who wants to watch minute after minute of boring video? In a world where most people still think of Twitter as just short text snippets, can micro-videos make an impact?
Let's be clear: This isn't a case of "video finally comes to Twitter." You've already been able to embed a YouTube or Vimeo video in a Twitter post forever, so this isn't the first time anyone's been able two add video to tweets. Vine is more of an attempt to co-opt the craze for animated GIFs, most prominently evidenced on image-heavy mini-blogging site Tumblr. ?You could also think of it as the latest entry in the "Instagram for video" app genre.
Vine plays to today's brief attentions spans, which causes people at a play or a concert to reach for their smartphones the moment the curtain falls at intermission, rather than trying to digest the performance. Vine movies may be limited in length, but like animated GIFs, they loop infinitely, which actually does the opposite of increasing their impact. Let's see how it stacks up against other "Instagram but for video" apps, such as Lightt and Cinemagram.
Signup and Setup As with so many new mobile apps, Apple's iPhone gets first dibs when it comes to Vine. I've contacted the company to ask when we might see apps for Android and Windows Phone, and will update this if and when I hear back. And as with so many hot new apps these days, Vine wants to interrupt you with notifications and wants access to your location, both requiring message box OKs at installation. I didn't need another source of notifications, but I though location might help for video posts.
As you'd expect with an app just acquired by Twitter, you can sign in with your Twitter account, or create a new Vine account using an email address. The typical social app would also let you sign up via Facebook, but that's not an option for obvious reasons. Conveniently, you don't need to actually provide your Twitter credentials, the app can take them from your iPhone's Settings. Despite Vine now being a part of Twitter, though, you're still prompted to agree to create a new Vine account, even if you sign up with your Twitter account.
Interface After setup, my view was of an Instagram-like newsfeed of GIF-like videos from contacts I didn't know I had. Apparently, these were preselected Twitter employees. The well-designed and simple interface had but two buttons in the top corners above the feed?on the left Home, and on the right a movie camera. Pressing the home button offered three more options in addition to the home view I was already viewing: Explore, Activity, and Profile. These first two were encouraging, reminding me of the addictive similar pages of Flickr. More on these in a bit.
A banner ad across the top of the home screen encouraged me to get my own new Vine follows. I could find these by scanning my phone's local address book, Twitter (of course), or Facebook (surprise!). Though some reports claim that Facebook has blocked Vine from accessing it, and though I got to the Facebook permission button, an error appeared when I returned to the Vine app. Tit-for-tat for when Twitter blocked the Facebook-owned Instagram.
I could also simply search for Vine user names, or invite friends to the service using email or SMS. Each user, as with every self-respecting social network, has a profile page, and Vine's resembles Twitters, except it offers separate tabs for Posts and Likes. At top was the user's photo, a text area for inspirational self-description and a big Follow button.
The Explore page was a treat. Here I could view Editor's Picks, Popular Now, and All Posts (presumably by recency). Colorful Windows 8-like tiles in the bottom half of this page let me browse hashtags, such as #magic, #travel, and #sports. The first of these hints at the prominence of stop motion, and also feature a lot of disappearing toddlers. Even the Popular Now videos weren't especially compelling, but it's early days, and no doubt there'll be plenty awesome mini-vids in the offing.
There's no website where you can view all your own and contacts' Vine videolets, so you'll only be able to see them in the app or in your Twitter feed. The videos play on the Twitter website and in the Twitter iOS apps, and in each of those places you get a link to a bare-bones Vine-hosted Web page for the video at hand.
Shooting with Vine When you hit that movie camera icon atop your home screen, you don't get the standard iPhone camera app in movie mode. Instead, you get a completely plain square image of what's in front of your iPhone's lens?that's right, there's no way to switch to the backward-facing camera to shoot your mug. Nor is there even a shutter button: You shoot video by holding your finger on the screen. You get a total of 6 seconds, and can lift and re-touch the screen to pause and restart shooting?which the service encourages. It's really well suited to stop motion shooting, or shooting those "magic" clips where something or someone disappears or suddenly appears.
Once you're through shooting, the Next button takes you to a page where you can add a caption for your tiny video compilation, choose a hash tag, and decide where to share it. Sharing target options are Vine, Twitter, and Facebook, and in this case, my test video did appear on my Facebook timeline, so there's no blocking in this direction.
You can also add a location at this point; the tool for this says "Powered by FourSquare" (of which I'm not a user), but it never worked for me in my testing. I'd think you'd be able to attach a location without having to be a member of yet another minor social network. And indeed a colleague was able to get location suggestions on her iPhone, though she wasn't a FourSquare member either.
The Final Products My gut tells me that Vine is not going to unseat YouTube or Vimeo anytime soon, or even Facebook video sharing. The videos it produces are usually jerky and somewhat unpleasant to view, which effect is multiplied by their ceaseless repetition. Luckily, though, on Twitter the videos don't auto-repeat. The six-second limit doesn't really give them a chance to have anything but a superficial impact. A lot of times, the best viral YouTube videos are marked for having a visual punch line after a time of suspense. Not possible with Vine.
I actually found Vine less interesting than the innovative Lightt app, which also limits shooting time, though to 10 seconds. Lightt also combines all your short videos into an endless timeline that you can fast forward or reverse through. Nor does Vine offer the clever effects you can find in apps like Cinemagram or SocialCam. And unlike their verbal equivalent, the Tweet, there's no link to the full version.
Vine Needs Some Ripening I'm all for innovative new ways to create and present video, and Twitter certainly needs to grow beyond being a place where you can get the occasional 140 characters from the oracle known as Justin Bieber. I'm just not convinced that Twitter's enforced verbal pithiness translates well to a video equivalent. Should you download the app and give it a shot? By all means, go for it! But as to paraphrase another tech writer, while a picture may be worth a thousand words, a Vine video somehow manages to fall short of that word count.
More iPhone App Reviews: ??? Vine (for iPhone) ??? YouSendIt (for iPhone) ??? EyeEm (for iPhone) ??? NRA: Practice Range (for iPhone) ??? Garmin (for iPhone) ?? more
International disaster relief organization, ShelterBox, is en route to Jordan after the government released an urgent appeal for aid as an ?unprecedented? amount of Syrian refugees continue to enter the country.
Sarasota, FL (PRWEB) January 25, 2013
International disaster relief organization, ShelterBox, is en route to Jordan after the government released an urgent appeal for aid as an ?unprecedented? amount of Syrian refugees continue to enter the country.
ShelterBox responds following disasters such as earthquake, flood, tsunami, hurricane, cyclone or conflict by delivering boxes of aid. Each box contains a disaster relief tent, stove, water filtration system, blankets and other items necessary to help families live independently and with dignity in the months following disaster.
Foreign Minister Nasser Judeh released a statement Thursday, requesting international aid after 20,000 Syrians crossed into the country in a single week. Judeh described the influx as ?unprecedented, larger than any other time in the last two years.?
In response to the country?s appeal, members of the highly trained ShelterBox Response Team (SRT) are en route to Jordan to assess the need for emergency shelter and other aid.
Although ShelterBox had prepositioned its aid with the Jordanian Red Crescent in December 2012, the need for additional emergency shelter and supplies is imminent.
ShelterBox first responded to the Syrian refugee crisis in October 2012, by delivering 500 boxes of winterized aid to the Domiz refugee camp in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. By December 2012, ShelterBox aid was also distributed in Syria, to a total of 710 families living families living in the Al-Salameh camp near the Turkey border.
An additional SRT is currently in Lebanon, awaiting the arrival of ShelterBoxes and assessing the need for more, in response to the Lebanese government?s request for aid earlier this month.
ShelterBox is also responding to the typhoon in the Philippines, bushfires in Australia and flooding in Nigeria.
ABOUT SHELTERBOX USA
Since 2000, ShelterBox has provided shelter, warmth and dignity following more than 200 disasters in over 85 countries. ShelterBox instantly responds to earthquake, volcano, flood, hurricane, cyclone, tsunami or conflict by delivering boxes of aid. Each iconic green ShelterBox contains a disaster relief tent for an extended family, stove, blankets and water filtration system, among other tools for survival. ShelterBox?s American affiliate, ShelterBox USA is headquartered in Sarasota, Florida. Individual tax-deductible donations to ShelterBox USA can be made at http://www.shelterboxusa.org, 941-907-6036 or via text message by sending SHELTER to 20222 for a one-time $10 donation.
Erin Holdgate ShelterBox USA (941) 907-6036 100 Email Information
Dealing with anger and its repercussions can be very challenging. Unaware of how to handle irritating and stressful situations may be a reason for many fits of anger and rage. Most people, with the exception of young children perhaps, recognize their problem with uncontrollable anger. Although there are many anger management activities which would enable them to better cope with confrontational situations, some people are uneducated regarding these techniques and activities.
There are many anger management activities individuals can practice or participate in when attempting to cope with daily feelings of anger. One activity which is recommended for anger management is exercise. Exercise has been proven to have a positive impact on an individual?s mood. Exercise helps an individual to decrease any negative feelings they might be experiencing. An effect anger management activity might be as simple as going for a walk or jog in the park. Visiting the gym to work out of taking part in their favorite sport may work well for an individual as an anger management activity. Taking a hike or spending a few hours in the beauty of nature would definitely allow a person to clear their head and release tension. Outdoor anger management activities would surely create an environment of serenity.
Anger management activities such as attending a support group, camp or retreat would certainly help people who are experiencing difficulties controlling their anger. One positive aspect of attending anger management activities such as there is the individual would see first hand that their problem is not unique, that it is shared by plenty of other people. Being able to share with people in similar situations might be the key to anger management for some individuals. Sharing would likely provide hope through success stories. In anger management activities such as these, people are forced to deal with their anger issues through various activities group sessions and one on one consults.
Anger management activities for children
Anger management activities are recommended when dealing with children who are coping with anger issues. A child is unlikely to respond well to group sessions and perhaps even become bored with one on one consults. Finding activities which are interesting and even challenging may be a better alternative. Kids enjoy fun and games. Designing anger management activities which are enjoyable yet beneficial would be so much more effective than forcing a child to sit down with an anger management counselor. Worksheets, coloring pages, individual games as well as interactive games would be accepted much better by children than a trip to the psychiatrist. When children are involved, it is essential to approach the problem carefully. Being overbearing will not go over well with kids. When considering anger management activities for kids, it is essential to be mindful that they are only children and the approach is important.
When considering anger management activities, an individual ought to choose one which they find interesting and enjoyable. Sticking a person in an unfamiliar setting may create feelings of anger which is not the intention of anger management activities. Finding an activity that works should be the key focus.
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Stress is always going to always be in our lives, which can be both a good and bad thing. Some people say that stress is good for us because it gives is that extra push of energy to just get stuff done. For others, it can be a bit more complicated though. Many people aren't sure how to manage their stress and get it under control before it becomes a problem.
Stress can become physically or mentally anguishing when it consumes your life. This is the point where you should realize that it's time to take control over your stress instead of letting it control you.
Stress management techniques can be used to calm us down when we get stressed out. The next time you get stressed out, try to remember the following techniques and apply them to reducing your stress.
1.) Deep Breathing
When stress has you really wound up, try taking deep breaths through your diaphragm. Breathing will allow your body to calm down cause a direct stimulation of the parasympathetic nervous system, resulting in relaxation and a reversal of the changes seen with the stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system.
2.) Visualization
Instead of continuing to think about something that stresses you out, try changing your train of thought and visualize something makes you happy. Since it can usually be difficult to escape from the environmental stressors around us, trying escaping in your mind to a place that relaxes you. This doesn't mean that you're suppressing your feelings, you are calming and learning to control them.
3.) Meditation
Meditation may be one of the most calming and powerful stress management techniques there is. Meditating properly allows you to let go of your worries and go to your ultimate point of relaxation. Try meditating in a quiet area where you know there will be no distractions. Sit straight up on a flat surface and align your spine with the ground, keeping your feel flat on the floor. You want to focus strictly on your breathing from this point on, and maintain a deep breathing pattern from within your diaphragm. If done accurately, you will fully experience the power of meditation. This doesn't work for everyone on the first try, so remember to practice on a daily basis.
4.) Yoga
Yoga is a combination of physical activity and the three tips we have already discussed so far, and promotes and overall sense of well-being. Yoga strengthens body and mind health and allows you to become more in touch with yourself.
Don't give up after the first time if these techniques fail to work. Practice makes perfect, and practicing these techniques in your free time can put you one step closer to managing your stress.
[unable to retrieve full-text content]A dolphin trapped in the Gowanus Canal drew rescuers who were reluctant to intervene before high tide, when it might have swum free on its own, but the animal died.
Jan. 24, 2013 ? When writing or speaking, good grammar helps people make themselves be understood. But when used to concoct a long computer password, grammar -- good or bad -- provides crucial hints that can help someone crack that password, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have demonstrated.
A team led by Ashwini Rao, a software engineering Ph.D. student in the Institute for Software Research, developed a password-cracking algorithm that took into account grammar and tested it against 1,434 passwords containing 16 or more characters. The grammar-aware cracker surpassed other state-of-the-art password crackers when passwords had grammatical structures, with 10 percent of the dataset cracked exclusively by the team's algorithm.
"We should not blindly rely on the number of words or characters in a password as a measure of its security," Rao concluded. She will present the findings on Feb. 20 at the Association for Computing Machinery's Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy (CODASPY 2013) in San Antonio, Texas.
Basing a password on a phrase or short sentence makes it easier for a user to remember, but the grammatical structure dramatically narrows the possible combinations and sequences of words, she noted.
Likewise, grammar, whether good or bad, necessitates using different parts of speech -- nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns -- that also can undermine security. That's because pronouns are far fewer in number than verbs, verbs fewer than adjectives and adjectives fewer than nouns. So a password composed of "pronoun-verb-adjective-noun," such as "Shehave3cats" is inherently easier to decode than "Andyhave3cats," which follows "noun-verb-adjective-noun." A password that incorporated more nouns would be even more secure.
"I've seen password policies that say, 'Use five words,'" Rao said. "Well, if four of those words are pronouns, they don't add much security."
For instance, the team found that the five-word passphrase "Th3r3 can only b3 #1!" was easier to guess than the three-word passphrase "Hammered asinine requirements." Neither the number of words nor the number of characters determined password strength when grammar was involved. The researchers calculated that "My passw0rd is $uper str0ng!" is 100 times stronger as a passphrase than "Superman is $uper str0ng!," which in turn is 10,000 times stronger than "Th3r3 can only b3 #1!"
The research was an outgrowth of a class project for a masters-level course at CMU, Rao said. She and Gananand Kini, a fellow CMU graduate student, and Birendra Jha, a Ph.D. student at MIT, built their password cracker by building a dictionary for each part of speech and identifying a set of grammatical sequences, such as "determiner-adjective-noun" and "noun-verb-adjective-adverb," that might be used to generate passphrases.
Rao said the grammar-aware password cracker was intended only as a proof of concept and no attempt has been made to optimize its performance. But it is only a matter of time before someone does, she predicted.
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I was fortunate to have Kleiner Perkins' investment partner Ted Schlein join me on Ask A VC this week. Schlein, who joined Kleiner in 1996 and has nearly two decades of experience in the VC world, discussed what's changed in the VC industry as well as what the expectation is for a return on investment for startups. We also tackled what's next in the enterprise world as Schlein sits on the boards of a number of enterprise companies including Jive Software, and was an early employee at Symantec.
I noticed that it was by Jane Wooldridge who many of you know as the business editor of the Miami Herald. I have been critical of the Miami Herald and its reporters who, like Ms. Wooldridge, are careful not to criticize the Miami-based cruise lines like Carnival and Royal Caribbean which contribute substantially to their newspaper's advertising revenues.
Actually the tweet did not refer to an article in the Herald at all. Instead it linked to an article in Travel + Leisure where Ms. Wooldridge answers her own question by assuring us that?cruise ships accidents resulting in death are "very rare" and that the?Concordia shipwreck was an "anomaly." ?These are exactly the talking points that the cruise industry sent to its friends in the travel industry immediately after the Concordia hit the rocks a year ago.?
Ms. Wooldridge goes so far as to suggest that the recent safety proposals of having safety drills before cruising, keeping strangers out of the bridge and other long overdue basic practices may "eliminate such incidents altogether."
Now I am accustomed to delusional puff pieces like this from travel publication editors (Mr. Woolridge is also editor of Travel + Leisure). The most notorious pro-cruise puff pieces come from cruise cheerleader Carolyn Spencer-Brown, who is editor of the Expedia/Travel Advisor owned Cruise Critic publication. She loves to say that cruising is "absolutely safe."
The truth is that there have been far more deaths on cruise ships over the course of the past five years than other forms of major transportation. The U.S. based commercial aviation industry is remarkably safe. ?The airlines had strict pre-flight checklists and safety procedures 50 years ago. And needless to say, the aviation industry never let the pilot's girlfriends hang out in the cockpit or permit jets to buzz towns for fun. ?
Cruise lines also have a major problem with crimes committed by employees and drunk passengers against women and children. The chance of being raped on a cruise is twice that of being raped ashore. Airlines, railroads and buses simply do not have these types of problems.
Do you really think that public relations inspired proposals promoted in a travel magazine will prevent the next deadly cruise ship collision or shipboard fire? ?Do you think that the new rules will protect your little girl from a pedophile male cabin attendant with a key card to your cabin? ? ?
If you want sunshine blown up your caboose, then rely on Ms. Wooldridge or Ms. Spencer-Brown for an answer to the question "is cruising is safe?" ?I guarantee that you will receive no real facts but lots of wonderful adjectives that accidents are "rare" and cruising is "absolutely" safe.
But if you want facts upon which base your own conclusions, check around for information from sources like Sociology Professor Ross Klein's informative website, or check out the website of the non-profit ?International Cruise Victims, or read some of our articles about cruise ship accidents, deaths, sexual assault of women and molestation of children which the cruise lines and travel writers would prefer you not know.
Since 2005 I have been to seven Congressional hearings regarding cruise ship safety, including the last two hearings following the Costa Concordia disaster?(photo above right). A half-dozen of my clients testified about the issue of whether cruise ships are safe.
I have not seen Ms. Wooldridge or Ms. Spencer-Brown at any of the hearings.?
An aircraft carrying three men went missing in Antarctica on Monday and the plane?s emergency locator beacon was activated, according to the National Science Foundation. ?
The status of those aboard remains unknown, NSF spokesman Peter West said Wednesday.?The Toronto Star reported that the three men are Canadian.
West said those aboard were likely a pilot, co-pilot and a flight engineer carrying or picking up cargo. They had been contracted to support a branch of the?Italian Antarctic Program that focuses on new technology and energy?? specifically nuclear fusion and fission.
The aircraft, a de Havilland Twin Otter, was returning from the South Pole to Terra Nova Bay, where the Italian Antarctic Program is based, when contact was lost as the plane flew over a remote area of the Transantarctic Mountains.
The plane was contracted out by Kenn Borek Air Ltd., a Canadian company based in Calgary that charters aircraft to the U.S. Antarctic program.
Rescue crews, based at the New Zealand Rescue Coordination Center, know generally where the beacon is coming from, but cloudy and windy conditions have prevented rescue planes from attempting a landing near the downed plane.
?There are not as many weather stations, so it?s difficult to find out what the weather is,? West said. ?There was low cloud, limited visibility in the air in the area where they were looking for the aircraft -- some blowing snow and issues with cloud.?
?
www.nsf.gov
A Twin Otter aircraft, photographed here in 2006, at the National Science Foundation's Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.
West said he didn?t know whether the flight crew carried cold weather survival gear. At the U.S. station, protocol demands that anyone leaving the base must have protective gear ? typically a parka, wind pants, insulated boots, a tent, food and a stove to melt snow into water.
He said that he doesn't recall a similar crash in his 14 years as a spokesman for the Antarctic program.
Antarctica, the size of U.S. and Mexico combined, is vast, white and isolated. There are about 50 research stations, some of them year-round, others open during research season, which runs roughly between October and early February ? summer in the Southern Hemisphere. During those months, the largest is McMurdo Station, the U.S. Antarctic station on Ross Island, with about 1,100 people.
?It?s a harsh continent,? West said. ?People take extra care if they can.?
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Public release date: 29-Jan-2013
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Leisure where Ms. Wooldridge answers her own question by assuring us that?cruise ships accidents resulting in death are "very rare" and that the?Concordia shipwreck was an "anomaly." ?These are exactly the talking points that the cruise industry sent to its friends in the travel industry immediately after the Concordia hit the rocks a year ago.?
protect your little girl from a pedophile male cabin attendant with a key card to your cabin? ? ?