Friday, August 17, 2007
MIT engineering student seeks public speaking championship
This news is sponsored by www.careerbd.net
An MIT doctoral student who devoted the past seven years to detailed research on offshore drilling will have just seven minutes to make his mark in the Toastmasters International World Championship of Public Speaking, starting today (Aug. 15) in Phoenix.
Vikas Jhingran, a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical and ocean engineering, is one of 10 candidates competing in the three-day public speaking contest.
Jhingran's seven-minute speech for the Toastmasters championship is titled "The Swami." Using humor and broad gesture, he narrates a story of how he found the answer to unlocking his full potential through a visit to a neighborhood wise man, who asked him the provocative question "Who are you?"
Jhingran has been involved with Toastmasters for four years, and he credits the nonprofit public speaking organization with improving his confidence and transforming how he presents his research.
When he worked at an oil and gas company in Texas, Jhingran says, he was not allowed to present his own research. The company's policy was to hire trained public speakers to make presentations. Now, after much practice, he enjoys giving oral presentations.
Since arriving at MIT in 2004, Jhingran has been involved in leadership and communication programs. From 2005-2006 he was co-president of the Sloan Leadership Club, when he was the only officer from the engineering school and first non-MBA president of the club. He co-chaired the Sloan Leadership Conference in 2006.
As a teaching assistant for the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP) during MIT's Independent Activities Period (IAP) 2006, Jhingran drew on his extensive leadership experience to mentor undergraduate and graduate students. He has also taught a workshop on public speaking during IAP 2006 and 2007 titled "The Charismatic Speaker."
"One of my goals," he says, "is to see a course in communication become an integral part of an engineering degree."
Toastmasters operates clubs devoted to public speaking throughout the United States and in 90 other countries worldwide
MIT engineering student seeks public speaking championship
An MIT doctoral student who devoted the past seven years to detailed research on offshore drilling will have just seven minutes to make his mark in the Toastmasters International World Championship of Public Speaking, starting today (Aug. 15) in Phoenix.
This news is sponsored by www.careerbd.net
Vikas Jhingran, a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical and ocean engineering, is one of 10 candidates competing in the three-day public speaking contest.
Jhingran's seven-minute speech for the Toastmasters championship is titled "The Swami." Using humor and broad gesture, he narrates a story of how he found the answer to unlocking his full potential through a visit to a neighborhood wise man, who asked him the provocative question "Who are you?"
Jhingran has been involved with Toastmasters for four years, and he credits the nonprofit public speaking organization with improving his confidence and transforming how he presents his research.
When he worked at an oil and gas company in Texas, Jhingran says, he was not allowed to present his own research. The company's policy was to hire trained public speakers to make presentations. Now, after much practice, he enjoys giving oral presentations.
Since arriving at MIT in 2004, Jhingran has been involved in leadership and communication programs. From 2005-2006 he was co-president of the Sloan Leadership Club, when he was the only officer from the engineering school and first non-MBA president of the club. He co-chaired the Sloan Leadership Conference in 2006.
As a teaching assistant for the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP) during MIT's Independent Activities Period (IAP) 2006, Jhingran drew on his extensive leadership experience to mentor undergraduate and graduate students. He has also taught a workshop on public speaking during IAP 2006 and 2007 titled "The Charismatic Speaker."
"One of my goals," he says, "is to see a course in communication become an integral part of an engineering degree."
Toastmasters operates clubs devoted to public speaking throughout the United States and in 90 other countries worldwide
MIT engineering student seeks public speaking championship
An MIT doctoral student who devoted the past seven years to detailed research on offshore drilling will have just seven minutes to make his mark in the Toastmasters International World Championship of Public Speaking, starting today (Aug. 15) in Phoenix.
This news is sponsored by www.careerbd.net
Vikas Jhingran, a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical and ocean engineering, is one of 10 candidates competing in the three-day public speaking contest.
Jhingran's seven-minute speech for the Toastmasters championship is titled "The Swami." Using humor and broad gesture, he narrates a story of how he found the answer to unlocking his full potential through a visit to a neighborhood wise man, who asked him the provocative question "Who are you?"
Jhingran has been involved with Toastmasters for four years, and he credits the nonprofit public speaking organization with improving his confidence and transforming how he presents his research.
When he worked at an oil and gas company in Texas, Jhingran says, he was not allowed to present his own research. The company's policy was to hire trained public speakers to make presentations. Now, after much practice, he enjoys giving oral presentations.
Since arriving at MIT in 2004, Jhingran has been involved in leadership and communication programs. From 2005-2006 he was co-president of the Sloan Leadership Club, when he was the only officer from the engineering school and first non-MBA president of the club. He co-chaired the Sloan Leadership Conference in 2006.
As a teaching assistant for the Undergraduate Practice Opportunities Program (UPOP) during MIT's Independent Activities Period (IAP) 2006, Jhingran drew on his extensive leadership experience to mentor undergraduate and graduate students. He has also taught a workshop on public speaking during IAP 2006 and 2007 titled "The Charismatic Speaker."
"One of my goals," he says, "is to see a course in communication become an integral part of an engineering degree."
Toastmasters operates clubs devoted to public speaking throughout the United States and in 90 other countries worldwide
MIT aims to optimize chip designs
The news is sponsored by www.careerbd.net
The computer chips inside high-speed communication devices have become so small that tiny variations that appear during chip fabrication can make a big difference in performance.
Those variations can cause fluctuations in circuit speed and power so the chips don't meet their original design specifications, says MIT Professor Duane Boning, whose research team is working to predict the variation in circuit performance and maximize the number of chips working within the specifications.
The researchers have recently developed a model to characterize the variation in one kind of chip. The model could be used to estimate the ability to manufacture a circuit early in the development stages, helping to optimize chip designs and reduce costs.
"We're getting closer and closer to some of the limits on size, and variations are increasing in importance," says Boning, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) and associate head of the department. "It's becoming much more difficult to reduce variation in the manufacturing process, so we need to be able to deal with variation and compensate for it or correct it in the design."
Boning and EECS graduate student Daihyun Lim's model characterizes variation in radio frequency integrated circuits (RFICs), which are used in devices that transfer large amounts of data very rapidly, such as high-definition TV receivers.
The researchers published their results in two papers in February and June. They also presented a paper on the modeling of variation in integrated circuits at this year's International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design.
RFIC chips are essential in many of today's high-speed communication and imaging devices. Shrinking the size of a chip's transistors to extremely small dimensions (65 nanometers, or billionths of a meter), improves the speed and power consumption of the RFIC chips, but the small size also makes them more sensitive to small and inevitable variations produced during manufacturing.
"The extremely high speeds of these circuits make them very sensitive to both device and interconnect parameters," said Boning, who is also affiliated with MIT's Microsystems Technology Laboratories. "The circuit may still work, but with the nanometer-scale deviations in geometry, capacitance or other material properties of the interconnect, these carefully tuned circuits don't operate together at the speed they're supposed to achieve."
Every step of chip manufacturing can be a source of variation in performance, said Lim. One source that has become more pronounced as chips have shrunk is the length of transistor channels, which are imprinted on chips using lithography.
"Lithography of very small devices has its optical limitation in terms of resolution, so the variation of transistor channel length is inevitable in nano-scale lithography," said Lim.
The researchers' model looks at how variation affects three different properties of circuits--capacitance, resistance and transistor turn-on voltage. Those variations cannot be measured directly, so Lim took an indirect approach: He measured the speed of the chip's circuits under different amounts of applied current and then used a mathematical model to estimate the electrical parameters of the circuits.
To the researchers' surprise, they found correlations between some of the variations in each of the three properties, but not in others. For example, when capacitance was high, resistance was low. However, the transistor threshold voltage was nearly independent of the parasitic capacitance and resistance. The different degrees of correlation should be considered in the statistical simulation of the circuit performance during design for more accurate prediction of manufacturing yield, said Lim.
The research was funded by the MARCO/DARPA Focus Center Research Program's Interconnect Focus Center and Center for Circuits and Systems Solutions, and by IBM, National Semiconductor and Samsung Electronics.
Crucifix Found in Austria
An 800-year-old, gold-plated crucifix that went missing after being seized by the Nazis has been found in a rubbish skip in Austria, police said.
The crucifix, made of copper and enamel, was crafted in Limoges, France, and was part of a Polish art collection brought to Austria during Nazi rule, Josef Holzberger, police spokesman in Salzburg, said on Thursday.
It was found in 2004 in the lakeside winter resort of Zell am See by a woman combing through a skip filled with the discarded possessions of a neighbor who had just died.
"The lady had a soft spot for old crockery and was rummaging for plates when she found the crucifix," said Holzberger. "She asked the deceased's family, and they said she could have it."
Last month the woman showed the crucifix to a friend who realized it might be something special and took it to a museum.
In the run-up to World War Two, the owners of the crucifix had hid it and other treasures by walling them inside the basement of a house in Warsaw.
They were discovered by the Nazis in 1941, brought to the Polish National Museum and later transferred to a castle in the Austrian village of Bruck an der Grossglocknerstrasse, near Zell am See, police said.
"We lost track of what happened then -- we don't know how the crucifix ended up in Zell am See," Holzberger said.
The crucifix might be worth up to 400,000 euros ($539,000) at auction. Poland's culture ministry has contacted the London-based Commission for Looted Art in Europe, which represents the heirs of former art collectors, Holzberger said.
About Crucifix.
A crucifix is a cross with a representation of Jesus' body, or corpus. It is a principal symbol of the Christian religion. It is primarily used in the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Churches and emphasizes Christ's sacrifice-his death by crucifixion
The Crucifix
On some crucifixes a skull and crossbones are shown below the corpus, referring to Golgotha (Calvary), the site at which Jesus was crucified-"the place of the skull." It was probably called "Golgotha" because it was a burial-place, or possibly because of a legend that the place of Jesus' crucifixion was also the burial place of Adam.
The standard, four-pointed Latin crucifix consists of an upright stand and a crosspiece to which the sufferer's arms were nailed. The Eastern Christian crucifix includes two additional crossbars: the shorter nameplate, to which INRI was affixed; and the shorter stipes, to which the feet were nailed, which is angled upward toward penitent thief St. Dismas (to the viewer's left) and downward toward impenitent thief Gestas (to the viewer's right). It is thus eight-pointed. The corpora of Eastern Orthodox crucifixes tend to be two-dimensional icons that show Jesus as already dead, as opposed to the depictions of the still-suffering Jesus that can be found in some other Churches.
Another type of depiction of the body on the cross is what might be called a "resurrection cross" or "resifix" depicting a triumphant risen Christ (clothed in robes, rather than stripped as for his execution) with arms raised, appearing to rise up from the cross, sometimes accompanied by "rays of light."
The crucifix might be worth up to 400,000 euros ($539,000) at auction. Poland's culture ministry has contacted the London-based Commission for Looted Art in Europe, which represents the heirs of former art collectors, Holzberger said.
Moon Survey :!!China to map 'every inch' of the moon
This news is sponsored by www.careerbd.net
China has announced plans to map "every inch" of the surface of the Moon as part of its ambitious space-exploration programme.
The NSA (National Space Administration) also made no bones about China's commercial interest in space, telling reporters that the Moon holds the key to future generation of energy.
Ouyang Ziyuan, head of the first phase of lunar exploration, is quoted on government-sanctioned news site ChinaNews.com describing plans to collect three dimensional images of the Moon. He also outlined plans to exploit the vast quantities of Helium-3 thought to lie buried in lunar rock.
"There are altogether 15 tons of helium-3 on Earth, while on the Moon, the total amount of Helium-3 can reach one to five million tons," he said.
"Helium-3 is considered as a long-term, stable, safe, clean and cheap material for human beings to get nuclear energy through controllable nuclear fusion experiments. If we human beings can finally use such energy material to generate electricity, then China might need 10 tons of helium-3 every year and in the world, about 100 tons of helium-3 will be needed every year."
The country's space programme is split into three phases - the first is "circling the Moon", the second "landing on the Moon", and the third "returning to Earth".
Earlier this year, the Chinese space agency outlined plans to launch the first probe in the second half of 2007. It has now also given a few more details of its plans for phase two, which will see an unmanned rover land on the lunar surface in 2010 and "meticulously" survey the area in which it lands. A sample-return mission is slated for 2012. ®
Related stories
- Surrey satellite firm to design NASA lunar mission (14 August 2007)
- US gov's flying laser hit by delays, problems (25 July 2007)
- Galileo to get public cash, agree EU ministers (8 June 2007)
- Space powers join forces to hit Moon and Mars (1 June 2007)
- Pentagon: China threatens space and cyberspace (30 May 2007)
- China will head for the moon this year (21 May 2007)
- Communist spy ring tried to steal Space Shuttle plans (11 May 2007)
More About.
China plans to survey all of the moon's surface before eventually bringing bits of the planet back to Earth, state media reported Friday.
"We would like to survey every inch of the moon's surface," Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of the China's moon exploration project, was quoted as saying on the website of Chinese News Service.
Ouyang, speaking at a conference in southwestern China this week, said China's lunar exploration programme was divided into three phases: orbiting the moon, landing on the lunar surface and coming back to Earth with samples.
China hopes to send an unmanned spacecraft to the moon to survey the moon systematically and after that, will attempt to collect samples of the moon to bring back to Earth, he said.
China's space agency chief, Sun Laiyan, said earlier this year that the country aimed to launch its first lunar orbiter in the second half of 2007.
"The moon probe project is the third milestone in China's space technology after satellite and manned spacecraft projects, and a first step for us in exploring deep space," the China National Space Administration head said.
The orbiter represented the first phase, with a moon rover to be used in the second phase scheduled for around 2012, reports said.
The plan for the third phase was for another rover to land on the lunar surface and collect samples before returning to Earth.
China would continue to research manned space missions, including a space walk and experiments to link passing spacecraft, he said.
337 Die in Strong Peru Quake
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The death toll from a powerful earthquake rose to at least 337 Thursday, a day after the magnitude-7.9 temblor shook Peru's coast, toppled buildings and shattered roads, officials said.
More than 827 people were reported injured and the Red Cross said the toll was expected to rise.
Rescue workers struggled to reach the center of the destruction, the port city of Pisco about 125 miles southeast of the capital, Lima. Pisco's mayor said at least 200 people were buried in the rubble of a church where they had been attending a service.
"The dead are scattered by the dozens on the streets," Mayor Juan Mendoza told Lima radio station CPN.
"We don't have lights, water, communications. Most houses have fallen, churches, stores, hotels, everything is destroyed," he said, sobbing.
An AP Television News cameraman who reached the city of Chincha, about 100 miles southeast of Lima, said he counted 30 bodies under bloody sheets on the floor of the badly damaged hospital.
Another church collapsed Wednesday evening in the city of Ica, 165 miles south of Lima, killing 17, according to cable news station Canal N.
The government rushed police, soldiers, doctors and aid to the stricken areas along the coast south of the capital but hundreds of vehicles were paralyzed on the Pan American Highway by giant cracks in the pavement and fallen power lines, the AP Television News cameraman reported from Chincha.
Giorgio Ferrario, head of the Peruvian International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, said teams from the Peruvian Red Cross arrived in Ica and Pisco after 7 1/2 hours, about three times as long as it would normally have taken because the earthquake had destroyed the roads to these areas.
He said that he expected the death toll to climb as rescue teams worked in the daylight.
News reports said dozens of people in Ica crowded hospitals that suffered cracks and other structural damage. The quake also knocked out telephone and mobile phone service in the capital and to the provinces, making it impossible to communicate with the Ica area.
Electricity also was cut to Ica and smaller towns along the coast south of Lima.
An Associated Press photographer said that some homes had collapsed in the center of Lima and that many people had fled into the streets for safety. The quake shook Lima furiously for more than two minutes.
"This is the strongest earthquake I've ever felt," said Maria Pilar Mena, 47, a sandwich vendor in Lima. "When the quake struck, I thought it would never end."
Antony Falconi, 27, was desperately trying to get public transportation home as hundreds of people milled on the streets flagging down buses in the dark.
"Who isn't going to be frightened?" Falconi said. "The earth moved differently this time. It made waves and the earth was like jelly."
Firefighters were called to put out a fire in a shopping center. Police reported that large boulders shook loose from hills and were blocking the country's Central Highway, which heads east into the Andes mountains.
State doctors called off a national strike that began on Wednesday to handle the emergency. President Alan Garcia also said public schools would be closed Thursday because the buildings may be unsafe.
The Civil Defense death toll of 337 first appeared on its Web site, but the organization's spokesman, Dario Ariola, refused to confirm the figure, which was much higher than the numbers provided by the health minister. But minutes later Civil Defense Commander Aristides Mussio confirmed the toll on Peru's state television station, saying one person was killed in Lima and 336 in the region of Ica.
The U.S. Geological Survey said Wednesday's earthquake hit at 6:40 p.m. about 90 miles southeast of Lima at a depth of about 25 miles. Four strong aftershocks ranging from magnitudes of 5.4 to 5.9 were felt afterward.
The Hawaii-based Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a tsunami warning for the coasts of Peru, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, Costa Rica and Panama. A tsunami watch was issued for the rest of Centra
l America and Mexico and an advisory for Hawaii.
The center canceled all the alerts after about two hours, but it said the quake had caused an estimated 10-inch tsunami near the epicenter.
The last time a quake of magnitude 7.0 or larger struck Peru was in September 2005, when a 7.5-magnitude earthquake rocked the country's northern jungle, killing four people. In 2001, a 7.9-magnitude quake struck near the southern Andean city of Arequipa, killing 71 people.
The region sits on two plates that are constantly shifting and Thursday's earthquake, like most earthquakes in the area, occurred when one plate dove under the other quickly, according to Amy Vaughan, a USGS geophysicist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Golden, Colo.
The plates are always "moving slowly, but this was a sudden shift," Vaughan said.
Some of the world's biggest quakes, including the catastrophic Indian Ocean temblor in 2004 that generated deadly tsunami waves, are caused by a similar movement of plates.
AP Writer Monte Hayes reported from Lima, Peru. Associated Press writers Leslie Josephs in Lima, Alicia Chang in Los Angeles and Sarah DiLorenzo in New York contributed to this report.
Quake Matter
An earthquake is the result of a sudden release of stored energy in the Earth's crust that creates seismic waves. Earthquakes are accordingly measured with a seismometer, commonly known as a seismograph. The magnitude of an earthquake is conventionally reported using the Richter scale or a related Moment scale (with magnitude 3 or lower earthquakes being hard to notice and magnitude 7 causing serious damage over large areas).
At the Earth's surface, earthquakes may manifest themselves by a shaking or displacement of the ground. Sometimes, they cause tsunamis, which may lead to loss of life and destruction of property. An earthquake is caused by tectonic plates getting stuck and putting a strain on the ground. The strain becomes so great that rocks give way by breaking and sliding along fault planes.
Earthquakes may occur naturally or as a result of human activities. Smaller earthquakes can also be caused by volcanic activity, landslides, mine blasts, and nuclear tests. In its most generic sense, the word earthquake is used to describe any seismic event-whether a natural phenomenon or an event caused by humans-that generates seismic waves.
An earthquake's point of initial ground rupture is called its focus or hypocenter. The term epicenter means the point at ground level directly above this.
Naturally occurring earthquakes
Fault types
Most naturally occurring earthquakes are related to the tectonic nature of the Earth. Such earthquakes are called tectonic earthquakes. The Earth's lithosphere is a patchwork of plates in slow but constant motion caused by the release to space of the heat in the Earth's mantle and core. The heat causes the rock in the Earth to become flow on geological timescales, so that the plates move slowly but surely. Plate boundaries lock as the plates move past each other, creating frictional stress. When the frictional stress exceeds a critical value, called local strength, a sudden failure occurs. The boundary of tectonic plates along which failure occurs is called the fault plane. When the failure at the fault plane results in a violent displacement of the Earth's crust, the elastic strain energy is released and seismic waves are radiated, thus causing an earthquake. This process of strain, stress, and failure is referred to as the Elastic-rebound theory. It is estimated that only 10 percent or less of an earthquake's total energy is radiated as seismic energy. Most of the earthquake's energy is used to power the earthquake fracture growth and is converted into heat, or is released to friction. Therefore, earthquakes lower the Earth's available potential energy and raise its temperature, though these changes are negligible.[1]
The majority of tectonic earthquakes originate at depths not exceeding tens of kilometers. In subduction zones, where older and colder oceanic crust descends beneath another tectonic plate, Deep focus earthquakes may occur at much greater depths (up to seven hundred kilometers). These seismically active areas of subduction are known as Wadati-Benioff zones. These are earthquakes that occur at a depth at which the subducted lithosphere should no longer be brittle, due to the high temperature and pressure. A possible mechanism for the generation of deep focus earthquakes is faulting caused by olivine undergoing a phase transition into a spinel structure.[2]
Earthquakes may also occur in volcanic regions and are caused there both by tectonic faults and by the movement of magma in volcanoes. Such earthquakes can be an early warning of volcanic eruptions.
A recently proposed theory suggests that some earthquakes may occur in a sort of earthquake storm, where one earthquake will trigger a series of earthquakes each triggered by the previous shifts on the fault lines, similar to aftershocks, but occurring years later, and with some of the later earthquakes as damaging as the early ones. Such a pattern was observed in the sequence of about a dozen earthquakes that struck the North Anatolian Fault in Turkey in the 20th century, the half dozen large earthquakes in New Madrid in 1811-1812, and has been inferred for older anomalous clusters of large earthquakes in the Middle East and in the Mojave Desert.
Size and frequency of occurrence
Small earthquakes occur nearly constantly around the world in places like California and Alaska in the U.S., as well as in Peru, Indonesia, Iran, the Azores in Portugal, New Zealand, Greece and Japan.[3] Large earthquakes occur less frequently, the relationship being exponential; for example, roughly ten times as many earthquakes larger than magnitude 4 occur in a particular time period than earthquakes larger than magnitude 5. In the (low seismicity) United Kingdom, for example, it has been calculated that the average recurrences are:
- an earthquake of 3.7 or larger every year
- an earthquake of 4.7 or larger every 10 years
- an earthquake of 5.6 or larger every 100 years.
The number of seismic stations has increased from about 350 in 1931 to many thousands today. As a result, many more earthquakes are reported than in the past because of the vast improvement in instrumentation (not because the number of earthquakes has increased). The USGS estimates that, since 1900, there have been an average of 18 major earthquakes (magnitude 7.0-7.9) and one great earthquake (magnitude 8.0 or greater) per year, and that this average has been relatively stable.[4] In fact, in recent years, the number of major earthquakes per year has actually decreased, although this is likely a statistical fluctuation. More detailed statistics on the size and frequency of earthquakes is available from the USGS.[5]
Most of the world's earthquakes (90%, and 81% of the largest) take place in the 40,000-km-long, horseshoe-shaped zone called the circum-Pacific seismic belt, also known as the Pacific Ring of Fire, which for the most part bounds the Pacific Plate.[6][7] Massive earthquakes tend to occur along other plate boundaries, too, such as along the Himalayan Mountains.
Effects/impacts of earthquakes
Chūetsu earthquake.
Man walking around in Ruins after Tsunami.
There are many effects of earthquakes including, but not limited to the following:
Shaking and ground rupture
Shaking and ground rupture are the main effects created by earthquakes, principally resulting in more or less severe damage to buildings or other rigid structures. The severity of the local effects depends on the complex combination of the earthquake magnitude, the distance from epicenter, and the local geological and geomorphological conditions, which may amplify or reduce wave propagation. The ground-shaking is measured by ground acceleration.
Specific local geological, geomorphological, and geostructural features can induce high levels of shaking on the ground surface even from low-intensity earthquakes. This effect is called site or local amplification. It is principally due to the transfer of the seismic motion from hard deep soils to soft superficial soils and to effects of seismic energy focalization owing to typical geometrical setting of the deposits.
Landslides and avalanches
Earthquakes can cause landslides and avalanches, which may cause damage in hilly and mountainous areas.
Fires
Following an earthquake, fires can be generated by break of the electrical power or gas lines.
Soil liquefaction
Soil liquefaction occurs when, because of the shaking, water-saturated granular material temporarily loses their strength and transforms from a solid to a liquid. Soil liquefaction may cause rigid structures, as buildings or bridges, to tilt or sink into the liquefied deposits.
Tsunamis
Undersea earthquakes and earthquake-triggered landslides into the sea, can cause Tsunamis. See, for example, the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake.
Human impacts
Earthquakes may result in disease, lack of basic necessities, loss of life, higher insurance premiums, general property damage, road and bridge damage, and collapse of buildings or destabilization of the base of buildings which may lead to collapse in future earthquakes.
Preparation for earthquakes
- Emergency preparedness
- Household seismic safety
- HurriQuake nail (for resisting hurricanes and earthquakes)
- Seismic retrofit
- Seismic hazard
- Mitigation of seismic motion
- Earthquake prediction
Google’s new storage service
It is about frikkin' time!
18 months ago the storage world was abuzz with the hints of Google's Gdrive, a rumored free(?) online storage service that was going to change everything. Microsoft was working feverishly on a counter-product "LiveDrive". Only it never happened.
Finally, Google has made its move!
And what a let-down! For a mere $2-$3 per GB per year, you can add storage capacity to your Gmail account and/or your Picasa photo sharing account.
There's nothing wrong with the pricing. It is about the same as any other online service. It just isn't any better, nor are the services wrapped around it anything special. It is unworthy of the Google name.
Let the competition begin
Carbonite and Mozy will give you unlimited backup storage space for anything for $50/year - and Mozy will give you 2 GB for free. SmugMug will give you unlimited photo storage - replicated 4 times no less - for $40/year plus well-designed photo albums. Amazon's S3 service runs about $2 per GB per year, depending on bandwidth. You can buy a 300 GB USB drive online for $100.
Carbonite, Mozy and SmugMug all get the fact that consumers don't really know how much data they might want to store, so they don't make them think about it. Google, on the other hand, charges $20/year for the first 6 GB on up to $500/year for 250 GB. Quick, how many gigabytes of mail and photos do you have?
So why would anyone buy Google's me-too storage service? I suppose if you are wedded to Gmail and Picasa it might make sense. Other than that I really can't think of a reason. Too bad.
The Storage Bits take
I really admire much of what Google has done with search, infrastructure and Internet advertising. My major concern about the company has always been their mediocre - nah, it isn't even that good - make that horrible marketing.
They spend countless hours and CPU cycles analyzing web page layout, but new product roll-out is amateurish at best. Did anyone perform a SWOT analysis? Any competitive analysis? Any strategic analysis on how this service might fit into a larger vision of Google and its customer relationships? Is there a business plan?
The whole effort reads like a few engineers fiddling around until they got something inoffensive enough for a not-very-plugged-in committee to approve. It sure does nothing to strengthen the Google brand or bring superior value to customers. If they like having a $500 per share stock price maybe someone in Mountain View should start thinking about those things.
Ships Becoming Largest Source of Emissions
According to Europa, in the EU ships are fast becoming the biggest source of air pollution. Unless more action is taken they are set to emit more than all land sources combined by 2020.
A 2003 study found that large ships generate 30 percent of global nitrogen emissions and 16 percent of sulfur emissions from all petroleum sources. Despite the fact that ships are more energy efficient than other forms of commercial transportation, marine engines operate on extremely dirty fuels. Most large ships use the dirtiest and least expensive diesel available, bunker oil.
Shipping is a small contributor to the world total CO2 emissions (1.8% of world total CO2 emissions in 1996)
According to a Reuters story, a group of north European companies plan to install a fuel-cell aboard a supply ship in 2008 and believe that a large share of the marine world will follow suit within 25 years. Norwegian shipping group Eidesvik Offshofre ASA plans to install a 330 kW fuel cell system on an oilfield supply vessel next year.
It is estimated that fuel cells now cost about six times more than diesel generators. But the technology can be up to 50 percent more efficient and much cleaner,
When powered by liquefied natural gas (LNG), as the first full-scale test model will be, carbon dioxide emissions are cut in half compared to diesel engines running on marine bunker fuel and sulphur and nitrogen oxide exhausts are nearly eliminated.
Iceland plans to convert its entire fishing fleet to hydrogen fuel cells as part of its environmental drive.
The shipping industry says it is more green than other modes of transport considering the huge amount of trade that ships carry, although the heavy fuel used in shipping emits 700 times more sulphur dioxide than diesel exhausts from road vehicles.
Sources and Emissions
Where does methane come from?
Methane is emitted from a variety of both human-related (anthropogenic) and natural sources. Human-related activities include fossil fuel production, animal husbandry (enteric fermentation in livestock and manure management), rice cultivation, biomass burning, and waste management. These activities release significant quantities of methane to the atmosphere. It is estimated that 60% of global methane emissions are related to human-related activities (IPCC, 2001c). Natural sources of methane include wetlands, gas hydrates, permafrost, termites, oceans, freshwater bodies, non-wetland soils, and other sources such as wildfires.
Methane emission levels from a source can vary significantly from one country or region to another, depending on many factors such as climate, industrial and agricultural production characteristics, energy types and usage, and waste management practices. For example, temperature and moisture have a significant effect on the anaerobic digestion process, which is one of the key biological processes that cause methane emissions in both human-related and natural sources. Also, the implementation of technologies to capture and utilize methane from sources such as landfills, coal mines, and manure management systems affects the emission levels from these sources.
Emission inventories are prepared to determine the contribution from different sources. The following sections present information from inventories of U.S. man-made sources and natural sources of methane globally. For information on international methane emissions from man-made sources, visit the International Analyses Web site.
Human-related Sources
In the United States, the largest methane emissions come from the decomposition of wastes in landfills, ruminant digestion and manure management associated with domestic livestock, natural gas and oil systems, and coal mining. Table 1 shows the level of emissions from individual sources for the years 1990 and 1997 to 2003.
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