August 27, 2007
Currency change aimed at adding security - Yahoo! News
The $100 bill represents more than 70 percent of the $776 billion in currency in circulation, two-thirds of which is held overseas.
Holograms, used extensively on credit cards, were considered for the $100. They were rejected because they did not offer the strong visual signal the government wanted.
interesting
Posted by TY at 2:45 PM
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San Jose Mercury News - Acer buying Gateway to create world's 3rd-largest PC vendor
Acer Inc. plans to acquire U.S. computer maker Gateway Inc. for $710 million in a deal that will push the Taiwanese company past China's Lenovo Group as the world's third largest vendor of personal computers.
Acer said Monday it is offering to buy Gateway for $1.90 per share - representing a premium of 57 percent to Gateway's Friday closing price of $1.21, but only 2 percent of Gateway's high of $82.50 in late 1999.
Shares in Gateway increased 59 cents, or 49 percent, to $1.80 in morning trading Monday.
With the acquisition, Acer will absorb a company founded in 1985 in an Iowa farmhouse and known for packaging computers in cow-spotted boxes. Now based in Irvine, Calif., Gateway struggled in recent years amid fierce competition and had difficulty selling its products over the Internet and the phone.
interesting
Posted by TY at 11:14 AM
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August 22, 2007
U.S. to leave Cheyenne even as Russia flexes muscle - Yahoo! News
The U.S. military will move its secure command center from deep inside Cheyenne Mountain even as Russia revives military maneuvers that led America to burrow under the rock almost 50 years ago.
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Construction on a new command center 12 miles away at Peterson Air Force Base is well under way despite security concerns that have driven some lawmakers to consider halting funding for the transition.
The move will shift more than 100 people responsible for detecting attacks on North America from a facility that sits under 2,000 feet of granite to a basement in an office building on the base that officials concede offers lower protection.
Air Force Gen. Gene Renuart, the U.S. commander responsible for homeland defense and protecting North American air space, says the switch is worth the risk of leaving a facility built to withstand the indirect effects of a multi-megaton nuclear blast.
It will combine operations now divided between Cheyenne and Peterson, helping the commander to receive information and respond to crises or attacks more quickly, Renuart said. It will not, however, save money as the military promised, congressional investigators have shown.
what timing
Posted by TY at 1:49 PM
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Chopsticks picked up in new China scare - Yahoo! News
A Beijing factory sold up to 100,000 pairs of disposable chopsticks a day without any form of disinfection, a newspaper said on Wednesday, the latest in a string of food and product safety scares.
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Counterfeit, shoddy and dangerous products are widespread in China, whose exports have been rocked in recent months by a spate of safety scandals, ranging from pet food to medicine, tires, toothpaste and toys.
Officials raided the factory and seized about half a million pairs of disposable bamboo chopsticks and a packaging machine, the Beijing News said in a story headlined "Dirty Chopsticks."
The owner, identified only by his surname Wu, said he had sold the chopsticks for 0.04 yuan a pair and made an average of about 1,000 yuan ($130) a day.
Wu, who had no license to sell the goods, said he had sold 100,000 pairs a day when business was good.
clever
Posted by TY at 10:47 AM
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August 21, 2007
Women really do prefer pink - Yahoo! News
Boys like blue, girls like pink and there isn't much anybody can do about it, researchers said on Monday in one of the first studies to show scientifically that there are gender-based colour preferences.
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Researchers said these differences may have a basis in evolution in which females developed a preference for reddish colours associated with riper fruit and healthier faces.
Recent studies have suggested there is a universal preference for "blue", and there has not been much previous evidence to support the idea of sex differences when picking colours, said Anya Hurlbert, a neuroscientist at Newcastle University who led the study.
"We speculate that this sex difference arose from sex-specific functional specialization in the evolutionary division of labour," she wrote in Current Biology. "There are biological reasons for liking reddish things."
interesting
Posted by TY at 11:39 AM
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Poll: White youths happier than others - Yahoo! News
From their relationships to their jobs to their money — even from they time they first roll out of bed — young white Americans are happier with life than their minority counterparts.
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According to an extensive survey of 1,280 people ages 13-24 by The Associated Press and MTV, 72 percent of whites say they are happy with life in general, compared with 51 percent of Hispanics and 56 percent of blacks.
"It doesn't surprise me," said Martin Carpenter, 21, a black New Jersey resident. "There's a lot of issues out there for African-American young adults. You can still go to certain places and feel uncomfortable, like you don't belong there."
Martin's feeling about racism, real or perceived, was echoed in the survey: 28 percent of minorities believe race will hurt them in the quest for a better life. Among whites, 20 percent feel their race will help in getting ahead.
Destiny Brown, 17, a black Virginia high school student, said she has friends who were already passed over for work simply because their names sounded different: "I know sometimes your name — people will give you a hard time when you try to get a job."
[snip]
Those numbers extend into all aspects of life:
• Parents: Sixty-six percent of minorities are happy with their relationships with mom and dad, compared with 79 percent of whites.
• Sex: Sixty percent of white youths are happy with their sex lives, compared with 46 percent of minorities. Both groups are about equal on the sexual activity scale.
• Friends: Eighty-one percent of minorities are happy with their relationships with friends, compared with 88 percent of whites.
• Jobs: Fifty-one percent of minorities are happy with their jobs, compared with 64 percent of whites.
• Money: Forty-four percent of minorities are unhappy with the money they have, compared with 35 percent of whites.
• Grades: Sixty-three percent of minorities are happy with their school grades, while 73 percent of whites are satisfied with their marks. Barely half of the minority respondents say school makes them happy, contrasted with 60 percent of the whites.
The study also found a split in how the races perceive the keys to happiness.
Among minorities, the most important factor was lack of financial worries, chosen by one in four respondents. For whites, one in five people chose a good family.
interesting
Posted by TY at 11:38 AM
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Lawmaker says NIH may be after workers - Yahoo! News
Employees of one of the National Institutes of Health are being asked to report all contacts with Congress — a request that one lawmaker suspects is an attempt to flush out would-be whistle-blowers.
Managers distributed "record of congressional inquiry" forms to employees of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, one of the 27 institutes and centers that make up the NIH. At least one of those workers reported being made "nervous" by the form — and forwarded it to congressional investigators probing allegations of conflicts of interest, excessive spending and other management issues at the institute.
classic
Posted by TY at 11:31 AM
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August 20, 2007
The Middle Seat - WSJ.com
British Airways has been a baggage nightmare for travelers since Christmas last year. Tens of thousands of bags have piled up at Heathrow at various times this summer. British Airways, the world's second-largest airline in international passenger traffic, mishandled 28 bags per 1,000 passengers in the second quarter this year, a rate that is twice as bad as the worst U.S. major airline, US Airways Group Inc. In all, British Airways has lost the bags of more than 550,000 customers in the first half of this year. The airline says it is sorry about customer experiences like Rabbi Soltz's and that its baggage operation is returning to "normal" now, but at Heathrow it is still susceptible to meltdowns when flights are delayed.
A look into the root causes of British Airways baggage problems reveals much about the state of airline dysfunction today. There's finger-pointing between various groups responsible for operations, plus a lack of manpower, aging equipment, jam-packed planes, security hassles and schedules packed too tightly together. Just like airport delays, bumped passengers and other travel problems this year, the British Airways baggage system shows how airlines have made operations so lean and taxed infrastructure so fully that problems compound exponentially for customers.
Traveler beware -- many of the problems likely won't ease until British Airways moves into a new Heathrow terminal in March, or the British government relaxes its security restriction allowing only one carry-on bag, which has sharply increased the volume of checked baggage.
doh
Posted by TY at 11:38 PM
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August 17, 2007
Pentagon Paid $999,798 to Ship Two 19-Cent Washers to Texas - Yahoo! News
A small South Carolina parts supplier collected about $20.5 million over six years from the Pentagon for fraudulent shipping costs, including $998,798 for sending two 19-cent washers to a Texas base, U.S. officials said.
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The company also billed and was paid $455,009 to ship three machine screws costing $1.31 each to Marines in Habbaniyah, Iraq, and $293,451 to ship an 89-cent split washer to Patrick Air Force Base in Cape Canaveral, Florida, Pentagon records show.
doh
Posted by TY at 7:58 PM
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U.S. diplomat accused of anti-Arab comments retires - Yahoo! News
A U.S. diplomat accused of having said "the only good Arab is a dead Arab" in a voice mail left with an Arab-American group has retired from the government, the State Department said on Thursday.
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The diplomat, Patrick Syring, was accused of having made abusive, intimidating and racist comments in e-mails and voice mails to employees of the Arab American Institute, a Washington group that promotes Arab-American interests.
The State Department declined comment on the legal case against Syring, which was outlined in an indictment filed at a U.S. federal court on Wednesday, but said the diplomat had decided to retire.
Syring is alleged to have made the comments in a series of e-mails and voice mails to officials the Arab American Institute, including its president James Zogby, when Israel was at war with Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas in July 2006.
"The only good Lebanese is a dead Lebanese. The only good Arab is a dead Arab. Long live the IDF. Death to Lebanon and death to the Arabs," Syring said in a voice mail recorded at the institute on July 17, 2006. IDF stands for Israel Defense Forces -- the Israeli military.
"Fuck the Arabs and Fuck James Zogby and his wicked Hizbollah brothers. They will burn in hellfire on this earth and in the hereafter," he wrote in an e-mail to Zogby and another institute employee on the same day.
strange
Posted by TY at 7:57 PM
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August 16, 2007
Cancer panel attacks U.S. food subsidies - Yahoo! News
A new presidential report on cancer takes on not only tobacco companies but the food industry while calling on the federal government to "cease being a purveyor of unhealthy foods" and switch to policies that encourage Americans to eat vegetables and exercise.
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The report, issued on Thursday, also urged changes in public and private insurance policies to encourage doctors to spend more time counseling patients on how to stay healthy by eating right, exercising and avoiding tobacco.
Federal, state, and local policies have actually made healthful foods more expensive and less available, have limited physical education in schools and created an environment that discourages physical activity, the report said.
"Ineffective policies, in conjunction with limited regulation of sales and marketing in the food and beverage industry, have spawned a culture that struggles to make healthy choices -- a culture in dire need of change," said the report, available on the Internet at http://pcp.cancer.gov.
...
"We heavily subsidize the growth of foods (e.g., corn, soy) that in their processed forms (e.g., high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated corn and soybean oils, grain-fed cattle) are known contributors to obesity and associated chronic diseases, including cancer," the report reads.
not surprising.
Posted by TY at 10:10 AM
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BMW sedan performs worst in crash test - Yahoo! News
The 2008 BMW 5 Series was the worst performer in new side-impact crash tests of luxury sedans by the insurance industry.
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The Acura RL, Kia Amanti and Volvo S80 all earned the highest safety rating from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, according to results released Thursday. The Cadillac STS and Mercedes E-Class earned the second-highest rating.
The tests were designed to show what would happen if a truck or sport utility vehicle hit the side of the sedan at 31 mph, the speed of a serious crash. Side-impact crashes are the most common type of fatal crash after a frontal crash, killing around 9,000 people on U.S. roadways in 2005, the institute said.
ouch
Posted by TY at 9:19 AM
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August 14, 2007
Russia said flying more missions near U.S. territory - Yahoo! News
PETERSON AIR FORCE BASE, Colo. (Reuters) - Russian bombers are flying more missions than normal near U.S. territory, including Alaska, demonstrating their long-range strike capability, U.S. and Canadian officials said on Monday.
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Russian aircraft carrying cruise missiles ran an aviation exercise near Alaska two weeks ago, according to Canadian Col. Andre Dupuis, an officer at the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a U.S.-Canadian operation responsible for protecting both countries' airspace.
"They didn't do it to practice alone. They're making a point, doing it outside of their normal training cycle," he told Reuters. "They maintain capability."
Russian bombers were also tracked last week flying a course toward Guam, a U.S. territory in the Pacific.
Some analysts and defense officials say the flights likely reflect Moscow's desire to display its military muscle to remind Washington of Russia's capabilities and express dismay over U.S. plans to build a missile shield in Eastern Europe.
interesting
Posted by TY at 10:48 AM
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August 9, 2007
Toyota's Lentz urges car dealers to improve service
Jim Lentz, executive vice president for Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., told industry leaders gathered in Traverse City for the annual Management Briefing Seminars that auto companies must do more to improve the customer experience in showrooms.
He cited a recent Gallup poll that names car salesman as the least trusted profession -- behind congressmen and insurance salesmen.
"We're not doing enough to understand this front-standing, critical problem," Lentz said. "We're all being judged at the dealership level."
The average customer, Lentz said, wants to spend no more that two hours buying a car, yet the process can drag on for hours. He said data shows that one-quarter of prospective buyers who visit a showroom to buy a car leave without making a purchase.
One consumer, responding to a survey of car buying, said she'd rather attend a funeral than do business at a dealership.
not surprising
Posted by TY at 9:37 AM
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August 8, 2007
Requiem for a Freshwater Dolphin: Scientific American
The baiji is gone. During six weeks of searching the Yangtze River, scientists and conservationists failed to spot any of the unique creatures. This means, they say, that the "goddess of the Yangtze" is extinct because, even if a scattered few are still around, there are not enough to reproduce and perpetuate the species.
"Our inability to detect any baiji in the main channel of the river despite this intensive search effort has the sad consequence that the prospect of finding and translocating any surviving dolphins to an ex situ reserve—their only conservation hope—has all but vanished," says zoologist Samuel Turvey of the Zoological Society of London. The scientists employed both four continuous spotters as well as a trailing microphone to try to pick up the baiji's waterborne whistles, which have been heard on Earth for at least 20 million years.
sad
Posted by TY at 1:30 PM
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August 7, 2007
Hospitals are shutting down burn centers - Yahoo! News
Experts say burn centers are expensive to maintain and often lose money because they are staffed with highly specialized surgeons and nurses and stocked with sophisticated equipment designed to ease patients' excruciating pain, fend off deadly complications and promote healing.
The number of burn centers in the U.S. has dropped from 132 in 2004 to 127, and burn beds have fallen from 1,897 to 1,820, according to American Burn Association records compiled from voluntary reporting by hospitals.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services puts the number of burn beds even lower, at just 1,500. And most of those are already filled, with the number available on any given day variously estimated at just 300 to 500.
"If something happens and we need the beds for burn patients, it is going to be a real catastrophe," said Dr. Alan R. Dimick, past president of the American Burn Association and founder of the burn center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Some states — Mississippi, North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and New Hampshire among them — have no burn centers at all. South Carolina has only a children's burn center, and there are just a few dedicated burn beds in Maine, Alaska and Hawaii.
"People ought to be pretty frightened by this," said Dr. Barbara Latenser, burn center director at the University of Iowa Hospitals. "Some people who live out West, they are 800 miles from a burn center."
[snip]
Wolfson said one recent report to the federal government showed that only 520 beds were actually available for use. Dr. William B. Hughes, director of the Temple University Hospital Burn Center in Philadelphia, said that more commonly, only about 300 beds are available at any one time.
Hughes said the United States had easily more than 3,000 dedicated burn beds in the early 1970s. But there has been a steady decline since then.
"We keep hearing we are ready for a terrorist attack," said Dr. Jeffrey Guy, director of the 29-bed Vanderbilt University Burn Center in Nashville. But even now, "our space is full almost all the time."
Guy said it is not uncommon for regional burn centers to be full and for patients to be transported long distances. "There are days we are taking burn calls for Chicago," he said.
Burn center directors say more beds are likely to disappear. Most burn centers are losing money because Medicare and Medicaid reimbursements have not kept up with the cost of providing care, experts say. Private insurers often follow Medicare's lead.
Since it costs about $10,000 a day to treat a patient with severe burns, and such patients typically require 50 days of intensive care, a single uninsured patient can wreck the finances of a small burn program.
Some burn centers around the country have lost a lot of money treating uninsured adults and children who were severely burned in explosions of clandestine methamphetamine labs.
"Burn units are money-losers," Hughes said.
Maybe they can upsell burn victims botox?
Posted by TY at 5:16 PM
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In a Hospital Stay, No Time to Rest - New York Times
Although I had visited this hospital’s emergency room several times over the years, and had two knee operations as an outpatient, I had never been admitted. I arrived at the E.R. with a 103.8 fever and unbearable chest pain, which blood tests eventually showed to be strep pneumonia. I was admitted within a few hours and given intravenous saline and antibiotics.
My bed, clearly designed for long-term patients to avoid pressure sores, inflated and deflated constantly, a noise I could silence only by turning it off — and losing the ability to adjust its height or angle. The room was semiprivate, and my roommate a deaf and partly blind woman of 93 who spoke almost no English.
Like any patient exhausted by pain, I desperately needed plenty of rest.
At 11:50 that night, my roommate, frightened and disoriented, sat down on my bed, grabbing at me, yanking at her IV and oxygen tubing, pleading for a “cuchillo,” a knife. (I speak Spanish.) As a career journalist, I have faced many odd situations, although never while tethered to an IV pole.
This was just the start.
Preadmission, dopey from painkillers, I had stayed lucid long enough to share information with the intake clerk, the triage nurse, two E.R. nurses, the emergency doctor, the X-ray technician and the admitting doctor. The E.R. physician was worried by the density of the infiltrate on my right lung, warning me it might be a “mass” — possibly lung cancer.
I needed a CT scan, adding three more conversations, the volunteer wheeling me there and back, the CT technician and another physician injecting the iodine.
Every interaction, no matter how brief, takes energy, something many patients have very little of, even while we try to be as pleasant as our pain, weariness and fear allow. Several nurses and physicians, including two pulmonologists, tried to cheer me up before my scan results, a gesture I appreciated but couldn’t respond to because I was simply too frightened about the possibility of lung cancer.
Thankfully, the test showed I only had pneumonia — a disease that puts more than a million Americans into the hospital each year. Now, I hoped, I could finally get some rest.
But sleep proved frustratingly elusive. Cellphones rang day and night. Patients, nurses, physicians and visitors talked loudly. Outside our window, cranes whined and clanked on a construction site, and workers’ voices clearly carried up five floors.
Add to this ambient noise the daily crowd moving in and out of our room. Someone asking if I wanted television, phone or Internet service, a chaplain, phlebotomists coming to take blood, the young woman changing our linens, orderlies, the janitor and ever-changing nurses.
Almost everyone had a question that needed answering, and quickly, not easy when you’re scared, tired, in pain or heavily medicated. Each encounter required my attention, a decision and my civility at the least. No one wants to be the monosyllabic “difficult” patient, but it takes a lot of energy to be friendly to so many people.
Then there were the all-day, high-volume conversations of my deaf roommate’s family and friends. Her son came to visit after I had spent much of the previous night racked with coughing. It started up again while he was there.
not surprising
Posted by TY at 12:34 PM
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August 6, 2007
‘Fake Steve’ Blogger Comes Clean - New York Times
The mysterious writer has used his blog, the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, to lampoon Mr. Jobs and his reputation as a difficult and egotistical leader, as well as to skewer other high-tech companies, tech journalists, venture capitalists, open-source software fanatics and Silicon Valley’s overall aura of excess.
The acerbic postings of “Fake Steve,” as he is known, have attracted a plugged-in readership — both the real Mr. Jobs and Bill Gates have acknowledged reading the blog (fakesteve.blogspot.com). At the same time, Fake Steve has evaded the best efforts of Silicon Valley’s gossips to discover his real identity.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Daniel Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes magazine who lives near Boston, has been quietly enjoying the attention.
“I’m stunned that it’s taken this long,” said Mr. Lyons, 46, when a reporter interrupted his vacation in Maine on Sunday to ask him about Fake Steve. “I have not been that good at keeping it a secret. I’ve been sort of waiting for this call for months.”
interesting
Posted by TY at 2:29 PM
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Flight delays soar to 13-year high - Yahoo! News
U.S. airline delays are at their highest level in at least 13 years, and analysts say fliers can expect more of the same for the rest of the summer.
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The Department of Transportation on Monday said the industry's on-time performance in the first six months of the year was its worst since 1995, the earliest period for which the agency has comparable data. In June, nearly a third of domestic flights on major U.S. airlines were late.
Part of the explanation for the worsening delays is that demand for air travel is rising, both on major airlines and on smaller regional carriers. In addition, the government said weather-related delays in June were up 7 percent from a year ago.
Reports of mishandled baggage and complaints filed with the government also rose.
not surprising
Posted by TY at 2:24 PM
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David Duchovny returns to series TV - Yahoo! News
David Duchovny seems calm and easy on the set of his hard-edged new Showtime series with the suggestive title.
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But there's a glimpse of a disheveled bed inside Duchovny's spacious trailer, his off-camera refuge on the studio lot. It's a testament to his long hours as principal star of "Californication" and one of its executive producers.
Beds, in fact, are an essential prop on "Californication," a comedy-drama set in Los Angeles and rated MA for explicit language and nudity.
But "it's not a thinly veiled show that's supposed to titillate you," said Duchovny, best known for his role as dour, alien-obsessed FBI Agent Fox Mulder on the classic cult series "The X-Files."
On "Californication," premiering Aug. 13 (10:30 p.m. EDT), the lanky actor plays dysfunctional writer Hank Moody, who drowns his angst over writer's block and his split with his gorgeous girlfriend, Karen (Natascha McElhone), in bouts of drinking and casual sex.
interesting
Posted by TY at 2:24 PM
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Lohan family has problems east and west - Yahoo! News
Ah, Long Island — land of Amy and Joey, birthplace of the bellicose Baldwin brothers, where Lizzie Grubman plowed her SUV through a nightclub parking lot and Billy Joel slammed three cars into assorted inanimate objects.
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Tabloid fodder, all — but with the Lohans of Merrick, the media mania is multiplied by three.
Daughter Lindsay seems headed for her third rehab stint this year following a California arrest on suspicion of drunken driving and cocaine possession. Back home, "momager" Dina and rehab-prone dad Michael shuttle between Long Island courthouses, trying to end their two-decade marriage as cameras flash and videotape rolls.
Their last court appearance drew more than two dozen paparazzi, camera crews and reporters, all for a divorce case once thought settled two years ago. The Lohans are also battling over visitation issues involving Lindsay's younger siblings.
Press reports that Lohan had traveled to Long Island last weekend set off a local media frenzy, but on Monday no one had pinned down the starlet's location. Some reports had her in Utah while others had her holed up back in mom's Merrick home.
With a family like this, how could the celebrity media resist?
"I feel like a second parent in the sense that I helped raise my family," Lindsay told Allure magazine earlier this year. "And I was put between my mother and father a lot. Well, I would put myself between them to try and keep the peace, and I felt good doing that."
and now you know
Posted by TY at 2:04 PM
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August 3, 2007
Bad bosses get promoted, not punished - Yahoo! News
How do people get ahead in the workplace? One way seems to be by making their subordinates miserable, according to a study released on Friday.
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In the study to be presented at a conference on management this weekend, almost two-thirds of the 240 participants in an online survey said the local workplace tyrant was either never censured or was promoted for domineering ways.
"The fact that 64.2 percent of the respondents indicated that either nothing at all or something positive happened to the bad leader is rather remarkable -- remarkably disturbing," wrote the study's authors, Anthony Don Erickson, Ben Shaw and Zha Agabe of Bond University in Australia.
Despite their success in the office, spiteful supervisors can cause serious malaise for their subordinates, the study suggested, citing nightmares, insomnia, depression and exhaustion as symptoms of serving a brutal boss.
The authors advocated immediate intervention by industry chiefs to stop fledgling office authoritarians from rising up the ranks.
"As with any sort of cancer, the best alternative to prevention is early detection," they wrote
not surprising
Posted by TY at 1:18 PM
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Arkansas couple welcomes 17th child - Yahoo! News
LITTLE ROCK, Ark. - It's a girl — again — for the Duggars. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar welcomed their 17th child, and seventh daughter, into the world Thursday.
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Jennifer Danielle was born at 10:01 a.m. at Saint Mary's Hospital in Rogers, Ark., the Duggars said in an interview. Jennifer weighed 8 pounds, 8 ounces and arrived five days after Michelle's due date.
Less than 30 minutes after giving birth, the Duggars already were talking of having more.
"We'd love to have more," Michelle said, adding that the girls are outnumbered seven to 10 in the family. "We love the ruffles and lace."
Jennifer joins the fast-growing Duggar brood, who live in Tontitown in a 7,000-square-foot home. All the children — whose names start with the letter J — are home-schooled.
The oldest is 19 and the youngest, before Jennifer, is almost 2 years old.
"We are just so grateful to God for another gift from him," said Jim Bob Duggar, 42, a former state representative. "We are just so thankful to him that everything went just very well."
Jennifer joins siblings Joshua, 19; John David, 17; Janna, 17; Jill, 16; Jessa, 14; Jinger, 13; Joseph, 12; Josiah, 11; Joy-Anna, 9; Jedidiah, 8; Jeremiah, 8; Jason 7; James 6; Justin, 4; Jackson, 3; Johannah, almost 2.
If those 17 kids all have 17 kids, and then those kids have 17 kids, that's a potential 4913 grand children.
Wow, that's a lot of SUVs to buy.
Posted by TY at 1:18 PM
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Bridge collapse spotlights America's deferred maintenance | csmonitor.com
The tragic rush-hour collapse in Minneapolis of the I-35W Bridge over the Mississippi River is again forcing a reexamination of the nation's approach to maintaining and inspecting critical infrastructure.
According to engineers, the nation is spending only about two-thirds as much as it should be to keep dams, levees, highways, and bridges safe. The situation is more urgent now because many such structures were designed 40 or 50 years ago, before Americans were driving weighty SUVs and truckers were lugging tandem loads.
It all adds up to a poor grade: The American Society of Civil Engineers gave the nation a D in 2005, the latest report available, after assessing 12 categories of infrastructure ranging from rails and roads to wastewater treatment and dams.
"One of America's great assets is its infrastructure, but if you don't invest it deteriorates," says Patrick Natale, executive director of ASCE.
Among scores of recent examples:
•Last month, a 100-year-old steam pipe erupted in midtown Manhattan, killing one man and causing millions of dollars in lost business.
•The inadequacies of levees in New Orleans became horrifyingly clear in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. The city is still recovering.
•In 2003, the Silver Lake Dam in Michigan failed, causing $100 million in damage.
America's 577,000 bridges are of particular concern because they are subject to corrosion. According to the website of Nondestructive Testing (NDT), which advocates not damaging structures during testing, the average lifespan of a bridge is about 70 years. Bridges are inspected visually every two years. However, NDT notes, "it is not uncommon for a fisherman, canoeist, and other passerby to alert officials to major damage that may have occurred between inspections."
what could possibly go wrong
Posted by TY at 1:14 PM
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August 1, 2007
U.S. drops Baghdad electricity reports - Los Angeles Times
As the Bush administration struggles to convince lawmakers that its Iraq war strategy is working, it has stopped reporting to Congress a key quality-of-life indicator in Baghdad: how long the power stays on.
Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week that Baghdad residents could count on only "an hour or two a day" of electricity. That's down from an average of five to six hours a day earlier this year.
But that piece of data has not been sent to lawmakers for months because the State Department, which prepares a weekly "status report" for Congress on conditions in Iraq, stopped estimating in May how many hours of electricity Baghdad residents typically receive each day.
Instead, the department now reports on the electricity generated nationwide, a measurement that does not indicate how much power Iraqis in Baghdad or elsewhere actually receive.
classic
Posted by TY at 3:06 PM
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Chinese Market Awash in Fake Potter Books - New York Times
These include “Harry Potter and the Half-Blooded Relative Prince,” a creation whose name in Chinese closely resembles the title of the genuine sixth book by Ms. Rowling, as well as pure inventions that include “Harry Potter and the Hiking Dragon,” “Harry Potter and the Chinese Empire,” “Harry Potter and the Young Heroes,” “Harry Potter and Leopard-Walk-Up-to-Dragon,” and “Harry Potter and the Big Funnel.”
Some borrow little more than the names of Ms. Rowling’s characters, lifting plots from other well-known authors, like J. R. R. Tolkien, or placing the famously British protagonist in plots lifted from well-known kung-fu epics and introducing new characters from Chinese literary classics like “Journey to the West.”
Sounds like a winner!
Posted by TY at 8:45 AM
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Mayor Takes the Subway — by Way of S.U.V. - New York Times
On mornings that he takes the subway from home, Mr. Bloomberg is picked up at his Upper East Side town house by a pair of king-size Chevrolet Suburbans. The mayor is driven 22 blocks to the subway station at 59th Street and Lexington Avenue, where he can board an express train to City Hall. His drivers zip past his neighborhood station, a local subway stop a five-minute walk away.
That means Mr. Bloomberg — whose much-discussed subway rides have become an indelible component of his public image — spends a quarter of his ostensibly subterranean commute in an S.U.V.
“I never see him,” said Namela Hossou, who sells newspapers every morning at the downtown entrance to the mayor’s nearest stop, at 77th Street, four blocks from the mayor’s house. “Never, never.”
The mayor’s chief spokesman, Stu Loeser, was asked in an interview yesterday whether being driven to an express station distanced Mr. Bloomberg from the experience of the average Manhattan subway rider. Mr. Loeser replied, “Who is the average Manhattan subway-goer? I don’t think it’s an answerable question. The mayor rides the subway like anyone else. Zips his card through, stands on the platform, and waits for a train to come.”
not surprising
Posted by TY at 8:40 AM
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