Suspended coffee

Posted on 07/04/2013 by Paul
This story will warm you better than a coffee on a cold winter day:

“We enter a little coffeehouse with a friend of mine and give our order. While we’re approaching our table two people come in and they go to the counter -
‘Five coffees, please. Two of them for us and three suspended’
They pay for their order, take the two and leave. I ask my friend:
‘What are those ‘suspended’ coffees ?’
‘Wait for it and you will see’
Some more people enter. Two girls ask for one coffee each, pay and go. The next order was for seven coffees and it was made by three lawyers – three for them and four ‘suspended’. While I still wonder what’s the deal with those ‘suspended’ coffees I enjoy the sunny weather and the beautiful view towards the square in front of the café. Suddenly a man dressed in shabby clothes who looks like a beggar comes in through the door and kindly asks
‘Do you have a suspended coffee ?’
It’s simple – people pay in advance for a coffee meant for someone who can not afford a warm beverage. The tradition with the suspended coffees started in Naples, but it has spread all over the world and in some places you can order not only a suspended coffee, but also a sandwich or a whole meal.”

Posted in Awareness, Fabulous | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Soundscraper – energy from noise.

Posted on 03/04/2013 by Paul

No, I’m not drunk. A soundscraper is a serious thing in the race towards clean energy.

As found on Inhabitat:

An entry in the 2013 eVolo Skyscraper Competition, the Soundscrapers would be constructed near major motorways and railroad junctions, prime locations for capturing ambient vibrations. A sound-sucking material would cover the exterior of the tower with a double-skin layer, held away from the façade on a metallic frame.

For each Soundscraper, 84,000 electro-active lashes would cover the metal frame and pick up noise from cars, trains, pedestrians and passing planes. Each of the lashes is armed with sound sensors called Parametric Frequency Increased Generators. Once the noise is picked up, an energy harvester converts the vibrations to kinetic energy. Transducer cells then convert the energy to electricity, which is stored or distributed to the grid for regular electric use.

The team estimates that just one Soundscraper could produce 150 megawatts of energy in a densely populated city, which roughly converts to 10% of the lighting needs of Los Angeles. The clean energy would also help the city reduce carbon emissions and reliance upon fossil fuels. Several Soundscrapers could drastically offset the electrical needs of a metropoli

soundscraper
Read more: Soundscraper Transforms Vibrations from City Noise Pollution into Green Energy Soundscraper Generates Energy From Noise Pollution – Inhabitat – Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building

Posted in Awareness, Environment, Tech | Tagged , | 1 Comment

On heart attacks

Posted on 28/03/2013 by Paul

How many folks do you know who say they don’t want to drink anything before going to bed because they’ll have to get up during the night!! Interesting…….

Something else I didn’t know … Why do people need to urinate so much at night time?
Answer from a Cardiac Doctor – Gravity holds water in the lower part of your body when you are upright (legs swell). When you lie down and the lower body (legs and etc) becomes level with the kidneys, it is then that the kidneys remove the water because it is easier. This then ties in with the last statement! I know you need your minimum water to help flush the toxins out of your body, but this was news to me. The correct time to drink water is very important according to a Cardiac Specialist!

Drinking water at a certain time maximizes its effectiveness on the body:
2 glasses of water after waking up – helps activate internal organs
1 glass of water 30 minutes before a meal – helps digestion
1 glass of water before taking a bath – helps lower blood pressure
1 glass of water before going to bed – avoids stroke or heart attack

Water drunk at bed time will also help prevent night time leg cramps. Your leg muscles are seeking hydration when they cramp and wake you up with a Charlie Horse.

Dr. Virend Somers is a Cardiologist from the Mayo Clinic, who is lead author of the report in the July 29, 2008 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

Most heart attacks occur in the day, generally between 6 A.M. and noon. Having one during the night, when the heart should be most at rest, means that something unusual happened. Somers and his colleagues have been working for a decade to show that sleep apnoea is to blame.

1. If you take an aspirin or a baby aspirin once a day, take it at night. The reason: Aspirin has a 24-hour “half-life”; therefore, if most heart attacks happen in the wee hours of the morning, the Aspirin would be strongest in your system.
2. FYI, Aspirin lasts a really long time in your medicine chest for years, (when it gets old, it smells like vinegar).

Why keep Aspirin by your bedside? It’s about Heart Attacks.

There are other symptoms of a heart attack, beside the pain on the left arm. One must also be wary of an intense pain on the chin, as well as nausea and lots of sweating; however these symptoms may occur less frequently.

Note: There may be NO pain in the chest during a heart attack.

The majority of people (about 60%) who have a heart attack during their sleep do not wake up at the time. However, if it occurs, the chest pain may wake you up from your deep sleep. If that happens, immediately dissolve two aspirins in your mouth and swallow them with a bit of water.

Afterwards: – Call the emergency service. Phone a neighbour or a family member who lives very close by – Say “heart attack!” – Say that you have taken 2 Aspirins – Take a seat on a chair or sofa near the front door, and wait for their arrival and ….DO NOT LIE DOWN!

Posted in Awareness, General | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Salt linked to autoimmune diseases

Posted on 24/03/2013 by Paul

Found on nature.com:

Nanowires show sodium chloride may cause harmful T-cell growth.

Salt may play a role in the overproduction of immune-system cells that attack an organism’s own tissues.

The incidence of autoimmune diseases, such as multiple sclerosis and type 1 diabetes, has spiked in developed countries in recent decades. In three studies published today in Nature, researchers describe the molecular pathways that can lead to autoimmune disease1 and identify one possible culprit that has been right under our noses — and on our tables — the entire time: salt2, 3.

To stay healthy, the human body relies on a careful balance: too little immune function and we succumb to infection, too much activity and the immune system begins to attack healthy tissue, a condition known as autoimmunity. Some forms of autoimmunity have been linked to overproduction of TH17 cells, a type of helper T cell that produces an inflammatory protein called interleukin-17.

But finding the molecular switches that cause the body to overproduce TH17 cells has been difficult, in part because conventional methods of activating native immune cells in the laboratory often harm the cells or alters the course of their development.

So when researchers heard a talk by Hongkun Park, a physicist at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, about the use of silicone nanowires to disarm single genes in cells, they approached him immediately, recalls Aviv Regev, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (also in Cambridge) and a co-author on two of the studies1, 2.

Park showed last year that these nanowires can be used to manipulate genes in immune cells without affecting the cells’ functions4. For the first of the Nature studies1, Regev and her colleagues used Park’s technology to piece together a functional model of how TH17 cells are controlled, she says. “Otherwise,” she says, they would have been only “guessing in the dark.”

In the second study2, an affiliated team of researchers observed immune cell production over 72 hours. One protein kept cropping up as a TH17-signal: serum glucocorticoid kinase 1 (SGK1), which is known to regulate salt levels in other types of cells. The researchers found that mouse cells cultured in high-salt conditions had higher SGK1 expression and produced more TH17 cells than those grown in normal conditions.

“If you incrementally increase salt, you get generation after generation of these TH17 cells,” says study co-author Vijay Kuchroo, an immunologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts.

In the third study3, researchers confirmed Kuchroo’s findings, in mouse and human cells. It was “an easy experiment — you just add salt”, says David Hafler, a neurologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who led the research.

But could salt change the course of autoimmune disease? Both Kuchroo and Hafler found that in a mouse model of multiple sclerosis, a high-salt diet accelerated the disease’s progression.

** The source on nature.com is longer, please go there if you want to read more about this. I’d suggest you do – and adjust your diet if you use a lot of salt.

Posted in Awareness | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Releasing your inner animal

Posted on 20/03/2013 by Paul

spots(Click the image for the full one.)

 

Posted in Awareness | Tagged | 2 Comments

Magdalene Laundries

Posted on 17/03/2013 by Paul
When Singer Sinead O’Connor tore a picture of the Pope on SNL, Americans were never told why.....In Ireland, they knew. For crimes as petty as being too beautiful or talking back.....girls found themselves in a living hell. Catholic Church enslaved 30,000 Irish women as forced unpaid labor in Magdalene Laundries until 1996 What a horrific story. The Irish Prime Minister gave a partial apology today for the government’s role in a 74-year scandal in which, a new official government report says, over 10,000 women were forced to work without pay at commercial laundries called Magdalene Laundries, operated by the Catholic Church for “crimes” as small as not paying a train ticket. Wikipedia notes that the estimate of the number of women who were used as forced slave labor by the Catholic Church in Ireland alone goes as high as 30,000 over the entire time the Magdalene laundries were in operation. The last Magdalene laundry closed in 1996. Women were locked in, couldn’t leave Magdalene Laundries for months, sometimes years The women were locked in and not permitted to leave. And if they tried to get away, the cops would catch them and bring them back. They were quite literally Catholic slave labor working for the government and even Guinness, which would pay the laundries for the women’s slave labor. Half of the girls enslaved in these Catholic Church prisons were under the age of 23. The youngest entrant was 9 years old. Singer Sinead O’Connor was perhaps the most famous Magdalene Laundry slave Singer Sinead O’Connor was forced to work in a Magdalene Laundry in Dublin: When I was a young girl, my mother — an abusive, less-than-perfect parent — encouraged me to shoplift. After being caught once too often, I spent 18 months in An Grianán Training Centre, an institution in Dublin for girls with behavioral problems, at the recommendation of a social worker. An Grianán was one of the now-infamous church-sponsored “Magdalene laundries,” which housed pregnant teenagers and uncooperative young women. We worked in the basement, washing priests’ clothes in sinks with cold water and bars of soap. We studied math and typing. We had limited contact with our families. We earned no wages. One of the nuns, at least, was kind to me and gave me my first guitar. No apology from the Catholic Church Absent from any of the media reports on the scandal that I could find was an apology from the Catholic Church which operated the Magdalene laundries and made handsome profits from contracts with government and hotels. Oh, found one. It seems the Catholic Church blew the women off. I know, you’re as surprised as I am: Victims of the child sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Irish Catholic Church have received an apology and compensation, but no one has taken responsibility for what happened in the laundries. Cardinal Sean Brady, the most senior Catholic cleric in Ireland, met with Justice for Magdalenes in 2010. He said “by today’s standards much of what happened at that time is difficult to comprehend” but that it was a matter for the religious orders who ran the laundries to deal with. The religious orders have declined to meet the women. The Irish Cardinal wasn’t interested in hearing from people who were hurt and abused — if not sexually, certainly physically and mentally, by the Catholic Church. And it’s not the Catholic Church’s fault. Where have we heard that story before? The laundries were run by nuns, many of whom treated the women sent to work there as slaves: Senator McAleese’s inquiry found that half of the girls and women put to work in the laundries were under the age of 23 and 40%, more than 4,000, spent more than a year incarcerated. Fifteen percent spent more than five years in the laundries while the average stay was calculated at seven months. The youngest death on record was 15, and the oldest 95, the report found. The Irish state is also implicated in the scandal because the police would take women to the asylums after arresting them for trivial offenses and would return runaways. The story of the Magdalene laundries shows what happens when an institution — in this case the church and the government — is considered beyond criticism. It probably isn’t a coincidence that the last of the laundries closed in 1996, shortly after the first wave of the Catholic pedophile priest scandals hit Ireland. Let me reiterate that for a moment. The Catholic Church had slaves as late as 1996. “It changed me as a person to authority, God forgive me I learned to hate people then” Here are some of the testimonials of the women who served as forced Catholic slaves. You can find them in theofficial report: “The only thing was I had appendicitis and asked [named nun] could I go to bed and she wouldn’t let me”. Some, but not all women reported that their hair had been cut on entry to the laundry. Some described this as an upsetting and degrading experience. “T’was the ultimate humiliation for you. It changed me as a person to authority, God forgive me I learned to hate people then”. One woman said that in the Magdalene Laundry in which she was, “You could write once a month but the nun would read the letters”. This is one is pure torture: Another very common grievance of the women who shared their stories with the Committee – particularly those who had previously been in Industrial or Reformatory Schools – was that there was a complete lack of information about why they were there and when they would get out. None of these women were aware of the period of supervision which followed discharge from industrial or reformatory school. Due to this lack of information and the fact that they had been placed in an institution among many older women, a large number of the women spoke of a very real fear that they would remain in the Magdalene Laundry for the rest of their lives. Even if they left the Laundries after a very short time, some women told the Committee that they were never able to fully free themselves of this fear and uncertainty. Victims reject Irish PM’s apology The victims have rejected the Prime Minster’s “apology,” which does sound somewhat lame: “To those residents who went into the Magdalene Laundries through a variety of ways, 26pc from state intervention or state involvement, I am sorry for those people that they lived in that kind of environment,” Mr Kenny said in parliament in Dublin today. “I want to see that those women who are still with us, anywhere between 800 and 1000 at max, that we should see that the state provides for them with the very best of facilities and supports that they need in their lives.” Did your defense lawyer write that one up for you? Here’s Joni Mitchell singing about the Magdalene Laundries: http://youtu.be/kU1Zymqlhko

When Singer Sinead O’Connor tore a picture of the Pope on SNL, Americans were never told why…..In Ireland, they knew.

For crimes as petty as being too beautiful or talking back…..girls found themselves in a living hell.

Catholic Church enslaved 30,000 Irish women as forced unpaid labor in Magdalene Laundries until 1996

What a horrific story. The Irish Prime Minister gave a partial apology today for the government’s role in a 74-year scandal in which, a new official government report says, over 10,000 women were forced to work without pay at commercial laundries called Magdalene Laundries, operated by the Catholic Church for “crimes” as small as not paying a train ticket.

Wikipedia notes that the estimate of the number of women who were used as forced slave labor by the Catholic Church in Ireland alone goes as high as 30,000 over the entire time the Magdalene laundries were in operation.

The last Magdalene laundry closed in 1996.

Women were locked in, couldn’t leave Magdalene Laundries for months, sometimes years

The women were locked in and not permitted to leave. And if they tried to get away, the cops would catch them and bring them back. They were quite literally Catholic slave labor working for the government and even Guinness, which would pay the laundries for the women’s slave labor.

Half of the girls enslaved in these Catholic Church prisons were under the age of 23. The youngest entrant was 9 years old.

Singer Sinead O’Connor was perhaps the most famous Magdalene Laundry slave

Singer Sinead O’Connor was forced to work in a Magdalene Laundry in Dublin:

When I was a young girl, my mother — an abusive, less-than-perfect parent — encouraged me to shoplift. After being caught once too often, I spent 18 months in An Grianán Training Centre, an institution in Dublin for girls with behavioral problems, at the recommendation of a social worker. An Grianán was one of the now-infamous church-sponsored “Magdalene laundries,” which housed pregnant teenagers and uncooperative young women. We worked in the basement, washing priests’ clothes in sinks with cold water and bars of soap. We studied math and typing. We had limited contact with our families. We earned no wages. One of the nuns, at least, was kind to me and gave me my first guitar.

No apology from the Catholic Church

Absent from any of the media reports on the scandal that I could find was an apology from the Catholic Church which operated the Magdalene laundries and made handsome profits from contracts with government and hotels. Oh, found one. It seems the Catholic Church blew the women off. I know, you’re as surprised as I am:

Victims of the child sex abuse scandals that have rocked the Irish Catholic Church have received an apology and compensation, but no one has taken responsibility for what happened in the laundries. Cardinal Sean Brady, the most senior Catholic cleric in Ireland, met with Justice for Magdalenes in 2010. He said “by today’s standards much of what happened at that time is difficult to comprehend” but that it was a matter for the religious orders who ran the laundries to deal with. The religious orders have declined to meet the women.

The Irish Cardinal wasn’t interested in hearing from people who were hurt and abused — if not sexually, certainly physically and mentally, by the Catholic Church. And it’s not the Catholic Church’s fault. Where have we heard that story before?

The laundries were run by nuns, many of whom treated the women sent to work there as slaves:

Senator McAleese’s inquiry found that half of the girls and women put to work in the laundries were under the age of 23 and 40%, more than 4,000, spent more than a year incarcerated.

Fifteen percent spent more than five years in the laundries while the average stay was calculated at seven months.

The youngest death on record was 15, and the oldest 95, the report found.

The Irish state is also implicated in the scandal because the police would take women to the asylums after arresting them for trivial offenses and would return runaways.

The story of the Magdalene laundries shows what happens when an institution — in this case the church and the government — is considered beyond criticism. It probably isn’t a coincidence that the last of the laundries closed in 1996, shortly after the first wave of the Catholic pedophile priest scandals hit Ireland.

Let me reiterate that for a moment. The Catholic Church had slaves as late as 1996.

“It changed me as a person to authority, God forgive me I learned to hate people then”

Here are some of the testimonials of the women who served as forced Catholic slaves. You can find them in theofficial report:

“The only thing was I had appendicitis and asked [named nun] could I go to bed and she wouldn’t let me”.

Some, but not all women reported that their hair had been cut on entry to the laundry. Some described this as an upsetting and degrading experience.

“T’was the ultimate humiliation for you. It changed me as a person to authority, God forgive me I learned to hate people then”.

One woman said that in the Magdalene Laundry in which she was, “You could write once a month but the nun would read the letters”.

This is one is pure torture:

Another very common grievance of the women who shared their stories with the Committee – particularly those who had previously been in Industrial or Reformatory Schools – was that there was a complete lack of information about why they were there and when they would get out. None of these women were aware of the period of supervision which followed discharge from industrial or reformatory school.

Due to this lack of information and the fact that they had been placed in an institution among many older women, a large number of the women spoke of a very real fear that they would remain in the Magdalene Laundry for the rest of their lives. Even if they left the Laundries after a very short time, some women told the Committee that they were never able to fully free themselves
of this fear and uncertainty.

Victims reject Irish PM’s apology

The victims have rejected the Prime Minster’s “apology,” which does sound somewhat lame:

“To those residents who went into the Magdalene Laundries through a variety of ways, 26pc from state intervention or state involvement, I am sorry for those people that they lived in that kind of environment,” Mr Kenny said in parliament in Dublin today.

“I want to see that those women who are still with us, anywhere between 800 and 1000 at max, that we should see that the state provides for them with the very best of facilities and supports that they need in their lives.”

Did your defense lawyer write that one up for you?

Here’s Joni Mitchell singing about the Magdalene Laundries

Posted in Awareness, Your rights | Tagged | Leave a comment

A colourful person

Posted on 12/03/2013 by Paul

Posted in Awareness | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

COBOL will outlive us all

Posted on 09/03/2013 by Paul

This may sound odd but it probably is truth. I found this headline on “itworld.com“. Being a COBOL programmer myself I wanted to know more of course:

In the early 1980s, I was told that COBOL was going away and that I should quickly move toward other programming languages. Well, thirty years later, COBOL is alive and well and living in large companies everywhere.

IDE-Cobol_3

Yes, most of the smaller COBOL programs written in the 1970s, 1980s, and even 1990s have been replaced with newer systems and newer technologies. However, the big mission critical systems written long ago in COBOL and modified and enhanced for the past thirty to forty years are still driving very large, very prestigious companies around the country and around the world. These companies include banks, insurance companies, manufacturing companies, retail chains, health care organizations, and every other type of company you can imagine.

As you may expect, over the years, many of these companies tried to replace these old COBOL systems. Many of these initiatives failed because the systems were (and still are) too big, too complex, too integrated into critical business processes, and working too well to replace.

There is an old joke “What’s the difference between computer hardware and computer software?” The answer is “If you use hardware long enough it breaks. If you use software long enough it works.”

So, this being a column about IT careers, why am I talking about COBOL, after all, it’s virtually never taught in college level Computer Science programs, it’s not a new hot technology that everyone wants to learn, it’s not even a sexy new technology that helps you deploy software applications onto mobile devices.

The reason that I’m telling you about COBOL is that I predict that over the next few years, new COBOL programmers are going to be in high demand and very possibly paid a premium for their efforts. Generally speaking, the COBOL programming skill set resides in baby boomers that have been programming in COBOL their entire career. The issue is that these baby boomers have begun retiring in enormous numbers. Additionally, new college recruits have neither the skill set nor the interest in replacing them. The problem for companies employing these COBOL programmers is that if the software stops, so does the company.

Please read more, if this interests you, at ”itworld.com“.

Posted in Tech | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Could a computer save lost languages of the ancient world?

Posted on 06/03/2013 by Paul

Could a computer save languages from extinction?
(found on ScienceRecorder)

Could a computer save lost languages of the ancient world?

Until now, saving languages from extinction largely depended on whether computer scientists could create algorithms able to capture samples before individuals speaking the language died off.

Now, it seems living speakers of ancient languages may not even be a requirement.

According to a new report, a Canadian scientist suspects that advanced computer programs could be used to recreate dead languages. The research team, comprised of Alexandre Bouchard-Cote at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and his co-workers at the University of California Berkeley, posits that dead languages could be reconstructed by feeding modern successors into computer programs configured to build extinct languages word by word.

Bouchard-Cote says a machine-learning algorithm could identify changes before they actually occur, a technological advancement that could be reversed-engineered to recreate dead languages. Citing an example of sound shifting, researchers said the well known Canadian Shift, where many Canadians now say “aboot” instead of “about,” is just one example that shows promising signs.

In a proof of concept, researchers reconstructed a set of languages from a database of more than 142,000 words that form 637 Austronesian languages — many of which are spoken in Southeast Asia, the Pacific, and regions in Asia. The program was able to accurately suggest how certain languages sounded and also identified which sounds were most likely to change.

The computer program could provide scientists around the world with potent tool for staving off the extinction of a number of languages, many of which are already on the decline. For centuries scientists have had to depend on deciphering lost languages by hand, relying on bits of parchment and other historical artifacts.

The language program is widely seen as a major advancement for language technologies in general. Researchers involved in the project say it is a compelling example of how big data and machine learning are beginning to make a significant impact on all facets of knowledge. That said, it is not the first time the idea of using computers to halt the decline of languages has come about. In mid-2012, Google announced its intention to collaborate with scholars, researchers, and language communities, through an initiative called the Endangered Languages Project. Through the project, people can learn about the Earth’s endangered languages follow the documentation being created to preserve them.

The paper is published in the most recent edition of the  journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Posted in Environment | Tagged , | Leave a comment

When you spent 29 years in prison.

Posted on 03/03/2013 by Paul

I read a story about a man in the USA, about a Mr. Randolph Arledge who in 1984 was convicted to 99 years in prison for the aledged murder of a woman in Texas. After 29 years new DNA tests proved that he was innocent and he was released from prison. He is now 58 years old, meaning that he spent half his life in prison. Innocent. That is serious, very serious.

prisonhands

When I read that, I also thought: what can such a man do after being released? He’s been out of the loop of humanity most of the time. Is his driver’s licence still valid? He needs to get a new house and get settled again – at that age. He’s probably going to have a major problem finding a job as his skills have most certainly gone to waste over the last 3 decades where computers have taken a flight and society has evolved in a massive way (which I think isn’t always for the best, but that aside).

It does seem that he won’t have many financial worries for now, a released prisoner will receive up to $80,000 (€60,000) per year that (s)he was held wrongly. He’ll need that though, to get that what’s left of his life back on track.

Posted in Awareness | Tagged | Leave a comment