Friday, 7 June 2013

How Social Media Is Changing Disaster Response

When Hurricane Katrina ravaged the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, Facebook was the new kid on the block. There was no Twitter for news updates, and the iPhone was not yet on the scene.
By the time Hurricane Sandy slammed the eastern seaboard last year, social media had become an integral part of disaster response, filling the void in areas where cell phone service was lost while millions of Americans looked to resources including Twitter and Facebook to keep informed, locate loved ones, notify authorities and express support. Gone are the days of one-way communication where only official sources provide bulletins on disaster news.
Researchers have now started publishing data on the use of social media in disasters, and lawmakers and security experts have begun to assess how emergency management can best adapt. “The convergence of social networks and mobile has thrown the old response playbook out the window,” Michael Beckerman, president and CEO of the Internet Association, told the House Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Communications on June 4.
The new playbook will not do away with the emergency broadcast system and other government efforts. Rather, it will incorporate new data from researchers, federal agencies and nonprofits that have begun to reveal the exact penetration of social media in disasters.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) wrote in its 2013 National Preparedness report last week that during and immediately following Hurricane Sandy, “users sent more than 20 million Sandy-related Twitter posts, or “tweets,” despite the loss of cell phone service during the peak of the storm.” New Jersey’s largest utility company, PSE&G, said at the subcommittee hearing that during Sandy they staffed up their Twitter feeds and used them to send word about the daily locations of their giant tents and generators. “At one point during the storm, we sent so many tweets to alert customers, we exceeded the [number] of tweets allowed per day,” PSE&G’S Jorge Cardenas, vice president of asset management and centralized services, told the subcommittee.
For more visit = Social Media Disaster

Saudi Silence on Deadly MERS Virus Outbreak Frustrates World Health Experts

Over the next few weeks officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) face a tough and politically charged call. The Muslim month of fasting, Ramadan, begins July 9 and could draw as many as two million people from around the globe to the holy sites of Saudi Arabia in a pilgrimage called umrah. But a new disease, called Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, or MERS, could threaten them.
Infectious disease control at mass gatherings is always a challenge, but this year even more so. Saudi Arabia is currently waging battle with MERS, yet it has released only the barest of details that scientists or public health officials could use to try to prevent its spread within Saudi Arabia or around the globe. In early May Saudi officials startled the world by announcing 13 new cases over the course of a few days. Since the start of May there have been 38 new cases worldwide—31 of them in Saudi Arabia—and 20 of the victims have died. With virtually no clues to draw on about where the virus lives in nature and how people contract it, WHO is trying to figure out what guidance to give those pilgrims, and the countries they will return to, about how to avoid infection and the international dissemination of a devastating new illness.
MERS triggers severe pneumonia and kidney failure in some cases. It is a cousin of SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, which broke out in mainland China in late 2002, spread from there to Hong Kong in 2003, and was then transported in the lungs of international travelers to Singapore, Hanoi, Toronto and other cities. Health officials do not want to pull out the big hammers used during the SARS outbreak, such as WHO travel advisories that urged the world’s citizens to avoid infected hubs such as Hong Kong and Toronto. On the other hand, no one wants umrah and the even largerhajj pilgrimage that will follow in October to trigger a pandemic.
The new virus was first isolated in June 2012. But its existence came to the world’s attention only weeks before last October’s hajj, when an Egyptian infectious diseases specialist who had been working in Saudi Arabia’s second largest city, Jeddah, reported that he had treated a man who died from an infection caused by a new coronavirus. Whether MERS has or can gain the capacity for sustained person-to-person spread is unknown. Kamran Khan, an infectious diseases physician who researches global flight patterns as a means of predicting disease spread, has had a worried eye on the Muslim religious calendar for some time. “We still don't have a good idea where this (virus) is coming from, so taking measures to mitigate risks are constrained,” says Khan, who works at the Saint Michael’s Hospital Keenan Research Center in Toronto
For more info visite = Deadly Virus

New Telescope Strategy Could Resolve Dark Matter Mystery

An intriguing hint of a certain type of gamma-ray light at the center of the Milky Way might be a product of elusive dark matter — or it might not be. For the past several years, scientists have debated whether the light is really there, and what it means. Now, researchers are petitioning the management team of NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, the observatory that saw the light, to change its observing strategy to determine once and for all whether the signal really exists.
However, even if there are extra gamma-ray photons coming from the center of the galaxy, scientists are a ways from knowing whether the photons were made by dark matter.
Theories suggest some mysterious form of matter that can't be seen or touched is rife throughout the universe, making its presence known only through its gravitational pull. The leading theory behind this dark matter posits that it's made of a new kind of fundamental particle called a WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle). [Graphic: Dark Matter Explained]
For more visit = Telescope
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Thursday, 6 June 2013

Begy Gomez

Becky G was born on March 2, 1997, in the city of Inglewood in southern California to Mexican parents. She also has two younger brothers named Frankie and Alex, and had two bestfriends (Shinaed Simpson and Jasmyn Fisher-Ryner). In her remix cover of the Jennifer Lopez hit "Jenny From the Block", aptly titled "becky From the Block", becky raps about much of her life story. Becky attended Oaks Elementary, which was located close to the Inglewood Cemetery. Becky G states her family had a tough life growing up. They lived in her Grandfather's garage.
Bellow Are the top songs of Begy g
1. Block it-Click To Download
2. Cody Simpson (wapos.ru) - Wish You Were Here (ft. Becky G)Click to download


3. Becky G feat. Will.I.Am - Problem = Click to download
4. Cher Lloyd - Oath (Feat. Becky G) = Click to download
5. Kesha ft Juicy J Wiz Khalifa and Becky G - Die Young= Click to download
6. Cody Simpson (wapos.ru) - Wish You Were Here (ft. Becky G)= Click to download

this is the list of the best songs of begy g

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Europe Reforms Its Fisheries

The breakthrough came at around 3 a.m. on 30 May in Brussels,
after a marathon negotiating session: the European Union (EU) finally agreed to end overfishing in its troubled waters.
Fisheries scientists say that the deal, which is expected to be approved before the end of the year, could allow fish stocks to recover to their previous bountiful levels, after being driven down by years of overfishing. But short-term restrictions are likely to bring unemployment to some fishermen.
“There is bound to be some short-termpain,” says Michel Kaiser, who studies fisheries at Bangor University, UK. “This reform has come about because there was a groundswell of realization that what we had before couldn’t go on.”
The deal places scientific advice at center-stage in determining catch limits, as the EU commits to fishing at healthy levels by 2015 “where possible” and by 2020 otherwise. New rules will also be phased in to reduce ecologically damaging ‘discards’ — the practice of throwing fish caught in the pursuit of other species back into the sea, with the vast majority dying in the process.
For years, scientists have warned that more fish were being caught than was sustainable, owing to a flawed ‘Common Fisheries Policy’ (CFP), which governs commercial fishing in European waters. Government ministers set higher catch limits for cod, haddock and some other species than scientists considered wise (see ‘A waning haul’). The latest agreement, which has been several years in the making, is backed by the three arms of European government: the commission, parliament and council. Parliament had been pushing for a thorough reform of the CFP to put catches in line with what science says is sustainable, whereas the council — made up of ministers from EU member states — had been less amenable to radical change.
Environmentalists are generally pleased with the deal’s main thrust: a commitment to fishing at maximum sustainable yield (MSY), the largest catch of a particular species that can be taken indefinitely without harming the main population. Scientists have two measures for MSY, obtained using mathematical models created with data from catches by commercial and research vessels: the overall biomass of a species needed to maintain MSY (BMSY) and the annual amount of fish taken from that species that will still allow the species to reach BMSY (FMSY). Fishing at a higher level than FMSYmeans the fishing is unsustainable in the long term. Environmentalists prefer BMSY toFMSY as a target, because reaching the former would show that a stock has actually recovered, whereas fishing in line with the latter indicates that a stock is on the road to recovery.
Visite original site =Fisheries

Temporal Cloak Erases Data from History

If you’ve ever wanted to edit an event from your history, then help may soon be at hand. Electrical engineers have used lasers to create a cloak that can hide communications in a 'time hole', so that it seems as if they were never sent. The method, published today in Nature, is the first that can cloak data streams sent at the rapid rates typically seen in telecommunications systems. It opens the door to ultra-secure transmission schemes, and may also provide a way to better shield information from noise corruption. 
In 2010, Martin McCall, an optical physicist at Imperial College London, and his colleagues proposed that it may be possible to create temporal cloaks that carve out short windows in time during which operations can be carried out unnoticed. Their work built on the principles behind invisibility cloaks, which hide objects in space by channeling light rays around them. When viewed from a distance, the light appears to have teaveled along a straight line, without having hit any intervening object.
Similarly, McCall and colleagues suggested that by pulling light waves apart in time, and then compressing them back together, it should be possible to create 'time pockets' in which to cloak events. In theory, this could enable “a whole new level of security” for data transmission along optical fibers, says Joseph Lukens, an electrical engineer at Purdue University in Indiana, and lead author of the latest study. “It doesn't just prevent eavesdroppers from reading your data — they wouldn’t even know there was any data there to hack.”
Last year, a team led by Alexander Gaeta, an optical physicist at Cornell University in laser pulses. But the time windows opened up too rarely to be able to hide data coming in at telecommunication rates. 
Ithaca, New York, built the first working temporal cloak by manipulating
Splitting light
To speed up the cloaking rate, Lukens and his colleagues exploited a wave phenomenon that was first discovered by British inventor Henry Fox Talbot in 1836. When a light wave passes through a series of parallel slits called a diffraction grating, it splits apart. The rays emanating from the slits combine on the other side to create an intricate interference pattern of peaks and troughs. Talbot discovered that this pattern repeats at regular intervals, creating what is now known as a Talbot carpet. There is also a temporal version of this effect in which you manipulate light over time to generate regular periods with zero light intensity, says Lukens. Data can be then be hidden in these holes in time.  
Lukens' team created its Talbot carpet in time by passing laser light through a 'phase modulator', a waveguide that also had an oscillating electrical voltage applied to it. As the voltage varied, the speed at which the light teaveled through the waveguide was altered, splitting the light into its constituent frequencies and knocking these out of step. As predicted, at regular time intervals, the separate frequencies recombined destructively to generate time holes. Lukens’ team then used a second round of phase modulation to compress the energy further, expanding the duration of the time windows to 36 picoseconds (or 36 trillionths of a second). 
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