Archive for the ‘To’ Category
What I can guarantee is that I wouldn’t spend a nanosecond of my vacation worrying about any of these 10 things. (You can make your own nominations in the TierneyLab blog.)
1. Killer hot dogs. What is it about frankfurters? There was the nitrite scare. Then the grilling-creates-carcinogens alarm. And then, when those menaces ebbed, the weenie warriors fell back on that old reliable villain: saturated fat.
But now even saturated fat isn’t looking so bad, thanks to a rigorous experiment in Israel reported this month. The people on a low-carb, unrestricted-calorie diet consumed more saturated fat than another group forced to cut back on both fat and calories, but those fatophiles lost more weight and ended up with a better cholesterol profile. And this was just the latest in a series of studies contradicting the medical establishment’s predictions about saturated fat.
If you must worry, focus on the carbs in the bun. But when it comes to the fatty frank — or the fatty anything else on vacation — I’d relax.
2. Your car’s planet-destroying A/C. No matter how guilty you feel about your carbon footprint, you don’t have to swelter on the highway to the beach. After doing tests at 65 miles per hour, the mileage experts at edmunds.com report that the aerodynamic drag from opening the windows cancels out any fuel savings from turning off the air-conditioner.
3. Forbidden fruits from afar. Do you dare to eat a kiwi? Sure, because more “food miles” do not equal more greenhouse emissions. Food from other countries is often produced and shipped much more efficiently than domestic food, particularly if the local producers are hauling their wares around in small trucks. One study showed that apples shipped from New Zealand to Britain had a smaller carbon footprint than apples grown and sold in Britain.
4. Carcinogenic cellphones. Some prominent brain surgeons made news on Larry King’s show this year with their fears of cellphones, thereby establishing once and for all that epidemiology is not brain surgery — it’s more complicated.
As my colleague Tara Parker-Pope has noted, there is no known biological mechanism for the phones’ non-ionizing radiation to cause cancer, and epidemiological studies have failed to find consistent links between cancer and cellphones.
It’s always possible today’s worried doctors will be vindicated, but I’d bet they’ll be remembered more like the promoters of the old cancer-from-power-lines menace — or like James Thurber’s grandmother, who covered up her wall outlets to stop electricity from leaking.
Driving while talking on a phone is a definite risk, but you’re better off worrying about other cars rather than cancer.
5. Evil plastic bags. Take it from the Environmental Protection Agency : paper bags are not better for the environment than plastic bags. If anything, the evidence from life-cycle analyses favors plastic bags. They require much less energy — and greenhouse emissions — to manufacture, ship and recycle. They generate less air and water pollution. And they take up much less space in landfills.
6. Toxic plastic bottles. For years panels of experts repeatedly approved the use of bisphenol-a, or BPA, which is used in polycarbonate bottles and many other plastic products. Yes, it could be harmful if given in huge doses to rodents, but so can the natural chemicals in countless foods we eat every day. Dose makes the poison.
But this year, after a campaign by a few researchers and activists, one federal panel expressed some concern about BPA in baby bottles. Panic ensued. Even though there was zero evidence of harm to humans, Wal-Mart pulled BPA-containing products from its shelves, and politicians began talking about BPA bans. Some experts fear product recalls that could make this the most expensive health scare in history.
Nalgene has already announced that it will take BPA out of its wonderfully sturdy water bottles. Given the publicity, the company probably had no choice. But my old blue-capped Nalgene bottle, the one with BPA that survived glaciers, jungles and deserts, is still sitting right next to me, filled with drinking water. If they ever try recalling it, they’ll have to pry it from my cold dead fingers.
7. Deadly sharks. Throughout the world last year, there was a grand total of one fatal shark attack (in the South Pacific), according to the International Shark Attack File at the University of Florida.
8. The Arctic’s missing ice. The meltdown in the Arctic last summer was bad enough, but this spring there was worse news. A majority of experts expected even more melting this year, and some scientists created a media sensation by predicting that even the North Pole would be ice-free by the end of summer.
So far, though, there’s more ice than at this time last summer, and most experts are no longer expecting a new record. You can still fret about long-term trends in the Arctic, but you can set aside one worry: This summer it looks as if Santa can still have his drinks on the rocks.
9. The universe’s missing mass. Even if the fate of the universe — steady expansion or cataclysmic collapse — depends on the amount of dark matter that is out there somewhere, you can rest assured that no one blames you for losing it. And most experts doubt this collapse will occur during your vacation.
10. Unmarked wormholes. Could your vacation be interrupted by a sudden plunge into a wormhole? From my limited analysis of space-time theory and the movie “Jumper,” I would have to say that the possibility cannot be eliminated. I would also concede that if the wormhole led to an alternate universe, there’s a good chance your luggage would be lost in transit.
In this May 22, 2008 photo, singer Madonna arrives for the 2008 amfAR Cinema Against AIDS benefit in Mougins, southern France. Madonna will introduce her documentary “I Am Because We Are” before its screening Saturday night at the Traverse City Film Festival in Traverse City, Mich., founded by her pal Michael Moore. The movie deals with the orphans of Malawi, the African nation where she and husband Guy Ritchie adopted a son. (AP Photo/Matt Sayles)
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — She might be known worldwide as the Material Girl, but there’s more than a little of the small-town Michigan girl left in Madonna.
The pop superstar arrived in this northern Michigan resort town Saturday to introduce her documentary, “I Am Because We Are,” a highlight of the Traverse City Film Festival. The event was co-founded by filmmaker, author and fellow Michigan native Michael Moore.
Hundreds of fans cheered from behind barricades as Madonna, wearing a black dress, high heels and sunglasses, stepped out of a black sport utility vehicle that pulled up in front of the State Theatre. She hugged a waiting Moore, who sported an orange baseball cap, and posed for photos with him.
Madonna and Moore shared the stage at the theater before a screening of the movie, which deals with the orphans of Malawi, the African nation where she and husband Guy Ritchie adopted a son.
“It’s great bringing my movie to a place that I feel familiar,” Madonna told the audience. “Not like the Cannes Film Festival, where nobody’s speaking English, or the Tribeca Film Festival, where no one sits down.
“There’s something poetic about coming back to the place where I used to come for holidays — camping trips with my dad and stepmother and my very large family,” said the 49-year-old singer, born to the southeast in Bay City and raised in the Detroit suburb of Rochester Hills.
Madonna was accompanied by her 11-year-old daughter, Lourdes, and the film’s director, Nathan Rissman. Ritchie was not present.
Moore, who won an Oscar for his 2002 documentary “Bowling for Columbine,” said he was humbled to be able to call Madonna a friend.
“She has such an incredible heart and such a generous spirit,” he said. “She does so much out of the glare of the lights to make the world a better place.”
Madonna had praise of her own for Moore, 54, a Flint-area native who has a home near Traverse City.
“There aren’t a lot of role models for us in the world, or people we can look up to,” she said. “People who are not afraid to stick their neck out, people who are not afraid to stand up for things and be unpopular, to go against the grain, think outside the box.
“And we need, and I need, Michael Moore in my life.”
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Millionaire socialite Paris Hilton has jumped into the U.S. election campaign, calling Republican candidate John McCain a “wrinkly white-haired guy” and offering her own energy policy.
The blonde Hilton, dressed in a leopard print swim suit and gold pumps, jokingly declared her own candidacy in a video posted on the website Funny or Die, saying: “I want America to know that I’m, like, totally ready to lead.”
She was responding to a television ad by McCain, 71, that used her image to attack Democratic rival Barack Obama.
The 27-year-old socialite said McCain’s use of her in the ad, which sought to undermine Obama by likening his popularity to her celebrity, had effectively put her in the race for the top U.S. office.
Pretending to take time off from reading a travel magazine as she leaned back on a lounge chair, Hilton insinuated herself into the hot issue between Obama and McCain — how to solve the U.S. energy crisis.
“We can do limited offshore drilling with strict environmental oversight while creating tax incentives to get Detroit making hybrid and electric cars,” Hilton simpered, drawing on suggestions from both candidates.
Hilton, a tabloid favorite who gained fame from a notorious home-made sex tape, offered to paint the White House pink and threw down the gauntlet to McCain and Obama.
“I’ll see you at the debates, bitches,” she said. Continued…
It looks like a team of UC Berkeley researchers led by mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang (pictured) have found a way to squeeze light into tighter spaces than ever though possible, which they say could lead to breakthroughs in the fields of optical communications, miniature lasers, and optical computers.
The key to this new technique, it seems, is the use of a “hybrid” optical fiber consisting of a very thin semiconductor wire placed close to a smooth sheet of silver, which effectively acts as a capacitor that traps the light waves in the gap between the wire and the metal sheet and lets it slip though spaces as tiny as 10 nanometers (or more than 100 times thinner than current optical fibers).
That’s apparently as opposed to previous attempts that relied on surface plasmonics, in which light binds to electrons and allows it to travel along the surface of metal, which only proved effective over short distances.
While all of this is still in the theoretical stage, the researchers seem to think they’re on to something big, with research associate Rupert Olten saying that this new development “means we can potentially do some things we have never done before.
Since a secret emergency meeting of computer security experts at Microsoft’s headquarters in March, Dan Kaminsky has been urging companies around the world to fix a potentially dangerous flaw in the basic plumbing of the Internet.
Dan Kaminsky, a Web security specialist, showing a list of servers and whether they are patched.
While Internet service providers are racing to fix the problem, which makes it possible for criminals to divert users to fake Web sites where personal and financial information can be stolen, Mr. Kaminsky worries that they have not moved quickly enough.
By his estimate, roughly 41 percent of the Internet is still vulnerable. Now Mr. Kaminsky, a technical consultant who first discovered the problem, has been ramping up the pressure on companies and organizations to make the necessary software changes before criminal hackers take advantage of the flaw.
Next week, he will take another step by publicly laying out the details of the flaw at a security conference in Las Vegas. That should force computer network administrators to fix millions of affected systems.
But his explanation of the flaw will also make it easier for criminals to exploit it, and steal passwords and other personal information.
Mr. Kaminsky walks a fine line between protecting millions of computer users and eroding consumer confidence in Internet banking and shopping. But he is among those experts who think that full disclosure of security threats can push network administrators to take action. “We need to have disaster planning, and we need to worry,” he said.
The flaw that Mr. Kaminsky discovered is in the Domain Name System, a kind of automated phone book that converts human-friendly addresses like google.com into machine-friendly numeric counterparts.
The potential consequences of the flaw are significant. It could allow a criminal to redirect Web traffic secretly, so that a person typing a bank’s actual Web address would be sent to an impostor site set up to steal the user’s name and password. The user might have no clue about the misdirection, and unconfirmed reports in the Web community indicate that attempted attacks are already under way.
The problem is analogous to the risk of phoning directory assistance at, for example, AT&T, asking for the number for Bank of America and being given an illicit number at which an operator masquerading as a bank employee asks for your account number and password.
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Three tech giants — Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Yahoo — said on Tuesday they are teaming up on a research project to help turn Web services into reliable, everyday utilities.
The companies are joining forces with academic researchers in Asia, Europe and the United States to create an experimental network that lets researchers test “cloud-computing” projects — Web-wide services that can reach billions of users at once.
Their goal is to promote open collaboration among industry, academic and government researchers by removing financial and logistical barriers to working on hugely computer-intensive, Internet-wide projects.
Founding members of the consortium said they aim to create a level playing field for individual researchers and organizations of all sizes to conduct research on software, network management and the hardware needed to deliver Web-wide services as billions of computer and phone users come online.
“No one institution or company is going to figure this out,” said Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of Yahoo Research who is also a consulting professor of computer science at nearby Stanford University.
Cloud computing has become the industry’s biggest buzzword. It is a catch-all term to describe how Internet-connected hardware and software once delivered as discreet products can be managed as Web-based, utility-like services.
“Potentially the entire planet will come to rely on this, like electricity,” Raghavan said, referring to the push to make everything from daily communications to shopping to entertainment into always-available, on-demand Web services.
“We are all trying to move from the horse driving the wagon to a million ants driving the wagon,” Raghavan said of the need to let computers manage millions of small jobs, adding that the available capacity on the Web would vary widely. “The challenge can be a billion ants one day and a million ants the next.” Continued…
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The 31 Places To Go This Summer
Posted on: May 31, 2008
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The 31 Places To Go This Summer
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The 31 Places To Go This Summer
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Traveling this summer may sound like a cruel joke: airlines are getting worse, gas prices are creeping toward $5 a gallon and the euro continues to go up, up, up. It’s almost enough to make you stay home. Almost. Readers’ CommentsWhat are your summer travel plans?Share Your Thoughts » With a little creativity and perhaps a willingness to stay closer to home, a great summer vacation is still within reach. Here are 31 options, from river rafting in eastern Oregon to biking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
The 31 Places To Go This Summer
Posted on: May 31, 2008
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The 31 Places To Go This Summer
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The 31 Places To Go This Summer
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Traveling this summer may sound like a cruel joke: airlines are getting worse, gas prices are creeping toward $5 a gallon and the euro continues to go up, up, up. It’s almost enough to make you stay home. Almost. Readers’ CommentsWhat are your summer travel plans?Share Your Thoughts » With a little creativity and perhaps a willingness to stay closer to home, a great summer vacation is still within reach. Here are 31 options, from river rafting in eastern Oregon to biking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
- In: Internet | make | safe | technology | The | To | working
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As the need for security on the internet continues to grow, one of the the guardians of the networked world lays claim to an enviable record.
In its 13 years in business, VeriSign says it has maintained a “100% up time” service in operating the infrastructure that controls the internet.
The firm has a crucial role in the day-to-day operation of the internet – it manages two of the world’s 13 root servers, which direct global internet traffic; it routes every web address ending in .com or .net; and it issues secure digital certificates to protect more than 900,000 web servers on the net.
In a rare insight into just how VeriSign works, the company invited the BBC into one of the main data centres where security is at the heart of everything.
The building itself is one of hundreds that dot Silicon Valley’s landscape; bland and unremarkable on the outside.
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 This is our most secure room. VeriSign has more than 4,000 employees worldwide and there are only six people in the whole company who have access to this space  Ralph Claar, Verisign, on the inner sanctum
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There is no fancy corporate sign on the manicured strip of lawn to hint that it is owned or operated by VeriSign. Steps up to the entrance were deliberately built to ensure nobody would try to ram the building. Cameras and motion detectors are everywhere to be seen. The reflecting windows on the outside are fake.
Inside is altogether more of what you would expect.
At each stage, at least two forms of authentication are required to enter various parts of the building, including door passes and fingerprint or handprint scanners.
“We are a regulated industry with the biggest banks in the world as our customers, so everything we do here has to be secure,” says Mike Kirwan, vice president of production services.
- In: $1 trillion | ' | Business | Food | imports | To | top
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Wheat prices have risen sharply in recent months
Record wheat production is expected in 2008, the FAO said.
The amount of money being spent globally on importing food is set to top $1 trillion (£528bn) in 2008, an influential report estimates.
Soaring food prices are the cause of the huge bill – likely to be up 26% on the 2007 total – said the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
The most economically vulnerable countries will bear the biggest burden, the report said, with costs rising 40%.
But the FAO said there were signs that some food prices were starting to fall.
However, it said prices were “unlikely” to return to the low levels of previous years – largely because of the higher costs associated with food production, primarily fuel.
The need to replenish stocks and the expected greater consumption – or utilisation – of crops, meant that demand would stay high, the report added.
“The most influential development in pushing up international prices of basic food has been the low level of exportable supplies resulting from utilization outstripping production for several crops in a number of major exporting countries.”
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