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LED-based visible light communication products will be commercialized during the first quarter of 2014 by Edinburgh, Scotland-based pureLiFi. The company, formerly known as pureVLC, made a beta release of its first product, the Li-1st, during 2013's third quarter and said it will "continue to design, develop and deliver Li-Fi components to the OEM market in 2014, with more Li-1st units being shipped to selected industry customers in Q1."
The company's product roadmap is geared toward speeding up sales and includes successive products that the company said will provide full networking capabilities while accelerating miniaturization. PureLiFi is spinout from the University of Edinburgh, which remains a partner and recently launched the Li-Fi research and development center. Harald Haas, who is behind the center and also serves as chief science officer of pureLiFi, which he cofounded, predicted that 2014 "will see even greater leaps forward in Li-Fi research and the Li-Fi industry." For more, see this pureLiFi release.
Avaya engineers are putting the final touches on a network capable of handling up to 54Tbps of traffic when the Winter Olympics opens on Feb. 7 in the Russian city of Sochi.
Sochi itself is a sprawling city of 350,000 people located on the Black Sea. Archeologists have found human remains in the area that date back tens of thousands of years. Today, Sochi’s subtropical climate makes it a popular Russian tourist spot.
The two locations where the Olympics will take place -- the Olympic village in Sochi and a tight cluster of Alpine venues in the nearby Krasnaya Polyana Mountains -- are completely new construction, so this project represents a greenfield environment for Avaya.
In addition to investing in a telecom infrastructure, Russia is spending billions of dollars to upgrade Sochi’s electric power grid, its transportation system and even its sewage treatment facilities.
“The whole town is nothing but a constantly changing, $50 billion construction site; for instance we’ve seen the road outside our hotel be torn up at least four times. As for modern IT infrastructure? There was none to speak of. We have really had to start from scratch, right down to the laying of conduit before we could even begin installing fiber and cabling,’’ says Dean Frohwerk, Avaya’s chief network architect.
That’s quite a contrast from 2010, when Frohwerk and his team provided telecom and networking services for the games in Vancouver.
And this time around, the demands for bandwidth and connectivity dwarf anything that Avaya delivered in Vancouver, where the network was capable of handling only 4Tbps.
The Sochi network will serve 30,000 athletes, administrators and staff, media, IOC officials, and volunteers with data, voice, video, and full Internet access through the Games sites.
Adding to the challenge, “We expect these people to be carrying and using multiple wireless devices,” says Frohwerk. “In Vancouver, we only had to provision one device per user. This means that we really have to have the capability to support up to 120,000 users on the Sochi Wi-Fi network, without issues or interruptions.”
Plus, Avaya has to deliver 30 IPTV dedicated HD Olympic channels via its telecom backbone, and has to make these channels available to Olympic family users over the converged network. (IPTV support is an Olympic first on the network, eliminating the need for a separate CATV HFC network.)
Click headline to read more--
The head of the UK's Department for Work and Pensions' welfare reform project, Universal Credit, was apparently explaining why the project was switching to open source technologies, when he was asked why they didn't do that originally, when the project launched two and a half years ago. His response? "such things weren’t available as they are today."
While there may be more open source available today, you'd have to have tried really hard to avoid learning about what was available just two and a half years ago. Oh, and this new open source project comes after they had to write off £40.1 million worth of IT assets, covering some of the original infrastructure investment, which they say "was of good quality" but "didn't reflect the needs of the project anymore because the specifications had changed so much."
So, to get this straight: you have a government welfare project, spending tens of millions of pounds on a proprietary system that was built for a different purpose than what they needed, and it was so inflexible that they have to scrap the whole thing and now start all over again.
At least they're using open source technology this time, but it really sounds like these guys are somewhat technologically clueless and got taken for a ride by some tech vendors who saw easy money the first time around.
Hopefully they're not using the same guys for this open source project.
More than 15 years ago, an optic-fibre cable was laid from Sydney to Melbourne. It went through public and private land, up hill and down dale at a time when ordinary users and businesses were only starting to understand the potential of the great, rambling beast known as the internet.
When it came to our area, a community-minded farming family refused to let the cable be laid through their farm land unless a connection was made to our local town.
For years, the cable lay idle and its ownership changed as local business, council and community groups tried to figure out a way to use it without pouring in great chunks of capital not available to a country town. In the meantime, a young tree-changer family arrived, attracted by a local historic building, the work of TG Barnes, an enterprising businessman who was shot dead by the notorious bushranger Johnny Gilbert in 1863.
Stephen and Wendy Byrne set up a cafe business in their Barnes building and threw themselves into local community development sector, volunteering their time and skills. An interactive kiosk providing tourism information was installed in their Barnes Store.
Now Byrne has put together a deal with a local investor and technical expert Geoff Peach of TUPS Company to provide wireless to Harden Murrumburrah. He is offering speeds of 100 megabits per second (Mbps) download and upload through their South West Wireless company. The town centre will have free wireless for locals and visitors, access to Quickflix movies, free audio and video conferencing. From there plans start at $19.95.
In contrast, the national broadband network, which is not coming to our town any time soon, is offering us 12Mbps download speed and 1Mbps upload speed. Our small community can only ever hope to get fixed wireless under either Labor or the Coalition.
The guts of the technology that will provide this information revolution is contained in three 20ft shipping containers, at a set-up cost of $500,000. TUPS has already set up a similar network in Gunnedah. If our town service works as it does in Gunnedah – it will be switched on before Christmas – it raises questions about the very nature of the NBN.
Click headline to read more--
A chance to help wild oysters grab a hold along the damaged areas of the eastern coast of Massachusetts is available through a fundraising effort at Indiegogo.com.
The "Born To Be Wild: Oysters Today for a Better Tomorrow" program, part of the Green Harbors Project at the University of Massachusetts School for the Environment in Boston, is attempting to raise $100,000 by Dec. 31 to pay for establishing oyster reefs and floating marshes in urban areas where natural salt marshes are unable to take root.
One of the Green Harbors Project in 2012 was the seeding of 4 million wild oysters in Wellfleet Harbor, part of a 2-acre oyster bed restoration project at Duck Creek led by Green Harbors Project Director Anamarija Frankic.
Another project on Nantucket is a hands-on college education program called LivingLabs.
Oysters can help restore coves and harbors to clean, natural and healthy states, and oyster reefs can fortify shorelines and help protect property from storms and erosion.
Green Harbors Project integrates research, education and stewardship of harbors, coasts and coastal communities, involving professors, students, scientists and volunteers. For more information, visit http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/born-to-be-wild-oysters-today-for-a-better-tomorrow--
As part of President Obama’s executive order last week, which included directing the federal government to triple its use of renewable energy by 2020, Obama instructed agencies to incorporate “Green Button” data further into their energy management practices.
First unveiled in 2012, the Green Button Initiative is literally a green button on a utility’s website that allows consumers to download their energy consumption data in a format that’s easy to understand.
According to the Department of Energy, 48 utilities and electricity suppliers serving more than 59 million homes and businesses have committed to giving customers Green Button access, and over 100 millions Americans already have access to their Green Button energy data.
The Green Button website says that the data provided to customers can be used to save energy in a number of different ways. These include customizing heating and cooling settings, helping facilitate energy-efficiency retrofitting, verifying energy-efficiency investments, and optimizing cost-effectiveness of solar panels, to name a few.
This kind of information can be especially useful in managing large campuses or apartment complexes where energy demands differ across different spaces.
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Imagine powering your home with waste bi-products. You could essentially power you home with pee. Adult human being produces 1-2 liters of urine per day. 1 liter is enough to power a small generator for 6 hours. How do we know this? A 14 year old girl and her friends from Nigeria, Africa created a system that separates the hydrogen and oxygen in urine, purifies the hydrogen and uses it to power a generator.
The amount of electricity produced is not shown, but judging from the size of the generator it’s probably at least a few hundred Watts. That’s more than enough to power small electronics and LED lighting in your home.
Click headline to read more, view pix and watch video clip--
Independent coastal experts say the federal government used outdated wave methodology better fit for the Pacific coast when they drafted Marshfield’s new flood maps. As a result, they say, the government over-predicted flooding that would occur during a 100-year storm for much of the state.
At the request of U.S. Rep. William Keating, D-Bourne, two coastal scientists analyzed data and methods used by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in developing Marshfield’s new flood maps, which the town is currently challenging.
The new maps expand flood zones and drastically increase the water elevation in many communities, meaning higher insurance premiums for thousands of property owners. Others would be required to pay flood insurance for the first time.
John Ramsey, a coastal engineer from Applied Coastal Research Inc. in Mashpee, and Brian Howes, director of the Coastal Systems Program at UMass-Dartmouth’s School for Marine Science and Technology, found that FEMA used a mapping method fit for the Pacific coast, where the wave periods are much longer and the beaches are straighter, instead of developing a correct approach for New England.
Keating plans to present the findings, detailed in a technical memorandum, to FEMA in a letter requesting a delay of the implementation of the maps. He will be circulating the letter to other members of the state’s congressional delegation for support.
The weakness of the Pacific model, which was used for all of Massachusetts, is that it’s based only on empirical data, rather than site-specific physics, Ramsey said Monday.
“We don’t have a straight coastline, and the simplified method doesn’t take offshore islands and shoals into account,” he said. “It’s unreliable in areas where the shoreline changes quite a bit, and most areas in the state are that way.”
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Convergence Partners Investments Ltd., a South African private-equity company focused on technology, plans to invest part of its $250 million fund for telecommunications infrastructure in Nigeria and West Africa.
“The rapid deployment of infrastructure is required and the operator community is not going to be able to absorb that growth themselves,” Chief Executive Officer Brandon Doyle said in a Nov. 28 phone interview from Johannesburg. “Our preference is to build infrastructure that will serve operators on a wholesale basis, rather than compete with them.”
The fund expects to reach $250 million by the end of next year after raising $145 million at its start on Nov. 27, with investments from the International Finance Corporate, the European Investment Bank, the Dutch Development Bank, the Development Bank of Southern Africa and U.K.-owned CDC Group.
It plans to spend at least a third of the fund in West Africa, Doyle said, with the bigger slice of the regional investment going to Nigeria.
Convergence Partners holds a 12.5 percent stake in Seacom Ltd.’s project to develop an undersea telecommunications cable to link South Africa and East Africa with Europe and India, and has invested in Dimension Data, South Africa’s largest technology services provider.
Bandwidth capacity in the region has grown in the last four years with the addition of three international submarine fiber connections to the only one that existed before 2010. Nigeria, Africa’s biggest oil producer, saw its bandwidth increase about 26-fold to more than 9,000 gigabytes per second, according to data provided by the Communications Ministry. A lot of that remains stranded in the cities where the nodes landed due to a lack of infrastructure to distribute it.
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In a ground-breaking move, voters in Boulder, Colorado, approved an initiative to end their relationship with Xcel Energy, a utility with $10.7 billion in revenues, thus clearing the way for the city to form its own municipal utility that would lower rates and make greater use of renewable energy.
Opponents of the effort had themselves put the question on the ballot in order to block measures by the city council. They also tried through a second initiative to hamstring the city from issuing enough bonds to be able to afford the purchase of Xcel’s facilities.
During the fierce battle that attracted national attention, corporate executives and their allies argued that the city had neither the money nor the expertise to manage such a complex enterprise. Advocates for the municipal utility, including New Era Colorado Foundation, fought back with a crowd-funding campaign that raised more than three times their financial goal. In a landslide, two-thirds of voters supported the idea of bringing the utility under public control and then rejected the borrowing limits designed to kill the deal by a similar margin.
Though the utility industry has gone through a wave of consolidation over the last two decades, they are starting to show the strains of technological, economic, and political change. Municipal utilities are far more common than most people are aware, with more than 1000 already functioning in the United States, serving 50 million customers, a population greater than the size of Spain. Most of these entities are owned by cities, and controlled by panels of local citizens. Some are even cooperatives owned by their members.
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This newly-released report from National Geographic is nothing short of devastating, demonstrating how the ongoing Fukushima catastrophe is affecting that the food chain of the entire Pacific Basin, including the waters off the coast of California. This information is taken from both National Geographic and the National Academy of Sciences and it shares that, as of July 1st of 2012, 98% of the studied sea floor 145 miles off the coast of California was covered with dead and decomposing sea creatures. For those who think that 98% may be a normal study number, only a few months earlier, in March the same study found less than 1% of the sea floor covered with ‘detritus’. Several up-to-date video reports depict that squid are now washing ashore on Santa Cruz beaches and that a mysterious illness is causing starfish of the Pacific Northwest to simply fall apart. Here are extracts from the reports published recently in two academic journals: Click headline to read more and watch video clip--
A recently released paper by former chief NASA climatologist James Hansen and 17 other international climate scientists is getting some pickup in youth movement circles. The paper, published by peer reviewed journal PLoS ONE, goes well beyond what one would traditionally expect from a scientific paper, mainly because of its intergenerational framing of climate change:
“The possibility of such intergenerational injustice is not remote – it is at our doorstep now. We have a planetary climate crisis that requires urgent change to our energy and carbon pathway to avoid dangerous consequences for young people and other life on earth.”
Hansen et al. go on to state that despite the increasing body of evidence stating that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, governments around the world continue to burn fossil fuels. Further fossil fuel extraction has and will impact us all, but it will inflict the greatest damage on my generation and those that follow. Hansen’s paper is compelling because it discusses an intergenerational justice angle, and the dire need for action, as being directly linked to climate science. While perhaps obvious, rarely is this connection made so explicitly in academic writing.
Among Hansen et al.’s main findings is that a previously understood limit of 2°C rise in global average temperature is a “dangerous target” that would not avoid the worst impacts of climate change. According to the paper, negative feedback loops connected to sea level rise and arctic ice melt would in fact become apparent with a 1°C degree rise in current temperatures. These environmental shifts are real, observable and actionable. And they must be addressed as such.
Our friends at iMatter recently wrote of their thoughts on the paper:
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On 19 November 2013, I attended the launch of the “2013 Country Visit Report of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Nigeria” that took place in London. [1] The report described the observations of two British Parliamentarians who visited Nigeria in July 2013 and covered interesting topics including the Human Rights of Nigerian women and children. However, in a footnote on page nine of the report there was reference to the recent United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) report which stated that Nigeria has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world at 10.5 million. [2]
I was sad when I read this. But why should I be sad? Should it matter to me? After all, I am not affected. I and all members in my family are educated. Also there are more Nigerian children attending school than those not attending. And the majority of Nigerian children out-of-school appear to come from the northern part of Nigeria, which is far away from where I come from in the deep south of the country. So it has nothing to do with me or my family. End of story, full stop. But this is a selfish and naive view that misses the bigger picture. Just because I was lucky to have educated parents who could afford to pay for the education of me and my three sisters, does not mean I should ignore less fortunate Nigerian children. It is no Nigerian child’s fault if they are born into poor families who cannot afford to send them to school. After all, no one chooses where they are born. If the 10.5 million figure is true, then Nigeria must act urgently. There are economic, political and social negative consequences for Nigeria if nothing is done. In this essay I will first give four reasons why I think it concerns all Nigerians and then offer four suggestions that I think can mitigate this sad situation.
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The South Korean government has officially gotten behind the goal of making South Korea a major player in the market for Internet-based military and commercial communications. This is not unexpected, as South Korea has long been one of the most wired nations on the planet. That’s because South Korea was an early pioneer in making high-speed Internet access available inexpensively and on a wide scale. In 2000, 40 percent of South Koreans had Internet access and ten years later that had risen to 81 percent. Thus, by 2005, over 95 percent of South Korean mobile phones had Internet access and by 2006, over half of home Internet users had high-speed access. Now all South Korean Internet users have high-speed access and the speeds are the highest in the world.
Although an American firm (Apple) invented the modern smart phone in 2005, it was a South Korean firm (Samsung) that went on to become the world’s largest producer of smart phones. Samsung went on to develop encryption for its phones, a feature many commercial and military users insist on. Samsung also makes available versions of their smart phones and tablets that meet the encryption and security requirements for South Korean and American armed forces. Smart phones equipped in this way are being used by the South Korean military and offered to the armed forces of allies (especially the United States). The U.S. Army has already tested Samsung smart phones and tablets and found that they get the job done on the battlefield.
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The federal government has given the U.S. Navy the final green light to inflict millions of instances of harm on marine mammals in Southern California and Hawaii over the next five years, including thousands of instances of permanent injury or death.
The permitting agency, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS aka NOAA Fisheries) announced today the finalization of rules governing the Navy’s training and testing activities in an area stretching from Southern California to Hawaii for 2014–2019.
Incredibly, NOAA Fisheries—the agency charged with protecting whales, dolphins, and other marine mammals—continues to claim “no harm, no foul” while giving the Navy approval to kill hundreds of whales and dolphins, inflict thousands of instances of permanent hearing loss, millions of instances of temporary hearing loss, and millions of instances of significant disruptions of vital life functions (migration, nursing, breeding, feeding, etc.).
NOAA Fisheries continues to defy common sense and claim that these injuries and harms will have a “negligible impact” on the more than 30 species of whales and dolphins that make Southern California and Hawaii waters their home, including endangered blue whales and humpback whales and hearing-sensitive beaked whales. The permit was issued despite the mountain of science (including the Navy’s own science) illustrating the harm sonar and explosives cause marine mammals, including recent literature showing specific impacts to Southern California beaked whales and endangered blue whales from sonar. These studies confirm that activities that cause endangered and struggling populations to forgo foraging and other critical life functions can no longer be shrugged off.
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Why is the government delivering a second class network when a couple more years could deliver fibre to premises, asks Tony Brown.
It is pretty sure that Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull was expecting plenty more brickbats than bouquets from the local IT community when he released his much anticipated Strategic Review into the national broadband network (NBN) last week – and he was not left disappointed.
Not only did Turnbull announce that a third of the country would not be getting a new network but he also admitted his network would cost $11.5 billion more than he said it would at the election and that he would fail to meet his election commitment of delivering 25 megabits per second nationwide by 2016.
Turnbull’s proposal to deliver a much scaled-back NBN with existing HFC networks left in place to serve 30 per cent of Australian homes, with fibre-to-the-node (FTTN) servicing 44 per cent of premises and 26 per cent of premises receiving new fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) services met with a predictably hostile reaction.
Indeed technology journalist Renai Lemay declared “I have lost any faith I had in Turnbull in his role as the Communications Minister…[my] default position will be that the minister is not acting in the best interests of Australia from an NBN perspective.”
Those are strong words but – accepting that Turnbull was too aggressive in his election promise of 25Mbps to all by 2016 – was anything else in the Strategic Review really that much of a surprise?
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In-flight cellular in the U.S. may be closer to reality than some consumers realize, with foreign airlines poised to extend services they already offer elsewhere. But evidence from overseas suggests the odds of being trapped next to a chronic caller are slim.
At its monthly open meeting Thursday, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission will discuss whether to issue a proposal for legalizing small cellular base stations on airliners. Such a plan would be subject to public comment and wouldn't take effect until well into next year at the earliest. If enacted, it would end a decades-long ban that has preserved airline cabins as rare cell-free spaces. Yet based on reports from overseas, calls in the cabin might prove to be rare and brief.
Actually allowing voice calls in flight would be up to the airlines, and most U.S. airlines seem unlikely to do so, let alone invest in equipment to carry cellular voice or data. Most have Wi-Fi for data already. But foreign airlines that already offer cell service elsewhere could probably start allowing calls over U.S. airspace fairly soon if an FCC rule change takes place.
Pulling out a cellphone in the air and dialing up family and friends is already legal in many places outside the U.S. British Airways, Singapore Airlines, Air France, KLM, Emirates, Aeroflot, Virgin Atlantic and other airlines offer cellular service, though some, including Lufthansa and Aer Lingus, prohibit voice calls. These in-flight services go through small, specialized cellular base stations installed on planes, which talk to the main cell network via satellites. The so-called picocells prevent interference with cell towers on the ground, which was the reason for the FCC's longtime ban.
In-flight cellular services typically are billed as international roaming, which carries a stiff premium. Partly because of cost, even passengers who can make cell calls on planes don't do it that much, according to an FAA report issued in July 2012. The agency surveyed aviation authorities in other countries about in-flight cellular in the early days of such services. Based on the few responses it got, airliners weren't bursting into a cacophony of one-sided conversations.
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George Marshall is a co founder of the Climate Outreach and Information Network (COIN), an organisation based in Oxford in the UK which specialises in climate change communication.
Whenever he can, Marshall tries to engage people in conversation about global warming: he finds it a tough task.
“I’m always casual about it – after all, no one wants to find themselves sitting next to a zealot on a long-distance train journey.
“But I need not worry because, however I say it, the result is almost always the same: the words collapse, sink and die in mid-air and the conversation suddenly changes course…it’s like an invisible force field that you only discover when you barge right into it. Few people ever do, because, without having ever been told, they have somehow learned that this topic is out of bounds.”
Others in the business of communicating climate change will sympathise: they become used to eyes glazing over, people suddenly finding others to talk to or urgently expressing the need for a drink. It can be a lonely occupation.
COIN has just produced a report entitled Climate Silence, questioning why the interest of the public in global warming is still low – despite all the warnings about the threats being faced.
The report, which focuses mainly on events in the UK, says public interest in the issue was at its height back in 2008. The Stern Review, making the financial case for tackling the problem sooner rather than later had, been published, the UK had brought in its Climate Change Act, and there was optimism that a global deal on climate change could be sealed at the Copenhagen summit.
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China has suspended imports of shellfish from the west coast of the United States -- an unprecedented move that cuts off a $270 million Northwest industry from its biggest export market.
China said it decided to impose the ban after recent shipments of geoduck clams from Northwest waters were found by its own government inspectors to have high levels of arsenic and a toxin that causes paralytic shellfish poisoning.
The restriction took effect last week and China's government says it will continue indefinitely. It applies to clams, oysters and all other two-shelled bivalves harvested from the waters of Washington, Oregon, Alaska and Northern California. U.S. officials think the contaminated clams were harvested in Washington or Alaska. Right now they’re waiting to hear back from Chinese officials for more details that will help them identify the exact source.
State and federal agencies oversee inspection and certification to prevent the shipment of tainted shellfish. Jerry Borchert of the Washington Department of Health said he's never encountered such a ban based on the Chinese government's assertion that these U.S. safeguards failed to screen out contaminated seafood.
“They’ve never done anything like that, where they would not allow shellfish from this entire area based on potentially two areas or maybe just one area. We don’t really know yet,” Borchert said.
The biggest blow could fall to those who farm or harvest the supersized geoduck clams. In the Northwest, they're concentrated in Washington's Puget Sound, where about 5 million pounds of wild geoduck are harvested each year. Aquaculture accounts for an additional 2 million pounds, according to estimates from the Washington Department of Natural Resources.
A barricade around the Chinese consumer market means trouble for those in the Northwest who rely on Asian trade.
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Add whales, sea turtles and sturgeon to the fight over the future of the Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station, but leave room for alewives as well.
Following a meeting between plant critics and Nuclear Regulatory Chairman Allison Macfarlane, several groups led by the Earthrise Law Center and including locally based Cape Cod Bay Watch, called on the NRC to add a new condition to the plant’s license, requiring Pilgrim’s owners to report occurrences, sightings or interactions with certain officially listed endangered and threatened marine species near Pilgrim. That was not in the relicensing documents but that may have been a mistake.
At one point, the NRC apparently thought there was such a condition in the new license. It said so in communications with the National Marine Fisheries Service, when discussing the pending relicensing of the plant in 2012.
When critics heard that discussion referenced, they went looking for it in the license. It wasn’t there. Click headline to read more--
It’s here! On Wednesday, Connecticut became the first state in America to pass a law that requires food manufacturers to indicate the presence of genetically-engineered ingredients on the label.
If you’re surprised, you’re not the only one. After bitter defeats at the hands of big food lobbyists in California and Washington, I would have thought that we’d have to wait a long time to see another labeling measure with even a slim chance of passing. Yet here is Gov. Dannel Malloy, commemorating a bill that finally honors Americans’ right to know what’s in their food.
Well, once I took a closer look at the bill itself, it became clear why we didn’t see a knock-down, drag-out fight between food labeling advocates and Big Food like in California and Washington.
According to a statement from Gov. Malloy’s office: “Connecticut’s GMO labeling law goes into effect only after four other states enact similar legislation. Additionally, any combination of northeastern states with a combined population of at least 20 million – including Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey – must adopt similar laws.
“The bill also includes language that protects Connecticut farmers by ensuring regional adoption of the new labeling system before requiring local farms to analyze and label genetically engineered products.”
So, while the law sounds great, and Connecticut legislators are patting themselves on the back for the accomplishment, it means absolutely nothing. Although the bill is now law, it doesn’t change a thing for Connecticut families, and doesn’t require food companies to do anything differently. Perhaps the only comforting thing is that we can tack a “yet” onto the end of that sentence.
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A notification from the India’s Department of Telecommunications on 18th July 2013 reclassified the term ‘Broadband’ as referring to connections that have the capability of a minimum download speed of 512kbps, the telecom regulator TRAI’s monthly telecom subscribers report mentions, stating that as per the notification:
“Broadband is a data connection that is able to support interactive services including Internet access and has the capability of the minimum download speed of 512 Kbps to an individual subscriber from the point of presence (PoP) of the service provider intending to provide broadband service”.
Accordingly, the TRAI has said that as per its classification, the minimum download speed has been increased from 256 Kbps to 512 Kbps, and from this October 2013 onwards, service providers have to report only those wireline Internet subscribers with at least 512kbps as ‘broadband’.
Consequently, the number of broadband connections in India has come down to 14.91 million connections (the rest are classified as “Internet” connections). In May 2013, India had 15.3 million broadband connections, but that was as per the old definition, and would have included connections between 256kbps and 512kbps. Note that the 14.91 million connections number is on the basis of data from 105 of 153 ISPs, with old data being used for 48 ISPs.
We’d like to remind the Department of Telecommunications, and recent ministers A. Raja, Kapil Sibal and Milind Deora, what utter failures they have been when it comes to enabling the growth of wireline broadband in this country.
It makes me feel old say this, but does anyone remember Dayanidhi Maran, and his tenure as Telecom Minister?
Back in 2007, Maran had wanted to reclassify broadband as 2 mbps*, and talked about using BSNL to change the benchmarks, in order to force private players to follow suit. Maran left the government after that, and was replaced by A. Raja. The rest is history: in terms of the 2G scam, the Aakash Tablet. We’re still waiting for the completion of the rollout of broadband to villages, which Maran, in 2007 had said, had the following targets:
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There are a lot of amazing places on our beautiful blue planet. So many, in fact, that I have a hard time imagining anyone being able to visit all of them during their entire lifetime. Some places are of course more epic than others, but they all have one thing in common, they are all worth visiting. One such place is an abandoned salt mine from 1932, which has now been converted into one of the world’s most epic amusement park complexes.
We see it more and more, mines being converted into everything from hotels to amusement parks. If anything, that is what we should be doing as we’re constantly creating dangerously large holes in our beautiful planet. This salt mine is 120 meters deep and is a royal sight for anyone that has the opportunity to take a look at it from above as well as from within. The things they have managed to do in this mine are nothing less than on the edge of brilliant.
Looking down into the deep hole, you will be met by a sight that rivals that of a science fiction movie. As a matter of fact, it looks like a space base at the bottom with all the lights that have been used to illuminate the abandoned mine. It is epic in every way and that is just the view from the top. Drop down to the bottom in the elevator and you will enter into an amusement park (which is really a recreational park) that can only be described as a Wally World within our own world.
There is literally everything in this deep mine from a Ferris wheel to a football playground, sports halls and an amphitheater. There is even room for a boat ride if you so crave one on the underground lake. I do not know how deep the water is in this lake and I would not want to find out either, but the whole place looks nothing but enchanting and magical when you look at it from all angles. So where is this place located? This abandoned salt mine is named Salina Turda and it is located in Romania - Salina Turda website.
Click headline to view pix--
Arctic fjords are poor places, low in marine life and muddied by glacial meltwater. In the southern ocean, where everything is upside down, it’s a different story. Scientists from the University of Hawaii report that they found unexpected riches deep in the fjords of the Antarctic Peninsula.
The Peninsula is one of the fastest-warming places on the planet. On land, researchers have used 150 years of moss growth as a kind of archive of change, and recorded a warming of 0.56°C per decade since the 1960s.
But researchers who photographed the sea floor found an abundance of bristle worms, sea spiders, sea cucumbers, crustaceans, jellyfish and of krill, they report in the journal PLOS One.
This is precisely what they had not expected: on the evidence of the rapidly-warming Arctic waters, these Peninsula fjords should have been much less lively.
“There appears to be something special about these fjords that stimulates sea floor productivity”, says Laura Grange, of the UK National Oceanography Centre at the University of Southampton, who collaborated in the study.
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The whole world can dig into the region’s history after a North-East university unveiled one of the most definitive mining archives online.
The North East England Mining Archive and Research Centre (NEEMARC) is founded by Sunderland University academic Dr Stuart Howard in association with a number of the region’s mining institutions.
Dr Howard’s team have digitalised volumes of the National Union of Miners (NUM) Durham Association minutes books.
The books, hosted on Sunderland University’s website, chronicle the records of the most powerful union in the country in what was arguably the most important region for coal mining, the North-East.
They are now online and cover the period 1876 to 1942 and are the first NUM materials anywhere to be digitised.
The archive paints a clear picture of the political, economic, social and cultural life in an industry that was so important to the region.
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