A 33 hour bus ride north along route 40 from El Chalten we were on the bus for 2 nights and we arrived at Bariloche last week last stop in Patagonia. We decided to stay a while needing a break from the bus but also because we found a lovely little bungalow to stay in cheap at 12 pounds a night with views of Lago Nahel Huapi and the Andes.
Lundi Macon
The last few days have been a ball This morning we went in to school for the morning... the style of teaching is very different to that in NZ. The teachers stand at the front of the class and lecture Curndog saved us in the afternoon though at lunch we left for a little trip for the entire afternoon to a town called Baune. I took a few photos which are on the photo link.Tomorrow we've got th
Planning Australia Tour in Best way
Australia is one of the worth visiting countries that hold the magnetism to make you fall in love with this place. Vacations spent in this pristine country are something which can be cherished and remembered forever. Alluring destinations friendly and warm hospitality spectacular sceneries exotic animal and plant life astonishing natural resources and pleasing weather are some of the renowned
Family Fun In Breckenridge Colorado
My partner and I are quite experienced skiers but our kids aged 8 and 6 have never skied before. Irsquom very keen for us to have a nice family skiing vacation and I canrsquot think of anywhere better than at the Breckenridge Ski Resort. Therersquos lots of different terrain and 155 trails to choose from. We can do our thing whilst the kids join the Ski and Ride School. There are lots of i
5 Weeks in Australia
A 14hour flight departing the evening of November 3rd from Los Angles would put me in Sydney Australia the morning of November 5th. Sitting with me in aisle 19 were Itzy a German woman who lives in a beach suburb of Sydney and Gai a lady from Minnesota who was born in Australia and going down under to visit family. They were both really excited for me to visit Oz and gave me some great tips
Book Excerpt: The Right Questions
Advice on having a vision map for your life.
About Us: Best-of-the-Year Tributes
Make a donation to Spirituality & Practice and pay tribute to someone or something who has inspired you, challenged you, and helped you grow in 2009.
Obama’s approval ratings take another dip at RCP
MONDAY MORNING POLLING UPDATE!
From Eric Dondero:
Late Sunday night... Down .1% since our last report. Obama's culmulative Real Clear Politics average stands at 48.8% Approvals, with 45.3% Disapprovals. That's a spread of 3.5%. The differentials on the graph are getting closer and closer to criss-crossing.
See it at RCP.
Note - the RCP running average combines Rasmussen, NY Times/CBS, WSJ/NBC, Bloomberg, Marist and other top polling firms.
UPDATE!!
Rasmussen reporting late Sunday dramatic decline over the weekend in Obama's approvals:
23% of the nation's voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Forty-two percent (42%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -19.
Today is the second straight day that Obama’s Approval Index rating has fallen to a new low.
See graph above. Note severe drop in Obama Approval since Friday (Health Care debate, Copenhagen, Climategate, Cap & Trade, ect...).
Full report at Rasmussen.
FURTHER UPDATE!
Real Clear Politics is now reporting that Obama's approvals have dipped yet again, now standing at 48.6%, down from 48.9% late last week.
IDAHO: Democrat switches to Republican to run against libertarian-leaning Dem Rep. Walt Minnick
From Eric Dondero:
Strange happenings in the home state of the Bowl-bound Boise State Broncos.
Seems a prominent Democrat has decided to switch parties to Republican, to run against incumbent Democrat Congressman Walt Minnick. The Congressman is considered to be the only Democrat in the entire House of Reps, who leans libertarian. A recent survey found him to have the most "conservative" voting record of the entire Northwest delegation, including Republicans. What's more, Minnick himself is a former Republican who switched to 'D' to run for the seat.
From Rocky Barker at the IdahoStatesman.com, Dec. 12:
the other big race for 2010 is expected to be the U.S. House seat now held by Democrat Walt Minnick. Minnick, a former Republican whose voting record in the House so far has appeared closer to his previous party affiliation, has irritated many Democrats for not supporting central party positions like a cap-and-trade climate law and a public option for health care reform.
Democrat Larry Grant, a Fruitland attorney who lost a narrow race in 2006 to Republican Bill Sali but stepped aside for Minnick in 2008, said he gets at least one call a week from Democrats urging him to challenge Minnick for the seat. He usually tells them no.
Recently, he told me, he answered yes.
“I said I was going to run for Congress as a Republican,” Grant said.
A Republican? That’s right, he said.
Since Vaughn Ward has the Palin wing of the GOP behind him and Raul Labrador has the Sali crowd behind him Republican moderates have nowhere to go in the primary, Grant said. If he jumps into the race he can get moderates along with Democratic crossovers unhappy with Minnick.
“All I need is 35 percent,” Grant said.
There is still rampant speculation that Sali might also jump into the race, but unclear as to what party; Libertarian, Constitution or Tea Party Independent.
And, there's still speculation that Minnick may switch back to Republican. Many progressives in Boise are urging him to do so, to make way for a hardline liberal "real Democrat" candidate.
Side Note - LR received a nice note from Rocky Barker at the Idaho Statesman for this linking of his piece. Turns out he's got a bit of a fondness for libertarians.
Did the Missoulian cover up for the Max Baucus Affair?
by Eric Dondero
What we know... Blogger Jodi Rove of Buffalo's Fire was the reporter covering the story of the Baucus affair, and the pending appointment of his Mistress Melodee Hanes. Rove reported earlier this week on her Blog, that Baucus's Senate office called the night before they were about to break the story, to inform the paper that Hanes's name had been withdrawn. She had been one of three candidates to be appointed to serve as Montana State Attorney General under Eric Holder. Now Rove's story has been confirmed.
From The Editors of the Missoulian, Dec. 9:
Eight months ago, when Hanes’ name surfaced as one of the nominees for the U.S. attorney’s job, the Missoulian asked Sen. Max Baucus’ spokesman whether Baucus was involved in a romantic relationship with Hanes – as her ex-husband was alleging – and if so, why Baucus would pursue a course that posed such a clear conflict of interest.
Not only would Baucus not speak directly to the Missoulian, but his then-spokesman, Barrett Kaiser, refused to address the issue and strove to keep any story at all about Hanes’ nomination from print. Indeed, the night before the story was to run, Kaiser called the paper and told us that Hanes’ nomination had been withdrawn.
With nothing from Baucus on the record, and no way to prove the veracity of Hanes’ husband’s assertions, the Missoulian couldn’t responsibly print the allegations.
This has led prominent Democrat blogger Jay Stevens to pen a piece, "It's not the affair. It's the cover-up." Stevens raises the question of possible collusion between the Missoulian and Baucus's office. From Left in the West:
Is it me? Or did they totally drop the ball on this story? What kind of reporter stops investigating a story when the investigated subject refuses to speak about it? They couldn't find anyone else to confirm Baucus' relationship to Hanes? Really?
Nationally syndicated columnist, legal scholar, and frequent Cable News guest Johnathan Turley has now joined in, commenting on his Blog:
Other details have emerged that may cause problems for Baucus. He insisted publicly that Hanes decided to withdraw from consideration as the new U.S. Attorney (with Baucus’ important support) when their relationship became more serious. However, reporters are now saying that the decision was made shortly after they confronted Baucus with the story at the Missoulian and said that they were about to make it public. Remarkably, the Missoulian never ran the story in March.
The Missoulian, a paper hugely supportive of Baucus in the past, now appears to be engaging in a little CYA criticizing Baucus for his decision making process.
Continuing from the Missoulian:
many Montanans are seriously questioning Baucus’ judgement just at the moment we should be focusing on his role in national health care reform, energy legislation and a host of other crucial legislative matters.
The Missoulian couldn’t care less about Baucus’ personal romantic relationships. Such things are a private matter that has no bearing on the public’s business – or at least, they should be. But when someone in a position of public trust and authority uses his position to further the career of someone he is romantically linked to, that warrants full disclosure and public scrutiny.
Baucus exercised poor judgment in this matter not once, but repeatedly.
The Missoulian is a notoriously leftwing biased newspaper in Montana. It services a university town. They make endorsements of only Democrats. In the 2006 race for US Senate, the paper ran repeated investigative pieces on Republican Senator Conrad Burns for allegedly questionable financial and campaign practices. Burns ended up losing that race to Democrat Jon Tester.
When one looks closely at the timeline of events that transpired last Spring, it's clear that at some point a decision was made at some level at the Missoulian to quelch the story. As Jay Stephens asks, why in the world would any newspaper just halt such an investigation?
One has to wonder if such a story would have been quelched had it been a Republican legislator in question.
And now some good old-fashioned Hardcore Right-wing Punk Rock from Wyoming
Right Arm of Wyoming
Gun Rights, Property Rights, Fuck the Nanny-State! Describing themselves as "Anarcho-libertarians," with a rightwing bent.
"So-called Anarchists voted in the bigger problem we have now. I'd take Ronald Reagan over the Commie Criminals we got now."
From the Editor: Our friends at Right Arm of Wyoming sent us a review copy of their latest CD "Cling to our Guns." Ever since it's been clinging to my CD player in my pick-up truck. It's become a permanent fixture in my '98 Chevy 4x4. Perfect for jamming on rural backroads here in South Texas.
Buy your copy now! LibertarianPunk.com The perfect gift for that lazy scraggly-ass leftwing friend of yours who just wants to cheer on Obama, but doesn't want to go out and find a job.
Michele Bachman: Time to KILL SOCIALISM!
This is no time for Holiday Cheer
Libertarian-Conservative Congresswoman Michele Bachmann didn't hold back on a recent conference call sponsored by the RNC.
From the Minnesota Independent:
U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann urged her supporters to fight health care reform by calling Congress “every day, when you wake up in the morning and comb your hair and take your vitamins.”
Democrats are purposely pushing health care legislation at holiday time, Bachmann charged during a nationwide conference call Thursday. “It’s intentional that they’re doing this at Christmas time and Hannukah.”
“We’re going to kill socialism,” Bachmann vowed during the call, which was hosted by the Republican National Committee. “They can’t have our country. We’re not going to let them win.
(H/t GOP12)
Tucker Carlson to launch new Journalist Website: Promises not to "suck up" to Obama
Another News Site from a Libertarian Republican slant
Joining Andrew Breitbart's recently launched BigGovernment.com comes yet another libertarian Republican leaning news site.
Nothing up yet, except a title. But within days Tucker Carlson will launch a new website for hardhitting investigative journalism for the Right.
The title simply: The Daily Caller - 01 11 10, (a reference to the date Republicans may take back control of Congress.)
Writes Margaret Chadbourn, "Tucker's next Move," at Washingtonian.com:
The nonstop clamor of the media is about to get louder with the launch of pundit Tucker Carlson’s newest effort, DailyCaller.com.
A libertarian Republican known for his love of bow ties and a quick elimination on Dancing With the Stars, Carlson says his Web site will have a heavy dose of tough, original reporting.
“The press has sucked up to Obama,” he says. “The core of the site is to provide better coverage of the White House, Congress, and the federal government.
He's gathered an impressive set of partners, and is gathering up writers who've been unemployed since Obama's recession began, in the faltering media industry.
Financial Brain Drain
Britain’s financiers and entrepreneurs are quitting the UK at a rate of 10 a week to avoid Labour’s new 50% taxes.
The burgeoning exodus threatens to deepen a £178 billion black hole in the public finances and leave middle-class voters with higher taxes for years to come, figures obtained from Companies House reveal.
The number of directors of British businesses registered as living in the low-tax centres of Jersey, Guernsey or the Isle of Man has risen by almost 500 to 6,729 in the past 12 months.
The British Virgin Islands is also a popular destination, with 615 directors of UK companies now based in the Caribbean tax haven — an 18% rise on a year ago.
Utterly predictable. But at least Jersey is prospering.
Episode 34 Dr Lele SNM India 2009
Episode 34 Dr Lele SNM India 2009
This podcast an interview with one of the fathers of Nuclear Medicine in India Dr Lele snr
He highlights many of the challenges and opportunities for Nuclear Medicine in india
INDIAN SNM 2009 Website
Preparing for SPECT lecture
Direct link to itunes ??
Direct link to itunes, download itunes, install, then click this link to subscribe to podcast
Take the Quiz on episode 17 and
Take the Quiz on episode 18
free.
Take the Quiz on episode 18
free.
Also I have updated our links and you can get the podcast page at both http://nuccast.com
And http://www.nuccast.com with the feed to put into iTunes or juice or your favorite podcast software can be found at http://molcast.com or http://www.molcast.com. The cardiac subset of the podcast can be found at http://cardiac.nuccast.com and the feed at http://cardiac.molcast.com.
Please pass on information about this podcast to your colleagues and to your CPD provider.
Remember you can get the podcast but going to itunes and entering the search term nuclear medicine best the way to subscribe is via this link
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The easiest way to remember to tell your colleagues about the podcast is via the web link at nuccast.com or molcast.com
Most importantly of all please help this podcast by contributing your opinions, Sound files, emails or phone calls details below:
You click on the little bird icon below and it will allow you to send me a voice mail from your computer.
If you don’t have a microphone then you can
1. Call toll-free anytime 24/7 in the USA at 1-888-65-GCAST (888-654-2278). If outside USA: +1-305-437-8719.
2. Enter the phone number 207-099-2527
then enter the PIN 1401
3. Record your message, don’t worry it wont go straight into the podcast unless you ask me too.
Please leave your name and email address in your message so I can get back to you.
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All contributions welcome, especially as sound files to nucmedpodcast@gmail.com.
Link link to mp3 file
Another 365 Days | Bad Astronomy
Great news, everyone! The 365 Days of Astronomy citizen podcast will go on for at least another year!
365DoA is an International Year of Astronomy project that lets you, the astronomy enthusiast, create your own astronomy podcast, upload it, and let everyone on this pale blue dot hear it. It was wildly successful, with spots filling up rapidly once it was announce last year. It also won a coveted Parsec podcast award this year, too.
But given this was an IYA 2009 project, I was wondering if it would continue on to 2010 and beyond, and it will! It’ll become a legacy project, and will be handled by Astrosphere New Media Association, a (charitable and tax-deductible!) online astronomy support group made up of dedicated people. I know this for a fact, because I’m a part of it.
Slots for 2010 are going fast, so you better grab a date if you want to participate! And if you want to help, then we could use some sponsors, too:
The podcast team also invites people and organizations to sponsor the podcast by donating $30 to support 1 day of the podcast, with your dedication appearing at the start of the show. For just $360, it is possible to sponsor 1 episode per month. Alternatively, you can also have a dedication message at the end of the show for a week, for a donation at the $100 level. These donations will help pay for editing, and posting of the podcasts.
Each episode gets between 5000 and 10,000 listeners, so it’s not a terrible way to advertise if you’re looking for that. But submitting an entry is free. If you read this blog — and you do, I see you there — then astronomy is something you enjoy. I bet you can think of some topic here that inspires you, that fires you up, that makes you think.
Go ahead! Make my year.
The Publishing Disruption
What a unique thing a book is. Made from a tree, it has a hundred or more flexible pages that contain written text, enabling the book to contain a large sum of information in a very small volume. Before paper, clay tablets, sheepskin parchment, and papyrus were all used to store information with far less efficiency. Paper itself was once so rare and valuable that the Emperor of China had guards stationed around his paper posessions.
Before the invention of the printing press, books were written by hand, and few outside of monastaries knew how to read. There were only a few thousand books in all of Europe in the 14th century. Charlemagne himself took great effort to learn how to read, but never managed to learn how to write, which still put him ahead of most kings of the time, who were generally illiterate.
But with the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the mid-15th century, it became possible to make multiple copies of the same book, and before long, the number of books in Europe increased from thousands to millions.
Fast forward to the early 21st century, and books are still printed by the millions. Longtime readers of The Futurist know that I initially had written a book (2001-02), and sought to have it published the old-fashioned way. However, the publishing industry, and literary agents, were astonishingly low-tech. They did not use email, and required queries to be submitted via regular mail, with a self-addressed, stamped envelope included. So I had to pay postage in both directions, and wait several days for a round trip to hear their response. And this was just the literary agents. The actual publishing house, if they decide to accept your book, would still take 12 months to produce and distribute the book even after the manuscript was complete. Even then, royalties would be 10-15% of the retail price. This prospect did not seem compelling to me, and I chose to parse my book into this blog you see before you.
The refusal by the publishing industry to use email and other productivity-enhancing technologies as recently as 2003 kept their wages low. Editors always moaned that they worked 60 hours a week just to make $50,000 a year, the same as they made in 1970. My answer to them is that they have no basis to expect wage increases without increasing their productivity through technology.
In the meantime, self-publishing technologies emerged to bypass the traditional publishers' role as arbitrers of what can become a book and what cannot. From Lulu to iUniverse to BookSmart, any individual can produce a book, with copies that can be printed on demand. Instances where an individual is seeking to go it alone without a huge upfront inventory production, or is otherwise marketing to only a tiny audience, have flourished. But print-on-demand is not the true disruption - that was yet to come.
Imagine what happens when the Kindle and other e-readers cost only $100. Brick and mortar bookstores will consolidate to fewer premises, extract profits mainly from picture-heavy books and magazines, and step up their positioning as literary coffeehouses. Many employees and affiliates of the publishing industry will see their functions eliminated as part of the productivity gains. College students forced to pay $100 for a textbook produced in small quantities will now pay only $20 for an e-reader version. But even this is not the ultimate endgame of disruption.
Therein lies the crescendo of disruption. The Intel Reader is a $1500 device for the visually impaired, but will soon evolve into a technology that interfaces with Kindle-type e-readers and chatters off e-books at 250 words/minute, from the full e-book library that is vastly larger than any traditional collection of audiobooks. A 90,000-word novel could be recited in just 6 hours, enabling a user to imbibe the whole book during a single coast-to-coast flight, even if the lights are dimmed. People could further choose to preserve their vision at home, devouring book after book with the lights out. As the technology advances further, the speech technology will allow the user to select a voice of his choosing to be read to in, perhaps even his own voice.
Thus, without many people even noticing the murmurs, we can predict that the next 3 years will see the biggest transformation in book production and consumption since the days of Johannes Gutenberg. That is a true demonstration of both the Accelerating Rate of Change and The Impact of Computing.
Biosensors change color when they detect specific neural messages
Scientists have resolved a question about how a popular class of drugs used to treat schizophrenia works using biosensors that reveal previously hidden components of chemical communication in the brain.
First measurement of cancer biomarkers in whole blood
A team led by Yale University researchers has used nanosensors to measure cancer biomarkers in whole blood for the first time. Their findings could dramatically simplify the way physicians test for biomarkers of cancer and other diseases.
Nanoprobes hit targets in tumors, could lessen chemo side effects
Tiny nanoprobes have shown to be effective in delivering cancer drugs more directly to tumor cells - mitigating the damage to nearby healthy cells - and Purdue University research has shown that the nanoprobes are getting the drugs to right cellular compartments.