Mailing Postcards From Home-United Freedom Team
http://www.blessedbypostcards.com id#488 How would you like to make money from home simply mailing out postcards? We take the calls and you get paid. No hassles. Contact me at ...
By: clinton tyler jr
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Freedom LIFE Team video on UTOKEN Digital Currency
This video shows a speech made by Mr. Lim Kim Seng, the founder and chairman of the "Banque de Dveloppement de Guine S.A." which is one of THREE banks and financial institutions responsible ...
By: FreedomGlobe1
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This page is maintained by the Free Software Foundation's Licensing and Compliance Lab. You can support our efforts by making a donation to the FSF. Have a question not answered here? Check out some of our other licensing resources or contact the Compliance Lab at licensing@fsf.org.
The free software definition presents the criteria for whether a particular software program qualifies as free software. From time to time we revise this definition, to clarify it or to resolve questions about subtle issues. See the History section below for a list of changes that affect the definition of free software.
Free software means software that respects users' freedom and community. Roughly, it means that the users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. Thus, free software is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of free as in free speech, not as in free beer.
We campaign for these freedoms because everyone deserves them. With these freedoms, the users (both individually and collectively) control the program and what it does for them. When users don't control the program, we call it a nonfree or proprietary program. The nonfree program controls the users, and the developer controls the program; this makes the program an instrument of unjust power.
A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:
A program is free software if it gives users adequately all of these freedoms. Otherwise, it is nonfree. While we can distinguish various nonfree distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.
The rest of this page clarifies certain points about what makes specific freedoms adequate or not.
Freedom to distribute (freedoms 2 and 3) means you are free to redistribute copies, either with or without modifications, either gratis or charging a fee for distribution, to anyone anywhere. Being free to do these things means (among other things) that you do not have to ask or pay for permission to do so.
You should also have the freedom to make modifications and use them privately in your own work or play, without even mentioning that they exist. If you do publish your changes, you should not be required to notify anyone in particular, or in any particular way.
The freedom to run the program means the freedom for any kind of person or organization to use it on any kind of computer system, for any kind of overall job and purpose, without being required to communicate about it with the developer or any other specific entity. In this freedom, it is the user's purpose that matters, not the developer's purpose; you as a user are free to run the program for your purposes, and if you distribute it to someone else, she is then free to run it for her purposes, but you are not entitled to impose your purposes on her.
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The most important freedom of all is the freedom to defend freedom.
COMMENT
When the Japanese invaded Malaya, I was at a barber shop getting my moustache trimmed. All of a sudden we heard this loud explosion. Boom! Everything in the barber shop fell off the shelf. The barber himself was so shocked that he lost control of his hand and accidentally shaved one side of my moustache. We looked at the street and saw people running for their lives. We did not know what was going on, but we decided to run as well. My barber ran with his bag of scissors while I ran with half a moustache on my face.
That was the story I grew up listening to. My grandpa always had wonderful tales to tell every time he visited. We used to spend hours sitting at the playground, coffee shops, street pavements and in trishaws while he told stories I could never find in any book today.
Grandpa told me how grandma got sick of eating tapioca for weeks when they were hiding from the Japanese. He told me how he was forced to become a translator for them; I still have no idea how grandpa learned the Japanese language in the first place. And he told me about sneaking under the table every time the Japanese forced him to drink liquor. Apparently it was impolite to decline invitations to drink.
My grandpa was an ordinary chap. In the mornings he would make a living with his old typewriter and his tiny table and chair strategically placed, sometimes outside the courthouse and sometimes outside the oath commission. In the afternoons he accepted invitations to recite prayers and verses from the Holy Book around the neighbourhood for minimal donations.
Money was always tight. But he was lucky he had grandma. She was an entrepreneur. Every morning there would be long queues from the street up to her kitchen where she sold tosai, idli, paratha and apam for breakfast. With whatever they made, grandpa and grandma raised seven kids.
My grandpa is no longer with me today. But his memories live in me through his stories. He did not carry any weapon. He didnt kill anyone, but he fought for the independence of our nation in his own way. He survived through the Japanese invasion and British rule, he lived to witness his motherland gain independence, and he gave the gift of freedom and peace to his children and grandchildren.
I still remember his pieces of advice.
Always trust in yourself. Always be strong. Always have faith. Always stand up for what you believe in. Always speak up when you disagree. Never let anyone step on you. Always be courageous. Always be happy. Always smile. Always remember that I love you.
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Freedom Station resident Jorge Salazar takes a moment while working around his house on Wednesday at the Freedom Station housing for vets in San Diego, California.
Jorge Salazar isnt exactly sure where he would have gone.
It was January 2014. He was finally being discharged from the Marine Corps after a 2012 bomb blast in Afghanistan took both of his legs.
He had been living at the Navy hospital in Balboa Park. But those beds are for people still in uniform.
Salazar put up a calm exterior, but, I was freaking out, the former infantryman says.
Thats exactly why Freedom Station, a grassroots transitional housing complex in San Diegos Golden Hill, was created in 2011.
The now nearly 4-year-old program has housed 30 injured post-Sept. 11 veterans as they make the transition from sergeant to civilian. And organizers are eyeing a second property to expand their services.
Back in 2004, Sandy Lehmkuhler saw the need while volunteering at the Navy hospital. Thats where the Pentagon sends some of the most gravely injured troops from the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, including many amputees.
These folks, mostly Marines, were waiting months for their medical discharges to be finalized. Sitting in hospital rooms wasnt helping their morale, or their ability to imagine a life ahead.
Freedom Station president Sandy Lehmkuhler (right) talks with Janet Miknaitis (left)(a mother of a resident) and Ed Hanson (a board member) on Wednesday at the Freedom Station housing for vets in San Diego, California. Eduardo Contreras
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Sir Francis Galton, father of eugenics
When Charles Darwin published his groundbreaking theory of Natural Selection in 1859, it was received by the public with considerable vexation. Although the esteemed naturalist had been kind enough to explain his theory using mounds of logic and evidence, he lacked the good manners to incorporate the readers' preconceived notions of the universe. Nevertheless, many men of science were drawn to the elegant hypothesis, and they found it pregnant with intriguing corollaries. One of these was a phenomenon Darwin referred to as artificial selection: the centuries-old process of selectively breeding domestic animals to magnify desirable traits. This, he explained, was the same mechanism as natural selection, merely accelerated by human influence.
In 1865, Darwin's half-cousin Sir Francis Galton pried the lid from yet another worm-can with the publication of his article entitled "Hereditary Talent and Character." In this essay, the gentleman-scientist suggested that one could apply the principle of artificial selection to humans just as one could in domestic animals, thereby exaggerating desirable human traits over several generations. This scientific philosophy would come to be known as eugenics, and over the subsequent years its seemingly sensible insights gained approval worldwide. In an effort to curtail the genetic pollution created by "inferior" genes, some governments even enacted laws authorizing the forcible sterilization of the "insane, idiotic, imbecile, feebleminded or epileptic," as well as individuals with criminal or promiscuous inclinations. Ultimately hundreds of thousands of people were forced or coerced into sterilization worldwide, over 65,000 of them in the country which pioneered the eugenic effort: The United States of America.
From the beginning, Sir Francis Galton and his league of extraordinary eugenicists were concerned that the human race was facing an inevitable decline. They worried that advances in medicine were too successful in improving the survival and reproduction of weak individuals, thereby working at odds with natural evolution. Darwin himself expressed some concern regarding such negative selection:
"[We] do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. [...] Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. [...] Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature."
Gaussian distribution of IQ scores in a large population
The early proponents of eugenics were also distressed over the observation that the poor segments of an industrialized society tend to have more children than the well-off, an effect now known as the demographic-economic paradox. It was feared that this lopsided fertility would dilute the quality of the human gene pool, leading to the deterioration of socially valuable traits such as intelligence. Indeed, this "reversion towards mediocrity" was suspected by some historians to be a major contributor to the fall of the Roman Empire. The gloomy prediction of mankind's decline was dubbed dysgenics, and it was considered to be the antithesis of the eugenics movement; but it was not considered inevitable. It was believed that a society could reverse its own genetic decay by reducing breeding among the feebleminded and increasing fertility of the affluent.
The cornerstone of eugenics was that everyone has the right to be "well-born," without any predisposition to avoidable genetic flaws. The 1911 edition of The Encyclopdia Britannica looked fondly upon the philosophy, defining it as "the organic betterment of the race through wise application of the laws of heredity." Prominent people gravitated towards the idea and engaged in vigorous intellectual intercourse, including such characters as Alexander Graham Bell, Nikola Tesla, H.G. Wells, Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, and US presidents Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge. Supporters popularized eugenics as an opportunity to create a better world by using natural processes to elevate the human condition, both mentally and physically.
The eugenicists' concerns regarding a falloff in average intelligence were not entirely unreasonable. It had long been observed that intelligence is inheritable to a large degree, and history had illustrated that science and culture owe much of their advancement to the contributions of a few gifted people. Ingenious composers such as Beethoven and Bach advanced the art of music, thinkers such as such as Pascal and Newton improved the power of mathematics, and insights from scientists such as Einstein and Hawking have furthered the field of physics. Deprived of any one of those men, today's world would be a measurably poorer place. Even before modern IQ tests existed, it was evident that a population's intelligence adheres to a Gaussian distribution, or "bell curve." Consequently, even a small decline in average IQ causes a sharp reduction in the number of geniuses. For instance, if the average intelligence of a community were to decline by five IQ points, the number of individuals in the 130+ "Gifted" category would drop by 56%. A ten-point decline would result in an 83% drop. Although IQ testing is far from perfect, it is clear that even modest erosion of average IQ could severely compromise the long-term progress of a society.
The archives room of the Eugenics Records Office
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The vast majority of average Americans never spend much time thinking about things like "population control" or "eugenics", but for the ultra-wealthy of the global elite and for the politicians that serve them, population control and eugenics are issues of the highest priority, and in fact it would be difficult to overstate the sick obsession that these elitists have with reducing the population of the planet.
Most of the time this sick obsession with population control does not make headlines, buta couple of recent news events hasbrought these issues back to the forefront once again. The first involved Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
In an absolutely stunning interviewwith the New York Times, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg alluded to the fact that abortion is all about getting rid of certain types of people that the elite do not want to have around:
"Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we dont want to have too many of."
Now in what kind of sick world is it EVER acceptable to use the phrase "populations that we don't want to have too many of"?
That has got to be one of the most offensive statement made by any public figure in recent memory.
Yet the mainstream media has mostly let is pass without objection.
Fortunately, at least one member of Congress took notice.Representative Joseph Pitts, a Republican from Pennsylvania, gave a stirring speech on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives denouncing Ginsburgs comment. If you have not seen his one minute speech addressing this yet, then you definitelyneed towatch this video:
Originally posted here:
The Radical Population Control And Eugenics Agenda Of The ...
Data Warehouse using Hadoop eco system - 08 02 Extract and Load Sqoop Demo
By: IT Versity
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Data Warehouse using Hadoop eco system - 08 02 Extract and Load Sqoop Demo - Video
Humankind benefits in a multitude of ways from ecosystems. Collectively, these benefits are known as ecosystem services. Ecosystem services are regularly involved in the provisioning of clean drinking water and the decomposition of wastes. While scientists and environmentalists have discussed ecosystem services implicitly for decades, the ecosystem services concept itself was popularized by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) in the early 2000s.[1] This grouped ecosystem services into four broad categories: provisioning, such as the production of food and water; regulating, such as the control of climate and disease; supporting, such as nutrient cycles and crop pollination; and cultural, such as spiritual and recreational benefits. To help inform decision-makers, many ecosystem services are being assigned economic values.
The notion of human dependence on Earths ecosystems reaches to the start of homo sapiens existence, benefiting from the products of nature to nourish and shelter from harsh climates. Recognition of how ecosystems could provide more complex services to mankind date back to at least Plato (c. 400 BC) who understood that deforestation could lead to soil erosion and the drying of springs.[2][pageneeded] Modern ideas of ecosystem services probably began with Marsh in 1864 [3] when he challenged the idea that Earths natural resources are unbounded by pointing out changes in soil fertility in the Mediterranean. His observations and cautions passed largely unnoticed at the time.[citation needed] It was not until the late 1940s that three key authors Henry Fairfield Osborn, Jr,[4]William Vogt,[5] and Aldo Leopold [6] awakened and promoted recognition of human dependence on the environment. One[who?] coined the idea of natural capital.[citation needed]
In 1956, Paul Sears [7] drew attention to the critical role of the ecosystem in processing wastes and recycling nutrients. In 1970, Paul Ehrlich and his wife called attention to "ecological systems" in their environmental science textbook [8] and the most subtle and dangerous threat to mans existence... the potential destruction, by mans own activities, of those ecological systems upon which the very existence of the human species depends. The term environmental services was introduced in a 1970 report of the Study of Critical Environmental Problems,[9] which listed services including insect pollination, fisheries, climate regulation and flood control. In following years, variations of the term were used, but eventually ecosystem services became the standard in scientific literature.[10]
The ecosystem services concept keeps expanding and includes socio-economic and conservation objectives, which are discussed below. A complete history of the concepts and terminology of ecosystem services as of 1997, can be found in Daily's book "Natures Services: Societal Dependence on Natural Ecosystems".[2]
As of 2010[update] there are various working definitions of ecosystems services in the literature.[11] The most recent revision by The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) to synthesize work in this field and prevent double counting in ecosystem services audits, has revised the MA definition to remove "Supporting Services" and replace it on the one hand with "Habitat Services" and on the other hand with "ecosystem functions" that "are defined as a subset of the interactions between ecosystem structure and processes that underpin the capacity of an ecosystem to provide goods and services".[12]
There is discussion as to how the concept of cultural ecosystem services can be operationalized. A good review of approaches in landscape aesthetics, cultural heritage, outdoor recreation, and spiritual significance to define and assess cultural values of our environment so that they fit into the ecosystem services approach is given by Daniel et al.[13] who vote for models that explicitly link ecological structures and functions with cultural values and benefits. There also is a fundamental critique of the concept of cultural ecosystem services that builds on three arguments:[14]
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) report 2005 defines Ecosystem services as benefits people obtain from ecosystems and distinguishes four categories of ecosystem services, where the so-called supporting services are regarded as the basis for the services of the other three categories.[1] The following lists represent the definition and samples of each according to the MA:
Ecosystem services "that are necessary for the production of all other ecosystem services".[17][18] These include services such as nutrient recycling, primary production and soil formation.[19] These services make it possible for the ecosystems to provide services such as food supply, flood regulation and water purification.
"Products obtained from ecosystems" [17]
"Benefits obtained from the regulation of ecosystem processes" [17]
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Member Resources
Ecosystem members are given access to a wealth of resources to help them create their applications built with Watson.
The services in Watson Developer Cloud are now available to anyone with a Bluemix account.
By signing up for Bluemix, developers get access to the Watson Developer Cloud and the Watson services in it. This publically available experience through Bluemix is for non-production use and for the time being, the services are beta.
Watson Ecosystem Partners have access to the same services plus production-level versions of some services within their own sandbox development environments. There, they may use their own content, configure, and train Watson services for production-level deployment.
Building an application thats built with Watson requires the right kind of data and content. The Watson Content Marketplace makes this possible by bringing together different sources of data for developers and content providers, including general knowledge, industry-specific content and subject matter expertise.
It's important to have access to the right people with the right skill sets to build a cognitive application. Whether its machine learning, user experience design or analytics, Ecosystem members can work with Watson experts on a fee or project basis.
The goal of the Watson Ecosystem is to nurture and support partners in developing commercial applications that incorporate Watsons cognitive computing capabilities and collaborate on new commercial uses for Watson. To that end, IBM will invest $100M in select companies that develop a solution on Watson technology. As invested portfolio companies, partners can gain access to IBMs technology, expertise, channels and client relationships.
Criteria for equity investment include company size and growth rate, the ability of the application to positively disrupt and spur innovation in a market or industry, and level of committed resources.
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Cyborg Kuro-chan Episode 39 (Japanese)
Episode Title: Mi #39;s Second appearance Air Date: June 17th 2000 Plot: Doctor Go and Mi-kun plan a bank heist but when they make it the bank they find out a group of robbers are already there...
By: Luke Davidson
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Invicta FC 11 Cris Cyborg vs Charmaine Tweet
February 27, 2015 | Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, CA Live on UFC FightPass Cristiane Justino vs. Charmaine Tweet -Featherweight Title Alexa Grasso vs. Mizu...
By: Mike Waz
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An ironic dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit
This chapter is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humour and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honoured within socialist-feminism. At the centre of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.
A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women's movements have constructed 'women's experience', as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women's experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.
Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs creatures simultaneously animal and machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality. Cyborg 'sex' restores some of the lovely replicative baroque of ferns and invertebrates (such nice organic prophylactics against heterosexism). Cyborg replication is uncoupled from organic reproduction. Modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonization work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984's US defence budget. I am making an argument for the cyborg as a fiction mapping our social and bodily reality and as an imaginative resource suggesting some very fruitful couplings. Michael Foucault's biopolitics is a flaccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open field.
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. Ths cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centres structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of 'Western' science and politics the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination. This chapter is an argument for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction. It is also an effort to contribute to socialist-feminist culture and theory in a postmodernist, non-naturalist mode and in the utopian tradition of imagining a world without gender, which is perhaps a world without genesis, but maybe also a world without end. The cyborg incarnation is outside salvation history. Nor does it mark time on an oedipal calendar, attempting to heal the terrible cleavages of gender in an oral symbiotic utopia or post-oedipal apocalypse. As Zoe Sofoulis argues in her unpublished manuscript on Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture, Lacklein, the most terrible and perhaps the most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a different logic of repression, which we need to understand for our survival.
The cyborg is a creature in a post-gender world; it has no truck with bisexuality, pre-oedipal symbiosis, unalienated labour, or other seductions to organic wholeness through a final appropriation of all the powers of the parts into a higher unity. In a sense, the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense a 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in the 'Western', humanist sense depends on the myth of original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by the phallic mother from whom all humans must separate, the task of individual development and of history, the twin potent myths inscribed most powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism. Hilary Klein has argued that both Marxism and psychoanalysis, in their concepts of labour and of individuation and gender formation, depend on the plot of original unity out of which difference must be produced and enlisted in a drama of escalating domination of woman/nature. The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars.
The cyborg is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity. It is oppositional, utopian, and completely without innocence. No longer structured by the polarity of public and private, the cyborg defines a technological polls based partly on a revolution of social relations in the oikos, the household. Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other. The rela-tionships for forming wholes from parts, including those of polarity and hierarchical domination, are at issue in the cyborg world. Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein's monster, the cyborg does not expect its father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the fabrication of a heterosexual mate, through its completion in a finished whole, a city and cosmos. The eyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. Perhaps that is why I want to see if eyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust in the manic compulsion to name the Enemy. Cyborgs are not reverent; they do not re-member the cosmos. They are wary of holism, but needy for connection- they seem to have a natural feel for united front politics, but without the vanguard party. The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.
I will return to the science fiction of cyborgs at the end of this chapter, but now I want to signal three crucial boundary breakdowns that make the following political-fictional (political-scientific) analysis possible. By the late twentieth century in United States scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted if not turned into amusement parks--language tool use, social behaviour, mental events, nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. And many people no longer feel the need for such a separation; indeed, many branches of feminist culture affirm the pleasure of connection of human and other living creatures. Movements for animal rights are not irrational denials of human uniqueness; they are a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture. Biology and evolutionary theory over the last two centuries have simultaneously produced modern organisms as objects of knowledge and reduced the line between humans and animals to a faint trace re-etched in ideological struggle or professional disputes between life and social science. Within this framework, teaching modern Christian creationism should be fought as a form of child abuse.
Biological-determinist ideology is only one position opened up in scientific culture for arguing the meanings of human animality. There is much room for radical political people to contest the meanings of the breached boundary.2 The cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed. Far from signalling a walling off of people from other living beings, cyborgs signal distrurbingly and pleasurably tight coupling. Bestiality has a new status in this cycle of marriage exchange.
The second leaky distinction is between animal-human (organism) and machine. Pre-cybernetic machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine. This dualism structured the dialogue between materialism and idealism that was settled by a dialectical progeny, called spirit or history, according to taste. But basically machines were not self-moving, self-designing, autonomous. They could not achieve man's dream, only mock it. They were not man, an author to himself, but only a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream. To think they were otherwise was paranoid. Now we are not so sure. Late twentieth-century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and art)ficial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.
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Donna Haraway - A Cyborg Manifesto - European Graduate School
Baywatch Marine Conservation Project on polluted PE beaches
There #39;s growing concern by the spike in rubbish and waste washing up on Port Elizabeth wild-side beaches, causing damage to sea life. Some marine conservatio...
By: SABC Digital News
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Baywatch Marine Conservation Project on polluted PE beaches - Video
San Diego beaches 1 24 2015
rrz518 enjoys beautiful weather at San Diego #39;s Mission Beach and La Jolla Cove.
By: rrz518
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APB #39;Beaches of Harris #39;
By: Robin Rayne Nelson
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The Normandy landings (codenamed Operation Neptune) were the landing operations on 6 June 1944 (termed D-Day) of the Allied invasion of Normandy in Operation Overlord during World War II. The largest seaborne invasion in history, the operation began the invasion of German-occupied western Europe, led to the liberation of France from Nazi control, and contributed to an Allied victory in the war.
Planning for the operation began in 1943. In the months leading up to the invasion, the Allies conducted a substantial military deception, codenamed Operation Bodyguard, to mislead the Germans as to the date and location of the main Allied landings. The weather on D-Day was far from ideal, but postponing would have meant a delay of at least two weeks, as the invasion planners had requirements for the phase of the moon, the tides, and the time of day that meant only a few days in each month were deemed suitable. Hitler placed German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel in command of German forces and of developing fortifications along the Atlantic Wall in anticipation of an Allied invasion.
The amphibious landings were preceded by extensive aerial and naval bombardment and an airborne assaultthe landing of 24,000 British, US, and Canadian airborne troops shortly after midnight. Allied infantry and armoured divisions began landing on the coast of France starting at 06:30. The target 50-mile (80km) stretch of the Normandy coast was divided into five sectors: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword Beach. Strong winds blew the landing craft east of their intended positions, particularly at Utah and Omaha. The men landed under heavy fire from gun emplacements overlooking the beaches, and the shore was mined and covered with obstacles such as wooden stakes, metal tripods, and barbed wire, making the work of the beach clearing teams difficult and dangerous. Casualties were heaviest at Omaha, with its high cliffs. At Gold, Juno, and Sword, several fortified towns were cleared in house-to-house fighting, and two major gun emplacements at Gold were disabled using specialised tanks.
The Allies failed to achieve all of their goals on the first day. Carentan, St. L, and Bayeux remained in German hands, and Caen, a major objective, was not captured until 21 July. Only two of the beaches (Juno and Gold) were linked on the first day, and all five bridgeheads were not connected until 12 June. However, the operation gained a foothold that the Allies gradually expanded over the coming months. German casualties on D-Day were around 1,000 men. Allied casualties were at least 10,000, with 4,414 confirmed dead. Museums, memorials, and war cemeteries in the area host many visitors each year.
Between 27 May and 4 June 1940, the retreating British Expeditionary Force, trapped along the northern coast of France, was able to evacuate over 338,000 troops to England in the Dunkirk evacuation. After the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin began pressing for the creation of a second front in western Europe. In late May 1942 the Soviet Union and United States made a joint announcement that a "... full understanding was reached with regard to the urgent tasks of creating a second front in Europe in 1942." However, Churchill persuaded Roosevelt to postpone the promised invasion as, even with American help, the Allies did not have adequate forces for such a strike.
Instead of an immediate return to France, the Western Allies staged offensives in the Mediterranean Theater of Operations, where British troops were already stationed. By mid-1943, the North African Campaign had been won. The Allies then launched the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, and Italy in September 1943. By then, Soviet forces were on the offensive and had won a major victory at the Battle of Stalingrad. The decision to undertake a cross-channel invasion within the next year was taken at the Trident Conference in Washington in May 1943. Initial planning was constrained by the number of available landing craft, most of which were already committed in the Mediterranean and Pacific. At the Tehran Conference in November 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill promised Stalin that they would open the long-delayed second front in May 1944.
Four sites were considered for the landings: Brittany, the Cotentin Peninsula, Normandy, and Pas de Calais. As Brittany and Cotentin are peninsulas, it would have been possible for the Germans to cut off the Allied advance at a relatively narrow isthmus, so these sites were rejected. As the Pas de Calais is the closest point in continental Europe to Britain, the Germans considered it to be the most likely initial landing zone, so it was the most heavily fortified region. But it offered few opportunities for expansion, as the area is bounded by numerous rivers and canals, whereas landings on a broad front in Normandy would permit simultaneous threats against the port of Cherbourg, coastal ports further west in Brittany, and an overland attack towards Paris and eventually into Germany. Normandy was hence chosen as the landing site. The most serious drawback of the Normandy coastthe lack of port facilitieswould be overcome through the development of artificial Mulberry harbours. A series of specialised tanks, nicknamed Hobart's Funnies, were created to deal with conditions expected during the Normandy campaign, such as scaling sea walls and providing close support on the beach.
The Allies planned to launch the invasion on 1 May 1944. The initial draft of the plan was accepted at the Quebec Conference in August 1943. General Dwight D. Eisenhower was appointed commander of Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). General Bernard Montgomery was named as commander of the 21st Army Group, which comprised all of the land forces involved in the invasion. On 31 December 1943, Eisenhower and Montgomery first saw the plan, which proposed amphibious landings by three divisions with two more divisions in support. The two generals immediately insisted that the scale of the initial invasion be expanded to five divisions, with airborne descents by three additional divisions, to allow operations on a wider front and speed up the capture of the port at Cherbourg. The need to acquire or produce extra landing craft for the expanded operation meant that the invasion had to be delayed to June. Eventually, thirty-nine Allied divisions would be committed to the Battle of Normandy: twenty-two American, twelve British, three Canadian, one Polish, and one French, totalling over a million troops all under overall British command.
Operation Overlord was the name assigned to the establishment of a large-scale lodgement on the Continent. The first phase, the amphibious invasion and establishment of a secure foothold, was codenamed Operation Neptune. To gain the air superiority needed to ensure a successful invasion, the Allies undertook a bombing campaign (codenamed Operation Pointblank) that targeted German aircraft production, fuel supplies, and airfields. Elaborate deceptions, codenamed Operation Bodyguard, were undertaken in the months leading up to the invasion to prevent the Germans from learning the timing and location of the invasion.
The landings were to be preceded by airborne landings near Caen on the eastern flank to secure the Orne River bridges and north of Carentan on the western flank. The Americans, assigned to land at Utah Beach and Omaha Beach, were to attempt to capture Carentan and St. L the first day, then cut off the Cotentin Peninsula and eventually capture the port facilities at Cherbourg. The British at Sword Beach and Gold Beach and Canadians at Juno Beach would protect the American flank and attempt to establish airfields near Caen. A secure lodgement would be established and an attempt made to hold all territory north of the Avranches-Falaise line within the first three weeks. Montgomery envisaged a ninety-day battle, lasting until all Allied forces reached the Seine.
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RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) Bianca D'Aquino adjusts her parasol to block the blazing sun and settles into her beach chair, sinking her painted toenails deep into the burning sand.
The 19-year-old used to travel hours to Rio de Janeiro's chic Ipanema beach, but a spate of mass robberies by groups of youths are keeping D'Aquino closer to home, on an artificial shoreline built on the banks of trash-strewn and polluted Guanabara Bay.
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The 2015 National Science Olympiad Astronomy Event Part 3
By: Chandra X-ray Observatory
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The 2015 National Science Olympiad Astronomy Event Part 3 - Video
Looking Up at the Library: Astronomy, Books and Experiences
Astronomer Ron Thompson of Southern Maine Astronomers talks with public librarians about tools and telescopes libraries can use to bring astronomy to their patrons. From the December 12, 2014...
By: Cornerstones of Science
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Looking Up at the Library: Astronomy, Books and Experiences - Video