A pharaonic plan to construct 80 miles of new Metro to bind Paris closer to its troubled suburbs in just over a decade was approved by the French cabinet yesterday. The €22bn (£20bn) plan - which has caused a deep rift within the ruling centre-right party - is the first stage of Nicolas Sarkozy's declared ambition to create a unified, eco-friendly, thriving "Greater Paris" as a monument to his presidency. The President's vision has been hailed by supporters as a 21st-century version of the rebuilding of medieval Paris by Emperor Napoleon III and Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann in the 1850s and 1860s.
A pharaonic plan to construct 80 miles of new Metro to bind Paris closer to its troubled suburbs in just over a decade was approved by the French cabinet yesterday.
The €22bn (£20bn) plan - which has caused a deep rift within the ruling centre-right party - is the first stage of Nicolas Sarkozy's declared ambition to create a unified, eco-friendly, thriving "Greater Paris" as a monument to his presidency.
The President's vision has been hailed by supporters as a 21st-century version of the rebuilding of medieval Paris by Emperor Napoleon III and Baron Georges-Eugene Haussmann in the 1850s and 1860s.
A new international university league table published Thursday by the London Times shows only one non-Anglo-Saxon university in its top 20. A new ranking system commissioned by the EU aims to offer an alternative. The London Times' Higher Education supplement merely reshuffled the top 10 of its new university league table, published Thursday. As in previous years, the world's best universities, according to the Times, are only to be found in two countries: the United Kingdom and the United States. Harvard came first for the sixth year in succession, while Britain's Cambridge University has overtaken Yale in second place. The Australian National University, McGill University in Canada and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich are the only colleges outside those two nations to break into the top 20, which offered little comfort to the non-English institutions striving for international recognition. "There aren't really any surprises in it," Petra Giebisch of the Center for Higher Education Development (CHE) in Guetersloh told Deutsche Welle. Giebisch is currently leading a project aimed at creating a better ranking system that does not favor English speaking universities. "That was one of the thoughts behind our pilot project," she said.
The London Times' Higher Education supplement merely reshuffled the top 10 of its new university league table, published Thursday. As in previous years, the world's best universities, according to the Times, are only to be found in two countries: the United Kingdom and the United States. Harvard came first for the sixth year in succession, while Britain's Cambridge University has overtaken Yale in second place.
The Australian National University, McGill University in Canada and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich are the only colleges outside those two nations to break into the top 20, which offered little comfort to the non-English institutions striving for international recognition.
"There aren't really any surprises in it," Petra Giebisch of the Center for Higher Education Development (CHE) in Guetersloh told Deutsche Welle. Giebisch is currently leading a project aimed at creating a better ranking system that does not favor English speaking universities. "That was one of the thoughts behind our pilot project," she said.
A man who claims he was unfairly dismissed from his job because he believes in climate change is attempting to have his environmental views recognised under religious law.Tim Nicholson, 42, says his beliefs on the environment are so strong they led to clashes with other senior staff at Grainger, one of the UK's biggest property companies.He said the chief executive, Rupert Dickinson, showed contempt for his concerns and once flew a member of staff to Ireland to deliver his BlackBerry, which he had left in London.In March, employment judge David Neath gave Nicholson permission to take the firm to a tribunal over his treatment. The company is challenging the ruling, arguing that environmental beliefs are not the same as religious or philosophical ones.
A man who claims he was unfairly dismissed from his job because he believes in climate change is attempting to have his environmental views recognised under religious law.
Tim Nicholson, 42, says his beliefs on the environment are so strong they led to clashes with other senior staff at Grainger, one of the UK's biggest property companies.
He said the chief executive, Rupert Dickinson, showed contempt for his concerns and once flew a member of staff to Ireland to deliver his BlackBerry, which he had left in London.
In March, employment judge David Neath gave Nicholson permission to take the firm to a tribunal over his treatment. The company is challenging the ruling, arguing that environmental beliefs are not the same as religious or philosophical ones.
Constantine "Connie" Xinos is the president of the home-owners' association in a gated community in the Chicago suburb of Oak Brook. He dislikes being near poor people (he successfully blocked a permit for a senior's home, stating, "I don't want to live next to poor people. I don't want poor people in my town"). He reportedly worked to elect an Oak Brook village council who would shut down the town library, which he also campaigned against. When local kids showed up at town meetings to ask that their library be left open, he is quoted as saying, "I don't care that you guys miss the librarian, and she was nice, and she helped you find books;" and to the library staff to "stop whining."
The global Muslim population stands at 1.57 billion, meaning that nearly 1 in 4 people in the world practice Islam, according to a report Wednesday billed as the most comprehensive of its kind. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life report provides a precise number for a population whose size has long has been subject to guesswork, with estimates ranging anywhere from 1 billion to 1.8 billion. The project, three years in the making, also presents a portrait of the Muslim world that might surprise some. For instance, Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon, China has more Muslims than Syria, Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined, and Ethiopia has nearly as many Muslims as Afghanistan. "This whole idea that Muslims are Arabs and Arabs are Muslims is really just obliterated by this report," said Amaney Jamal, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University who reviewed an advance copy.
The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life report provides a precise number for a population whose size has long has been subject to guesswork, with estimates ranging anywhere from 1 billion to 1.8 billion.
The project, three years in the making, also presents a portrait of the Muslim world that might surprise some. For instance, Germany has more Muslims than Lebanon, China has more Muslims than Syria, Russia has more Muslims than Jordan and Libya combined, and Ethiopia has nearly as many Muslims as Afghanistan.
"This whole idea that Muslims are Arabs and Arabs are Muslims is really just obliterated by this report," said Amaney Jamal, an assistant professor of politics at Princeton University who reviewed an advance copy.
Many Arab countries are rather sparsely populated: the biggest being Egypt, with 81 million, followed by Morocco and Algeria with 35 million.
Population wise, Islam's center of gravity is squarely in Asia, with Indonesia having 240 million people and the Philippines having a sizable Muslim minority.
Another frequent phantasm under our latitudes: "they're breeding like rabbits". Actually, countries like Lebanon, Tunisia, Algeria or Iran have a fertility rate well under 2 children per woman, and, in the words of historian and demographer Emmanuel Todd, are more under threat from de-islamization... Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time.
Are square A and B the same color? They are. Are too. To verify this, click here to see them connected. The above illusion, called the same color illusion, illustrates that purely human observations in science may be ambiguous or inaccurate. Even such a seemingly direct perception as relative color. Similar illusions exist on the sky, such as the size of the Moon near the horizon, or the apparent shapes of astronomical objects. The advent of automated, reproducible, measuring devices such as CCDs have made science in general and astronomy in particular less prone to, but not free of, human-biased illusions.
What this optical illusion shows is that even the "equality of colour" (supposedly, people can agree that two colours are the same without having to agree on what colour they perceive it to be) experiments can be ambiguous. En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
The Gestalt effect refers to the form-forming capability of our senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves.
Boeing and international academic and business partners are looking into ways of producing commercially viable aviation fuel from saltwater plants in a push toward reducing carbon emissions from air travel. The Boeing Co. said scientific studies were focused on salicornia bigelovii and saltwater mangroves -- plants known as halophytes. Research conducted in the United States, Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates and other locations showed the plants thrive when irrigated with seawater and can be produced in large quantities to extract biofuel suitable for aircraft....Boeing says biofuel development is focused on plant sources that do not distort the global food chain, compete with freshwater resources or lead to unintended land use change.
The Boeing Co. said scientific studies were focused on salicornia bigelovii and saltwater mangroves -- plants known as halophytes.
Research conducted in the United States, Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates and other locations showed the plants thrive when irrigated with seawater and can be produced in large quantities to extract biofuel suitable for aircraft....Boeing says biofuel development is focused on plant sources that do not distort the global food chain, compete with freshwater resources or lead to unintended land use change.
Because Salicornia bigelovii can be grown using saltwater and its seeds contain high levels of unsaturated oil (30 percent, mostly linoleic acid) and protein (35 percent),[7][8] it can be used to produce animal feedstuff and biodiesel on coastland where conventional crops cannot be grown.... There are experimental fields of Salicornia in Ras al-Zawr (Saudi Arabia),[8] Eritrea (Northeast Africa) and Sonora (Northwest Mexico)[10] aimed at the production of biodiesel. The company responsible for the Sonora trials (Global Seawater) claims that between 225 and 250 gallons of BQ-9000 biodiesel can be produced per hectare (approximately 2.5 acres) of salicornia,[11] and is promoting a $35 million scheme to create a 12,000-acre (49 km2) salicornia farm in Bahia de Kino.[12]
