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Sunday, December 14, 2008

Ksenia Sukhinova of Russia, won the Miss World 2008 crown on Saturday, outshining 108 other international competitors. She was crowned by her predecessor Miss World 2007, Zhang Zilin of the People’s Republic of China. She pledged to “help people” and said, “I think I can help people and I want to help people and today if I walk away with this crown I will do that.”

Sukhinova, 5′ 10″, said that her immediate ambitions included meeting Russia’s president Dmitry Medvedev. She is a student of Tyumen State Oil and Gas University, she is enrolled in the Bachelor of Science program, majoring in Engineering.

Sukhinova was born in 1987 in Nizhnevartovsk, in the north west of Siberia. Sukhinova won the 2007 Miss Russia beauty contest on December 14, in Moscow, where she represented Tyumen. Ksenia surpassed 50 other contestants from all over Russia. She was unable to represent Russia at Miss Universe 2008 due to her college work, so her 2nd runner-up, Vera Krasova, replaced her in the contest. Vera placed as the 3rd runner-up to Venezuela’s Dayana Mendoza.

Miss World 2008, the 58th Miss World was held at Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, South Africa on December 13, 2008. Originally, the pageant was going to take place in Kiev, Ukraine, but because of the ongoing crisis between Georgia and Russia in neighboring South Ossetia, the Miss World Organization decided to move the pageant away from Eastern Europe. 109 contestants from all over the world competed for the crown, marking the biggest turnout in the 58 years of the pageant, surpassing the previous record of 107 during Miss World 2004.

She is the second Russian contestant to win Miss World, the first was Julia Kourotchkina in 1992.

The first runner-up was India’s Parvathy Omanakuttan, while the second runner-up was Trinidad and Tobago’s Gabrielle Walcott. The other finalists were Angola’s Brigith dos Santos and South Africa’s Tansey Coetzee. There were 15 semi-finalists.

Julia Morley, Miss World committee head, and wife of Miss World creator Eric Morley said that the winner has to espouse “beauty with a purpose” with charity via fund raising, being one of the main focuses of the contest. “Over the years the crown that is worn by the winner is a symbol for fundraising. Miss World herself, this year, the winner from China, she’s raised over 30 million dollars in her year in office. So perhaps from anything else it does a lot of good things for needy children and old people, which I think is important too.” she said.

It was the sixth time that South Africa hosted the pageant, more than any other country except England. The event was aired live to millions of viewers in 187 countries, who, for the first time in the pageant’s history, were allowed to vote for one of the semi-finalists through the Internet. An international jury elected the winner.

Sunday, February 26, 2006

The Boston College men’s basketball team defeated the North Carolina State Wolfpack at home in a 74-72 double-overtime thriller on Feb. 25. The BC Eagles, ranked #11 going in to the contest, left with a 22-6, 9-5 record in the Atlantic Coast Conference, while the NC State Wolfpack dropped to #19 after the game with a 21-7, 10-5 record.

Boston College star Sean Marshall finished with 22 points, including three 3-point shots, while Craig Smith had 18 points, 14 rebounds and six assists for the Eagles.

Ilian Evtimov led the Wolfpack with 16 points.

BC outscored the Wolfpack by two in the first half, which was reversed in the second half. Only Miller’s second overtime 4-pointer put BC decisively in the lead and allowed them a victory.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

The Creative Archive project is a BBC led initiative which aims to make archive audio and video footage available to be freely downloaded, distributed, and ‘remixed’. The project is still in a pilot stage, and is only available to UK residents, but the long-term future of the project could have a major impact on the way audiences interact with BBC content.

The project is partly inspired by the Creative Commons movements, and also by a general move within the BBC to be more open with its assets. Additionally, educational audiences such as schools have expressed an interest in using BBC content within the classroom, both to watch and to create multimedia content from.

So far, clips made available under the licence have included archive news footage, nature documentary footage, and video clips content designed for educational uses. “It’s done very well with the audiences we’ve directed them towards – heavy BBC users,” says Paul Gerhardt, project leader. Users downloading the clips are also prompted to fill in a questionnaire, and so far 10-15% of people seem to be doing something with the material, although the BBC can’t be sure what exactly that is.

One of the biggest limitations within the licence as it currently stands during the pilot scheme is that the material is only available for use by people resident in the UK. The BBC’s Creative Archive sites use ‘geo-IP filtering’ to limit downloads to the UK, but there is some confusion over whether people who create their own content using the material can upload their creations to their own websites. A question within the FAQs for one of the more recent selections of clips suggests that this isn’t possible, saying “during this pilot phase material released under the terms of the Creative Archive Licence cannot be used outside the UK – therefore, unless a website has its use restricted to the UK only, content from the ‘Regions on Film’ archive cannot be published on it.”

“We want people to make full use of this content, whether they cut and paste it or whether they share it, and we completely accept that we’ve got a bit of a contradiction at the moment by saying UK-only and yet encouraging people to put it on their sites to share it with others, because you can’t expect people to have geo-IP restriction technology,” admits Mr Gerhardt. “We’re thinking hard about how to deal with this after the pilot – at the moment it’s quite likely that we’re probably going to need to find a distribution partner outside of the UK, so that if you’re outside of the UK you’ve got roughly the same experience as in the UK, but the content could be surrounded by sponsorship messages or advertising or whatever. Once we’ve done that then leakage from one to the other won’t really matter very much.”

The Creative Archive project has not been without critics from the commercial sector, worried that the BBC giving away their content for free would make it difficult for them to be able to make money from their own content. The BBC has explained to some of the commercial players that the content would be limited during the pilot, would not be available in broadcast quality, and that watermarking technologies would be trialled so that content could be recognised when it crops up elsewhere. The BBC is also investigating a business model for the future where there would be a “close relationship between public access to low-resolution content and a click through to monetising that content if you want to buy a high-resolution version”. People who want to play around with the material might discover they have a talent and then find they need to get a commercial license to use it properly, Mr Gerhardt explains, and the project wants to make it easy for this to happen.

Before the project can go ahead with the full scale launch, it will have to go through a ‘public value test’ to assess its overall impact on the marketplace, and commercial media companies will have a chance to input at this point.

For ease in clearing the rights, all of the content available under the pilot project is factual, but in the future the project could include drama and entertainment content. The BBC may also, in the future, work the Creative Archive licences into the commissioning process for new programmes. “This raises some really interesting ideas – if you have a documentary series, you could use the Creative Archive to release the longer form footage, for instance – that would create a digital legacy of that documentary series,” Mr Gerhardt explains. “The other interesting thought in the longer term would be for the BBC, or another broadcaster, to contribute to a digital pool of archive material on a theme, and then invite people to assemble their own content out of that. We could end up broadcasting both the BBC professionally produced programme accompanied by other programmes that other people had made out of the same material.”

One of the ways that the Creative Archive licence differs from the other ‘copyleft’ licences like Creative Commons, aside from the UK-only limitation, is that the licence currently allows the BBC to update and modify the licence, which may worry those using the licence that their rights could suddenly become more restricted. “The licence at the moment is a draft, and we’ve given warning that we may well improve it, but we wouldn’t do that more than once or twice. The ambition is that by the time we scale up to the full service we would have a fixed licence that everyone was comfortable with, and it wouldn’t change after that.”

“The ambition is to think about creating a single portal where people can search and see what stuff is out there under the same licence terms, from a range of different suppliers. The idea is that if we can create something compelling like that, we will attract other archives in the UK to contribute their material, so we’d be aggregating quite a large quantity.”

The Creative Archive project has captured the interest of many Internet users, who are growing increasingly, used the idea of being able to ‘remix’ technologies and content. Some groups have been frustrated with the speed at which the project is developing though, and with some of the restrictions imposed in the licence. An open letter to the BBC urges the dropping of the UK-only limitation, the use of ‘open formats’, and to allow the material to be usable commercially.

Mr Gerhardt has publicly welcomed debate of the licence, but makes it clear to me that the whole BBC archive will never all be available under the Creative Archive terms. “We will make all our archive available, under different terms, over the next five to ten years, at a pace to be determined. There would be three modes in which people access it – some of the content would only be available commercially, for the first five year or so after broadcast, say. The second route is through a ‘view again’ strategy where you can view the programmes, but they’d be DRM-restricted. And the third mode is Creative Archive. Over time, programmes would move from one mode to another, with some programmes going straight to the Creative Archive after broadcast.”

Others who disagree with the ‘UK-only’ restriction within the licence include Suw Charman, from the Open Rights Group, who has said “it doesn’t make sense in a world where information moves between continents in seconds, and where it is difficult for the average user to exclude visitors based on geography.” On the project generally, though, she said “I think that it is a good step along the way to a more open attitude towards content. It is a toe in the water, which is far preferable to the attitude of most of the industry players, who are simply burying their heads in the sand and hoping that lawsuits and lobbying for new legislation will bolster their out-dated business plan.”

Other organisations currently participating in the Creative Archive scheme include the British Film Institute, the Open University and Teachers’ TV. Two artists have been awarded scholarships to create artworks using BBC archive material, and BBC Radio 1 has held a competition asking people to use the footage in creative ways as backing visuals to music. The process of making the BBC’s archive material fully available may be a long one, but it could end up changing the way that people interact with the UK’s public service broadcaster.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

25-year-old man David Striegl was knocked unconscious by a kangaroo on the Mount Ainslie nature reserve in the Australian capital Canberra on Thursday. He received cuts and bruises and a black eye after being scratched and hit by the kangaroo. Mount Ainslie is located near the centre of the Australian capital, with Australia’s parliament houses designed to be viewed from the top of the mountain.

He does not remember much about the incident, only that he turned around and saw the kangaroo which hit him in the face. He said that the kangaroo scratched him at first then guessed that it must have hit him which caused him to lose consciousness. He was taken to hospital by a motorist who was passing by. At the hospital he was given x-rays and a tetanus shot before being discharged.

Striegl had been jogging up the mountain during his lunch break. Joggers and cyclists are common on the mountain, which is located a few kilometres from the city centre. He was a former Australian rules footballer, and says he had never been in a fight, until being hit by the kangaroo. He had seen kangaroos box each other before but didn’t know they would box people. He said he would not have thrown a punch back if he had the chance because of their status as a national symbol, and he has no hard feelings against kangaroos. His colleagues at the United Group Ltd. real estate office where he works have given him the nickname Skippy, after the famous television show. He said he will continue jogging at the reserve, but with company next time.

Injuries from kangaroos in Australia are rare, and it is almost unheard of for someone to be knocked out by one. This attack comes a year after a kangaroo crashed through a window of a house in Canberra before rampaging through the house.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Toyota announced on Friday that it will recall around 17,000 Lexus vehicles in response to risks of the fuel tank in the cars leaking after a collision.

The Lexus HS 250h model was subjected to the recall following a US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) investigation. Despite previously passing Toyota safety inspections, the conclusions of an NHTSA sub-contracted investigator were that; when the vehicles in question collided with an object at more than fifty-miles-per hour, more than 142 grams of fuel, the maximum allowed by US law, leaked from the crashed car.

According to Toyota, further tests did not show any additional failure of the fuel tank.

In response to the findings, Toyota issued a recall of all affected vehicles, since the company had no solution immediately available. The recall includes 13,000 cars already sold, as well as another 4,000 still at dealerships.

Toyota says it plans to conduct further tests to determine the cause of the leak. A Toyota spokesman, Brian Lyons, said that the company was “still working to determine what the root cause of the condition is.” It’s still unclear when exactly the recall will take place, or when dealerships will be allowed to sell this model again. Lyons said that Toyota is “working feverishly to get this resolved as soon as possible.”

Toyota isn’t aware of any accidents stemming from the leaking fuel tank in the affected vehicles, first introduced in the summer of 2009.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

A new law which seeks to utilise reusable energy and minimise cost impact on consumers is under development in Japan. The new law, which would be effective from July 1 next year, would seek to reduce Japan’s dependency on nuclear power.

The new legislation would urge power utilities to cut costs by purchasing renewable energy from outside companies and private businesses. Japan’s decision has been referred to as opening the door on renewable energy, which currently only contributes to six percent of Japan’s energy sources.

Politicians have amended the bill, allowing the revised bill to pass through parliament later this month. Prime Minister Naoto Kan who is pushing for the bill to be passed in return for his resignation, has stated that the ‘feed-in-tariff on renewable energy will be set at a fixed price so that utilities are limited to purchasing electricity from renewable power generators. Kan hopes that this will encourage more business and private corporate partners to enter into the renewable energy market.

“As a medium-term revolutionary energy and environmental strategy, we have decided to start a thorough review of nuclear power policy and draw a roadmap for a reduction of the dependence on nuclear power” Mr Kan said.

Large companies are concerned about the new legislation as it will continue to affect profit margins which are low due to power shortages and high priced exports. The bill was changed to reduce the surcharge for large power companies after complaints from the Japanese steel industry. If the scheme is launched then consumers will face an increase on electricity bills as utilities can pass their costs onto end-users. Despite the governments promise to cap the surcharge for the next ten years, there is no reference to it in the revised bill.

Lawmakers hope that by adding a provision requiring utilities to streamline their operations, the impact on consumers will be minimized.

A third party group will be set up within the under the Agency for National Resources and Energy to ensure that the setting of fixed prices are fair and just.

Thursday, July 14, 2005

First Active has become the first financial institution to offer 100% mortgages in the Republic of Ireland. The bank previously offered 100% financing to professionals in finance and medicine, but is now to offer this product to anyone who can afford to meet the repayments.

The development is a huge boost for first time home buyers who have been struggling to get on the Irish property market in recent years due to the rapid increase in house prices. A typical first time buyer in Dublin with 92% financing would normally have to put down a deposit of €20,000-€30,000 in cash, but now have the option to produce no deposit.

First Active has said that 100% mortgages will be available across its entire range of mortgage products.

Note however that this is not necessarily an entirely positive development.

The United States and most of Europe have experienced a housing price bubble in recent years. A bubble occurs when buyers purchase a property not because its price is appropriate for its actual value but because they expect the price to significantly rise in the short term permitting resale with a profit.

In other words, the prices people pay for properties becomes divorced from the real value of the property; the purchase is speculative and depends purely upon the expectation that people will continue to buy properties in this way (e.g. without proper consideration of their real value).

The terrible weakness in this is that when the market corrects itself and prices fall to a level where properties are being priced at their actual realistic value, anyone holding a property loses a great deal of money, since the price they paid does not reflect the actual realistic value of the property.

This kind of shock to the housing market is extremely undesirable. Significant write downs in the value of property often significantly depress the economy as a whole.

Less than 100% mortgages force buyers to invest a significant amount of money in the act of purchasing their house, which tends to discourage purely speculative purchasing, thus helping to mediate house price bubbles.

With 100% financing, anyone who can meet repayments can speculatively purchase a property. This naturally encourages pricing bubbles.