The following is a list of dig diaries which you might want to follow
KV-63 (updated intermittently)
Saqqara.nl (updated weekly)
Brooklyn Museum 2010 dig diary (updated weekly)
Djehuty (updated daily – in Spanish)
If anyone knows of any others please forward me the links. Thanks.
Nokia N900 owners are now the envy of the mobile world having been given the privilege of being the first group of people to use the official finalized version of Firefox Mobile. Firefox Mobile will run on the Maemo 5 platform and incorporates many features seen in the desktop version of Firefox including the Awesome Bar, add-ons, tabbed browsing, location-aware browsing, and safe browsing which provides you with an instant web ID and allows you to your easily customize your security settings. Mozilla also introduced Weave Sync, a feature which allows you to sync your tabs, history, bookmarks, and passwords between your desktop and mobile device. Anyone rocking a N900 want to share your first impressions with us?
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The Guardian, UK (Paul Sussman)
In 1972, when I was six, my aunt took me to see the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum. I’ve been hooked on Egypt and archaeology ever since – I spent most of my childhood looking for tombs in our garden in Watford.Although I make my living as a writer and hold no formal archaeological qualification, I have worked on digs whenever I can and learned on the job. The one I’ll always remember took place more than 10 years ago, working as a field archaeologist and diarist with a team digging in the Valley of the Kings.
I was part of the Amarna Royal Tombs Project and we spent four years excavating in the valley, around the tombs of Tutankhamun and Ramesses VI. As well as digging new ground, we were given permission to re-excavate a small existing tomb, KV56. I was in charge of this re-excavation.
Discovered in 1908 by English archaeologist Edward Ayrton, KV56 had yielded one of the most spectacular arrays of jewellery found in the valley, hence its nickname: the Gold Tomb.
With Crysis 2 set for release within the year, it seems that Crytek is already busying itself with its next big title. According to a LinkedIn profile spotted by Connected Consoles, an “unannounced MMO FPS” is now
Several student groups at Kansas Wesleyan University are collecting funds to help earthquake victims in Haiti.…Additionally, KWU’s Student Nurse Organization and Biology Club are raising funds for the American Red Cross’ Haitian Relief Fund.
Read the full article in KSAL – Salina, Kansas
Lewis Hamilton put the rumors to rest during the McLaren Mercedes MP4-25 launch event in Newbury, at least the ones regarding his new teammate Jenson Button. The 2008 world champion told the media that it was his personal choice to see the reigning F1 champion in the same McLaren seat as him, although when he first told that to his team, McLaren was not negotiating with Button.
According to Lewis, he spoke personally with the members from McLaren’s staff and for the first time launched the hy… (read more)
Global Voices has sent a two-person team to Port-au-Prince in the wake of the Haiti earthquake, to help support citizen media activity. Georgia Popplewell and Alice Backer are also contributing firsthand reporting to our coverage of recovery efforts. Find out more about their assignment here.
PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI, 30 January, 2010
Régine Zamor is a Haitian-American based in New Rochelle, New York, but raised in Brooklyn. Her Haitian family is from Martissant. She decided to come to Haiti after the 12 January earthquake and volunteer on her own, without signing up with a major NGO. She had contacts in Haiti and the Dominican Republic before arriving, having volunteered with Haitian indentured laborers in Batey Ocho, Barahona, in the Dominican Republic last summer. Her family and friends in the United States were supportive of her decision.
Régine is a film producer and writer who just finished a documentary film on street children in Cap Haïtien, titled Bagay Dwòl. She has been blogging about the film and about her first-response volunteering at her blog, Bagay Dwol Journal.
When she initially arrived in Haiti, a couple of days after the quake, she researched where her help was needed and wound up volunteering in food distribution, information sharing — both in person and through her blog — and in medical supplies distribution through various contacts at smaller NGOs such as SOIL, Wynn Farm, and COHEF.
Georgia Popplewell and I met with her at the Hotel Oloffson a couple of afternoons ago.
“I didn't want to wait”
When I told other Haitians living in the United States that I was traveling to Haiti with Global Voices, many who were on waiting lists with large well-known NGOs and US government agencies expressed dismay. For example, my friend Alex — who holds a masters degree in public health administration and has been working in the healthcare industry in the United States for years — was itching to be picked from a volunteer list. When Régine explained to Georgia and me how she made it to Haiti shortly after the quake, I immediately thought of Alex and all the others waiting in the U.S.
Régine decided not to wait, and in this video she explains how she connected with the work she wound up doing:
(A version of this video with French subtitles is also available on dotSUB.)
Régine and other first-responders took food distribution in their own hands and at their own cost
I have only spotted one UN-run food distribution line since my arrival here a week ago. It was near the National Palace, and proved so chaotic that either tear gas or pepper spray was allegedly used on the crowd. A handful of UN officers seemed to be handling a crowd of thousands. A system for the distribution of the global influx of aid by either the UN or the Haitian government has yet to materialize. But in speaking to Régine, it became clear that many Haitians and others willing to help took matters into their own hands during the first-response period.
Here Régine explains how she coordinated with an NGO contact in the Dominican Republic to buy food, have it sent to Port-au-Prince, and distribute it to Orphelinat l'Amour du Bon Berger.
Volunteering with the Parc Antoine Izméry Clinic in Delmas 33
When we met Régine at the Oloffson, an American buddy from her hometown of New Rochelle, NY, interrupted our meeting to introduce some doctors to her. Régine left Georgia and me to go and meet them, and eventually introduced us to one of them, an American doctor who has served Haitian patients in the Bahamas for the past 11 years. She turned to us and said: “He just agreed to come to the Sité Solèy Clinic with me tomorrow morning.”
That is precisely what Régine means by her role in “information sharing”. Via word of mouth and using all means available, she has connected tens of people to whatever service needs she has identified or become aware of.
Here Régine shares a bit about the work she has been doing at the medical clinic at Park Antoine Izméry in Delmas 33:
On her blog, she explains how she delivered needed medical supplies to Kenscoff.
Régine's journey is far from over. Like many of the Haitian-Americans I have met in Port-au-Prince, she is planning on installing herself permanently here in the next few weeks. Here are her “Helpful Resources for Volunteering in NYC.”
Global Voices' work in Haiti is supported by our general support donors and by a humanitarian information grant from Internews. Please visit the Global Voices Haiti Earthquake page for more coverage.
No matter how much they get in terms of criticism, Nintendo still has the numbers to show how much they have in terms of sales. The veteran gaming company has revealed their lifetime sales figures for hardware
Calvin Chin is an American entrepreneur who lives in Shanghai. He founded Qifang, a P2P lending site for Chinese student loans. You can read more about Qifang here. He attended the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this last week, where China was the center of attention. We asked him to write this guest post and share his unique perspective as an American building a startup in the heart of China.
Here at Davos it seems China keeps coming up in two ways – neither of them positive. One, with the worst of the crisis behind us, people are turning from last year’s hopes of China as economic savior to China as free-rider keeping its currency cheap, bullying its minorities and shirking its responsibilities in Copenhagen. Two, in the tech community, seems everyone is talking about Google, Chinese government hackers and censorship.
My view, and I think it’s one that many in China would probably share, is that while free access to information and the rest of the world is inherently a good thing, so is political stability. The Chinese government has earned a lot of slack for raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, and if things did go out of control a heck of a lot of people would get hurt. So even if they want China to be plugged in to the rest of the world to encourage innovation and Chinese tech entrepreneurship (which I think they do), they’d put that priority after getting most Chinese people better lives.
It’s kind of the same deal that Chinese startups all make, to try to do build cool stuff but while working within the system. So Tudou and Youku screen their videos and the fastest growing microblogging service is run by a portal that has the infrastructure from screening blogs to be able to screen tweets. All these companies are making the same decision that Google made to enter China in 2004 too (and stay for now), but for Chinese entrepreneurs they don’t have the option of not being in the China market. It’s what they know and where they have their best shot at success. And I’m sure if you’d ask them, they’d sincerely agree that eliminating poverty and keeping things stable comes way before access to a few articles in a foreign language about events that don’t mean much to them. I don’t think many non-Chinese would like the aggressively patriotic and self-important China that would probably be the outcome of democracy there today anyways.
The Chinese market for startups is growing so fast, is so competitive and is characterized by so many unfair advantages for the big players, that local entrepreneurs just keep their heads down and roll with the political and market changes. Take Digu for instance, they launched as a pretty simple copy of Twitter that focused on celebrity accounts, then pivoted to a social game model when all the startup microblogging platforms got shutdown and Sina (with a lock on celebrity blogs) launched Weibo, and are now back to straight microblogging with a better ability to keep the tweet streams “harmonized.” Digu didn’t whine, they just sucked it up and forged ahead.
This is typical for Chinese startups. Whether they are localizing an international hit, copy-2-china style, at a much cheaper price and a better UI like Kuukie. Or they’re a fit for Chinese net culture with a product that you don’t see elsewhere like Douban’s social network for talking about books (and now other media).
The thing is while the majority of Chinese netizens really don’t care that much about what’s going on outside of China, the ones who do care, people who would start companies, people who want international news, all know workarounds to use services they like or read about sensitive topics from other perspectives. They use Twitter clients like Bage or free (http://hotspotshield.com/) or paid VPNs. So much so that Twitter won in the grassroots Chinamode awards.
So actually, the Chinese government kinda gets the best of all worlds: most Chinese netizens are sufficiently inconvenienced so they’ll never stumble into places they shouldn’t, motivated innovators still find out about, get to, and can track any going on globally, and international companies that would otherwise compete for local market share get locked out.
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MobiPDFScanner is a very useful app which has a bunch of uses. It can be used for archiving old documents when you don’t want the paper copies lying around, for sending a bunch of images to someone over the internet or just to help keep some photos organized. The interface is fantastic…
Read the full review at BestWindowsMobileApps here.
If you’re not sure about the whole cloth diaper deal, here’s your chance to try it out for no charge. One mommy (or dad) will receive a free infant diaper trial pack from Kushies!
The diaper trial pack, courtesy of Kushies, includes two Ultra-Lite diapers, two washable diaper liners (optional for extra protection), two washcloths and 10 biodegradable diaper liners (of course, the disposable liners are totally optional should you choose to continue using Kushies). Shown above is the neutral diaper, but Kushies also makes them in pink or blue. The trial pack retails for $32.99.
Post from: Blisstree
The authors evaluate promising process flowsheets for bioethanol production from different feedstocks along with current and promising technologies for bioethanol production. Case studies illustrate how process synthesis allows for the …
As we all know, the awards season is here and the second most important thing people want to know besides who won, is what the celebs are getting for swag. The 52nd Annual Grammy Awards show takes place tonight and we got a few details on some of the items popping up in Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Kings of Leon, and probably Kanye West’s gift bag (if he doesn’t act like a fool again.) This time the Grammy’s have gone techie and are offering a plethora of loot that are gadgety in one way or another.
i360 music infused headwear will be included which is appropriate considering the Grammy’s are all about music. At the special Neil Young Grammy reception yesterday, celebrities were gifted with a Seagate FreeAgent Go for Mac with a a specially designed MusiCares skin. The drive is perfect for storing, transporting and sharing music. OhMiBod was also strangely selected as an official participant in the Grammy Gift Bag, because celebs need a good massage once in a while…. Ritmo Advanced Pregnancy Sound System was also selected as swag for the Grammy’s as well – because rock stars should prep their kids while in the womb with a possible future career in music. Some of the other techie items being gifted to celebs will be: SteelSeries Siberia v2 full-size headsets and electronic cigarette starter kits. And this folks, is only techie stuff… we didn’t even list the rest of what they will be getting tonight – which is A LOT MORE!
So for the rest of us who aren’t rich and famous, and able to get awesome gifts for free, Radar online is giving away a Grammy Gift Bag of their own worth 5K, which also includes a bevy of techie goodies. But if you have no luck with that – eBay is currently running a Grammy Celebrity Auction with all proceeds going to the MusicCares Foundation.
Panasonic is nothing like shy about pushing out a plethora of compacts, but while it was talking up specs for the new Lumix F-series of compact cameras back at CES, we’ve just now got some prices and a release date to chew on. The FH1 (12 megapixel, 720p video) goes for $160, FH3 (14.1 megapixel, 720p) is $180, and the FH20 (14.1 megapixel, 720p) is $200. In slim land, the FP1 (12 megapixel) hits at $150 and the FP3 (14.1 megapixel, 720p) is $230. Finally, some killer value can be found in the bulkier F3, which does 12.1 megapixels and 720p video for a mere $130, and the barebones 10.1 megapixel F2. All of the cameras should be out in mid-February.
Panasonic clamps down prices, release window for latest F-series line of compact cameras originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 31 Jan 2010 06:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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KABUL: For the US Marines deployed to the battlefields of southern Afghanistan, life is fragile and thoughts focus on the day they see their families again, but something about this war is different. They are preparing for an offensive on Marjah, one of the Taliban’’s big urban strongholds in the southern province of Helmand, but progress is slow with the militants apparently preferring fight to flight. The Marines will soon be joined by tens of thousands more soldiers, the lion’’s share of the 30,000-strong troop surge promised by US President Barack Obama in December to try and turn around the grinding Afghan war. A foot patrol for one platoon of Marines ends with a dash under a hail of bullets across a heavily-mined poppy field. The soldiers have been pinned down in a muddy mound, the thorny weeds cutting through skin. They recover soon enough, however, manoeuvring away from the Taliban’’s crosshairs and driving them away with heavy machine-gun fire. “I pray in the morning and at night, hoping that someone up there is looking after me,” says Lance Corporal Justin Blancas, serving with the Marines 1st Battalion, 6th Regiment Alpha Company’’s 2nd Platoon. “I have already made my peace with God because this war is different, it’’s not conventional,” the 23-year-old bespectacled Chicago native says. “These Taliban have learned their lesson. They adapt as fast as we do, but we are bound by our strict rules. They are not,” he adds, panting after a 100-metre dash for cover behind an abandoned mud house. “It can be a death run like this every day.” The US and NATO troop surge is set to swell the foreign force to 150,000 this year, but Afghan and Western officials are also talking about a political solution to end the Taliban-led insurgency as its enters its ninth year. To force the Taliban leadership to the negotiating table however, US military officials have said there needs to be greater success on the battlefield — and this is where the Marines come in. But the challenges on the ground are immense. Fields are littered with improvised explosive devices (IEDs) responsible for most of the deaths of foreign troops in Afghanistan, which hit a record 520 fatalities last year. The Taliban are also entrenched in their strongholds holding sway over the population and setting up shadow governments across the country, meaning they have the local intelligence that the Marines desperately need. “Marjah has also been a stronghold by the Taliban for some time. They know where we are coming and can stage ambushes anytime,” says one sergeant who asks not to be named. Five Marines were killed in southern Afghanistan in two days of January alone in IED blasts and ambushes. Platoon commander Lieutenant David Emison, a Virginia native and the first Marine in his family, still sports a busted lip and chipped teeth sustained from a recent bomb blast that killed a sergeant. “They (the Taliban) make very powerful IEDs out here. If you step on them, you don”t get a second chance,” says Emison, the group’’s tactician, whose 25-year-old wife is pregnant with their second child back home. He says that after the incident, he has tried to become more careful about where he treads, but knows that a blast could take any of them anytime. The ex-college wrestler pushes away ugly thoughts and believes the unpopular war Obama inherited from the past administration will have a positive outcome. “It does not pay to be scared,” he says. Blancas, meanwhile, arms himself with his assault rifle, two rosaries and prayer cards stuffed in his pockets as the Marines prepare a full-on assault on Marjah in the coming weeks or months. Marjah has a population of at least 60,000. Built in the 1950s with US government help, it was intended to be a model agricultural town with an irrigation system flowing from the Helmand river. But instead of legitimate crops, poor farmers plant opium poppy, the trafficking and sale of which bankrolls the Taliban movement. The Marines” mission is to show US strength, assist in installing government control in Helmand province and let the local population know they have arrived. The challenge however is huge. Taliban militants harass the villagers at night, warning them of trouble if they help US troops. Under the cover of darkness, they also plant IEDs in fields the Marines have to cross. For father-of-one Blancas, it all comes down to one simple thing. “We do what we have to do, but I plan to be out of the corps soon and be daddy. I just have to stay alive till then.”
Contents of this issue include;
News from Egypt and the World of Egyptology: Another bumper report ‘From our Egypt Correspondent’ brings the latest news and information – you won’t find this anywhere else! This issue includes reports on new work in and around Luxor, including the opening of Howard Carter’s house and new discoveries in and around Karnak and Luxor temples, from Islamic Cairo and on a new exhibition in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. There is also a report from the Director of the Oriental Institute in Luxor and the work being done there.The history of the Rosetta Stone
The Missing Link: Mile Neilson from the British Museum, reveals how a statue fragment, discovered at Saqqara has solved the problem of identification of one of the earliest and best-known statues to enter the museum’s collection in the nineteenth Century.
The Cult of the Apis Bull: The worship of the Apis Bull was one of the longest lasting of all the cults in the ancient Egyptian Pantheon, as Maxwell Stocker explains.
Investigating Early Mummification: Dr. Vicky Gashe describes her work looking at the origins of mummification in Egypt, revealing all is not as straightforward as is sometimes thought.
The ‘Belly of Stones’ : ancient Egypt’s Southern Frontier: Betty Winkelman describes some of the great Middle Kingdom fortresses in Nubia, some of the most amazing military structures in the world, now lost beneath the waters of Lake Nasser.Into Egypt’s Eastern Desert: In the second of two articles, Colin Reader takes readers on a trip into the eastern desert looking at the geology and the ancient remains to be found there.
Featured Pharaoh: Senusret III.
Architectural Gems: “Pharaoh’s Bed” at Philae.
PerMesut: in our regular feature for younger readers, Hilary Wilson looks at ancient Egyptian Flowers.Net Fishing: our regular look at Egyptology on the Web, tracing the history of ancient Egypt. This issue Victor Blunden looks at the reigns of Pinudjem and Psusennes.
New Books featured in the December issue
Swifter than the Arrow: The Golden Hunting Hounds of ancient Egypt, by Michael Rice.
Thutmose III: the Military Biography of Egypt’s greatest Warrior King, by Richard A. Gabriel.
The Ancient Egyptian “Tale of Two Brothers”, by Susan Tower Hollis.
Egyptian Art, by Regine Schultz and Matthias Seidel.
Rock Art of the Eastern Desert of Egypt: Content, Comparisons, Dating and Significance,, by Tony Judd.
The Pyramids, by Miroslav Verner.
Abusir XIII: Tomb Complex of the Vizier Qar, his sons Qar Junior and Senedjemib and Iykal, Edited by Miroslav Barta.
Soldiers, Sailors and Sandlemakers: A Social Reading of Ramesside Period Votive Stelae, by Karen Exell.
Refugees for Eternity: The Royal Mummies of Thebes, Part Four, Identifying the Royal Mummies, by Dylan Bickerstaffe.(Previous book reviews can all be seen on the magazine’s web site, www.ancientegyptmagazine.com)
Plus full Egyptology Society listings and UK lectures from February to April 2010 and listings of exhibitions and Egyptological events and now including listings of Egyptological Societies around the world.
Mursya writes that the Kazakh film “Kelin” (“The Daughter-in-Law,” directed by Ermek Tursunov) was shortlisted with 8 others for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
TajikVoice posts (and Andrey translates) stories of real people in Tajikistan, telling how they are being forced to “voluntarily donate” money to the construction of the Rogun dam and hydroelectric power plant.
